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The Spirit Messenger
| Date: |
06 March 2005 12:00 |
| Producer: |
Ingwe Productions
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| Show: | Carte Blanche |
Gordon Smith (spirit medium): 'I can be chatting to people and all of a sudden somebody appears at their side.'
Known as 'the psychic barber', Gordon Smith is said to have the extraordinary ability to talk to the dead.
Gordon: 'Sometimes they just come because they can.'
Reputed to be one of the most gifted mediums in the world, Gordon's abilities have often been put to the test. Using his special connection to the spirit world to help comfort the grieving, he refuses to charge for his sittings as a medium, and still makes a living as a hairstylist in his Scottish hometown.
Zaa Nkweta (Carte Blanche presenter): 'Born and bred in Glasgow, from a young age, Gordon says, he began to see visions from the other side. Not surprisingly though, these early manifestations of his psychic abilities didn't always go down too well with his mother and father.'
Gordon: 'One day in the garden - it was a bright sunny day - a friend of my mother and father's just came walking along the street at usual, like he liked to do. He spoke to me, he sang a little song, he was happy. And then I asked him where he was going and he said, 'Tell your mother I'm in Dalbeth'.'
Thinking nothing of it, seven-year-old Gordon ran into the house to pass the message on to his mother. Little did he know that she had just come back from this man's funeral in Glasgow's Dalbeth cemetery.
Gordon: 'She absolutely freaked out. In fact, she slapped me. She got such a fright, she dropped everything she was doing - she was peeling potatoes at the time - and I couldn't understand her reaction.'
Put off by this backlash, he suppressed his psychic gift until he was in his mid-twenties when a close personal friend's brother appeared to him on the night he died in a fire.
Gordon: 'And the moment I saw my friend's brother it was like just this opening in my mind and I would see light around people. In fact, I went to the optician and I did it logically; I went to have my eyes tested because I thought, 'This is ridiculous, I'm starting to see lights around everyone.'
But when he took his friend to a medium to help her cope with her brother's death, he was startled by the psychic's reaction.
Gordon: 'And she said, 'You can do what I do; you see people don't you?' I didn't want to admit that. I was a closet medium, and that was my coming out.'
But as a young man he found this awakening difficult to cope with, as visions came to him without warning.
Gordon: 'Because I didn't know what was coming next, and then of course I started to have expectations and I started to test the spirits as it says in the Bible, 'Test'. And I said, 'You will do this, that and the next thing,' and they would comply up to a point, and then I realised I could do something good with it. That was the point that I started to accept, 'Yeah, this is okay,' and I tried to discipline myself with it.'
Using a strict regime of meditation to expand his psychic abilities, he spent five years training in mediumship, learning to get rid of what he calls his 'mind rubbish'.
Gordon: 'If I'm giving someone a communication from the spirit world, I'm not associated with my mind because I've done this 'clearing out' if you like.'
But as a family man he has also had to learn to separate his abilities as a psychic from his role as a father.
Gordon: 'It's horrid at times when my kids lie to me or someone lies to me, because I know.'
Zaa: 'So what do you say?
Gordon: 'Nothing. Because again its not their fault that I feel that. They've got to learn to live their life and adapt and do their things and make mistakes, and that's a hard thing not to get yourself involved in.'
His understanding of the spirit world and human consciousness has been shaped by twenty years of psychic encounters with the 'other side', and is deeply rooted in the eastern philosophic tenets of reincarnation and the Karmic wheel of life.
Zaa: 'So is there a heaven and hell?'
Gordon: 'Yeah, here, this is... This is the heaven and hell. I mean, this is the only life where you experience hell, there's nothing darker than this. This is the darkest you'll be and the heaviest. If we are spirit beings, which we are, then nothing is more solid and more heavy to us than this physical frame.'
Zaa: 'The people on the other side, depending on how they die, let's say someone doesn't want to go, someone's clinging on...'
Gordon: 'People struggle with it, yeah.'
Zaa: 'How does that affect...'
Gordon: 'Their consciousness? Their consciousness is disturbed so they're not haunting people or anything like that, but there's a disturbance that needs to be sorted out. I mean, I get a lot of people who just swear at me right away because they're angry and because they died in the middle of something...there's nothing worse than if somebody dies in the middle of sex!'
With a wit to match his sixth sense, Gordon often uses humour to get him through his daily dealings in death.
Zaa: 'Why would spirits want to communicate with us?'
Gordon: 'To take away our sadness and to stop us feeling limited by death. That is the simple reason.'
And tsunami survivors, Ilse Panaino and her sister-in-law Lesley are looking for just such a message of comfort from the loved ones they lost in the disaster. Gordon, Lesley and Ilse agreed to give Carte Blanche the rare opportunity to film them in a private sitting.
