Today, the Victory of Light convention is in town at the Sharonville Convention Center. This is a twice a year show concerning all things psychic and spiritual. It’s our first time attending. Ty and I invite some like-minded friends along and decide to make a day of it. The first thing that strikes me as we pull into the parking lot at a few minutes going on 11 AM is the place is packed and the convention center parking lot is a lot bigger than I thought it was. We park in the hinterland of the lot and make our way to the entrance to the conference center where there is literally a line to get in the door. I am surprised at the number of people here on a Saturday morning before 11 AM. We finally make our way inside, pick up some programs, meet our friends and go off to the first session which is a Q&A with Dr. Mark Pitstick. This is another one of those synchronicities because Dr. Pitstick is on the board of Helping Parents Heal and is the founder of the Columbus chapter. We were just talking about him when we attending the meeting there earlier this week. The Q&A goes really well. It’s clear the audience has a pretty good grasp on this material. What I’ve been hearing from the people who lecture on the afterlife, NDEs, etc. is that the audiences are growing more sophisticated, and larger, over the years. The people in this community perceive a larger and deeper interest in spirituality and judging from the audience in attendance at this convention it looks like they’re right.
The Q&A with Dr. Pitstick was really good. It was worth the price of admission, we also got to grab a couple of minutes with him to introduce ourselves and tell him we had attended the meeting in Columbus and were interested in talking about starting a chapter in Cincinnati. We will see where that takes us.
After the Q&A we spent some time walking the floor of the convention. There was a ton of trinkets, crystals, artwork, clothing etc. for sale. Some of it quite nice, some of it just junk. There was a booth where they were selling magnetic jewelry that was supposed to improve your aura, your balance, your strength and I think maybe make you taller. It was very similar to a demo I saw a guy give a few years ago at a local festival. There were crystals that were supposed to reverse the effect of EMF coming from your cell phone. There were all sorts of mediums and tarot card readers and the like. Even though I’m thoroughly convinced there are very real and very good mediums out there, I am skeptical about someone setting up a booth in one of these shows and offering 15-30 minute readings with so much distraction around them. It’s certainly possible you could get a good reading there, but I wasn’t about to venture it.
We thought we’d see some of the mediums for ourselves as they were offering what are known as gallery or platform readings in some of the rooms. That’s where a medium will pick a few audience members and give quick readings of a few minutes each. I think it’s this kind of thing that really gives mediums a bad name. There were some obvious cold reading techniques being deployed. Most of the people being chosen were in the 30-50 or above age range. So, you heard a lot of “Is you mother in spirit?”, if that was a “no”, it would quickly move to father. If that was a no then “grandfather”. Now the chances of one of these questions for someone our age being right are pretty high when you ask about mother or father. When you move on to grandmother and grandfather, you’re just about assured of a “hit”. They mediums would pass right over anything they got wrong and they got a lot wrong. A young girl was being read, the medium got something about her “studies” from someone in spirits who said she was her study guide. Nothing specific about the relationship between the girl and the guide. And if you take a girl who looks like she’s high school or college age, it’s a pretty good guess that she’s going to be studying something. Ty got a reading from one of the mediums who first guessed her mother was in spirit (wrong), then her father. She asked “We’re you close to your father?” Again, a very general question. She said something about him having a Chevy. Older generation guy, who had God knows how many cars. Yes, he had a Chevy. Now, if any of these mediums had given a name of anyone or chosen someone who lost a child or sibling and hit on that, I’d be impressed. Even on their very general statements, I’m going to guess they were hitting somewhere between 30-50%. I think I could do almost as well myself. An empathetic person looking at someone can guess with decent accuracy a lot about them from the way they are dressed, their age, the way they carry themselves, etc. As much as I want to believe and an open to believing I saw no evidence that mediumship is real there and I really wanted to.
While we were there we decided to something really crazy and watch a demonstration of a woman channeling “light beings”. Her particular guides are a group of beings from the Sirius star system and she claims they come in and she allows them to take over her body. She said she would sound very different when they spoke through her. She started with a 15-20 minute pre-amble telling us what to expect and why channeling is important. I have to admit I was a little nervous expecting to see her face change or a male voice coming from this small woman or something really freaky. When she was finally ready to begin she did some deep breathing techniques then began speaking with a slightly different (almost British) accent and in a lower, very serious sounding tone. But, before that, and she had told us to expect this, she emitted this series of tones that I honestly don’t know how she made them. She said that they were healing tones and if we let them in they could heal us, somewhat. When the message came through from the Sirians, there was nothing specific, nothing tangible, nothing evidentiary (though I don’t know what that might have been). It was basically a continuation of the stuff she had been telling us before about how we are undergoing a planetary shift in consciousness and people like us were going to be the conduits to help usher it it. Nothing that I disagree with. But, nothing I hadn’t heard before and not a message we needed to hear from the Sirians.
I realize this might make it sound like the show wasn’t worth it, but to the contrary. It was a really fun day. We saw some really great art, got to meet and listen to Dr. Pitstick and had a good time with our friends. After having the amazing readings I’ve had with mediums I got to see some others operate and I can see why if people only have that experience why they’d be disappointed. The show is coming back in November and I’ll probably go again.
