Lord Larehip

It’s funny that I keep seeing this Sylvia Browne on TV when she is the lousiest, most incompetent psychic ever. Not to mention the ugliest. But when you get right down to it, most psychics suck ass. And yet, they are still here, still taking in the gullible. For some years now, I have toyed with the idea of starting a cult—just for the hell of it. But I’m also afraid of just how out of control it might get.

Basically, if you study a few things about human nature, you can be a psychic. Actually, you don’t need anything but a stunted sense of a conscience and a highly developed sense of greed but here are some things I’ve discovered over the years that will help:

First of all, body language. Learn about body language. You can sum up a person’s life in a few seconds just by observing their body language. For example, ask a few questions that require a person to dig back through their lives. When they are recounting memories, watch their eyes. If they look to their left while they are thinking about past events, they are usually recalling events as accurately as they can. If they look to their right, they are probably lying. Why? It’s the left and right brain thing. We look to the left when we are recalling, we look to the right when we are creating. However, looking down and to the left indicates a person is in self-talk mode, i.e. they are having an inner conversation about something like an event that has occurred. Looking down and to the right means they are usually assessing feelings and so is a self-talk about things going within them rather than something external as an event. If a person widens their eyes when they talk, they are usually passionate about that subject and want to draw you into it to share their passion. So just by questioning someone and watching their eyes, you can learn what interests them, what doesn’t, what they are truthful and what they are not which enables you to push all the right buttons. If you adjust your questions accordingly, it will seem to that person that you are reading their mind, that you have some special insight into them.

Be forewarned, however, the types of people who go to psychics for answers can get hooked on you if they believe you can “see” right into them. They could fall in love with you, they could stalk you. You can even tell if they feel that way by their eyes. If you talk about something mundane with them and that person looks directly at you the whole time listening to every word, that is a sign the person is attracted to you. Also look at the pupils of their eyes. If they are dilated, that could be a sign that they desire you. Behaviorists have long established that our pupils will dilate when viewing an object we desire. HOWEVER, don’t assume that because someone is looking at you with dilated pupils that it means this person wants you. So many other factors can be at play and will give you a false reading. It’s a combination of body language you need to observe and not just one thing and you need to observe this language on more than one occasion, an established pattern.

Another thing about body language is the bouncing or shaking foot. You’ve seen someone sitting in a chair or on a bench or something absently bouncing their foot or shaking the ankle or knee from side to side—clearly unaware that they are even doing it. What does that mean? Generally, it means this: “I don’t want to be here but I can’t leave.” They are symbolically running away but since they are staying in the same spot, they are acknowledging that they can’t run away.

As an example, I once worked in an office that had a new healthcare carrier and they sent over a representative to explain the new changes. As we filed into the conference room, she was sitting there, smiling and greeting us. As I sat down, I could see her lower body and she was shaking her leg and I knew she didn’t want to be there. She was saying, “I would leave right now if I could.” Since her job didn’t seem to be particularly unpleasant, I took it to mean that, ultimately, she just didn’t really like her job, that she would take something better in a heartbeat. If I was pretending to be psychic and she came to me, I would be sure to mention that she doesn’t really like her job and she would likely nod in agreement and marvel how I could know that.

Another time, I was sitting at an airline terminal and there was a young couple sitting across from me. The girl was quite attractive as I recall. She had her legs crossed while her boyfriend or husband read a magazine or newspaper. What caught my attention was that she was bouncing her foot in an overtly animated fashion. As I watched surreptitiously, the bouncing became more animated until she was fairly bouncing in her seat. It was so over-the-top that it intruded into her train of thought and she stopped the bouncing. Then she uncrossed her legs, crossed them again the opposite way and, within 10 seconds, started to bounce her foot again more and more and more. Just from watching this I knew she was caught in a loveless relationship. How? She wanted to get away from this man and BADLY. But she couldn’t. I didn’t get the impression that she was being abused by him. She couldn’t leave probably because if she left him, she’d be alone and she found that more intolerable than staying in a relationship someone she not only didn’t love but didn’t even like. “I want to get away from him but I have no one to go to,” she was saying. Again, if I was psychic and told her that, she’d probably be amazed that I knew that.

As a psychic, know that only certain types of people will come to you for answers—namely, the uncertain and the desperate. They will generally ask you questions that they already know the answers to. They are simply looking for validation. I once saw this girl ask Sylvia Browne, “I’m getting married soon and I want to know if my boyfriend is, like, gonna cheat on me.” Even someone as bad at playing a psychic as Browne knew enough to answer yes. Why? Obviously, because this girl wouldn’t have been asking the question unless she was pretty sure that he was going to cheat.

Say someone comes to you—the psychic—and says, “I’m convinced my son is being molested but I don’t know who is doing it. I’ve gone to the police but they said they can’t help me. Can you tell me who it is?” The first question you ask is, “Do you know anyone—friend, neighbor, family—who might be doing this?” She’ll say no but be insistent. “Think, think who might do this.” Keep hammering. She knows who it is, you just have to draw it out. Eventually, she’ll say, “Well, I’m sure this is nothing, but once my younger brother, Joe, was watching my son and when I came home, they were asleep on the couch and Joe had his arm around my son. I mean, it seemed innocent enough but somehow it just kind of struck me as strange.” Then you tell her that Joe is molesting her son. She already knows it’s Joe but she can’t bring herself to accuse her own brother. She just needs to hear it from you. So you tell her.

