EPISODE NOTES
This week I’m sharing my thoughts on claircognizance and the perfect tool, in my opinion, to develop it and use it more.
This segment is one of the most popular in my archives … It was recorded in response to a question from a listener who wanted to know how she could ever hope to become a psychic if she didn’t communicate with spirits. And I was like … “Claircognizance!”
I’ve mentioned on other episodes that theoretically, I believe you can be psychic or intuitive without any mediumship or communication with spirit entities at all, even if you are an atheist.
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TRANSCRIPT
Several months ago I received an email from a listener of the podcast, I presume, and I think she was responding to one of those requests that I would have made where I said, you know, send me your questions if you have any that you'd like me to answer on the podcast. And it wasn't an interaction like I have with you guys who become supporters on Patreon. I often message you guys through that platform when you come on board and we have a little back and forth around your favorite shows, which topics you'd like to see more of. If you do have any specific Q & A, I pull those out and I keep a record and an ongoing list to work from. So, this woman just sent this to me, an email and it was a very large collection of questions. And I remember thinking like, this is great.
This is like a syllabus. I can just work through this over time and do a whole bunch of different episodes. There were cases where even one of her questions could have produced two or three different episodes depending on what part of the question you decided to focus on. Case in point, she sent me one question that kind of blew my mind a little bit because she was under the assumption that you have to communicate with spirits in order to be psychic. And she even said, "How can you be psychic if you can't communicate with spirits directly?" And I think I may have touched on this in an episode where I talked about spiritual atheism a little bit. I don't know if you recall hearing that. I'll have to go look it up and see if I can find it. I know I did a bonus episode on Patreon with Heather Alice Shae and we talked about that a little bit, but I do know that I talked about atheism and ESP and the kind of idea that spirit communication wasn't necessarily the same thing as like biologically tested science, you know, laboratory experiments around extra sensory perception.
And so those are very different topics and they don't always have to go hand in hand. So I was blown away by her having this assumption that she couldn't be psychic unless she started to essentially be a medium, I think was even where she was going with that. And so I had this question in my list of possible topics of something to talk about. But what I really realized when I started trying to answer this question is that it is a question about claircognizance. When I read that, how can you be psychic if you don't communicate with spirits? I thought claircognizance. Hello, that's just, you know, straight download, that's psychic Wifi and you don't really have to go through anyone to get that. You're not being relayed anything. It's just there. I've done an episode also where I talked about my reading process in great detail and it's evolved over time.
When I first started this website, people were sending me questions about their spirit guides, because at the time I was telling stories about my experiences with angels and spirit guides. And so my first readings were about identifying spirit guides and telling people what names I got for their spirits. And you know, I remember at the time the Montel Williams show had Sylvia Browne on like once a week. Do you remember this? And that was one of the things people would stand up in the audience when he would go around in the mic and let them ask really quick psychic questions of Sylvia and she would just do these cold reads from the stage, really quick, just rapid fire. And that was one that a lot of people would stand up and ask, "Can you tell me who my spirit guide is? Can you tell me the name of my guide?"
So I don't know if that had something to do with it, but it was a big part of the conversation when I started doing readings back in 2006. And now I very rarely have anyone ask me about their guides, even when we're on the phone and we're talking about a whole lot of different stuff. And that's cool. It may or may not matter. Most people are focused on something that's going on in their real life and how to affect something in a practical way down here in the real world. To tell you the truth, that's what I'd be spending my time on as well. I want solutions. I want strategies. I think that it's an interesting conversation to have, especially with other people who are involved in spiritual development or working on their psychic abilities. It's fun to go and have a coffee chat together amongst ourselves about all that stuff. That's the kind of thing that I'd like to talk with students in the Automatic Intuition community about.
