Breaking Down Psychic Abilities
I experience confusion about what constitutes various psychic abilities among the laypeople on a pretty regular basis, so I’m going to break it down for you here, thoroughly:
A psychic is a person who consciously utilizes their intuition. Psychic abilities are intuitive abilities. Some people argue that there’s a difference. I don’t think there is–it just exists on a spectrum. A lot of people will label the lower, less conscious end of the spectrum as intuitive and the higher, more conscious end as psychic. Additionally, some people prefer to label themselves as intuitives because there’s less of a stigma associated with it than there is to the word “psychic.”
Psychic Abilities: Types of Clairs
CLAIRVOYANCE is but one modality of psychic abilities: clear seeing. This can manifest as “visions” (for lack of a less loaded term) which you may see either in your mind or with your physical vision, the latter of which tends to be more rare.
You can think of different psychic modalities like different languages, and clairvoyance is most often the most symbolic of them, depending on the situation. It can look like watching a scene play out in front of you or it can look like symbols, numbers, words, etc. Dreaming, in a way, is a form of clairvoyance.
CLAIRAUDIENCE is clear hearing. This is almost never like having a phone conversation with someone, at least not in my personal experience. It’s more like hearing words and phrases, and the occasional full on sentence in your head, and sometimes physically.
CLAIRCOGNIZANCE is clear knowing (intuitive downloads: you just “know” things or have ideas, thoughts, or abstract concepts that pop into your head), and CLAIRSENTIENCE is clear feeling, i.e. physically feeling energy as well as emotions (a.k.a. empath). This can also include phantom tastes and smells, and the feeling of phantom physical sensations such as touch, or it may involve taking on the physical symptoms of another person such as headaches, nausea, body aches and pains, lethargy, etc.
***It’s important to note that this is not the ONLY reason why an individual may experience phantom sensations, simply one possible reason.
For me, claircognizance and clairsentience are very connected because the concepts that you just “know” often have a subtle energetic signature associated with them that I can feel and I have to feel into what’s being downloaded in order to put it into words.
Much in the way that I said clairaudience isn’t like picking up the phone and talking to someone, having a “conversation” in my head with spirit is not exactly like sitting in a room and talking to another person. It’s more like hearing words accompanied by some type of visual and/or feeling (and that feeling could be the knowing type or the emotional type).
The whole process is akin to picking up subtle, abstract sensory input and piecing it together in a way that makes sense, logically, without totally overthinking it. Or, to use the language analogy I mentioned earlier: it’s like looking at wingdings while hearing someone speaking a few Spanish words that you know, but understanding the whole thing in English and then having your body respond like, “That’s correct.” That feeling may be felt suddenly, like the sensation you have when you recognize something, or perhaps the feeling associated with clarity or an epiphany–or it may feel more like a deep knowing such as the sensation associated with certainty.
Most people tend to have one or two predominant clairs. I seem to experience them all equally these days.
Now, let us demystify all the ways that people can use these modalities of psychic abilities.
I already stated one of them, which was the…
EMPATH – a person who feels subtle energies and many times, the emotions of others. Empaths tend to be straight clairsentient, sometimes with a dash of HSP (Highly Sensitive Person).
MEDIUM – A person who can sense spirits. A medium may use any of the aforementioned clairs in any combination. They are referred to as a ‘medium’ because they are an intermediary between a noncorporeal entity and a corporeal entity. As an aside, a noncorporeal entity doesn’t necessarily have to equate to the spirit of someone who has died. You can also communicate with the higher self of incarnate people, plants, animals, and a whole slew of interdimensional beings that would probably stretch your mind a bit too much for today’s purposes.
PRECOGNITION – When one uses these abilities to sense an energetic trajectory and predict where it may or may not lead. I could probably write an entire post on the nuances involved in precognition, but I’ll save it for another day.
REMOTE VIEWING – (Typically) purely clairvoyant in nature, although a person practicing remote viewing may use other psychic senses to inform what they are seeing.
PSYCHOMETRY – The practice of feeling the energy that has been left on or programmed into physical objects. This practice may utilize all clairs.
CHANNELING – The practice of opening yourself up to allow one of those aforementioned noncorporeal beings to communicate through you rather than just to you. This is different in that there’s less of a logical processing of information which means less of your ego (personal ideologies and beliefs) color it. Typically this manifests as more claircognizance than anything else.
AUTOMATIC WRITING – Automatic writing can be a form of channeling that comes out in written form rather than spoken. For me, personally, I tend to be able to sort of tap into a certain energy while writing where things just flow without me putting much thought into it. This is once again more claircognizance than anything else.
TELEPATHY – Most people are pretty familiar with what telepathy is: the mind-to-mind communication between two people. Telepathy can manifest through clairaudience (which is how most people imagine it to be like) but also through clairvoyance and claircognizance.
This is really just scratching the surface. It only gets weirder from here.
Lastly, I will leave you with this:
Everyone…everyone…possesses these subtle senses we call psychic abilities. You are born with them, just as you are born with the ability to taste, touch, feel, smell and hear.
Therefore, psychic development is not the development of these abilities, it is the cultivation of your awareness of these senses. Because of their subtle nature, we often ignore them much like we ignore emotions and unpleasant thoughts associated with our shadow selves.
