As children my younger sister would say she was psychic and tell me about her psychic experiences. I recall, for better or worse, vehemently discouraging such a line of thought. I would tell her that she is not a psychic and if she continued to say she was, then she was a liar. Dismayed, she eventually stopped announcing that she was a psychic to us sisters and maybe even stopped letting herself acknowledge so-called “psychic” experiences when she had them. In retrospect I regret my harsh and ignorant stance, but at the time (and I was a tween myself) I believed it was for her own good: she couldn’t run around in public telling people she was psychic. How would people take her intellect seriously if she did?
Now I have always been convinced that my sister may have had strong intuitive abilities for what may be beyond the five physical senses, not unlike the way all the women from my maternal line are drawn to the preternatural. My grandmother, my mother, my first cousins descending from my grandmother, and my sisters all display a heightened awareness of the logically inexplicable. But psychic?
I saw it this way: when you are a voracious reader, at some point you will want to give it a try and become a writer yourself. Likewise, if you’re fascinated by metaphysics and occult phenomenon, at some point you will want to be part of it, and maybe even convince yourself that you’re psychic. Not too different from how I try to convince myself that I’m a writer even though I have yet to publish a damn thing.
Sure, I am convinced that intuition is real. Intuition is the perception of a truth, occurring incident, circumstance, or event independent of any logical reasoning, actual knowledge, experience, or cognitive deductive process. It is synchronicity. It is a prickling of what is about to happen before it happens. It is the sensation of energies that you can’t physically see, hear, smell, touch, or taste, a sensation for when those energies are in balance and when they are out of balance, and the enigmatic knowing of how you might be able to balance it if you were to try.
Being intuitive is like being detail-oriented, or organized, or calculating differential equations. Not everybody is detail-oriented, organized, or able to do math, but anybody can be with enough effort. It is just a skill, albeit a remarkably empowering one when we use it. It might also be a trait. Some seem naturally disposed to it and others need to really work to acquire the skill. I guess somehow those who seem naturally disposed to being intuitive have come to be referred to as psychic.
My question is: where on the continuum of intuitive ability must one be for that person to qualify as “psychic”?
Continue reading “Are You Psychic? The Sum of Intuition and Ego”
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