I think it's interesting, but when we go face forward with the clients that's not necessarily gonna have that much of an impact on someone's life. So my readings are very much evolved over time to the point where I just think of them now as claircognizant. I really don't pay that much attention to guides, personally. And what I mean by that is I don't individually try to identify who I'm speaking with. If I do call in my guides for myself, I do that kind of as a general group. I just sort of think of them as a collection of guardians and energy and spirits and stuff. I have a nickname for them, which I'm not going to share because it's kind of like, it's a little silly, but it's also private. It's kind of like a magic word. So I'm not gonna tell you what that is, but I have a little word that I say, whenever I want to call them to me. But even that is a very abstract sort of thing.
Claircognizance to me is the most important intuitive sense. It produces like 99 percent of the content in my readings. It produces a lot of the oracle messages. It produces a lot of the articles that I write. All kinds of stuff. I think of it as just being this sort of pure download. But speaking about the clairs and why claircognizance may be a little bit harder to identify or develop, is because first of all so much psychic development out there -- and you've heard me talk about this before, Anna holden mentioned it on a recent episode as well -- that most psychic development courses are focused on clairvoyance. It's easy to understand because our entire language feels to me like it evolved out of a need to describe visual information to one another. And we also, in this modern era have a lot of metaphors around film and television and video and close circuit security cameras.
When you think about a word, a term like slow motion ... I used that incorrectly in a book, in a novel that I had set in 1917, and I caught it and edited it before it went out the door. But I remember thinking, oh, what, wait a minute. That's a video editing term that's something that's like VCR era. I don't think that they would have had any conception of what slow motion meant because you didn't see things in slow motion until TV started showing you this slow motion effect. So anyway, we have all this language to describe clairvoyance, we can talk about obviously the imagery that we see itself, the colors, who's there, where they are, what's happening. We can speak that to another person.
We can also use terms like fast forward, freeze frame, rewind, go back, watch it in slow motion, watch it in replay. Ce can do that in our minds conceptually with clairvoyance. So it makes it very easy to talk about clairvoyance. We also commonly have dreams and we share those with one another and again, it's a kind of language sharing, a visual experience. So I would say clairaudience is also easy to share in the same kind of way and talk about, because it is language. It comes in as language or it comes in as music and more than anything there's a sense of time associated with clairaudience. Like I was sitting in my room typing at 3:15 and I heard the sound coming from the hallway. There's also the sense sometimes of something being whispered near you or it could be an interior voice, but the idea of being able to place a clairaudient signal in time or space is easy to talk about. It's also easy to simply relay what you heard.
So if I'm talking on the phone to someone and you're in the room with me, I can listen to what that person says and then I can repeat it to you, even word for word. Again, clairaudience is something that's very easy for us to have a dialogue around.
Now. Claircognizance is interesting because even though I feel like it's the pure source, the channel with the most content, the easiest way to actually retrieve psychic information without thinking about it ... It's a little bit hard to talk about. And if you're new to it or you're trying to develop that particular skill, it's a little hard to say when it happens or how it happens. It's kind of like an I Dream of Jeannie special effect. You know what I mean? It's like -- blink, it's there. Blink it's not there.
If you go to that security cam footage metaphor, in terms of clairvoyance, you can watch something appear on screen. You can stop it and you can rewind it and you can zoom in on it, all that kind of stuff. But with claircognizance, it's like you go to the security cam footage and it's missing. It's like that scene in the movie where someone edited the security cam footage and ... blink, it's just gone.
Clairsentience is ... Well, you know, it's difficult to talk about feelings, right? It's hard to describe emotions in writing. It's hard to convey emotions to other people. When we think about empathy, which is a kind of clairsentienc, it's an ability to sort of feel what someone else is feeling or compassion, which is slightly more removed, but it's the ability to willfully and intentionally project yourself into the emotions of someone else and take them on and try to connect with them.
It's hard for us to project our emotions at someone. Even when we think about telepathy, we think about telepathy being more in terms of clairvoyance. "I'm going to look at this card with the triangle on it and I'm going to beam that at your brain and then you're gonna see the triangle."