No matter what your personal feelings are about god and an afterlife, never tell your clients these things don’t exist. They are not coming to you so much for truth as for comfort. “Where is my dead husband now?” “He’s fine. He doesn’t want you to worry about him.” That’s what you say because that’s what she wants to hear.

When recalling events from your client’s past, never be too specific. “I see your brother as a young boy and I see him in a pipe or a culvert.” “Yes, he fell into a sewer when he was 7 and broke his leg.” But even if such an event never happened, memory is malleable and people will bend their memories to match your “psychic vision.” The truth is, our memories are fictions!! This is because your memory, like a computer’s, is limited. It can only hold so much information. To pack in more information, you have to let go of other information. When I was serving on a ship in the U.S. Navy, I could draw my ship’s entire power plant from memory—every valve, every circuit breaker, every pump, every motor, every fuse panel, every pipe, every gauge—in stunning, even painful, detail. I was a walking encyclopedia of my ship’s power plant. That was many years ago. Since that time, I have had to pack in a lot more information while my ship’s power plant ceased to be of the slightest importance to me (my ship has already been scrapped). Could I draw that power plant today? No, I cannot. If I tried, I would be producing a fiction. All memories fade with time so if you do not get too specific about psychically recalling events in a client’s life, they will supply YOU with the information and think you supplied it to them!! Ever heard of recovered memory syndrome from the 80s? A bunch of quacks convinced patients that they had been molested by parents or grandparents or aunts and uncles when they were children even though it was later proven nothing of the sort had happened although quite a number of innocent people were jailed over it and often for many years. Our memories are such fictions, so shockingly unreliable, that we can insert more fictions into them and we can’t even tell them from the real memories! Why? Because we don’t have ANY real memories!! Every memory you have is a fiction!! Every single one!!! Some are closer to reality than others but none are completely factual or accurate and so are, by definition, fictions!

The secret of being a good psychic is to give out generalities—the same ones—to every client but make them believe that these generalities are instead tailor-made only for them. This is the “horoscope effect.” Just as a horoscope provides details to the reader who feels that what it says describes him to a tee, it actually describes EVERYONE to a tee. You don’t have to make your predictions match a client to a tee just make it general enough and the client will be convinced that the prediction is entirely true and match it to himself.

The way to pull this off is to understand that people want to be groomed and led around. They want to be “culted.” You may think you are too smart to join a cult. Well, guess what? So does every person who has joined a cult. Like your dog or cat, you want to be petted by someone you respect. This forum is a cauldron of would-be cultists. Every group or artist you look up to, whose CDs you buy without hesitation, have put you in thrall and you sit poised on the cusp of cult indoctrination. If you can be enthralled with a person or group because you love their music then you can be recruited into a cult. Cults are crawling with people exactly like you. Here is another secret: a cult can be designed but the desire to be part of one is just normal human behavior. Nothing extraordinary needs to be done to indoctrinate someone. They join because of the human need to belong to something greater than oneself. ANY person is just ripe to be “culted.” You, me, anybody. It’s part of being human.

So once a client comes to you, you must “cult” them. You must put them in thrall so that they will believe you over anyone else because you have shone them how you know what no one else knows. The beauty of it is that you don’t have to convince them of anything; they will convince themselves. Street magicians know this. They pull off simple sleight-of-hand card tricks that cause people to back away from them in fear because it seems to that person that the magician truly has scary, unearthly powers. Once the client convinces himself that there is no sleight-of-hand, they convince themselves that the seeming magic that they then witness MUST be real. Beautiful!

All you have to do is set yourself up as an authority using the methods described here. Once you do that, they automatically submit to you and it doesn’t matter what hare-brained nonsense you may spew thereafter. They will accept it because you said it. This is why corporations pay famous athletes or movie stars to advertise their products. If Tom Brady says to buy Michelin tires then you buy them if you are a Tom Brady fan. You don’t care if Brady knows squat about tires and you don’t care if he even uses that brand of tire. He told you to buy them and you are in awe of his talent (i.e. he has something you lack that you have always wished you had and so he is a type of superior being) so you buy them. You have been culted. And product loyalty, which is often built in just this way, is also a form of this “acculturation.”

Should you worry that sometimes a client may call you on your BS? It may happen occasionally but the vast majority of the time—no. It is important to remember as the psychic that if your clients had any real common sense, they wouldn’t be coming to you. They are uncertain of their knowledge and that makes them ripe for exploitation because the more unsure they are, the more they are likely to accept crazy, off-the-wall explanations especially when they come from you the psychic authority.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”—Voltaire.

But if I make a mistake, won’t the client notice? Not unless you draw attention to it. Musicians know this. They practice a song they plan to perform in front of a crowd until they have every last note down pat. But while performing it, they hit a wrong chord. Does the audience notice? No, unless the musician draws their attention to it. If he just goes on playing as though nothing happened then nothing happens. Stop worrying. You’re the psychic so you’re in control and you’d better show it.