Why John Edward Struggles with Names

Popular television medium John Edward often struggles with the names of communicating spirits.  However, much more than chance would suggest, he gets a correct name.  At other times, he gets the first letter of a name.  He might say that he is getting a "J" name, "maybe John or Joseph."  In a recent program, he said he was getting an "F" sound, maybe a "Fred," or possibly "Ph"  for "Phil."  At times, he won't get the person's name at all.  It's pretty much the same with Lisa Williams, another television medium of the clairvoyant and clairaudient type.

The pseudoskeptics claim that it is all "cold reading."  They say the mediums are fishing around for a name and that when they do get one right it's simply because most people have a John or Joseph or Mary somewhere in the family tree.  If the medium isn't specific about the person communicating, e.g., saying it is a "father figure," which might mean a father-in-law, stepfather, grandfather, or an uncle, the medium further increases the odds for a "hit" on the name.  Even the true skeptic and believers are inclined to wonder why it is so hard for a medium to get a simple name or an exact relationship.  They assume that communicating with the spirit world should be like talking to someone on the phone. Clearly, it is much more complicated.

Silver Birch, the Indian spirit guide who spoke through the British medium Maurice Barbanell, explained it this way:  "...there are all the processes involved in transmitting the thought, the picture or symbol - we do not speak words in our world - through the medium's guide, or even direct to the medium.  If it is done by means of clairvoyance, all this is a very intricate process.  Do not think that because you hear me talk with facility through this instrument (the medium) that it is easy...I have to use what I call a multitude of ‘threads' to maintain my hold on this instrument.  At any given moment, any one of my ‘threads' may be severed and away goes some of my power."

Silver Birch further explained that it is not like communication in our world, where there is only one level of consciousness involved.  "You have to reduce spirit to matter, two entirely different forms of expression, and in that process of stepping down many things can go wrong," he transmitted.  

In 1917, the Rev. Charles Drayton Thomas, a psychical researcher, began sitting with the renowned British medium, Gladys Osborne Leonard.  He quickly made contact with his father, John D. Thomas, and his sister, Etta, receiving much veridical information proving their identities.  However, he wondered why they had such difficulty in giving their names and the names of others. "It became evident that the giving of a name involved the overcoming of some obstacle, and that usually the difficulty, whatever it might be, was too serious to permit of success," Thomas recorded.  "There is unquestionably a difficulty in transmitting names through trance mediums, though some give them more successfully than do others." 

Unlike Edward and Williams, Leonard was a trance medium.   She would go into a trance and her body would be taken over by "Feda," her spirit control or spirit guide.   Feda would then relay information from spirits.  Feda often spoke of herself in the third person, e.g., "Feda is having difficulty understanding.."  While it was a different form of mediumship, the problem with names seems to be similar.

The discarnate Thomas explained the difficulty involving names to his son:  "One cannot sometimes get the names right.  If I wish to speak about a man named Meadow, I may try that name and find that Meadow is not spoken rightly by Feda.  So I then wait and try to insert the idea of a green field, connecting it with the idea of the man described.  We always try for a definite thing which will tell you exactly what we mean; but if unable to do that, we have to get as near to it as we can.  Sometimes we have to depend upon slender links in giving you the clue."

The father further told his son that he was able to convey an idea much easier than he could get actual words through the medium.  As an example, he mentioned that when he tried to get the word "Jerusalem" through the medium, Feda gave the word "Zion" instead.

Etta also explained to her brother that it was much easier to send ideas to Feda than it was to send words.  She said that she could not get her husband's name, Whitfield, through Feda.  "Is it not strange that I cannot say my husband's name?" she communicated.  "I can feel it, but cannot say it; that is, I cannot get it spoken.  I get it on the surface, so to speak, but cannot get it into the medium's mind."  At a sitting four months later, Etta again attempted to get her husband's name through, but only succeeded in getting Feda to say to say, "Wh--, Whi---, Wht--."

Etta further told her brother that the more she tried to think on the name, the more difficult it was to get it through the medium's brain, adding that she could not control the medium's power of expression.  "One may get a word into her mind and yet be unable to make her express it," she explained.  "Because it is in the mind it does not follow that her brain will take it.  Unless the ideas in the mind are tapped on to the actual brain one cannot express them."

Etta likened the brain of the medium to a keyboard on a typewriter.  "You can place your finger on the right key, but unless you tap it there is no expression.  The brain takes or does not take from the mind."  Trying too much for a certain word, Etta continued, results in the keys becoming "stiff" with apprehension. 

The younger Thomas noticed that Feda could more easily catch a first syllable than the whole name, but sometimes she would catch only the first letter, which he understood was pictured for her by the communicator. When one communicating entity tried to get the word "Greek" through, Feda struggled with "G--, Gre--, Grek, Greg, Greeg."

Thomas further observed that when Feda had latitude in the selection of words, e.g., Zion for Jerusalem, communication was easier.  However, when it came to proper names, this alternative was not always possible.

The discarnate Thomas also told his son that when he entered the conditions of a sitting his memory would divide into its former earthly conditions of conscious and subconscious.  Thus, the same forgetfulness he might have had when in the flesh with regard to names and other things still existed on his side of the veil.

Table-tilting is a more accurate method of getting names, Drayton Thomas pointed out, as the communicator can dispense with the control and, assuming enough psychic energy, can direct the tilting himself, i.e., so many tilts for each letter of the alphabet or a tilt for the proper letter when the sitter recites the alphabet.  But this method is, of course, slow and cumbrous.   

Communicating through the Geraldine Cummins, an Irish automatic writing medium, Frederic W. H. Myers, a pioneering psychical researcher who died in 1901, talked about his attempts to communicate through Feda and Mrs. Osborne Leonard.  "I was invisible to Feda, but Feda, when she understood that she was to search for a new communicator, cast about her that net of psychic force with which she apprehends the symbols we try to display to her," Myers wrote through Cummins' hand.  "It was difficult at first to drop my name within it, but at last success was mine...I do not know which letter first met with her attention.  I merely gave the suggestion of my Christian name and surname in letters, and I understood that the first letter was apprehended separately.  To me it is of little moment what first caught her attention; the image really was the sum of myself as I was then alive.  Many figures in that sum were not perceived, were not snared in the net, but a sufficiency was obtained and then she was able to get the name." 

Myers explained that the messages are received by mediums not in words but in thoughts.  Moreover, if the medium' vocabulary and overall intellect are inferior to those of the communicating spirit, there is much difficulty in getting the message through. "It may seem strange to men and women that a revelation of our condition seldom comes through with clearness," Myers went on.  "That is the fault of the instrument which cannot render the tune we would gladly play upon it."