Earlier this year we told the story of the Panaino family and the tragedy that struck their lives as they holidayed on the island of Phi Phi.
Ilse's daughter, Chene and Lesley's mother also survived the disaster. But Bevan, Ilse's husband, died while trying in vain to save his father from the raging waters.
Lesley Panaino: 'She just broke down and she just said, 'Les, how can I leave my husband now?''
Ilse Panaino: 'That tore my heart out. I felt I had deserted him...I've given up on him.'
The bodies of Bevan and his father were returned to South Africa, bringing their family some form of closure. But when we spoke to Lesley, the day before she and Ilse met with Gordon, she told us that for them it's really still a case of 'one day at a time'.'
Lesley: 'My mom goes up and down, she's on a roller-coaster. She still feels very confused about what really happened on that particular day.'
Battling from memory loss, Lesley's mother is still affected by stress related to the trauma of the tsunami and the loss of her husband and son.
Lesley: 'If there's an answer for her from my dad and my brother, yes I'd love to give it to her in the hope that it will help her.'
Left to cope with raising their four daughters on her own, Ilse also hoped to get some word of re-assurance from her husband, Bevan, although she admitted she was sceptical.
Gordon: 'Never any guarantee with this that it will work, and I've got to tell you that because sometimes it doesn't...'
Having met them for the first time, Gordon had no knowledge of the Panainos' history nor the circumstance of Bevan's and his father's death.
Gordon: 'What I'm going to do is take your hand, if that's okay, just for a second 'cos I just need to tune in...'
Gordon: 'I like to get a sense of the feeling of the person, then I mentally just send them a thought asking if anybody there wants to communicate with this person and then I have a little ritual that I do which is saying, 'Please God can I help this person.''
Gordon: 'Okay, it's fine, bless you.'
Gordon may often feel how a person died but he doesn't focus on the event, but rather on their living spirit.
Gordon: 'As soon as I took your hand, I got the sense of a man in the spirit world, somebody quite young I feel who went over very, very quickly, that's the sense I get. Does that make sense to you? Somebody who passed like that and it's almost like this sense of [breathing hard] okay I made it, okay he's not that long in the spirit world. I do feel that this was quite a recent thing and I do feel that it was very tragic. I feel a lot of tragedy here for many people.'
Gordon: 'There's a little blonde child that I'm seeing, let's just say that he's with the child and he's putting his arms around her to say he's looking after her. And there are times that she will recognise him, even though she's small, but there are times that she will feel his presence and he will never step away from her; he'll always be there to guard and protect her. It's her breathing, but she's a bit chesty. He's telling me, don't worry about that, there's a lot of healing coming in for her, okay?'
Ilse: 'Nobody knew that. It was only Lesley, myself and Myrtle, my mother-in-law, that witnessed her breathing problems.'
Gordon: 'He's showing me, I'm not sure if it's a sports car, but it's certainly a fast car. Does that make sense?
Lesley: 'His car! ... He bought an SLK last year'
Gordon: 'Do you hear music around you at the moment? There's a connection to music. He loves his music, doesn't he? I even feel like I want to play music as well. So there's some connection with music and bands and things.'
Lesley: 'Anyone that knew him knew that he loved music. Often he used to go and play at his friend's club as a DJ just because he enjoyed it.'
Gordon: 'But there's concern over someone's mother who's here... does that make sense? He just keeps saying, 'I need to help mother, I need to help mother,' because her heart is beating and she's actually becoming really ill through this and she needs to... she has tried, but it's not right... this stuff she's holding onto her. Nobody can blame themselves for this, I mean there's absolutely no one who can blame themselves for this, but I feel as if she is taking on a lot of the responsibility for this.'
Lesley: 'Bevan and my mom had a very close connection and he was always there to lift up my mom's spirits...'
Gordon: 'If you're going to do it, do it right...'
Twenty-five minutes into the sitting Gordon felt another spirit come through, a grandmother adding concern for Lesley's mother.
Gordon: 'Just look after your mother, would you? I'm fighting to keep him here but I know that he so much wants you to know that he is still alive and he's still very much with you.'
Ilse: 'It's amazing, I can't explain the feeling because I was very sceptical about this whole thing. It's just made me see things in a very different light because how is anyone to know about the little things that have been mentioned.'
Zaa: 'What happens to Gordon when this is happening? What happens to you?'
Gordon: 'Working with anyone in the spirit world fuels you, it really does. I get this sense of healing when they come through and that passes through me to the person. It's not just about the evidence.'
Lesley: 'I feel so uplifted and if that's what it gives to people who have lost somebody so close to their hearts...it's an amazing gift to have and to help heal people.'
And for this 'spirit messenger' healing begins when people start to focus on life and the living.
Gordon: 'There's too many interested in the death and the dying and stuff like that. And this is what my job's about - to show people that you cannot die for the life of you... that's the actual message.'
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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