| Life Changing Messages - Interview with Gordon Smith |
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| Ceri Balston | |||
| Wednesday, 07 May 2008 | |||
  Gordon Smith is a medium renowned for his ability to give exact names of people, places and even streets. The seventh son of a seventh son, Gordon travels around the world to appear before audiences, read for celebrities and demonstrate his abilities, but his feet have remained firmly on the ground. Harmonious Living’s Ceri Balston caught up with Gordon during his recent tour of South Africa.Harmonious Living: When did you first discover you had this extraordinary gift? Gordon Smith: I think that’s kind of two fold, because as a child I had many experiences of mediumship, but I couldn’t honestly say that I discovered it, if you know what I mean. I was twenty-one when my best friend’s brother died, and the night he died he appeared in my bedroom. So that was the first time I really experienced that kind of thing as an adult, because all the childhood experiences I kind of put away to my imagination. So when it happened again as an adult I suppose it opened up all these memories. So, at twenty-one, my friend asked me to take her to see a medium, and I had no idea what a medium was, but I found out that there was a spiritualist church where mediums stood on a public platform and gave messages and I took her there, much to my own annoyance actually. I said “Should be dabbling in things like this? Your brother’s just died, why would you want to get involved with these people?” And what I liked about it was the medium that night said, “Look I don’t have to be a medium to know that you’re grieving, and that you’re in the very early stages, and I’m not going to fool you or delude you, I’m going to speak to you in private.” She said, “But the boy sitting next you is a medium”. And then she said to me, “You do know that you’re a medium?” and I said “Am I?” and she said, “Have you told her what you’ve seen?” Well, I hadn’t told her that I had seen her brother because to me, you didn’t talk about things like that. So basically that night was the opening for me and I spoke to the medium she just said “This is crazy, you are the medium”, and I told my friend what I’d seen and she said, “Why didn’t you tell me that?” And I said “Well I don’t know if I believe all of this”. Harmonious Living: And from that evening did you fully embrace it? Gordon Smith: Well I felt comfortable with the situation I was in, they weren’t wacky, this wasn’t a séance, so it seemed quite normal. I said to the woman, “If I’m a medium, what do you mean? How did you become a medium and get on that platform, is there training?” And she said there is, there’s a development group where you go and learn how to meditate and basically develop your life. I thought you had to learn skills as a medium but I what learnt was that you literally look at your own life and you process yourself and you get to know ‘you’ as opposed to a lot of people in this life who tend to just to live through their life. And we were never really taught to give messages to people. It was in the self awareness that you had to learn then what was real what was not real. So that was a good thing and I thought this is not as zany as I thought it was going be and actually I really liked her, and I got to be really connected to a lot of the people there, because again I found them a be very grounded, very normal people. So it was actually ok, and the more I did that the more I found that these things would happen, I would have the sense of somebody dying or the sense of somebody needing help with a loss and it became a sense thing that built up, I would intuitively know and then something would accompany it, a vision or a voice or something, so that kind of happened naturally I suppose, through the development. Harmonious Living: You position yourself as a grief counsellor I believe…. Gordon Smith: Not really. Grief counselling I think is different, I’m not taking away from that. I have a half an hour get to the crux of something, and grief counselling you would be letting the person unwind until they discover their thing. So what a medium does is takes them to the point of, “right, there’s what’s stopping your grief from moving, the fact that you hated your father, you never got to say goodbye and he died. Now you can call it anything else you like and keep yourself in that state for another year if you want, but I am now offering you the chance to deal with this, because your father’s says, ‘Let it go’.” So in that sense there is a sense of counselling I suppose but it’s a half hour or hour session with somebody and you have to hit that on the head, it’s like “bang, there you go”. Harmonious Living: From your experiences and the research you’ve done, what can you say happens when we die? What do you believe? Gordon Smith: First of all the sense of dying is actually much more pleasurable, I believe, than we are being led to believe. The death thing is a collaboration thing, and probably the very opposite of birth. Most babies cry when they come in, it’s a traumatic thing, death is a release thing, it’s a letting go, and it’s actually an expansion. I have never heard anyone come back from death and say it was terrible. There’s always this, “wow”, this is elimination of self, and I think it’s like when you dread something and it turns out to be fantastic, it’s like that, it’s amazing. So what’s going to happen to each individual as they die is patterned on the life they’ve lived I suppose. Then you get people who have done some heinous thing in this life who are terrified of death. Mentally they can keep themselves in a between stage, and nobody’s putting them in limbo or purgatory or anything, they are by their own fear thinking “I’m frightened to go on because I’m going to have to look at these things”, things that they never looked at in their life but they knew were there. The ordinary man on the street, who’s just lived a life, when they die they