What Is ESP (Extra-Sensory Perception)?
Have you felt a little different from other people since you were a child? Do things happen to you that you can’t explain? Do you sometimes have a clear feeling about a future event? If so, you might be "supersensory" (in other words, psychic).
In this article, we'll explore the following 10 signs to see if you have extra-sensory perception or a sixth sense.
10 Signs You Might Be Psychic
- You have a well-developed intuition.
- You know when trouble is imminent.
- You hear voices.
- You just know things.
- You read thoughts.
- You see auras.
- You have visions.
- You sense the past when holding objects.
- You often experience déjà vu.
- You have divinatory abilities.
1. You Have a Well-Developed Intuition
This is also known as a gut feeling or a strong hunch. Your body, everyone’s body, in fact, is an antenna. It is sensitive to energy. Everyone can tune into their intuition, but most choose to ignore it. You have learned that your intuition has guided you well throughout your life. You don’t make decisions logically, although you do consider that your way is logical.
To test out your intuition, next time you have to make a decision, however small, place your hand on your solar plexus and become aware of the feeling in your body when you consider each choice laid before you. Do you feel it? Your body and your intuition know what to do before you do it.
2. You Know When Trouble Is Imminent
This is known as precognition (pre-knowing). You recognize it before it happens. This often manifests as a feeling of dread or a deep sense of knowing that unless you or someone else takes action, there’s going to be trouble. Sometimes it’s hard to know what exactly is going to happen, but you can feel it.
It’s possible to train yourself to discern the forthcoming event by journaling your feelings. Ask your feelings what they are trying to tell you.
Perhaps you often dream about the future. This also comes under the precognition umbrella, but usually, the dream is very specific. You are shown snippets of events, usually detrimental to someone close. Sometimes it might be a catastrophic event, such as an earthquake or another natural disaster. Precognitive folk are often able to foretell when people are about to die because they meet them in their dreams.
3. You Hear Voices
You hear whispers and voices, but there is no physical source. You’ve ruled out mental disorders, so it’s likely that you have clair-auditory (clear hearing) abilities. Very often, this psychic skill means you are a channel for spirits.
It’s up to you whether you develop this further by delivering the messages to those they are intended for or whether you shut down this ability.
4. You Just Know Things
Some may mix this up with intuition, but it doesn’t matter. They are certainly closely related. Claircognizants (people with clear understanding) know things they shouldn't be able to know. They find it hard to explain it—they say, “I just know it.” Some might mention that the knowing is a strong mental feeling.
5. You Read Thoughts
You often know what someone is going to say before they say it. You can tell who’s calling before you answer the phone. Sometimes you know when your child or partner is in a difficult situation. You may often preempt a request. For example, you take your husband a cup of tea, and he says, “You must have read my mind.” If this happens a lot, you are probably tuning in to his "requests." This is a sign that you have telepathic skills. If you think you are telepathic, there are many ways to develop your ability. Playing guessing games is helpful.
6. You See Auras
Seeing auras is more common than you think. You can probably see your own right now. Hold your hand in front of a dark background and move your fingers slightly. You should see a silvery aura like cigarette smoke around your fingers. It might take a little practice, but you’ll soon be able to play with the energy between your fingers. Then you can progress to other people and auric colors.
7. You Have Visions
Seeing visions and spirits is a sign of clairvoyance (clear vision) or second sight. This often occurs in conjunction with clairaudient abilities. Receiving messages from spirits means that you are a psychic medium (i.e., an intermediary between the living and those who have passed). It’s possible to shut down these abilities, but often times spirits can be quite nagging in their enthusiasm to get their message heard.
8. You Sense the Past When Holding Objects
You might be able to discern the past history of an object or its owner simply by holding it. It can work with people too. Have you ever brushed past someone in a busy street and had a picture flash into your mind that seemed to have nothing to do with you? That’s psychometry, or clairtangency (clear touching). You are picking up vibration. Everyone can do this, but not everyone can translate what they feel into words or pictures.
9. Déjà Vu
We all have these odd little experiences, but you may have them more than most because you are tuned in. People think they are experiencing something they experienced in the past, but it’s the opposite. You may never have been in that place, but you once had a "future memory" of it. Hence the strange feeling of knowing but not quite knowing. You are tuning into a memory.