I do think that with clairsentience, it's the reason why fiction is so powerful and storytelling. Why storytelling and filmmaking and television and acting is such a huge part of our world. Here we are, we're so developed, we have this amazing information technology. We have philosophical concepts and we think of ourselves as being highly evolved over thousands of years even though we have very far to go. But have you ever stopped to think, why is Hollywood such an important place in our universe and why our actors paid so much money?
Why are professional athletes valued at the level that they are? I think it's a clairsentience thing. I think it's because they have an ability that allows us to live and experience things vicariously through them. When you read a book, you're essentially reading another life. You are plugging into another reality. There is a connection between acting and writing and even sports performance. You think about the Olympics or you think about the game day shows where they have these biographies and these emotional backstories and they really get you invested in what's happening. So you are living through these other people emotionally.
Clairsentience is something we talk a lot about protecting ourselves from. Also being able to ground the energy. Clairentience is often something that we're trying to manage. that's changing for me a little bit, especially after talking to Anna Holden from Sensitivity Uncensored.
If you haven't listened to that episode and you are an empath or highly sensitive person, check that out because when it comes to someone coming to me and saying, "How do I develop who I am as a clairsentient person?" I think Anna is onto something that's really powerful and empowering and willful and kind of punk rock ... Like everything I wouldn't have thought to associate with empathy. So check her out. I am processing a lot of what I'm learning from her and rethinking about how I approach it.
But on this particular segment, I really wanted to talk about claircognizance and developing that tool in particular. I think you can find a lot of information out there on developing clairvoyance and almost any workshop that you go to at a new age center is probably going to have some type of visual component or vision work in it.
I want to just to take a few minutes and say claircognizance is my jam. It's something that I find a lot of people in the Automatic Intuition program coming in with some aptitude for. If I do see that in the assessment of the attunement that we do, I will usually suggest to them that they develop their claircognizance because there is a bit of an overlap with clairaudience.
Clairaudience is about language and it's about receiving instructions, information, shining sentences, cool titles, names for things. You know, sometimes it's a haiku, sometimes it sounds like a greeting card. Sometimes it sounds like a directive or a warning. It can be any number of experiences. It can be lyrics in a song that speak to you. I always say, when you have a song stuck in your head, notice what those lyrics are and stop singing it for a minute and imagine, okay, what if that's a message?
What if that's the back of an oracle card and you're doing a divination experience?Imagine what is it that you're thinking about right now? What is your subconscious trying to communicate to you through the song lyrics? Sound and music are coming from a slightly different part of the brain than language too. So there's a lot that we can talk about regarding clairaudience. I do consider myself primarily a clairaudient intuitive. That's what I identified with for a long time. This idea of me saying, you know what, it's all claircognizance for me at this point is a bit of a newer development. I even need to change my About page, to tell you the truth, to more accurately reflect that. It's easy for me to mentor someone who has some kind of aptitude for claircognizance or clairaudience because I think that there is enough of an overlap that we can work with them simultaneously because.
If if someone asks you a question and you just kind of know the answer to what they're asking you, you just have this great piece of advice. It just spills out of you and you may even be aware in the moment as you're speaking it. I'm like, wow, who was talking? This is really great. I've never even thought about this before, but now this is great. Information is coming out of my mouth and that's a bit more of a dialoging or channeling experience. But the reason why I say that's related to clairaudience is because our minds have to almost immediately -- not almost -- our minds literally translate everything into language and words, just so we can think about it. And it's a micron of ... I don't even know how to quantify how quickly that happens, but the moment you think something, even if it's an I Dream of Jeannie blink and it's there, your mind immediately attaches a word to it or starts to tell a story about it or forms language around it. Because that's the only way you can handle it. Even in your own head. That's the only way that you can really think about it.
So when you go to communicate claircognizant information to someone else, even in the moment, improvisation, conversation -- as fast as it's happening -- it is getting translated into language. So to me, the lines blur a little bit sometimes between claircognizance, clairaudience and what we would call vocal channeling or being a transe channel.
