The five "clairs": Identifying and developing psychic senses

Remember learning about the five senses as a schoolkid?  Psychic ability is often considered to be a sixth sense, and that's one way to think of it.  But there is a more precise construction, which posits five psychic senses that correspond to the five physical senses.  These are sometimes called "the five 'clairs,'" after the French word stem that they all share.  Today, we're going to define all five, and discuss how they're used and different ways to develop them.

Clairvoyance ("clear sight").  Clairvoyance is the ability to see objects remotely, or to receive other true visual impressions through visions or dreams. Clairvoyance is probably what comes to mind first when people think of psychic abilities.  This makes sense, because for most of us, sight is the sense we rely on the most to navigate the world.  There are many sub-categories of clairvoyance.  Clairvoyant information most often comes spontaneously, through brief flashes of mental pictures.  The skill of a trained remote viewer is a very focused kind of clairvoyance.  Clairvoyant ability is what allows certain people to see auras and subtle energy, spirits, elementals, and other discarnate beings.  We can even classify mystics and religious visionaries as clairvoyants, if we're willing to venture that the realms they access have some external validity.

Some clairvoyants see things with their physical eyes open.  Some see them as mental images or behind closed eyes.  Some can receive images at any time; others get visions only in a trance or dream state.  (No way is better than another.)  Visions vary in intensity, too.  They can be as crisp and colorful as a movie, or lack detail, color, definition or motion.

Clairvoyance and other psychic gifts are almost certainly inborn, to some extent--but it is also possible to strengthen and develop your abilities through practice.  Clairvoyance is traditionally linked to the third eye chakra, so try searching for practices designed to stimulate and develop it.  (Too many to cover here.) Visualization exercises are a great way to improve the clarity of your visions (and enhance dreaming and artistic ability, besides).  And of course, if you're ready for it, scrying is one of the best ways to learn to awaken and control clairvoyant functioning at will.

Clairaudience ("clear hearing").  Clairaudience, or psychic hearing, is a gift that is similar to, but distinct from clairvoyance.  Clairaudients can hear sounds playing elsewhere, or receive spoken messages from beyond the range of normal hearing.  Have you ever sat down next to a friend, and "heard" a song playing, only to find out she had that song stuck in her head?  That's one example of clairaudience.  (All five of the "clairs" can involve telepathic contact, but "hearing" the thoughts of others in proximity to oneself is one of the most common forms of telepathy.)  Some, but not all mediums have clairaudient abilities that allow them to hear spirits' voices.  (Mediums who are clairvoyant, but not clairaudient, prefer to communicate through symbols and gestures.)

Clairaudients sometimes report hearing ancillary sounds, such as ringing or buzzing, that accompany the onset of psychic hearing.  Sometimes there is speech that isn't easily discernible--a murmur just outside of the range of hearing, or several voices speaking at once.  This is said to be most common when clairaudience is undeveloped or just awakening.

Needless to say, the process of developing or discovering clairaudience can be disorienting and frightening.  I suppose this is true of all psychic perceptions, but more so with clairaudience because the experience can be so similar to symptoms of mental and physical illnesses.  Of course, diagnosis of these ailments should be left to the professionals, and you should get help if you're concerned about your health.  However, if you find that strange audio perceptions occur when you're feeling spiritually open (e.g. during meditation or when you're around new people and places) and not the rest of the time, that may help rule out the more mundane causes.

People with clairaudient gifts can focus and improve their abilities through the process of sound scrying.  Similar to visual scrying, a device--a seashell or glass held to the ear, rushing water, or a white noise generator--helps creates a blank space of sound through which clairaudient impression can manifest.  Automatic writing is another way to learn to focus the flood of words into a usable stream.  Clairaudience is linked to the throat chakra, so again, you could try searching for practices to stimulate and strengthen that psychic center.

Clairsentience ("clear feeling").  Clairsentience has got to be the most common psychic phenomenon. Who hasn't had a bad feeling about a person or place, that later turned out to be completely correct? Clairsentience covers a broad range of bodily sensations that provide with information about people, places, and decisions.  This information comes through in the form of tickling or tingling sensations, changes in temperature, and pleasant or unpleasant "gut feelings."  The ability to experience intuitive leaps without any sensory information has another name, claircognizance--but mind and body are so closely linked that this distinction is mainly theoretical.  Both clairsentient and claircognizant folks describe the phenomenon of "just knowing" things, without being able to describe where this knowing comes from.

