In this week’s segment, I’m sharing my thoughts on claircognizance and the perfect tool, in my opinion, to develop it.

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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