-Franz Bardon[1]
You are already receiving information psychically. We all occasionally do things “on hunches,” “gut feelings,” or have a little voice in our heads that tells to do or not do certain things. Some of us receive little images in our thoughts and dreams that guide us. Becoming psychic is simply a matter of becoming more aware of these phenomena, and learning to activate these experiences at will.
I must warn you that developing the gift of psychic awareness is sometimes as much of a curse as it is a blessing. We all have darkness within ourselves as well as light, and you will sometimes experience dark things when you explore psychic reception. I once gave a reading to a young woman who was concerned about the psychosomatic illness of her mother, and I found myself quickly plunged into a scenario of childhood sexual abuse. The young woman confirmed that her mother had been abused, but it was a very difficult experience for both of us, and I only hope that I gave her some comfort. This is not a plaything. As you become more and more “psychic,” you will begin to know things about the people in your life that are unsettling and often disturbing to your relationships. You may suddenly “know” which friends are cheating on their partners, and who is becoming a drug addict or alcoholic. You may foresee unsettling political information in the world. However, you must observe caution in believing anything that you receive psychically, because it is very easy to confuse psychic awareness with fantasy. And fantasies can lead you to all sorts of unhealthy paranoia. I know of several people who have really fouled up their lives, convinced that they “knew things” about their friends that turned out to just be their own fears and projections.
It is also in almost all cases completely inappropriate to share information you receive about another person unless they specifically ask for it. People should not be given metaphysical information that they don't want. It could even be harmful. And, even if they do ask and you share, you will constantly be put into precarious situations. Many people are in denial and won't believe things you see, and they will resent you for saying them, and sometimes you will be wrong, exposing yourself to even more problems. Most people that hang up a shingle as a psychic are frauds, so they don't have to worry about ethical and moral issues. But you will. Genuine psychics are usually very cautious about sharing their gifts, and they are almost never in it for the money.
That being said, opening up to psychic receiving is also a delight. It can bring you closer to your loved ones through deep empathy and it can prevent you from taking wrong steps in your life. You must simply take a balanced and cautious approach, being sure to test the validity of anything you receive as much as possible.
In this chapter we are largely going to focus on the three main types of psychic receiving, clairvoyance, clairaudience and clairsentience, or psychic seeing, hearing and feeling. We will also cover some alternate ways in which you can use these psychic senses along the way. As I mentioned in a previous chapter, you will probably gravitate more toward one or another of these psychic tools, based on your own dominant sensory modalities, but you should really endeavor to develop all your senses as much as possible, because once they are all working together each one will be empowered by the others. In the exercises that follow, we will focus on one of the psychic senses at a time, but once you have some experience with each of them individually you can start using them in various combinations as you see fit.
As you are learning to awaken these latent powers, you must keep a few things in mind. Your impressions may at first be only vague and fleeting, but you must make every effort to pay attention to any chance image, feeling or inner sound that comes up. Your true psychic message will probably be the first thing that comes to you, before you have a chance to set your expectations. This first fleeting impression will be a genuine message from your subconscious, while later ones may be impressions that your subconscious is creating in order to please you. Your subconscious will try to make you happy, even if that means lying to you. You may not like what you see initially, or it may seem irrelevant, or it might be so vague that you don’t understand its meaning. It is a mistake to ignore these first impressions.
Instead, if you do not understand something, ask for clarification or explanation rather than ignoring an impression. If you are not in the habit of inner exploration, (which I hope you are by now!) you may not really even feel connected with the inner pictures sounds and feelings that will come up. It is just a matter of practice to start getting a sense of these things.
The absolute worst mistake you can make is to feel that what you are getting is not good enough. This will make your subconscious feel that it has to impress you in some way, and the information you receive may become more glamorous, but it will most likely be less accurate. You want to receive useful information, not just experience interesting pyrotechnics in your mind. Just relax and enjoy the process. Over time, your inner senses will evolve as you grow closer and closer to your own unconscious, and the impressions that you get will become stronger, clearer, and easier to understand.
You must be careful about preconceived expectations in your work, because it is very easy to influence your subconscious in this way. If you think Peggy is cheating on her husband, and seek information on this clairvoyantly, your subconscious may show you scenes of infidelity just to make you happy. This is why in “scientific remote viewing” the viewer is usually not given any information whatsoever about the target. The target is sealed in an envelope, with a series of random numbers as a target coordinate. That way, no preconceived notions can influence the impressions received. So, when you are conducting your psychic experiments, try to be as open as possible, with no specific expectations. When you have emotionally charged questions that you really want an answer about, you could even try sealing a few of them in envelopes so that you don’t know what question you are getting psychic impressions about. Your super-conscious and subconscious minds will know perfectly well which question is within the envelope. You could also conduct your experiments with a friend, and do your psychic questioning for each other, each of you giving a series of sealed questions to the other. But, for the most part, just keeping a clear and open mind, and making sure that your subconscious knows that you want accurate information should keep you out of too much trouble.