Some clairsentient people are sensitive to the energy of places or objects--they may have trouble remaining around places that have a buildup of negative energy, without necessarily being able to say why.  Clairsentients who pick up on the emotions of people and animals are also known as empaths.  Often, the pain or emotion an empath's body picks up from others can seem so real, it's hard to separate from their own experiences.  This isn't reserved for the extraordinary few.  Anyone who's ever had a close physical relationship--as a parent, as a lover--has experienced an intermingling of energies at least bordering on clairsentience.

Clairsentience is probably the most widespread of the psychic gifts--it would seem that nature has endowed all conscious beings with the ability to "feel" danger, and also to experience connection with others.  But because it's so subjective, it can be hard to learn to trust hunches and feelings.  One really "out there" clairvoyant experience is usually enough to convince someone of the reality of psychic abilities, but clairsentient experiences tend to be less evidentiary.  Clairsentient awareness builds over time, as you learn what different feelings mean to you, and as you gather that your impressions are usually correct.

Clairsentience is associated with the heart chakra (especially in the form of empathy) and with the solar plexus chakra (the source of the proverbial "gut feeling").  Dowsing (e.g., with a pendulum) can be an ideal divination method for those who have strong clairsentient impressions, but perhaps lack the visualization

Clairalience ("clear smelling").

The last two "clairs" are the least often discussed, but they can be very useful, especially as supplementary skills.  Biology tells us that smell and taste are our oldest senses, the ones connected with our animal past.  In human beings, they're somewhat atrophied.  Most other creatures routinely gather information about their environments through smell, but for us, this ability is so rare that it seems to border on the supernatural.

In folklore, clairalience is most often associated with spirit presence.  It's very common for the dead to announce their presence with a whiff of a familiar perfume or tobacco.  In the realm of ceremonial magic, scent also plays an important role.  Many spirits, gods, and astral places have fragrances that are associated with them, and the proper incense or perfume can be used either as a tool to draw them near, or as a signal of their presence.

If you want to develop your sense of psychic smell, try meditating to get back in touch with this vestigial sense.  When you smell something, you're actually taking molecules of it into your body through the air.  How weird is that?  (And yet, its an apt description of how we move through the mundane and psychic worlds alike, never isolated, always taking in and putting out stuff.)  Close your eyes and see how many smells you can discern in the room around you. You can also practice "visualizing" (or recalling) familiar smells, trying to recreate them in your mind as vividly as possible.

Clairgustance ("clear tasting").

Clairgustance is the least-discussed of the five "clairs"--I've never met anyone who claims to be a gifted third-generation clairgustant.  I once heard a phone psychic describing the experience of tasting the peanut butter sandwich one of her clients had been eating before the call--but that's the only example I can think of.  Taste and smell are very similar, biologically speaking, so I would imagine that anything said about clairalience would also apply to clairgustance.

In conclusion, I'd like to point out that this discussion of the five "clairs" is meant to be helpful for identifying and exploring a variety of psychic gifts.  Obviously, these categories are somewhat arbitrary and the boundaries are blurry--so there's no point in getting hung up on them.  For instance, if you ask a question and hear the spoken answer "yes," is that clairaudience or clairsentience?  In a vision, you smell an orange so clearly it makes your mouth water--are you developing your clairalience or clairgustance?  And so on.  Have fun!

The internal monologue: Friend or foe?

All right, so...I want to talk a little about the internal monologue, as it relates to scrying.  The internal monologue is the voice of your conscious mind as it describes its environment, makes judgements, has insights and ideas, gives you a play-by-play of your physical and emotional condition.  Everybody has one of these mental commentary tracks.  A sample:  "It sure feels good to be sitting in this nice comfortable chair.  It's kind of hot upstairs, though.  Maybe I should get up and go downstairs.  Nah.  I hope we don't have another warm winter.  I really don't want to go to work tomorrow.  My boss is such a stupid bitch.  No, that's not a right thing to say--I don't even know her that well.  She should be nicer, though.  I wonder what's in the fridge."

When you begin meditation practice, one of the first things you learn is how to silence this internal voice, or at least diminish its impact on your concentration.  As I beginner, I tried to squash it by yelling, "SSShhhhsshhh! Quiet, you!" at my mind every time I had a stray thought.  (Hint: That doesn't work.)  Some more effective methods include repeating a mantra, focusing on your breath, hearing your thoughts fading into silence or visualizing them blowing away.  Eventually, with a little practice, you can experience a rare moment of stillness--a quiet interval where your brain's not talking to you and your body's not asking for anything.  Then your internal monologue starts in with the "Wow!  I did it! This is so new and exciting!" thoughts, and you're back to square one.

