The Element Encyclopedia of the Psychic World: The Ultimate A–Z of Spirits, Mysteries and the Paranormal. Theresa Cheung
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries messages from the spirits received clairaudiently were an established part of many séances. Today clairaudience often occurs in psychic readings.
Tuning in: an exercise to help develop clairaudient ability
If you’re a good listener, if you find certain sounds and noises unbearable and if you are good at noticing changes in tone, pitch and frequency of noise, chances are you’re more likely to receive psychic information through clairaudience. We all have some degree of clairaudient ability; we all experience those words or thoughts or ideas that seem to come from nowhere, but we tend not to recognize them or we take them for granted. You may wonder how you can tell if the voices you hear are psychic information or your own daily thoughts. One way to figure this out is to listen carefully. Your intuition tends to speak to you in a kind, loving and positive \ way. Self-talk tends to be harsher.
Find a place where you feel comfortable and won’t be disturbed. Sit down, relax and breathe deeply. Imagine a shield of golden light around your ears for hearing and protection. Next, imagine a tuning knob such as on a radio in front of you. With this knob you can tune your hearing to a new frequency - that of your higher awareness - where you can receive clairaudient guidance. Sense a subtle sound change as you adjust the frequency. Note whatever information you receive. You may receive very little at first, but keep trying, and after a while you may find that your ears automatically tune to receive clairaudient information whenever you focus.
Clairaudience differs from the disembodied voices heard at séances and poltergeist cases, which are considered to be collective apparitional phenomena. It also differs from telepathy, which is the ability to read the thoughts of another person. Clairaudience can be identified in many different ways. You may hear sounds or voices that you know aren’t happening in the real world and that you know aren’t the same as your own inner voice. These voices may come when you are awake or in your dreams. They may be the voices of dead relatives or the voices of spirit guides. Besides voices, certain sounds may provide you with psychic insight. Some people hear ringing in one or both of their ears and believe this to be a message from the universe. Others hear music, whispers, laughter, crying, bells ringing or other sounds.
CLAIRFRAGRANCE
Often considered a form of clairsentience, clairfragrance occurs when a person smells the fragrances of those who are no longer alive, for example, the perfume of a deceased loved one when no one close to them is wearing or using that perfume, or from which the source is unidentifiable, for example whiffs of flowers or plants when none are around.
CLAIRGUSTUS
Experiencing sweet or sour tastes in the mouth that are not associated with eating or belching. Often classed as a form of clairsentience.
CLAIRSENTIENCE
The word clairsentience comes from the French and means ‘clear feeling or sensing’. It involves the ability to pick up information through smell, taste, touch, gut feeling or intuition.
One of the most important experiments to test clairsentience took place in 1922 at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, where a psychic by the name of van Dam was tested in psi guessing games. The experimenters tried to transmit telepathi-cally colours, tastes, feelings and moods, and the results were impressive.
Feeling what is around you is the most common way to receive psychic information. All people experience clairsentience through fleeting impressions but just aren’t aware of it. For example, we all feel drawn to some people more than others for no apparent reason. But if a person is emotional, empathetic and compassionate by nature, and often affected by the moods of those around them, then chances are that psychic impressions typically come to them through clairsentience rather than through clairvoyance or clairaudience.
Investigate your clairsentience
Are you an emotional person? If so, what moods do you feel? Can you feel the moods of other people and animals? Can you feel the moods of specific locations or from objects? Can you feel the moods of spirits who have died with unresolved issues? Do you feel emotions about certain events in history and don’t know why? Do you feel the emotions of friends or family or people close to you? Do you ever get a gut feeling that you should contact someone immediately? When you touch something or someone, do you get a rush of feelings? Do you sometimes experience physical sensations such as warmth or cold for which there is no external cause? Do you often have gut instincts about people or places you know nothing about? The following exercise is a fantasy meditation that is designed to stimulate clairsentience - your awareness to sense, read and respond to the feelings and atmospheres around you.
Find a quiet place and sit down in a comfortable position. Breathe deeply, and imagine you are a beautiful fish in the ocean. Enjoy the feeling of freedom as you glide through the water. Now imagine yourself to be one fish in a school of brightly coloured fish. You swim in rhythm with your group, sense its mood and shift your direction in perfect time and rhythm with the others. Now take this one step further and imagine yourself to be able to feel the mood of an entire oceanic world. You automatically sense and locate where to feed, play and swim and where you will be safe. You feel in total harmony with your ocean world.
CLAIRVOYANCE
Parapsychologists consider clairvoyance to be one of the three classes of psychic perception or extrasensory perception (ESP), along with telepathy and precognition, although there is overlap among the three. The word clairvoyance comes from the French, meaning ‘clear seeing’, and refers to the power to see an event or an image in the past, present or future. This type of sight does not happen with your physical eyes, but with your inner eyes. A person with clairvoyant ability can receive information in the form of visual symbols or images. Some clairvoyants describe it as a bit like having a movie screen in your head with images moving across it. Other clairvoyants may see symbols that they learn to interpret, or perhaps people and animals in their spirit form.
Psychic visions typically appear internally, through the mind’s eye, and this is called subjective clairvoyance, but in rare cases they can also appear externally, in the environment around them as if they were real, and this is called objective clairvoyance. Many people think of the term ‘inner eye’ as a figure of speech, but the yogic tradition also uses the term. According to Eastern tradition, the third eye or sixth chakra is the seat of clairvoyance. Located in the centre of the forehead, it is the screen that receives clairvoyance, whether in the form of visions or imagery. In me-diumship, clairvoyance may account for the ability of mediums to provide unknown information at séances.
There are several different types of clairvoyance, including the ability to see auras (auric sight), to see into the past (retrocognition) or into the future (pre- cognition). Different states of clairvoyance also include the ability to see through objects (X-ray vision), the ability to see health conditions in other people or animals (body scanning), the ability to see things from far away (travelling clairvoyance), the ability to experience visions in dreams (dream clairvoyance), the ability to see things that transcend time and space (spatial clairvoyance), and the ability to see astral, etheric and spiritual or divine planes (astral and spiritual clairvoyance).
Under your eyelids
People who have strong visual skills tend to be particularly attuned to clairvoyance. If you think in pictures and notice how things look or appear first, rather than how they sound, feel, taste or smell, you may have clairvoyant abilities just waiting to be developed. Perhaps images that you can’t