are just going feel this amazing feeling and be accompanied by people whom they have known. “Oh my God that’s my mother, oh my God that’s so and so”. But again that is a kind of heavenly state, at some point that will die away. We need that because it’s a projection of this goodness, you feel there is amazing power, it’s like “Wow”, and in your heaven you feel “I’m back with my mother and I’m back with my brother, I’m back with all these people I loved, and we are in an amazing state,” but at some point you just realise that this amazing state is you and your best moments are all these things. And I don’t want to give away too much of that because a lot of people need heaven, it would be unfair of me to take away heaven from who are dying because it is heavenly and that’s what the first sense is, “wow, what an amazing feeling to be out of that limited body and no pain, no nothing.” It’s a good thing, it’s good to die. Harmonious Living: In your books you caution people from visiting fake psychics/mediums. For those people who are seeking to find a medium how can they find someone authentic? Gordon Smith: Reputation I think is everything and good mediums, good psychics do actually build up a reputation, and not by their cost or anything, by the fact if somebody recommends them to you. Look at the difference in that person. “God that’s Mrs So and So, she was in terrible state, whatever’s happened to her, wow what an amazing change”. So use your common sense. I will say that if there are spiritual churches wherever you live go along there and watch, do nothing, just watch, and think, “is this for me, do I want this?” And use your common sense and your own judgement and think, “Yeah it’s not for me” or “Yeah, I really think that person is good”. Speak to the people who run the place, they will always have the most popular mediums, popular because they are good. So there’s a way of doing it, and again all of these things are accessible on the internet these days and you can look up various organisations, spiritualist organisations who would vet their mediums. So there in you’re going to see someone who’s at least had to be vetted by a body of people who deem you to be sensible enough to be a medium. That is better than Mrs So and So who sits at the end of the pier, because you don’t know what she’s going to do, she maybe good but you don’t know, because nobody’s vetted her. In the UK at the moment they are actually bringing a new Fraudulent Medium’s Act where the mediums can be tried for extortion, because if they are found just to be giving general garbage to people and taking money then they’re going to be arrested and charged for that. Harmonious Living: So UK law does recognise that people like yourself have a role to play…? Gordon Smith: Well the great thing about there being a Fraudulent Medium’s Act, what the law’s done without knowing it is that they’ve given credence to those who are not fraudulent. That was actually brought about in 1956 by a medium called Helen Duncan because she was arrested for being medium and they had nothing to arrest her under except for the Witchcraft Act of 1735. They thought that this was ludicrous, so they had to create a law which was the Fraudulent Medium’s Act, which they have now just reviewed because all these people are trading as mediums and psychics. Harmonious Living: You must come across a lot of sceptical people, both in your day to day life, and with other people who come to see you for a session. How do you convince them that the messages you’re receiving are genuine? Gordon Smith: People who come to see me are very rarely sceptical, people coming to see me have had a loss, and their scepticism in that loss would be you know, they need convincing, so I just do what I do – what I do is convincing. If it’s not they would know. One of the recent debates I had with a psychologist in the UK was where he said “But these people are gullible”, I said “Are you telling me that because somebody’s lost a child they lose all sense of reason? They don’t actually, they are actually more inclined to be pernickety about what you give them.” I can say to somebody, “I have your boy here, his name is George” and they’ll either say, “Yeah that’s right” or then I’ll say something, and they’re like “No, that’s absolutely wrong”. So they are not gullible, they want you to cross t’s the dot i’s, they want exceptional evidence. I’m very lucky that I have done so many tests with the sceptics now. More recently I did a thing on television live with one of the biggest sceptics of mediumship in the UK, a guy called Professor Chris French. He said to me, “I’ll challenge you on national television,” and I said, “Yeah, let’s go for it, let’s do it”. And his role was, he would read body language of two people…. Harmonious Living: Was that ‘This Morning’ with Fern Britton and Philip Schofield (click here to watch the clip) Gordon Smith: Yes it was, it was a great laugh actually because he blindfolded the people so they wouldn’t know who the medium was. Both of the women came out and said, “No the first guy was a bit dubious, and I don’t really feel he told me anything”. Where I was getting things like… well one of them her father died, her name was Angela, and he called her Angie Baby, and he used to sing the song ‘Angie Baby’ to her. Silly little things like that, it either is or its not, whereas Chris was doing the general body language thing. “There’s a man who died,” etc, whereas I said “Your father died, you were sitting with him when you died”, and these kind of this things. But Chris, actually he’s now a great supporter of me, he will never say it on television. But I think I don’t get a lot of criticism from sceptics, certainly in the UK, because anything they’ve asked of me I’ve put myself up for it. And they’ve always come out in my favour, and that’s ok. Harmonious Living: And so people have done scientific research? Gordon Smith: Masses of scientific research, and proper research, we’re talking seven years