I share my perceptions and concepts as a way for you to compare them to your own.

To de-mystify psychic phenomena and experiences.

To embrace not only the ways in which you might recognize yourself in what I’m describing, but also the ways in which in you’re different.

Talking about it can help others locate it within themselves.

An Angel at My Table film about Janet Frame

Frances film about Frances Farmer

The Hours film partly about Virginia Woolf

Iris film about Iris Murdoch

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Doing what the voices in your head tell you to.

It’s THE #1 disparaging joke you hear all the time that might sometimes be referring to phenomena we would categorize as clairaudience.

So, har har.

In a lot of cases, hearing voices is synonymous with the absolute deepest depths of mental illness. It was the one thing through my teens and twenties that kept me from ever, ever acknowledging the psychic phenomena I experienced.

I feared being committed against my will. I don't fear it so much lately but it's still a fear that I can access if I needed to. Like, I could drag that out and be like, yeah, I remember what it feels like to worry about that and I can see how I can put myself in a situation where everything could go horribly wrong.

It's more of a horror movie screen playing out in my mind than actual real anxiety. But when I was younger, there was definitely a real fear.

And then growing up there were all these movies about voices and craziness, and a lot of times they were about authors. There was a movie in 1990 called An Angel at my Table that was about the New Zealander poet Janet Frame who was committed at the time that she won her country's highest literary honor.

Obviously it's been 30 years since I've seen that movie, but there are a few images that haunt me. Like, I remember them bringing her a volume of her work that had just been published in hardcover and wanting her to sign it, to autograph it. She was heavily sedated in a mental ward and didn't really.. it wasn't even conscious of the fact that her book had just come out and that was like, the first time she held it. And it won the equivalent of a Pulitzer or a Booker.

And there was another scene where they put her in a padded cell and she literally writes poetry on the walls of the padded cell. That's how much she needed to get those words out.

And then there was a movie Jessica Lange starred in in the 80s about Frances Farmer, who was famously lobotomized basically for being too willful and outspoken for a woman in the 1950s. She was sort of a political activist I guess, or would've been by today's standards.

Nobody plays crazy like Jessica Lange, by the way. I mean it's a great performance.

But yeah, that feeds into all your horrors about being committed against your will, medicated, and then it all unravels, right? You lose your agency. You literally lose your rights as an adult.

Of course, Virginia Woolf, who is one of my hugest literary heroes in the whole world, who was famously so depressed for so long that she finally walked into the river with stones in her pockets. Gotta been hearing that story since I was in junior high school. And it's been dramatized in a lot of different places and shared and reshared.

Most recently, Nicole Kidman's performance in the Hours, which is an incredible performance and a great movie. But again, all this stuff about these people going nuts, especially writers.

After I watched the movie Iris, which was Judi Dench starred as Iris Murdoch who lost the faculty for words. She was technically suffering from dementia and Alzheimer's, so it wasn't craziness necessarily, but they did very distinctly dramatize the fact that this woman who was known for her phenomenal vocabulary literally lost her ability to access words slowly and was conscious that it was happening to her as an author.

This is like the worst horror ever. I get it. It's Sophie's Choice. It's these amazingly emotionally triggering dramatizations that happen in movies, but I just, at that point, was like, you know what? I'm never watching another movie about an author suffering from mental illness, addiction, alcoholism, nothing.

Just forget it. Ever. Why are there so many of those anyway? There are too many!

But back to hearing voices.

Conversing with them. Listening to what they say. Talking back to them. Asking them questions. I do it in my car all the time. We stare at crazy people who do it in the streets who are homeless and obviously suffering maybe from schizophrenia or something like that. It's something that we've all witnessed.

I doubt I look anything like that in my car. As a matter of fact, I think I probably look like I'm just talking on hands-free. But I am aware of the connection there.

It does always make me wonder, well who are they talking to? What are they saying? Because it depends on which voices. They do seem to be arguing and there are combative situations going on so that is not what we practice around here, as far as accessing clairaudient intuition, chanelling, automatic writing, mediumship. All these things are not about screaming at invisible assailants.

Hearing voices and doing what they tell you to do could be a really helpful thing. Again, depending on the voice:

Some of those are accessible by anyone. Some of them are deeply woo woo. And none of them are crazy, by the way. None of those things are mental illness, and I honestly today don't fear that if I went to a therapist and spoke to them the way I'm speaking to you right now that I'd be committed.

I think we'd have an understanding about the phenomenon that I'm talking about. And I would have no problem placing this within a purely clinical context and talking about archetypes and programming and kind of the different channels of the mind and consciousness. It doesn't have to be woo woo for me. Or it can be.

Sometimes it depends on who I'm talking to. I'm not going to correct anyone who tells me that their message came from their guide or from one of their guardians or someone who tells me it comes from a muse.

I never question how other people choose to label their voices but I do like to offer the concept of labelling and categorizing and analyzing to everyone and I offer my own little compartmentalizations for people to borrow and use as a starter kit if they're new to this.

Then there are those external voices that become programmed as your own. Those are the really troublesome ones. They're just as insidious as invisible people who are following you and out to get you.