But scrying is not meditation--not exactly.  Scrying sessions often begin and end with short periods of meditation, but the middle interval is a separate state of consciousness.  I'd say it's like goats and cows: They have more similarities than difference, but they are different animals.  In meditation, one of the goals is to achieve freedom from stimuli, mental or otherwise.  Total stillness and blankness.  (Zen student: "Master, in meditation today I had a vision of the Heavenly Buddha seated on a golden lotus."  Zen master:  "Just focus on your breathing and it will go away.")  When you scry, however, you actually want those stray bits and pieces to intrude upon your consciousness--that's sort of the whole point.  They are the packets that contain psychic information, wisdom from the higher realms, gems from the unconscious, pretty pictures, or whatever it is your after.   I don't know if this is an East vs. West thing.  I also don't think the two modes are incompatible or truly divergent.  Clearly, some of skills and techniques you learn from a practice of meditation are very useful for getting yourself into the mental state necessary for scrying.  And the reverse is probably true as well.

So, normally when you scry, the internal monologue is still active.  It's pretty much always active, unless you use one of the techniques for turning it off.  Your conscious mind may be feeding you random thoughts to distract you, telling you encouraging or discouraging things about your practice, or describing or commenting on the things you see.  This last function is the most useful.  (Although you have to be careful about over-analyzing your visions--as some remote-viewing experiments have shown, often the vision is correct, but the interpretation is wrong.)  Some sources I've read even recommend using narrative voice to go along with the images in the speculum.  Using this method, you actually talk yourself through the session out loud.  "I see dark clouds.  They're lit from behind.  Sunlight?  Now they're moving, forming a funnel shape...oh, it's a tree.  There's someone sitting under the tree..." and so on.  This technique works similar to a mantra.  Describing the pictures in words keeps your verbal center busy, blocking out extraneous thoughts.  It's also a good way for a beginner to see what it feels like to have a continuous stream of visions, and to acknowledge that they really are seeing something--even if it's just various colors and shapes.  Some scryers also report that hearing their own voice has a self-hypnotic effect.  You start out just describing what you see, and as you proceed, the voice will sound stranger and farther away, and before you know it you're in a nice little dissociative state.

There are other good reasons not to banish your internal monologue while scrying.  Dictating your impressions out loud has one obvious benefit:  You can record them for later.  We've already covered how important note-taking is, and recording your sessions is a way to get detailed notes without the break in concentration of reaching for a pen and paper.  And of course, if you're scrying for someone else, or in a group session, you have to be able to be able to talk and see at the same time.  You have to use words to share, because they aren't seeing what you're seeing (probably).  Finally, there's the issue that scrying isn't just a visual phenomena--it can also trigger clairaudience in certain people.  Psychic impressions of words, phrases, even whole conversations can enter the mind spontaneously--and these don't sound all that different from ordinary verbal thoughts.  Of course you have to learn to tell them apart, but if you reflexively shush every word that pops into your head, you might miss out on some useful information.

Speaking from experience, I will say that the internal monologue does act as a tether to the conscious mind, keeping you from reaching down into the deepest trance states.  But that's not necessarily a bad thing.  The deepest trance states don't always yield the most content.  (Just like how the deepest sleep is often dreamless.)  Those deep, deep states are enjoyable, and can be profound in their own way.  But it's harder to bring nuggets back from them.  Keeping one part of your mind tied to the realm of words helps with retention--as you mentally verbalize your visions, you're actually storing them for later.  Think "canoe" to yourself, and you're more likely to remember that you scried a canoe. Again, it's similar to dream retention.  What practice do they always advise to help remember your dreams?  Keeping a dream journal, naturally!  Dreams evaporate quickly upon waking, but if you can scribble down just a few key words, you'll be able to recall the dream vividly for days afterward.  Same deal with scrying.

In conclusion, while the internal monologue is usually cast as the baddie in meditative and/or spiritual practice, it does have some useful functions for scrying.  The key is to be able to minimize irrelevant chatter, while staying open to clairaudient impressions and using your verbal faculties to retain and communicate what you see.  (Not easy, admittedly.  But nobody said it would be.)  Also, while scrying is not the same critter as meditation, doing a traditional meditation practice won't hurt, and will certainly help keep the unwanted noise to a minimum.