A very strong conviction that you have been somewhere before or have met someone previously probably indicates that you are remembering a past incarnation.
Some psychics are able to intuit meaning from divinatory tools, such as tarot cards, playing cards, and a glass or crystal ball. | Source
10. You Have Divinatory Abilities
If you are able to intuit meaning from divinatory tools, such as tarot cards, playing cards, a glass or crystal ball, palm reading, tea leaf reading, or anything like that, then you are probably an intuitive psychic. It is possible to learn such skills; for example, the tarot is a structured system that anyone can learn. The skill when reading cards is to marry the meaning with your intuition to give an accurate interpretation.
Scrying (foretelling the future using a reflective object or surface) with a crystal ball or dark mirror is a form of meditation. Again, anyone can learn this and with practice, become proficient in foretelling the future.
Another divinatory skill is divining for water, objects, and energy lines. Divining involves using a divining rod, usually made from a light twig or wire, and picking up varying energy patterns from the earth. Holding a pendulum will also yield results.
Notable Psychic Abilities
- Apportation:The ability to undergo materialization, disappearance or teleportation of an object.
- Astral projection or mental projection:The ability to voluntarily project the astral body (consciousness) is associated with the out-of-body experience, in which the astral body is felt to temporarily separate from the physical body.
- Aura reading:The ability to perceive "energy fields" surrounding people, places and things.
- Automatic writing:The ability to draw or write without conscious intent.
- Bilocation:The ability to be located at two or more places at the same time.
- Biokinesis:The ability to change and control DNA.
- Chronokinesis:The ability to alter one's own perception of time, causing their sense of time to appear to slow down or speed up.
- Clairaudience:The ability to acquire information by paranormal auditory means.
- Claircognizance:The ability to acquire psychic knowledge by means of intrinsic knowledge (just know).
- Clairgustance:The ability to taste without physical contact.
- Clairolfactance:The ability to access spiritual or mediumistic knowledge through smell.
- Clairsentience:The ability to psychically feel, that is to receive messages from emotions and feelings.
- Clairvoyance:The ability to perceive people, objects, locations, or physical events via extrasensory perception.
- Conjuration:The ability to materialize physical objects from thin air.
- Divination:The ability to gain insight into a situation using occult means.
- Dowsing:The ability to locate water, sometimes using a tool called a dowsing rod.
- Electrokinesis:The ability to control electricity with the mind.
- Energy manipulation or energy work:The ability to manipulate physical or non-physical energy with one's mind.
- Energy medicine:The ability to heal with one's own empathic etheric, astral, mental or spiritual energy
- Levitation ortransvection:The ability to float or fly by mystical means.
- Mediumship or channeling:The ability to communicate with spirits.
- Precognition or premonition:The ability to perceive future events.
- Prophecy:The ability to predict the future.
- Psychic surgery:The ability to remove disease or disorder within or over the body tissue via an "energetic" incision that heals immediately afterward.
- Psychokinesis or telekinesis:The ability to manipulate objects with the mind.
- Psychometry or psychoscopy:The ability to obtain information about a person or an object by touch.
- Pyrokinesis:The ability to create and manipulate fire with the mind.
- Remote viewing, telesthesia or remote sensing:The ability to see a distant or unseen target using extrasensory perception.
- Retrocognition or postcognition:The ability to supernaturally perceive past events.
- Second sight:The ability to see future and past events or to perceive information that is not present to the physical senses, in the form of a vision (precognition or remote viewing, a seer).
- Scrying:The ability to look into a suitable medium with a view to detecting significant information.
- Telepathy:The ability to transmit or receive thoughts supernaturally.
- Thoughtography:The ability to imprint images from one's mind onto physical surfaces—such as photographic film—by psychic means.
