Intuitive Skepticism

I'm in something of a very unusual position.

Apart from a few years in my adolescence when I went through a period of fascination with the occult and paranormal, I've always been a skeptic. I never seriously considered Paganism or Wicca or anything, I was just really interested in supernatural phenomena and read a lot about it from sources that were not very good and extremely biased and managed to partially convince myself--albeit very flimsily--that ghosts and spirits and psychic powers existed. It didn't last very long. I have been a skeptic my entire life. I was skeptical of Santa before I could even read based solely on the fact that Santa and my mom had the same handwriting. (My mom is a teacher and has very, very distinct and neat 'teacher print' handwriting--it seriously honestly looks a lot like this font and the style alone is very distinctive.) As a small child, and the first grandchild and niece on all sides by many years, I was something of a disappointment to my relatives because they all had expectations of being able to tell me all kinds of crazy weird shit that runs the gambit from 'unlikely' to 'ludicrous' and have me believe it because I was a little kid and would have believed anything. I never believed anything anybody told me unless I saw it myself--if an adult failed to explain something to my satisfaction, I refused to believe them until I got an answer.

So my fascination with the supernatural and paranormal didn't last more than three or four years. There was no blinding moment of understanding about it--just a realization that a belief in the paranormal didn't square with my inherent natural skepticism and I had no actual legitimate reason to believe in any of it other than a desire for it to be real because it was interesting. And that wasn't a good enough reason to deny reality. I had--and still have--the same fascination with dragons and unicorns, too, but I don't delude myself into thinking they're real just because I want them to be. I dropped the belief and went back to my old lifelong habit of demanding an explanation for everything before I considered believing anything.

There is a lot of shit in the world I don't understand. Partly because I'm not smart enough to grasp really complex ideas, but mostly because I just plain can't explain shit. But I can accept that I can't explain things without having an overwhelming urge to attach any ludicrous, unsubstantiated, unrealistic 'explanation' to something just so it has a reason for happening. I can see something bizarre for which I have no explanation and say, 'I have no fucking idea what I just saw' and leave it at that indefinitely without feeling it's incomplete and hastily saying it was some paranormal phenomena. I can't know everything, I can't understand everything, and expecting to be able to do so is just as unrealistic a mindset as believing that ghosts are the things that go 'bump' in the night. 'I don't know' is a perfectly acceptable answer when you don't know. It's honest and it makes no hasty conclusions based on hopeful supposition and leaves you open to a more reasonable real-world answer that might come along later. 'I don't know' carries no pressure and no burden of proof. 'I don't know' isn't arrogant. 'I don't know' doesn't try to explain something it doesn't understand.

Having said all this, I'm still in a very strange position.

Among the many things about which I am extremely, fiercely skeptical is psychic power. Remote viewing, mind-reading, mediums, and shit like that. Some people can definitely appear to do these things without any immediately apparent trick being used but that doesn't mean there isn't a trick to it. Just because you know there's a trick doesn't mean you're going to be able to spot it--part of any 'trick' is being able to conceal its inner workings even from people who know you're doing it. To beat a dead horse, my boyfriend and his dad are both magicians. They're both very good. They both do a lot of tricks very close-up without revealing how it's done. They have both at various times seen magicians perform and been unable--despite knowing it's all a trick--to deconstruct their slight-of-hand. Even when they know the trick themselves. Max said upon seeing a close-up trick once, "I know what he's got to be doing, but I can't see him doing it."

Just because you see someone appear to jump from A to Z all at once doesn't mean the other 24 letters aren't there. It just means they managed to conceal all 24 from you.

HOWEVER.

I have an uncannily accurate talent for reading people I have never met before and getting into their heads that seems so much like a psychic ability that other people have tried to convince me I have powers I don't even believe exist. I'm extremely observant, intuitive, clever, and have a very good basic understanding of personality types and human psychology--these are talents anybody can have and any brain-dead donkey can learn but that, combined, give the appearance of a supernatural power. I don't just mean I can tell what kind of person someone is based on a very short introductory conversation--I can guess likely aspects of their pasts based on how they act currently. With an unnerving specificity.

(Just to use one example: people who don't usually start conversations themselves or open new avenues of conversation were most certainly socially uncertain in their youth and still are. They don't talk to new people unless introduced and won't say hello first--they'll wait on the edge of a group until specifically invited in. It's because they're usually very frightened of rejection of any type, including conversational, which is why they won't talk about anything new unless they can be reasonably certain they'll know how other people will respond. Not because they don't want to be disagreed with, but because they see a really virulent disagreement in opinion as a form of rejection and they don't want to risk leaving themselves vulnerable to it. You won't believe how accurate this is, or how shocked people are that I know it without having met them before.)

There is no magic involved. No supernatural power. No paranormal phenom. It isn't even something I've had to say 'I dunno' about and wait until I understand it better. I know exactly what I'm doing and how I'm doing it--if I didn't I wouldn't be able to do it at all. It's something of which you need an extremely good understanding and very good grasp in order to utilize successfully. Anyone who does it and insists they have no idea how or why they can is lying. They know. They just don't want to tell you. I, however, have no problems telling people it is a trick, and telling them how I do it if they want to know. Mostly my explanation, unless further prodded, is, "I'm not psychic, I'm just really good at people." It's this talent that makes me 100% sure I fall nowhere on the autism spectrum because being able to do this requires an intimate understanding of subtle social cues and subtexts that most neurotypical people don't even have, let alone a subset of the population suffering a mental illness characterized by a total lack of social intelligence.

Every single solitary professional 'psychic' does this. They make small talk with people that doesn't outwardly seem to be significant but is giving them a constant stream of critical information about their subject that they will use to convince them of their abilities. But it's one of those things you have to understand yourself in order to see someone else doing it. Otherwise you just won't know what to look for.

I didn't learn until recently that there was a name for it. It's called 'cold reading'. If I was a less scrupulous or greedy person, I could very easily pretend to have psychic powers and set up shop as a mystic. It would not be difficult, I would be successful, and I would get away with it. But I don't have any paranormal abilities and everything I can do is something other people can learn. It just happens that I'm really good at doing it naturally without having had any real training or education. Albert Einstein was a gifted physicist and mathematician without a university affiliation--he just had a significant natural talent. All I have is a significant natural talent, and one that requires an intimate knowledge and understanding of in order to utilize. It's not something I'm just 'good at' without trying. It's something I have to have a very detailed understanding of every minute aspect to use.

No amount of insistence from people who believe in the supernatural will convince me that I have anything other than an unusually intuitive--but completely natural--understanding of people. I am, essentially, a psychic who does not believe in psychics.

Everything--everything!--has an explanation. There's just no guarantee that you'll be able to figure it out, or that anybody ever will.

Just because you can't see the trick doesn't mean there isn't one.