There is no easy way to tell whether something is genuine psychic information or just imagination, projection or fantasy. The one thing I can say on this subject is that it will generally just seem right. You will know it when you experience it. But even this isn’t entirely accurate because there have been plenty of times in my life when I have felt something to be accurate when it was not, and vice versa. Generally, the more you trust your psychic powers, the more often they will start to be correct. Your subconscious seems to benefit from this sense of trust. Like a child or family pet seeking praise, your subconscious desires to please you. If it feels like you are dubious no matter what it does, your subconscious will stop bothering to worry about giving you accurate information. Likewise if your subconscious is sure that you want some specific preconceived answer, it may give you the answer you want even if it is wrong. So, I would say that the best course of action is to assume that all impressions you receive are in some way related to the information you need, and simply try to understand what that message is communicating.
Exercise 30 – Developing Clairvoyance
Time Required: 10 to 15 minutes
Clairvoyance is the art of “seeing” distant places, people, and things. It is also the art of receiving symbols and visions of a practical or spiritual nature. Eventually, clairvoyance can lead to traveling on the inner planes, the out of body experience or astral projection. This will be covered later. As with looking at auras, you will not be using your physical eyes for this practice, but rather you will be using your inner eye, or third eye, located between your eyebrows. The basic technique is very simple.
Always do this and all other psychic exercises in a relaxed and playful way.
1. If possible, use your pendulum to make sure your subconscious is willing to work psychically right now. There will of course be times when this is not convenient or necessary.
2. Use your anchor to go into the Alpha state.
3. If possible, do a few Kundalini arousing breaths.
4. Tell your subconscious and superconscious that you want to obtain clairvoyant images, and that you would like them to be accurate, rather than just trying to please you.
5. Specify what you would like to know about, if you have something specific in mind.
6. You may have your eyes closed or open, but shift your gaze to your third eye and relax your attention there, allowing whatever comes into your mind to appear. Images may be brief, momentary.
7. You may again ask for the specific information if you are not receiving anything, or clarification of anything you receive. But you should not refuse or ignore any images that you see no matter how vague or momentary. If you do not understand something, or feel that you have missed something, simply ask for more.
8. Do not analyze, simply observe what comes, keeping it in your mind, not forgetting anything.
9. Return to normal consciousness slowly and deliberately, intentionally remembering all that you have experienced.
10. Immediately write down whatever you have observed. It is important to write it all immediately, because you will tend to forget it quickly, much like dreaming.
With this exercise, you may simply see shapes or colors or other symbolic images. At first you may not know what these mean. Your whole unconscious may have a way of communicating to itself and to you that is unfamiliar. Over time, you will get a sense of what these communications mean. You may also see memories from your own life that relate to the question at hand, and require further interpretation. At first, there may be no clear connection between the memories and the question, but if you stay with it, there is some message there. You may also see real time images or complete images of future events. Sometimes it may be a little hard to distinguish what is what. You can always ask for greater clarification, but sometimes this clarification may itself be just as confusing. Simply observe for a while in these practices, recording everything, and your powers will slowly expand.
The images may be so very brief and fleeting, particularly at first, that you don’t even notice them. We are all in the habit of ignoring large parts of our inner senses. We are in fact constantly generating images, and once you get in touch with this flow of imagery, your powers will grow immensely. Try your best to note every passing image, turning it over in your mind, examining it in detail.
You can also try adding your other senses, touching, smelling tasting and hearing these images, to give them greater life and depth. You will want to use this technique frequently, to really get the hang of it, so go ahead and try using it with any or all of these experiments:
Choose a few friends, and receive some clairvoyant images relating to them. These may be symbolic images, or what they are currently doing, or where they are currently heading in life. Follow up with your friends if you wish, but do so with subtlety. Don’t tell them that you are psychically spying on them. No one wants that!
Choose a few people you don't know, and receive images relating to them.
Choose a few celebrities, and receive images relating to them.
Get a symbolic image for your day. This is a fun technique, in which you just ask for an image that will define your day. You will find that these images will be very meaningful and often helpful in situations that come up through your day. You can also receive an image relating to your upcoming week, or your whole year. You could use this on New Year’s Day, to get a sense of how your year is going to go, and how best to deal with what you will face.
