Psychic or spirit: Learning to discern

One of the criticisms of mediumship as evidence for the survival hypothesis is the issue of the source of a medium's information: it is argued that the medium could be accessing psychic information from a living person (Braude, 2003; Gauld, 1983).

Our qualitative longitudinal study into the experience and phenomenology of Spiritualist medium development shows that this is also a significant issue for novice Spiritualist mediums, in that their unfoldment process involves learning to discern between information that may be attributable to a discarnate source, and information that should be attributed to a psychic source.

This paper will summarise the research project and its aims, and present the results of the analysis. Initial results indicate that while the issues that the participants encountered were often similar, there was notable degree of variation in both the process of learning to discern and the discernment strategies adopted by the participants.