They're dangerous because they're something that you heard, that you picked up from someone else and took on, and have been accessing and repeating on a loop, on an internal mental loop, for so long that you probably have forgotten the original source, the voice itself has morphed over time to impersonate your own inner voices. Like, your own internal voice of yourself.

Negative, self-sabotaging critical voices, someone telling you about yourself you chose to believe.

You may have chose to believe it because you didn't know any better, or you were a child, or you were bullied, or you were afraid. There are a lot of different reasons why you would choose to take that on. But it is a choice, even if it was kind of forced on you.

And it is something that you can get rid of later. If nothing else, you can learn to access and acknowledge, okay wait a minute, where's that voice coming from? Who is that? That sounds like something my mother said to me a really long time ago.

Oh yeah, I remember now where that came from, therefore when I hear that come up again, I can dismiss it. No, not listening to you. I know who you are. Sit down and go shut up.

So there's all of that, within the concepts of clairaudience and hearing voices.

There's also a question of internal source versus external. For the sake of separating what comes from within versus what comes from outside… I use a big box for the voices coming from within. To me, it's all a bit like being logged onto some network of information.

It’s different than the voices I might create. For instance, the notes I’m writing down here to speak to you from, the character dialog in fiction, although sometimes, some of that is a little bit channelled in a way that overlaps and many authors will have the experience of having books dictated to them or have fictional characters they invented take over on the page and run the story.

And there's a spectrum of how that's viewed. A lot of creative people who don't view that as a psychic phenomenon nevertheless still view it as a magical creative experience. And a lot of people will acknowledge that happening to them and simply think of it as a profound mystery of the artistic process.

I know Alice Walker famously said that the Color Purple was dictated to her. She heard the voice of that character and basically transcribed it. And I have that experience writing character. Sometimes that's the initial impulse to write fiction.

To give an example of this internal versus external thing, so there’s a song you’re humming this morning because it’s been used on a commercial you keep seeing on TV. T-Mobile or whatever has had this commercial on for a month and you've heard it every day and now you're singing it in the shower. That’s external. You can identify where that came from.

But then there are songs that come untriggerred, unbidden, they surface from the subconscious like this silent Spotify within your brain. The Spotify radio station that's on shuffle and it pulls things up that are stored in the mind. But it's still coming up internally. It's not triggered by something external like hearing it on the radio.

You may not have heard it in years.

Actual real songs I'm talking about, from artists who created and recorded them externally. At some point you have downloaded them. Maybe you burned the album out on repeat when it came out years ago and you haven't heard it in a long time but sometimes it might resurface. One of those songs will come to you.

I do read that experience these as intuitive. Just the same way that you read a feather on the ground, or a number on a license plate, or a digital display, or finding a playing card on the ground and interpreting it as a Tarot message. All those kinds of things.

I read music that comes internally that way, especially snatches of lyrics because you'll notice when this happens, when you get like an earwig, a song stuck in your head that came from nowhere, it's a particular snatch of lyrics that is looping. It's not the whole song from start to finish, intro to fade out. It's usually one or two parts that you keep looping over and over again.

So one of the best things you can do is either stop and really speak those words outside the melody as if it is just a message written down on a piece of paper, or actually write it down and see it in print. They look different on paper. They sound different when they're spoken not sung, and sometimes that will help you have an aha moment about what is that saying?

Sometimes it's really literal. I keep saying this thing to myself over and over and over again, and I didn't realize it's a message!

Now where it's a message from... Maybe it's your guides triggering it. Maybe it's your Higher Self pulling it out and waving it in front of you. Maybe it's some other kind of mechanism. Maybe you've been asking a question and it's your subconscious just kind of retrieving that from some internal library and presenting it as an answer, but it comes in the form of music.

You know, music happens in a different part of the brain than spoken language and reading and all that kind of stuff. We listen to a lot of music and we learn a lot of music by heart in a way that people used to learn and recite poetry.

You watch those historical films and TV shows and there are people wandering around in the garden reading from a book of verse and they can recite this stuff off the top of their heads and I always thought, damn!

But I think the modern equivalent of that is me being able to bust out a Missy Elliot rap from 2004 at any given moment just because I've heard it a million times and it's stored in my brain, right?

So it's kind of like that.

So the first thing you want to do is say, hey, you know what? If this was a telegram, is it a message? And maybe the next thing you ask, what emotions come with that song? What emotions are attached to it? What feelings is it invoking or dragging with it? Maybe it's the context of when the song first entered your consciousness. Something about the time and place of your personal history. What was going on in your world when that song came out, that kind of thing?

So maybe the message isn't the song. Maybe the message is about you returning to something from that time period. Was there something going on then that you need to reconsider, pull back out, reconnect with.

I remember as a kid or maybe a pre-teen or something, overhearing adults talking about Barbra Streisand claiming that she hears music. I don't know if this was being repeated anecdotally, or if there'd been some 60 Minutes interview or something had happened at that time that they were talking about it. I just remember overhearing it.

I understood that what they were saying was that she had made some claim that she hears music within. Psychically. Internally. Of course, even though she’s a vocalist, she’s not necessarily a composer right?

I don't even know