Cleopatra’s Chief Eunuch
The amazing volume of rubbish promulgated by the commercial television networks in Australia has long ceased to amaze me, and yet I must shake my head in dismay at the credulous rubbish featured on Channel 7’s “Today, Tonight” this evening.
The item in question was a puff-piece for “leading UK Psychic Astrologer David Wells”. Wells like all of his ilk claims that he is able to communicate with the dead. He also claims that he can help people to realise their past lives. Apparently Wells’s real passion is “opening up other people’s wallets minds”.
Wells spouts the usual rot, for example “Ghosts are the very first level, they’re the very first thing you meet so when you deal with ghosts for want of another word, I prefer to call them astrals [sic] beings, that’s the first level beyond the physical.. there are many levels after that when you reach spiritual guides and masters then you’re dealing with bigger issues, you’re dealing with soul issues.” What? What are soul issues? What hierarchy exists among the dead? Who’s making this up?
Apparently the people that pay $80 to sit in the audience of his show “kind of use [his] energy to get into the past life, [he] give[s] them the technique and let[s] them go, let[s] them tell [him] what’s happening.” What type of energy is this exactly? If we do as Brian Dunning suggests and replace the word energy with “measurable work capability” this statement makes absolutely no sense. It would appear to be an easy day’s work to get people to tell you their past lives. None of this cold reading rubbish with the usual shotgun questioning technique when your audience actually tells you what they want to hear.
People believing in past lives always make me chuckle. Nobody was ever a street sweeper or any other mundane occupation and nobody existed previously in some unremarkable era. Rather they always claim that they were kings or queens or lived in some historically important (and well known) era. Perhaps Cleopatra’s Chief Eunuch.
Mr. Wells discovered his “gift” after having pnuemonia. Apparently he “had an outer body experience which wasn’t big old white lights and things it was an old lady who told [him] to go back into bed and was in fact already in bed”. So while febrile he had a hallucination.
The credulity of the producers of “Today, Tonight” and the manner in which stories such as this are presented disturbs me. Surely no program worthy of its salt would run a piece like this without asking for evidence. Where is Mr. Wells’s evidence? Where is the skeptical opinion? If, as he claims, he can use his “energy” to regress people to past lives, there must be some information that his victims clients produce that is historically verifiable and can shown to be previously unknown to them.
Sadly it is the details of where tickets to Mr.Wells’s show may be purchased at the end of the transcript that point directly to the motivation behind running this story. I can’t be certain, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr.Wells’s promoters had something to do with it.
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