If you feel you’re not making enough money and want to change jobs, clairvoyance is one of the best paid occupations and, despite what you might think, one of the easiest. All you need is a certain charm, a minimum understanding of others, and a certain amount of chutzpah. But even without such qualities, probability still works in your favor.
Try this experiment. Approach someone at random, though it’s helpful if the person is well disposed toward your paranormal qualities. Look him or her in the eye and say: “I feel there’s someone thinking of you very much, someone you haven’t seen for many years, but who once loved you, and suffered because you hadn’t reciprocated . . . and now that someone realizes how much you have suffered, and is sorry, though perhaps it’s too late . . .” Is there anyone in the world, apart from a young child, who hasn’t had an unhappy experience in love, or at least in love inadequately reciprocated? And so your subject will be the first to run to you for help, and cooperate, telling you that he or she knows exactly whom you’ve captured so clearly in your mind.
You can say: “There’s a person who underestimates you, and speaks badly of you, but does so out of envy.” It’s most unlikely your subject will reply that he or she is admired by all and sundry and has absolutely no idea who this person could be. He is more likely to identify the person right away and admire your skill in extrasensory perception.
Alternatively, say that you can see a dear departed loved one standing beside your subject. Go up to someone of a certain age and tell him you see the shadow of an elderly person who has died of a heart ailment. Every living being has had two parents and four grandparents, and if you’re lucky, several uncles and aunts and a beloved godparent as well. If your subject is of a certain age, it’s likely these people will be gone, and probable that out of at least six dead relatives, one has died of heart failure. If you’re unlucky, and since you’ve had the foresight to approach your subject in the company of others equally attracted by your paranormal gifts, you can say you’re perhaps mistaken, that the person you see is not a relative of the person you’re talking to, but of someone standing nearby. You can bet that one of those present will say that it’s his or her father or mother, and at that point you’re home and dry, you can talk of the warmth this shadow radiates, of the love it feels for that person, now ready for your enticement . . .
Discerning readers will have identified the techniques of the charismatic personalities who appear on television shows. Nothing is easier than to convince a parent who has just lost a child, or someone who’s still grieving the death of a parent or spouse, that this good soul has not vanished into thin air and is still sending messages from the other side. I repeat, being a psychic is easy: other people’s suffering and credulity work in your favor.
That is, of course, unless you’re dealing with someone belonging to CICAP (the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Pseudosciences). CICAP researchers investigate phenomena claimed to be paranormal (poltergeists, levitation, psychic phenomena, crop circles, UFOs, water divining, not to mention ghosts, premonitions, spoon bending, card reading, weeping Virgin Marys, and so forth), and they demonstrate how it’s done, reveal the trick, explain scientifically what appears to be miraculous, often repeating the experiment to show, once the trick is understood, how we can all become magicians. Two CICAP sleuths, Massimo Polidoro and Luigi Garlaschelli, have published some of the results in a book, which makes for amusing reading.
But I hesitate to talk about amusement. The fact that CICAP has its work cut out means that gullibility is more widespread than we might think, and the book will in the end sell a few thousand copies, whereas someone like Rosemary Altea, when she appears on television, playing on people’s suffering, has a following of millions.
2002