The perception beyond senses

Extrasensory perception is “…perception (as in telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition) that involves awareness of information about events external to the self not gained through the senses and not deducible from previous experience — called also ESP”. In other words, extrasensory perception is about receiving information regarding outside events, but not through the usual five senses, hence “extrasensory”. Everyone has this psychic potential, but that potential is more developed in some people due to many factors such as environment and inclination. The most common examples of ESP are telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and retrocognition.

Telepathy

Telepathy is considered the most common form of ESP. It is a way of communicating without physical limitations. The easiest way to describe it is to liken it to mental radio, or a mental podcast, or even a mental phone call. There are several kinds of telepathy, any one or more of which will be quite familiar to nearly everyone. For example, when you’re thinking of a song and your daughter comes downstairs, cranky because she’s got a song in stuck her head that she can’t stand – and it’s the same song that’s been playing in your head. Or thoughts of a particular friend you haven’t seen in awhile pop into your head, and you reach for the phone to call her – only to have the phone ring with her call to you. Or maybe you turn around because you heard a friend call your name before she actually spoke it out loud. Yes, sometimes these things can be put down to coincidence or a common stimulus, but sometimes there is no rational explanation, especially when it happens regularly. Instances such as these are examples of accidental or involuntary telepathy, but it is possible to train yourself to send and receive telepathic messages voluntarily and deliberately.

Clairvoyance

Clairvoyance is understood as perceiving objects, current events, or surroundings in real time without being physically present – in other words, seeing something that is happening to someone else. Unlike telepathy, clairvoyance happens independently of someone else’s mind. An example of involuntary or accidental clairvoyance is someone who can’t find her cat all of a sudden getting a very clear image of the cat cowering under the blue tarp that’s stretched over the woodpile next door – even though this person is nowhere near the woodpile in question. A good example of voluntary or deliberate clairvoyance is the psychic who helps investigators locate a missing weapon, or is able to describe the surroundings of a missing person or the people who are imprisoning her.

Precognition

Precognition is the ability to know what is going to happen before it does – not simply assuming the logical conclusion of an action based on experience, or extrapolating from current possibilities, but actually seeing or knowing the outcome beforehand. One example is someone who, as she’s approaching a particular intersection, gets a vivid image of a truck barreling through the stoplight. When she reaches that intersection, she doesn’t immediately cross, but looks both ways slowly and carefully, even though she has the green light – and watches the truck plow through the very spot she would have been had she not waited. What makes precognition especially complicated is the fact that some events are fixed – they’re going to happen no matter what – while others are not, and thus can be changed with intervention. The trick is to know which is which, so as to be prepared to either cope with a situation, or avoid it altogether.

Retrocognition

Retrocognition is knowledge about the past that isn’t obtained by learning, inference, direct experience, or any other “normal” means. This form of ESP is extremely difficult to verify, because, in most cases, if it were possible to verify it, then retrocognition wouldn’t be necessary in the first place. For example, if you say that George Washington slept at a certain spot, but there’s no record of it, then you can’t prove you’re right; but if there is a record of it, you can’t prove that you didn’t read the record. One instance where retrocognition could conceivably be verifiable – and useful - would be in unsolved murder cases. A psychic could pick up information from where the victim was last seen alive in public, which would help point investigators in the right direction.

There are other, less common, forms of ESP, as well as instances where two forms of ESP are combined or ESP is combined with another form of psychic ability. Clairaudience is the auditory version of clairvoyance. Psychometry, the ability to know the history of an object just by touching it, would seem to be some sort of combination of clairvoyance and retrocognition. Mediumship, the ability to communicate with the dead or other entities, seems to be mostly a specifically focused combination of clairvoyance, clairaudience and telepathy. Remote viewing is the ability to gather information about a particular target using the mind. The CIA and the US Army studied it for a time, especially during the Cold War. There are those who consider remote viewing to be a combination of clairvoyance and astral projection. Astral projection is the deliberate and voluntary separation of consciousness from the body for the purposes of travel to distant locations and other dimensions – a planned and focused Out-of-body Experience (OBE). While Out-of body Experiences can happen accidentally or involuntarily to people who are dying or on certain kinds of medication, astral projection requires careful training and practice.

The human mind is an amazing thing. It is capable of so much more than is typically demanded of it. Extrasensory Perception is something we all possess, to one degree or another; we just need to take the plunge and explore!