This is why many people experience heightened intuition and increased psychic experiences as they go through the process of healing and integration. They are cultivating self-awareness.
Before engaging in any kind of intuitive development, I highly recommend that you engage in a significant amount of shadow work.
Learn why you should engage in shadow work prior to intuitive development here.
Thanks for being here,
Ash
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Very, very helpful, thank you! Especially that last little bit about ‘developing’ psychic abilities just being heightened self awarness!!
What do I do if I’ve had instances that seem to fit Clairaudience, telepathy and precognition?
Most of these through external hearing how do I tell the difference? I’ve been awoken in the mornings by the voices of individuals that make no sense at all to me since I don’t recognize any of them what they say has no meaning to me at least. Their out of nowhere and inconsistent for instance an old man who yells wake up?
A little boy calling for his dad? A young woman knocking on what sounds like a back door saying let me in? Am I hearing real people or something else? Then there are sounds like wine glass hitting the ground shattering? The crunching sound of metal on metal? The sound of a huge boom? Most recently the sound of sonar!
Then there’s the impossible conversation i heard outside my window impossible when you consider how far from the street and height of my window you literally have to be levitating pressed against my window yelling and even then it would never ever be that clear. What makes it crazy is that same conversation occurred hours later two doors away in a neighbor’s driveway as he was pulling in! How could I over hear a conversation that wouldn’t take place for a few hours? I’ve heard the sound of a car crash when I went to check nothing at all 24 hours later a car crash a block away?
I’ve had friends and family my wife most recently will say things like how did you know that? You just said it. I heard you say it clearly, no I was thinking it but I never said that. It’s even happened with strangers I’ll hear them say something only to realize their repeating what I just heard seconds later at first I was confused only to realize they never said it the first time.
Then there are events of my youth which is a longer list for another day.
The clairs are HOW you experience something. Things like precognition are WHAT you are experiencing. Does that make sense?
For example, a medium can be clairaudient or clairvoyant or both and that’s how they experience mediumship. Same goes for precognition. You’re just experiencing it through different modalities.
As far as attempting to tell whether what you’re hearing/seeing is happening now or in the future, I think that’s a subtlety that you have to feel for. Sometimes it’s just a wait and see.
After your response which makes a lot of sense I’ve been giving it more thought and wondering
Why I’m experiencing these now? What triggers these precognitions? What’s the rhyme or reasoning behind them? Why just a word or sound? Why are they so infrequent? Why did I have them more often more clearly years ago and now almost nothing?
There could be a lot of different reasons. I have become increasingly more psychic as the journey continues, but my predominant modes of receiving information have shifted drastically. I used to rely heavily on dreaming, and these days it’s more so waking. Clairvoyance used to be my predominant claire and now clairaudience seems to be vying for first place, but I get all of it pretty regularly.
There also doesn’t have to be any special meaning behind them. We’re constantly connected to the quantum fields around us. You may just be accidentally tapping in from time to time.
For example, I tend to “channel hop” when I’m doing mundane activities like vacuuming, gardening, or some kind of monotonous creative project. One day I was out in my back yard spray painting a picnic basket and I heard someone behind me give me a suggestion about how I should be doing it. “No, that’s a terrible idea,” I thought. Then I realized it was a spirit behind me watching what I was doing. lol
I probably wouldn’t have noticed him had I not been in that particular “auto pilot” sort of state of mind.
Talk about channel hop the strangest coincidence if you can call it that occurred a few days ago. As I mentioned previously early on August 2, I first heard the sound of sonar while preparing breakfast out of nowhere then add to that a few days later August 7th my wife and I where watching a tv show when they added the sound of sonar which did not make sense, my wife said what a strange sound to add to a shows ending?
I Then told her about the sonar sound i heard a few days prior. August 8th or 9th I called a friend and mentioned that sound and he said that’s weird I was just watching voyage to the bottom of the sea when they played that very sound and the phone rang and it was me calling. Then I discovered on August 15th that someone had vandalized the local submarine museum they had snuck onboard during Saturday or Sunday morning and opening the hatches so that the submarine suffered a huge amount of water damage. I have not had another occurrence since so was this a coincidence? And what was the point it’s not like it changed anything?
We’re surrounded by energy all the time, and energy contains information. It could just be that you’re pulling in random bits of info, and that’s all it is. It could also be your guides showing you that you have abilities and that you should trust them. Its being confirmed for you.
Last night I saw for a few seconds a very vivid shape in 3D on my rig a rectangular shape in yellow like the yellow in sunglasses. It was incredibly vivid and so real. What does this represent? I’ve seen shapes in vivid colors before
Usually quick and then it’s gone it usually when I’m just sitting lost in a day dream of thoughts, but I can’t recall what was thinking when I saw it.
What are your thoughts regarding a sudden increase in precog events? For the past few weeks, I’ve had an increase in events where I think of someone and they call me, or I can’t remember the name of something very obscure and then I hear it on the radio. I’ve always had this type of thing happen but not at this frequency.
I think it just means you’re becoming more psychically aware. Typically our intuition gets stronger as we become more sensitive (usually as a result of feelings safer in our bodies).
I clearly understand what you’re experiencing. I’ve known it my whole life. Tried to drown it out because I was a bit overwhelmed and also didn’t want to look like a freak to others.