Good luck!

-M

Dissecting the "P" word: What's wrong with "psychic"?

Over the years, I've encountered a lot of people who do metaphysical work of one kind or another and are uncomfortable with the word "psychic."  I'm definitely one of them.  Just hearing the term makes my eyebrows tilt inward, and saying it makes my hands leap up into involuntary air quotes.  So, I'd like to spend some time unpacking the word--what it really means, and what about it makes people's skin crawl.  This may seem like a semantic rabbit hole I'm going down here, but bear with me.

1. So, let's start with the obvious knock against "psychic"--its connotations are kind of sleazy.  Sure, it's Greek for "of the soul," but somehow that noble word got saddled with images of ugly neon signs and the back pages of irreputable magazines.  (Thanks, Miss Cleo.) The fact that some jurisdictions require the disclaimer "for entertainment purposes only" from psychic readers does the word further injury.  People who believe that they have genuine abilities just don't want their god-given talents confused with the smooth dealings of a cold reader or mentalist.  It's no wonder you see so many business cards for the "intuitive counselor" and the "angelic life coach" around town, with nary a "psychic" to be found.

2. "Psychic" is divisive, especially when used as a noun. It implicitly divides people into two categories--those who are and those who aren't--when most people agree that psychic talents exist on a continuum.  Furthermore, the word can have an unpleasant ring for people whose gifts manifested early in life.  Many of us have always felt weird or different, and chances are, the first word we learned that described our otherness was "psychic."  Maybe the word got slapped on us when we accidentally displayed our talents in some way that caught the notice of family or friends.   Maybe we heard it applied to an alien species on television and thought, "That's it.  I must be from another planet."  Now, as adults, we can deal with the fact that we are different--if only because of the fact that not everybody believes in or studies this stuff.  (Whether everybody is or can be psychic is a whole 'nother can of worms, which we'll have to savor later.)  But the word draws attention to the difference in a way that belies how common psychic experiences are to human beings--and brings back crummy memories, besides.

3. "Psychic" is unspecific.  There are just too many psychic gifts, all trying to crowd under that one umbrella term.  There's the "big four" which have been most extensively studied (clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy, and psychokinesis) and many more which are on the fringes (mediumship, psychic vampirism, extraterrestrial communication, and energy work of all flavors).  There are people who have psychic dreams, psychic feelings in their big toe, and people who claim not to have any psychic ability at all, but have mad skills when you hand them a deck of tarot cards.  So describing a person as "psychic" is like calling someone "creative."  It's mildly descriptive, but it doesn't provide a whole lot of information about what it is that they actually do--do they paint, do they make windchimes out of beer cans, or what?

4. "Psychic" is a pretty stiff claim, the kind that raises the hackles of skeptics and even moderate believers.  Me, I like to think of myself as a thinking occultist, one of an elite fraternity of seekers who aren't out to scam people or massage our own egos.  One of the markers of this fraternity is that we are hell-bent on being honest and forthcoming about what we can and cannot do.  And precision of language is a big part of that.  Thus, I'm comfortable saying that I have psychic experiences, even frequent ones--but to round that up to "I'm psychic" feels like an extravagant claim that I can't really back up, especially not to the harshest skeptics.  (Say "psychic," and those folks hear "omniscient.")  Most psychic events are spontaneous and kind of random, but claiming to be psychic implies the ability to gain information at will--in a deliberate, consistent and focused way.  I'm certainly not there yet, and furthermore, I've never met anyone who is.

5. I've saved my biggest objection for last:  The whole concept of psychic ability is an extremely limited (and limiting) paradigm.  Dean Radin expresses it best in Entangled Minds, when he says that we need to stop thinking of psychic phenomena powers of the mind, but instead as properties of the universe.  This is an incredibly important and overlooked point.  To focus our amazement on abilities "possessed" by an individual is to miss the truly amazing realities they imply--a splendid unity and complexity in the universe, properties of time and space that are almost beyond imagining.  In other words, the next time you have a so-called psychic perception, the conclusion you should be drawing is not "I'm special" but rather, "This world I'm a part of is incredible."

So, that's just a handful of my reservations about the word "psychic."  (Whew.  I feel much better now.)  I'm not saying nobody should use the word, or even proposing an alternative. I'm just enumerating the ways I find the term problematic, and why I can't quit doing those douche-y air quotes when I say it.  I'd be interested in reading some others' opinions.  Do you use the word "psychic" to describe yourself?  Why or why not?