The open reading
After a lovely dinner with Mark Edward and several other California-based Skeptics last Saturday, I decided to ask Mark if I could try a "vision from feeling" reading with him as the volunteer. I have a
paranormal claim in which when I look at a person I feel a pattern across them that then in my mind translates into images of internal health information, which in itself is perhaps not interesting, but what makes it a claim that I still investigate is the accuracy in description of internal information that one should not have access to just by looking at a person.
I asked Mark to turn around and explained that I not only do not need eye contact but that it is distracting to me and for a volunteer to turn around also eliminates a lot of the potential cold reading that we do not want. We did not have a pen and paper at hand so I started collecting my impressions in my mind. I start from the head and work my way downwards, feeling into one part of the body at a time and noting if I feel something out of balance that would indicate a health problem, at which I would then look closer to form a description of what I feel.
I use no interaction with the person such as speaking or touching. I also like to write down my impressions as I read the person and to then put my pen away once I am done and that way nothing can be added or removed from my reading when I reveal my conclusions. But we had no paper this time.
There are hundreds of things to look at and to consider in a person when doing this kind of a reading. Even just the head has so many things to look at. The brain, eyes, ears, etc, and then there is a whole body to look at. It quickly becomes overwhelming and I always end up having to skip parts. When I do a reading it is not like having a blank sheet of paper with the few interesting bits of information already written on it and ready to pull out. Rather, it is like having to read a whole book with one chapter for each part of the body and searching for a particular keyword in amidst a vast amount of text. You end up not reading the whole book in the matter of minutes available after a dinner occasion and right before several of you are about to be in a hurry to catch the movie afterwards. You end up turning the pages and skimming and skipping parts and gathering what little you come up with, but knowing that you did not do a complete job.
A full and thorough head-to-toe reading takes from my experience a minimum of half an hour up to an hour or two. Imagine how much time it takes to do an autopsy examination of a person, or even to investigate an MRI. I did not do a complete reading of Mark, nor did I claim to have done. Therefore if I miss information that is there, this should by no means be held against my claim.
What made matters worse was that, in my impressions, Mark had the most fascinating intestines and I found myself gazing at them for the longest time and describing them in great detail to Mark. Even though, as I explained, there was no health problem there. It was just different, that's all it was. In most people, the way I see it, the outer surface along their intestines looks glossy and has a thick layer of the fluid that covers internal organs and reduces friction. Also, the color of the exterior of intestines tends to have darker colors. The outside of his intestines looked lacking in this layer of fluid, looked less inflated with fluid within the intestinal walls themselves, the color was more yellow across the outside, and there was more of the fat covering than I have seen in others. The fat was like soap or lard and I was describing its texture. It just looked so significantly different from "everybody else" that I ended up looking at that and describing it time after another. It also doesn't help that the small intestine is one of my favorite things to see.
After some time I decided to stop reading into him and to give him the information that I had so far. Before beginning to describe what I had seen or felt, I did tell him that if I don't mention something it does not mean that it is not there. I did try to explain, before sharing my impressions, that I had not done a complete reading, and that there may be things that he does have but that I had not seen or searched for. None of what I described should be of a personal or private nature so I can assume Mark does not mind it if I share it here, besides it is only the impressions of a woo and not an actual medical diagnose.
I said to him that I was highly surprised because I felt that his brain is mostly frontal lobe active and not occipital lobe. Frontal lobe deals with logical thinking and occipital with the more intuitive or visualized. Had I had to guess, since Mark has worked a great deal with giving, although knowingly fraudulent ones, psychic readings of many forms, that his brain would be very intuitive and emotional in its way of analyzing things, but here I was feeling that he rather uses his intellect and logic when forming conclusions. (In the
first picture I am actually pointing to my frontal lobe and describing this!)
I said that he is well-nourished, and I rarely get to make that conclusion about a person. In my impressions, most people do not eat healthy enough to come across as what I would feel defines to be well nourished. It takes a lot of eating and not skipping meals and to make wise food choices to get all of the essential nutrients, and most people do not eat well enough.
I also said that another thing I rarely get to say, is that his spine is perfect. No back ache or issues with his spine. And that the inner lining of his stomach is thicker and better than in anyone I have ever seen before, therefore he has no stomach ulcers or problems with his stomach. I think that is all I said.
To hold my claim accountable for missed information is like asking you to quickly read an entire book in a matter of minutes, when you have not the time to read it nor the inclination as it was right after a dinner and before a movie, and to then quiz someone on virtually
any part of the content of the book. "Here, have a book right after dinner, and take only a few minutes to read all of it, we don't have all night to let you sit and read it. Now, what was written on page 473, in the second paragraph, about the man's blood sugar regulation?" Could
you do it? I am not a speed-reader.
Or, it is like going to the cardiologist, who runs plenty of tests on your heart and concludes on the health of your heart, and then you criticise their medical competence since they missed that you have skin cancer when they did not even test for it! I did not specifically check his blood sugar, nor pancreas, or other indications of diabetes, so how would I have known? Had I said that Mark does
not have diabetes,
that would have been evidence against the claim.
I look at a person and describe what I see from what I feel and my claim is then evaluated based on those descriptions. The accuracy or inaccuracy of the impressions that I have is what this claim must be evaluated against. My claim has never been that "I see all health information in a person". My claim is, and always has been since the very start, that, "when I look at people I perceive health information, and that health information would be accurate". I have never claimed to access all health information "that is considered to be there". This was even clearly stated in my very first letters to the IIG where I first described my claim even before joining this Forum several months later.
My claim is not falsified if I missed some information. My claim is falsified if the health information that I do describe with confidence and claim to have perceived, is confirmed to be inaccurate. I hope that I have made this distinction clear to those for whom it was not already clear.
