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Morality of Money for Psychic Readings?

T Stokes

"Sufficient for your need, not sufficient for your greed". (Mahatma Ghandi)

A question that continually arises, year in and year out is the proposition that it is somehow wrong to charge money for healings or readings. Some people do believe it is wrong to ask, or accept money for these services, which they feel are god given.

My own view is that of Jesus, he said that ; "A labourer is worth his hire". The key is to ask only a modest sum, there is the school of thought that the bigger the fee the better the service, but this is not always the case. At a recent spiritual meeting I witnessed a resurfacing of this old argument, certainly in my own experience god gave me no "gift", it arose from having been earned with study, discipline, struggle and difficulty, maybe from a previous life, and for god to give one a gift and not another person, would smack of favouritism, and god has no favourites. Regardless of the teachings of some religious cults.

Over many years of doing readings at psychic fairs and festivals in Britain,
my offer was that anyone who came and wanted a reading and could not afford one, would be read for free when I had finished working.

Having said that, for many years I made no charge for readings or healing, and people do tend to think if it is free it cannot be any good, some will come just to have a laugh at your expense. The other side to this is that often when people come for help, monetary difficulty is usually part of the equation and to take advantage of another's suffering can incur severe karmic penalties.

A Buddhist philosopher once said.-- "A thousand sorrows."

" You are merely engaged in an eternal process of multiplying your wants, you have developed the accumulative instinct so that you have actually come to look upon life, as an opportunity of piling up rubbish in the shape of material possessions.

" Western civilisation is nothing but a process of multiplying your wants, the luxuries of today are the necessities of tomorrow, and the more the horizon of these wants extends, the more you will have to toil to gratify them, and you are forced to devote an ever increasing part of your life to procuring the means to gratify these artificial wants , you are indeed the slave of your wants, for each new want implies a new sorrow , the sorrow experienced in the deprivation of the means to acquire it, a thousand wants implies a thousand sorrows, a thousand disappointments a thousand pains."

The spiritual thinking behind one man having so much and another so little is that the accumulation of much wealth cannot be achieved without some cheating or over charging, and all religious scripture infers that overcharging is a form of theft. And it even states that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. So the pursuit of money for its own sake is a crime against the spirit.

The only mention of Christ losing his temper in the bible is over the ;
"money changers in the temple" and this has been the root problem with the dislike of Jews over the centuries with the crime of "usury" or loaning money at huge interest charges, the Jewish god Shekinah comes from the same root word as Shekels or money, and this is "Sagan" or home.

It is so easy to forget that when we die, we only take with us our spiritual wealth.
William Blake said; "Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion", and I would add that, the flames of hell are kept burning with the desires of materialism, and the worship of materialism is a form of Idolatry.

Idolatry is not just the worship of a false god, it occurs whenever a purely human value system becomes the main focus of religious aspiration, the veneration of sportsmen or pop stars, is to worship a false god, and money worship is the falsest of all.
So if you are asked " is it O.K. to charge for healings or readings" I feel it is fine as long as it is a reasonable price, as money is only an exchange tool, not an end product.

The other side to this coin, and I have heard competent mediums, some household names claim that a reading from an intuitive is just "psychic" while a reading from a medium is "spiritual" a well known and talented television medium we all know charges £250, is that spiritual ?

So we need another look, just because a person is on the other side does not suddenly make them "spiritual" and not all spiritualists are spiritual and some spirits are not spiritual either !

Perhaps the most spiritual message I ever had was 40 years ago from a crippled old lady in a wheelchair with a very shabby pack of playing cards.

My feeling here is that some people do want mundane advice, career, love, family and health, but others need the comfort, that only a spirit guide can give in terms of inner guidance.

My main grouse is the number of complaints about frauds, and particularly the psychic telephone lines, and I do think we in Britain will have to regulate ourselves soon, as the threatening regulation from The European Union will cripple us all, But certainly a re-appraisal is long overdue.