If you have a goal or project you are working on, get some insight through clairvoyant images.
If you have a friend in need, get some images of how best to help. Be cautious however, and keep the information to yourself.
Try to determine what a friend or a few friends are doing right now. Follow up to see if you were right, keeping the nature of the experiment to yourself.
Try to get future visions for your friends and yourself. Simply record these, and follow up later when you can clearly see what has happened. If you see something nasty in the future of a friend, keep in mind that it may be more symbolic than literal. You can try to support this friend, but don’t be a busybody.
Try to get symbolic images relating to some of your friends. Again, use subtlety and common sense, avoiding psychic invasion of their privacy.
Exercise 31- Remote Viewing
Time Required: 30 minutes to one hour.
This is just a simple variation on the last exercise. Remote viewing is a buzz word that is fairly popular to describe any kind of clairvoyance that is in a controlled “scientific” setting. The term was coined by a government funded research project at the Stanford Research Institute back in the 1970’s. It has come to be adopted by many parapsychological research groups and a number of new age teachers. Many different writers have produced different instructions on the “correct” way to do remote viewing, but they are all quite different and all work to varying degrees. Technically, all of the exercises in this chapter fall under the general heading of remote viewing. However, for our context, I am using the term to describe the exercise of trying to get information from a distant place without any prior knowledge of what or where this may be. This will be an extremely simple exercise, not following any particular protocols, but generally just using a blind target format. You could use this same technique for any of the exercises in this chapter.
For this exercise, you will need to have someone seal a piece of paper identifying a location, person, thing or event into an envelope without telling you what it is. You could also do this yourself by choosing a number of different things and sealing them all into identical envelopes. If you do this you will want to make a large number of envelopes and wait a while until you’ve mostly forgotten what you created so that you do not feel tempted to make a guess as to which one it is.
1. Place the envelope with the target in front of you.
2. Before you even begin, your mind may produce a little guess as to what might be in the envelope. Ignore this for the most part, because it is most likely not accurate. Write it down before you start, but don’t let this guess color the rest of your experiment. It is most likely just a trick of the mind rather than a genuine psychic hunch. We all want to guess as quickly as possible, so the subconscious will throw something up. It might be useful, so write it down, but after that forget about it.
3. Use your pendulum to make sure your subconscious is willing to work psychically right now.
4. Use your anchor to go into the Alpha state.
5. Do a few Kundalini arousing breaths.
6. Tell your subconscious and superconscious that you want to obtain information about the sealed target, and that you would like the information to be accurate, rather than just trying to please you.
7. Shift your gaze to your third eye and relax your attention there, allowing whatever comes into your mind to appear. Images may be brief, momentary.
8. Don’t try to receive anything, just relax. Allow low-level impressions to come to you at first such as shapes, colors, textures and sensations. Allow other senses to participate, smell, touch, hearing. Simply be open to any information.
9. If you are working with a partner, share with them aloud whatever you are receiving, and let them write it down. Do not let your partner lead you if they know what the target is.
10. Do not analyze, simply receive what comes, keeping it in your mind, not forgetting anything. Don’t try to figure out exactly what you are receiving about. Just receive impressions. Your first few times with this technique you may only receive vague senses of things. Do not worry. Simply keep these impressions in mind.
11. Return to normal consciousness slowly and deliberat
ely, intentionally remembering all that you have experienced.
12. Immediately write down whatever you have observed if you do not have a partner who has been recording for you.
13. Analyze it later. Don’t rush. Collect a few experiments before you bother about whether any of it is accurate or not.
The great advantage of this technique is that it forces you to really open up to pure impressions. When you know what you are psychically seeking there is a much greater chance of just making things up or making conscious guesses in order to feel that you’ve received something. With this technique, you will only receive images produced by the subconscious mind.
This doesn’t necessarily ensure accuracy. Sometimes, what you received will have nothing to do with the target. Do not become concerned about this. Simply keep trying. Eventually you will be amazed, and this will happen more and more frequently the more often you experiment.
Exercise 32 - Crystal Gazing
Time Required: 10 to 15 minutes
This is simply another variation on clairvoyance. Some people find that having an external point of focus helps to jog the visual sense. You can use this technique with a crystal ball of any size or color. You could also look into a bowl filled with black ink, a dark mirror or magick mirror, or even just stare at the wall or any blank surface. Hermetic Adept Franz Bardon actually suggests the use of magically coated paper to create a magick mirror.[1] In many ways this technique is similar to aura gazing, because while your eyes will be open you will primarily still be using your third eye to receive information.
The Book of Magick Power Page 11