My general rule of thumb in mentoring intuitive development is that the tools that work with clairaudience are also likely to produce the most and the best information around claircognizance. To me the most reliable and the simplest and the most obvious tool is automatic writing, which produces the most volume of detailed content. And that's very easy to share with the client.
So if you're thinking in terms of producing a reading for someone else, if someone brings you a question and you use some clairvoyance, you might get a symbol or an image. You describe that to them and it may be a string of those things. But it's kind of fragmented.
One of the things that I've noticed with automatic writing is it tends to be very language heavy, very conversational, and it has a lot of descriptors built into it. Just in terms of the number of words it produces, produces more detail. Sometimes in those little bits of random detail that you just think of as word choice, when you look at it, there's actually a pattern of something that will speak to the client. Like say for instance, you start using a whole lot of metaphors around something like music, without knowing their musical background, it may be really meaningful to them that you are using language that we associate with sound and music. So even though you might be talking about something metaphorically or symbolically, you might start telling a story.
The cool thing about automatic writing is it just produces a lot and it gives a lot for the client to have feedback around. And it's also already in a format that's very easy to share. It's almost instantaneous. You asked me a question, I retrieved the answer. I dream of Jeannie Blink and here it is. I'm typing it to you as fast as I possibly can. Send. Send an email off to that person. It's one of the purest forms for me of doing a reading and it's one of the reasons why I looked again at doing email readings. For a long time, I decided that email readings were somehow lesser than talking to me on the phone. I will say that there is something that happens when you speak to me live. It's a whole other ballgame, and there's more that can take place. But when it's just an answer to a question, and it's really specific and sort of limited in scope, I think automatic writing is amazing.
I do have a tutorial by the way, just to plug it. It's called Automatic Writing Lessons and that's been on my Shop page for years and years. It's a very basic, personal take on how to do proprioceptive writing, freestyle writing, automatic writing. You can use it in a lot of different contexts. It's a technique that uses a timing device as a way of invoking speed, and speed in my conception is related to the intuitive channel.
The intuitive channel is really fast. The thinking mind is a little bit more ponderous and slow. So when you're trying to develop your intuition or you're trying to isolate the intuitive channel, speed is your friend and you want it to happen as fast as possible. You don't want to think about it. You don't want to edit it. You don't want to take it apart or fix it in any way.
The detail that you can bring through in automatic writing is really incredible. Here's the thing though: you'd never know it without the feedback from outside your own head, from outside your own experience. You really need someone else to judge it because to you, it could just look like something that you made up. The best way to test this and probably one of the only ways that you'll ever know how your intuition is landing or how accurate it is. You may be surprised. A lot of people would do this automatic writing exercise and think, oh, that seems like a ho hum run of the mill kind of monologue that I wrote down, not even realizing how many psychic hits and how much detail there is hidden within it. The only way that you ever find that out is by getting feedback from the person that it was intended for.
I really learned to trust my intuition because of the feedback. From doing it over and over again, I've just learned to trust that the process produces something and not to overthink it or question it. Not to be hesitant about it. The feedback from client after client saying, "Oh my God, how'd you know this? I can't believe you used this word. I can't believe you said such an such." That kind of feedback is where you start to realize, oh, I'm tapping into something here. It does have a meaningful impact for the other person.
You really can't judge it. That's the key. You need someone else to judge it. Do automatic writing sessions using questions that are provided to you by someone else. Now you might be tempted to do this with someone you're close with, like one of your kids or your mom or your best friend who is also into this kind of stuff, and maybe you do card readings for each other or something like that... That's okay, but it's actually undermining you a little bit whenever you do readings for people that you know. On some level you question whether or not your subconscious has retained information about them that you don't consciously remember. You worry that you are extrapolating and making up educated guesses based on things that you already know about this person. Even though you don't really, you may tell yourself, oh, I'm doing automatic writing for this person. Somewhere in the back of your mind, if you know them, you are doubting a little bit that some of those other things might be factors.
