Psychic Franchise
Seeking psychic guidance is much like any other service; there are great discrepancies in quality. You can do your research and select a verified psychic reader with a genuine gift, or you can call a psychic hotline with a genuine script. To investigate the plight of the modern psychic, Kate Leaver did both.
The Great Psychic Hotline Authenticity Test
The transcripts of my phone conversations speak for themselves…
Recorded voice: Welcome to the Psychic Circle. If you have had a psychic reading from us before and have the access code of a particular reader, press 1. For the next available operator, press 2. We recommend the latter because that way fate will direct you to the operator best able to read your future. There will be three beeps every five minutes.
Psychic # 1: Mary-Kelly
I say: Hi, I’m Kate. I’m looking for some psychic guidance.
She says: Ok Kate, I’m going to need to establish a link with you. If you think about a particular aspect of your life, I will try and link in with you. Then you will trust me with your future.
I say: Ok. I’m thinking.
She says: What is it?I say: Oh, I tell you? I thought you were going to link with me to find out?
She says: No no you need to tell me so I can get the link.
I say: Right. I go to university, so let’s go with education.
She says: Ok I’m feeling a stressful energy. I think you need a break. I can’t say if the break is from a person, a place or a thing, but you need to take it to see the wood for the trees. There will be a turning point.
I say: Mmmm. Ok. Just out of curiosity, is there anything more specific?
She says: Specific, love? Specific is a personal judgment, isn’t it? Don’t you think the term ‘stressful’ is specific? Don’t you think ‘turning point’ is specific?
I say: Well, no. Not really.
She says: Do you feel the link with me?
I say: I can’t say I do.
She says: Alright my love, speak to someone else.
(Hangs up)
Psychic # 2: Heidi
I say: Hello? Is this Heidi I’m speaking to?
She says: Ah, yes. Heidi? Yes. Can I have your name please?
I say: Kate.
She says: Ah, Kate. Kate, you have a very good future. There will be a change in your life. It will be different.
I say: Well that’s good news isn’t it Heidi? What kind of change?
She says: The “Gee Wiz look at your partner and your work and your life” kind. You’re very lucky. You’ve got a lot of luck. You should play Lotto. From around July I would say. Yes, July. But don’t tell a soul.
Psychic # 3: Romy
She says: Hello? I’ll need your name and your birth month.I say: Hi, Kate and November.
She says: Ok Kate, we specialize in love and relationship readings. Are you seeing anyone at the moment?I say: Yes.
She says: Are you happy with him?
I say: Yes.
She says: What is his birth month?
I say: April.
She says: Let me see. Oh yes! Yes, you two are compatible aren’t you? The planets say so. You want the same things, don’t you? From a relationship. You’re young, is it true love? I would say so. He’s honest, isn’t he? You’re both very fiery people, aren’t you? You know what I mean – oh yes! – once the fire goes on there’s no water and there’s no wind. You’re both hot people; very warm.
I don’t have to be a psychic to predict that my phone bill will be astronomical this month. At $3 - $5 a minute, the psychic hotlines I dialed were a bargain – but not if the operator can deftly keep you on the line with rambling responses and meaningful pauses. I wondered if they could hear me scribbling down their predictions on a notepad beside the phone. I kept my voice steady and my comments honest. I wasn’t making a prank call – it would’ve been awesome to report back on the sincerity of hotline psychics. But all the while I was wondering if they could detect some incredulity at what they were saying.
I’m totally onto them. The trick is, as I’m sure you’ll observe, to give abstract enough advice that anyone can adapt it to be true about their own circumstance. They check for encouraging murmurs along the way and pause long enough for someone to interject helpful feedback. I thought about this a while, and wondered what it would have felt like to call a psychic hotline with guiltless hope, looking for an answer you couldn’t find elsewhere. From this point of view, it worries me not so much that people would exploit the allure of psychic readings for money, but that vulnerable people might count on their advice.
Relationships, success, family, career, love, soul mates, the future - these are not small things they purport to know about. If these women are not channeling a psychic energy at all, then the authority they assume on the most intimate parts of someone’s psyche could be very dangerous. There is an enormous responsibility that comes with counseling someone in relation to their marriage, their career or their family. If they really are calling upon the psychic energies of the universe, awesome! If not, it’s a hideous betrayal of trust (un)justified by the supernatural.
Tales of insincere psychics are great.
Tales of real psychics are even better.
Asking someone to look into your future makes you vulnerable. When an absurd stream of generic advice is all you receive, you’ve dodged the possibility of someone having knowledge about you that you’re not even privy to. When an engaging and intelligent person gently predicts things that correspond with your life, your family and your circumstance, it’s a very different pack of tarot cards.
I interviewed the Psychic of the Year for 2008 the other night. Dr Jason Betts is a kind-faced, long-haired man with a wonderfully wizard-like stature. He takes Reike seminars, he has a plethora of qualifications and an honourary doctorate, he is a certified genius and he is a marriage celebrant for The Order of the Mystic Rose.
Given my disdain for 24/7 online psychics, I venture the topic of commercialized psychic powers with Dr Betts. “In the psychic world” he says, “there are many different ways of drawing information. When you consult me by word, letter, thought or even without the intention, knowledge comes to me. You could leave your personal handbag and I could hold that and without looking at the contents tell you something about you. It doesn’t really matter it just matters where to put our attention and an inception will follow”. That’s a pretty cool party trick… I wonder if the natural intuition we non-psychic folk rely on for first impressions of people could ever be developed into psychic powers.
Psychic powers confuse me in much the same way time travel in a movie does. The more I think about the possibilities it presents, the more I wonder whether having powers is a blessing or a burden. If you can foresee the future, does that mean you have to consciously follow the path you’ve predicted? What if you change course; does destiny adapt? Does telepathy eventually piss you right off because you can’t find a volume switch for the voices in your head when you’re trying to sleep? Do clairvoyants always know what’s going to happen in their own life and just act surprised when it happens?
Keeping the above ridiculous questions for my own speculation, I asked Dr Betts whether he needs the intent to receive an inception (i.e. knowledge about someone) or whether he is sometimes ambushed by truth about someone’s future. “It’s kind of like having a sound system with 8 microphones”, he said. “Sometimes there is background sound, but we can block that out. Right now most of my attention is on you, but also on the cosmos, on the street. There’s also the danger line. It’s a matter of juggling different lines of interest”.
This account of our discussion alone will do little to convince you of Dr Betts’ gifts. I told him I would need something to convince the skeptics of his authenticity. The only way to do this is to demonstrate his powers, he said.
And so there was a long pause, while Dr Betts closed his eyes across the table from me, his brows twitching ever so slightly as if he was looking at something on the back of his eyelids. This wasn’t an act. Without going in depth into my personal details, suffice to say that his perceptions of me were wonderfully accurate. The type of life he saw for me in the next decade enacted some of my most private ambitions; things he could not have known from our exchange until that point. He gave me a very specific timeframe for the future, but also perceived some eerily relevant information about my maternal grandparents that consolidated my belief in him. Keep an eye out for Jason – my prediction is you’ll be hearing more about him this year.