testing, retesting, retesting, pseudo-setters, more pseudo-setters, and it’s all proper science tests, like “Let’s do this experiment like three hundred times and see how it pans out with the statistics. It was a loooong process (laughs), but I did it. Harmonious Living: Are you constantly bombarded with messages? Gordon Smith: No, never. Part of your development was how to and when to know to do it. So the development we did was, is it necessary for you and the public to hear messages from the other side? No it is not. Is it necessary for you to do it and do it well when people come to you when they have a grief, to sit in bar or sit in somewhere social and do it? No. If anything you’d be belittling what you’re doing by attracting attention to yourself. That would be a bit like a doctor saying, “Has anybody got an illness here that I can treat?” Hearing voices all the time would take me into the realm of schizophrenia. “Are the voices still there?” My sons will say that, “Are the voices still with you father, are they telling you to give me money?”, “No the voices have gone”… (laughs all round). Harmonious Living: What can people expect from your latest book ‘Life Changing Messages?’ Gordon Smith: Basically what the title says. A journalist accompanied me whilst we were doing this book, and he witnessed first hand – a very hardnosed journalist believe me, known for being a really nasty guy in the British press, I was quite glad they used someone like that and not somebody who was on my side. So his job was just to remain impartial, just to sit on the fence just taking notes, and basically he saw people whose lives had changed, it literally was a change of life. There’s an amazing story in that particular book where a women whose son had gone missing, and remember this book came out at the same time as the Madeline McCann thing, and I was inundated about that because of this story. It was a woman who called out in the middle of the theatre thing I was doing, she called out “Just help me!” and the tone of her voice was such that everything stopped and I thought, no I won’t, I said “I will speak to you when we finished, I’m not going to do this in public”. So when I saw her in private… cutting it short, I said “Ah, you’ve lost a son and his name’s (and I said his name)”, and that’s how it started. And she said, “So he’s dead” and I said “Yeah”, and her son went onto describe that he was in the army, he was killed by accident, and where his body would be found, and he said “I wish you would stop looking for it because you’re not going to like what you find”. And I said, “you will find his body, it’s in France, it’s in a river, on the bend in the river, near a weir,” and I described the place. She said that’s where he was stationed. They dredged the river and they found human thigh bone, and the DNA testing said it was his. Since they’ve found other body parts, but at least the woman could have a funeral of sorts two years on. And what a turnaround, because she said, “I’ve discovered that my son’s dead. I’ve had two years of hell not knowing, assuming that he’s dead but keeping a little bit of hope in my heart.” And she said, “And the message that you’ve brought tells me that not only is he dead but that he’s still alive, that spiritually he sees what we’re doing, who else would know where his body was, who else would know that it’d been chopped up and all the things?” So that took that woman out of a hell realm and allowed her to grieve, and that allowed her to then begin the first steps of healing. And there’s so many stories in that book that just, their whole life has been stunted by a death and the message that they have received has brought them out of the darkness and they’ve started living again, and a lot of them have started helping other people, and that’s where the ‘Life Changing Messages’ title comes from. Harmonious Living: From your interaction with people who have passed on, and the messages that they’ve given to their loved ones, what advice can you offer to the living? Gordon Smith: To the living, well first of all embrace life, because we we’re all so worried about death that we forget to embrace life, and that death is not such a final thing, and knowing that does allow you to actually live a life less painful and less fearful, and that to me is my advice. Also enjoy the living, don’t wait ‘til they’re dead to start grieving for them and start wanting them and loving them, love them while they’re here. This is the silly thing that people do. It’s like when people die they become a saint, “Oh, he was such a good father” but in your heart you’re like, “No he wasn’t”. So reconcile things here, don’t wait ‘til somebody dies before you do all this stuff, I should’ve, could’ve, would’ve, it’s too late, it’s too late for the human mind, it’s not really too late, but that’s the torture that people put themselves through. Grief itself is nothing other than a sense of disconnection, that’s all it is. The depressions that multi-layer themselves on top of grief are what damage us, the anger, the fear, the denial, all these things, you know the things we never did. That’s not grief, that’s a self-imposed depression based on the feeling of disconnection. So we can learn that the grief thing is disconnection and when you actually reconnect to them through your mind, which you can, all you have to do is remember their life and they become alive again in your mind. Nine out of ten people just remember they’re dead and that keeps them dead and keeps the separation. If you’ve lost somebody celebrate their life, don’t mourn it. Celebrate the fact that you were allowed to love somebody in that time and they will never be gone, you will feel them, you will sense them, they will still be able communicate with you through your dreams, through your heart, through your memory. So I would do that, animate their life, don’t end it. And basically, embrace life… don’t take life so seriously.
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