I See Dead People

I remember when I was still young and in spiritualism. It was quite an interesting experience going from almost having perceived no psychic ability to being on stage, on platforms in front of 70 to hundreds of people—even thousands on certain occasions—and doing the old classic John Edwards thing: telling people what their dead relatives have said, manifesting very personal stories—stories that I had no conscious awareness of.

How does one gain access to these things? How does it cultivate?

It wasn’t always that simple. In fact, there were quite difficult times in the development, and there were a lot of issues around the area of self-trust. It even gave me this one little joke at one point saying that the difference between the psychopath and the psychic is: one thinks he’s speaking to God, and the other one knows he’s speaking to God.

This variance is a real one. There’s a disconnect that we must be aware of. Some people will have the scattered up of their experience that is in contradiction to their other experience. This creates a psychic disconnect. And I want to highlight that at first, to recognize that not all events are psychic. Some events are very much related to your own personal experience.

In fact, this is one of the truisms. Even when we look at psychic development, as a young mystic or young psychic or young witch begins to cultivate their abilities, the first messages intuitively and psychically that they’ll be giving—and even the people that they attract in order to do these things—will directly relate to themselves. Spirit weaves this trick over us in the sense that you won’t do anything that you’re not really ready for. You will meet the right people. You’ll move into the right interactions only once you’re ready for those experiences.

And that is an indicator to trust the self—trust the deeper components or the God within.

Let’s look at that a little bit in my own journey.

In my experience, I remember one of my first real psychic messages and how it came about. It wasn’t Hollywood. There was no moment where I sat in the old spiritualist science circle, looked at another individual, and his grandfather appeared next to me and gave me all these detailed instructions about his life. Not at all.

My first event was quite simple. I was sitting in a circle group, and there was an individual sitting in the corner of the room. As I looked over, this person caught my attention.

Now, keep in mind: this didn’t just spontaneously happen. We were already going through a meditative experience, which means certain things were already in place. I was in trance. We had gone through a guided visualization. So, I had engaged my active imagination faculty.

These two being in place, I opened my eyes, looked at the individual, and started perceiving certain things. It wasn’t the Hollywood moment. What happened was simple: I saw what seemed like light coming up, but then a shadow started to formulate around it. Then I saw a Graham Hancock book.

Memory serves me that it was kind of the opposite way around. I saw the Graham Hancock book in the person’s mind. I saw this light activate, and then I saw a shadow figure kind of taking over it. My interpretation, the same way as from a position of active imagination, was: what is the symbolic?

So I said to the individual, “I have this feeling, this intuition, this hunch, and I’m just going to give it to you. You give me a sense of whether this is true or not.” I said, “I believe that you are currently doing a lot of research. I think maybe this could be in the lines of Graham Hancock or other ancient culture philosophies. And what happens to you as an individual is that you start experiencing a moment of enlightenment, a higher way of thinking—but then your reasoning, your logical, realistic self gets in the way and disperses that. And you’re back on the research path.”

The person was blown away. And again, I didn’t get that as direct information. Symbolically in my mind, I saw the book. I saw the research. I saw the light going on, and then I saw the shadow—representing rationality—taking over.

What this allowed me to do was to cultivate trust—faith, if you will—in my intuitive and psychic abilities. But those wouldn’t always serve me well. Sometimes I had intuitions and they were completely wrong. And spiritualism has a classic saying that really describes this, and they refer to it as “the God thought.”

The “God thought” is this moment of intuitive knowingness that arises. But the second we rationalize or justify it, the descent begins. Once a thought or impression has dual nature, opposition, or mixed emotions—it’s been distorted. It’s no longer the actual thing. It’s most likely the practitioner’s own psychological projection.

And that’s why the terms are important: clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience. “Clair” simply means “clear”—clear seeing, clear hearing, clear feeling. And for those things to be effective, you must first clear your drama. You must clear your psychic and psychological projections.