James VanPraagh: Medium of the Century

                On Sunday, October 19, 2014 Stockton was lucky enough to be graced with the presence of world renowned medium and window into the spirit world James VanPraagh.  Tickets sold to non-students for around thirty dollars while a student like myself had to pay a measly eight to experience this wonder that is VanPraagh. I was fortunate enough to sit in the second row, where I had an amazing view the man of wonder.  Now, I have to be honest, I did show up around ten minutes late, so the show had already started.  But, I arrived to VanPraagh already giving it his all to convince every one of the audience members of his powers to talk to those who have crossed over.  I got the following out of his teachings, and really, I have to say that I’m a tad disappointed. 

            First off, he talked of the presence of God ad his view on religion.  He personally doesn’t have one but believes, not in the being God, but in the acronym ONE: Omniscient Nurturing Energy.  He believes that we are all God, in a sense, and that he is simply the energy within us.  Then he talked about the acronym FEAR.  Can you tell that he likes acronyms?  Anyway, FEAR stood for a False Ego Appearing Real, which led to the acronym EGO.  That’s number three, ladies and gentlemen!  So, now you’re wondering and just have to know, “What does EGO stand for Joe?!”  Well, it stood for Edging God Out.  So we have EGO edging out ONE based on FEAR.  By this time, I was just so infatuated I had to hear more.  He began to speak of a “near death” experience he had a couple years ago in which he saw an old cousin of his who had committed suicide years before.  She told him of this beautiful piece of ribbon, which he later refered to as a tapestry, that was connected to a large matrix of another dimension that hovered over all of our heads.  This tapestry represented the energies we brought into and put out during our on Earth years. 

            As you can imagine, it only got worse, to where he compared thoughts to that of a wifi hotspot and that thoughts could be transmitted from one person to another if we could just sync up our bandwidths.  Really, this guy is ahead of his time.  Well, after all of this lecture, there was a “meditation” in which we “released” all of our negative energy.  A reading followed, but before he could do the reading, he had to make one thing clear to everyone.  If you wanted spirit to come through, it wouldn’t.  Well, there went my hopes and dreams.  So, after pulling teeth for two readings I decided it was time to go.  Who knows, maybe if I had stayed, he would have talked about a cancer patient who I could have related to.  But then again, do I really want that?