History's Most Famous Psychics
Name | Bio | Born |
Andrew Jackson Davis | An American Spiritualist, born in Blooming Grove, New York. | August 11, 1826, Blooming Grove, NY |
Daniel Dunglas Home | A Scottish physical medium with the reported ability to levitate to a variety of heights, speak with the dead, and to produce rapping and knocks in houses at will. His biographer Peter Lamont opines that he was one of the most famous men of his era. | March 20, 1833, Currie, United Kingdom |
Hélène Smith | A famous late-19th century French medium. She was known as "the Muse of Automatic Writing" by the Surrealists, who viewed Smith as evidence of the power of the surreal, and a symbol of surrealist knowledge. | December 9, 1861, Martigny, Switzerland |
Edgar Cayce | An American self-professed clairvoyant who answered questions on subjects as varied as healing, reincarnation, wars, Atlantis, and future events while allegedly asleep. A biographer gave him the nickname, The Sleeping Prophet. | March 18, 1877, Christian County, KY |
Wolf Messing | Claimed to be a psychic and telepathist. According to Messing, he was able to broadcast mental suggestions in order to alter people's perceptions. | September 10, 1899, Góra Kalwaria, Poland |
Jeane Dixon | One of the best-known American self-proclaimed psychics and astrologers of the twentieth century, due to her syndicated newspaper astrology column, some well-publicized predictions, and a best-selling biography. | January 5, 1904, Medford, WI |
Sylvia Celeste Browne | An American author who claimed to be a medium with psychic abilities. She appeared regularly on television and radio, including on The Montel Williams Show and Larry King Live, and hosted an hour-long online radio show on Hay House Radio. | October 19, 1936, Kansas City, MO |
Uri Geller | An Israeli-British illusionist, magician, television personality, and self-proclaimed psychic. He is known for his trademark television performances of spoon bending and other illusions. | December 20, 1946 (age 72 years), Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel |
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Psychic Tools and Techniques
Tools and Techniques | About |
Astrology | Astrology calculations are based on the exact positions of the Sun, Moon and planets. This has lead to a uniform calculation system. You can actually bring a copy of your chart to any competent astrologer and they will be able to read it. |
Crystal Ball | The visuals that a psychic gets from crystal ball are said to be by far the most accurate illustrations of the future. |
Feng Shui | Creating an energy of harmony in your work and living environments can make you a master of the universe when it comes to career and love success. Or so they say. |
I-Ching | When you toss the I-Ching and compose a hexagram, a psychic guiding you on this exercise is working with a divination technique that is nearly 5,000 years old. Used by emperors for millennia, the randomness of the I-Ching toss transforms into an orderly vision for the future. |
Ouija Board | Intense energy from the astral plane can guide the glass to letters that spell out answers to the most intense, specific questions. Under the right guidance, a Ouija is Instant Messaging to another plane of reality. However, many psychics say that entities use the channel opened up as a gateway. Be careful. |
Palmistry | The simplest lines can have the deepest meanings to a master of palmistry. Return visits are especially helpful as a palm reader can see the subtle shifts to your fortune as the actions and repercussions of your free will choices are recorded as changes in the lines in your hand. |
Relaxation Techniques | A psychic who gets you ready for a reading with a session of relaxing truly understands that a tense client mind is like reading a long novel, while reading a relaxed mind is like watching a fascinating new movie. |
Runes | Druidic runes combine the archetypal symbology of astrology with the chance energy absorption of tarot. They are one of the best indicators of the “big picture” as it relates to your inner psyche and human potential. |
Tarot Cards | The rich illustrations of a tarot deck give your psychic many possible points of departure. The card spreads juxtapose differing situations to reflect the complexity of everyday life. |
Tealeaves | A psychic versed in the art of tealeaf reading understands that the patterns left in the swirl have been impacted by your energy like the Moon controlling the tides. Subtle and ephemeral, the good psychic can see one or two grand archetypal visions in every session. |
What to Do if You Think You Are Psychic
It’s up to you—do you want to build on your gift/s, or would you rather not experience your psychic abilities? Sometimes, you can shut them down by stating your intention clearly. Meditation may also help. If you would like to see where your skills could take you, then research and practice until you become competent.
Search for people with similar abilities to your own and share your experiences. Don’t be frightened of your extra-sensory perception; know that it is indeed a gift, and remember, whatever it is you "see," it was going to happen anyway.
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