If you want to really develop your claircognizant ability and you want to test it and really get a sense of where your hits are landing and how, use questions from a stranger. That may sound really hard to do, but actually the online world and social media makes it very easy for us to be connected with people who are virtual strangers.
We might know their face and we know their name and maybe know little bits about them. I would bet there are probably a lot of you listening who belong to spiritual groups or interest groups around new age topics or psychic development, stuff. Groups where there's a bunch of people that you don't really know. They're members for the same reason you are, which is around a topic. You may only be focused on a few of the people that you've interacted with, but you actually do have, on social media, access to thousands of people who you don't know, who you really don't know anything about. If you were to present to them, hey, I want to test myself, I'm going to try to do some automatic writing. Is there anybody who wants to participate with me? You can get some volunteers really quickly and you can do some practice readings, using the timed automatic writing technique.
Get these people that you don't know to present you with questions. The cool thing is if you want to do one for a friend of yours and then do one or two or three for total strangers, what you will notice is it's actually really liberating to do a reading for a total stranger. To do an automatic writing exercise, with a question as a prompt from someone you don't know ... if you produce any words at all, it pretty much has to be your intuition. Because that's all you have to rely on an answering their question. You really don't have things stored in your subconscious that you remember about them from earlier interactions. You don't have their backstory to extrapolate from. Because they're strangers.
This is a really basic, great strong way to develop claircognizant ability and the feedback is where you will learn. You have to kind of retro-engineer the feedback. What I mean by that is that sometimes the things that I feel the weirdest about writing down, like say for instance, I'm doing a reading for someone and it's all in text, it's an email and I'm doing automatic writing and I'm clickety clacking away, 100 words per minute and there's this whole story unfolding and it makes sense. And then something will come through that kind of doesn't belong or seems odd or seems to break the flow of the story in some way. Now, as a writer, as a storyteller, if I was editing that story, I would edit those things out. This doesn't make sense. Why is this detail about a blue stuffed animal in the middle of this paragraph? I would take things out that didn't go along with the other kind of symbolism and conceptual stuff going on in the text.
But with automatic writing, with claircognizance, with testing your psychic ability, don't edit anything. Don't remove anything. You can clean it up for spelling and add some punctuation. Add paragraph breaks. I always appreciate people who format their writing is such a way that it's easy to read. But don't remove content. Don't remove thoughts or concepts or details or phrases or word choice. Don't change any of that stuff. The stuff that I most want to remove is usually the stuff that the clients respond to the most strongly. It's the thing that they have the most association around, the biggest stories around.
Had I only done five or 10 readings and looked at them and thought, now that sounds ridiculous. I would have never known that. Those things that feel ridiculous to me are really good stuff. Those are some psychic kits. And because I've heard that over and over again, I'm like, there it is again, the thing that I thought was weird and dorky, they have this entire story around it. What happens then is the 11th and the twelfth and the 13th time I do it. I just allow myself to feel that and write it down. At this point when I start to get one of those sort of uncomfortable, weird details, I'm like, yes, nailed that. Give me those, because I know that there is power in those and I've learned to trust that what I experience as discomfort in that moment is actually getting at something psychic.
It might not be that for you, it might be something completely different. You may feel like a real magical sense of flow during those parts that are truly landing with the other person. You won't know until you let them evaluate them. The thing that's really hard to wrap your mind around is that you are not a good judge of your abilities. You need someone else to judge it for you in order to get any kind of distance and objective perspective on it.
So don't edit. Resist the urge to remove anything. Write, really quickly clean it up a little bit just for punctuation and formatting. Send it back to that stranger who provided you with the question. And ask them for feedback. Let them know up front that's what you're looking for, that you're doing this in exchange for some constructive, compassionate feedback.
That is my absolute number one best tip for developing your claircognizance. The rest of it, I think you'll find in the experience of using it.