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Dear Soul Arcanum:
I’ve been learning about mediums and psychics and am trying to figure out how their abilities differ. I’ve noticed that many psychics call themselves clairvoyant and have learned that clairvoyance means they can perceive events and information without the use of their ordinary senses. Here the term “see” is used in place of just “know” or “understand.” Other ESP abilities I have learned about include telepathy and precognition. I understand this to mean that a clairvoyant reads the energy of a client by perceiving the client in their mind without the use of their ordinary senses. Why would a psychic only define herself as a clairvoyant and not mention her precognitive or telepathic skills? As for mediums, most mental mediums generally describe their abilities in terms of the “clairs” – clairvoyance, clairsentience, clairaudience, etc. I don’t understand the difference between having a “clair” type of ability and being a medium. I have had some readings with mediums in which it seemed the medium was reading the energy of a spirit like a psychic would read the energy of a person, and others where it seemed the medium was channeling direct messages from the spirit. Can you clear these matters up?
Carolyn
Dear Carolyn:
I understand your confusion. While it may seem like clairvoyants use the term “see” as a synonym for “know” or “understand,” I believe they are saying HOW they tend to receive the psychic information they are in the process of understanding. Clairvoyance is my strongest psychic sense. When I say to a client, “I see you and your boyfriend traveling down a road, and in the future, this road splits and you take one path and he takes another,” I’m describing what I am literally being shown in my mind’s eye. I may then go on to explain what I “understand” from this by saying, “From this, I get that you and your boyfriend are going to eventually split up but it won’t be for a while yet.” Clairvoyance is thus not so much a psychic sense in and of itself as a style of psychic perception. If I were primarily clairaudient, I might instead say, “I’m hearing that you two are destined to split up, but I keep hearing January and the words turning point, so I feel this won’t be overtly set in motion until next January.”
If psychic ability were language itself (a way to communicate with other people, spirit guides, etc.), we might say that clairvoyance is a particular language like English. Other psychic languages like clairaudience, clairsentience, etc., are like French and Spanish. In order to clearly communicate with particular spirits, we have to be able to speak the same psychic language. Since spirit guides are far more adept at inter-dimensional communication, we might say for the sake of simplicity that they are fluent in all the languages. This means we just have to be fluent in one of the psychic languages to be able to consciously seek guidance from Spirit.
Keeping this in mind, you can perhaps now understand why a psychic would label herself clairvoyant and not go into her telepathic or precognitive skills. By saying that she is clairvoyant, she is saying that she speaks a certain psychic language. This means she can perform all sorts of psychic tasks in that language. If she is communicating telepathically or predicting the future, she will do so largely through mental pictures. A clairaudient can perform all the same psychic tasks but she will do so mainly through mental dialogue. Someone who is fluent can use their fluency to talk to other people and to write letters, emails and texts and perform all sorts of other communication tasks. Someone who speaks only French would do these same things in their own language. Further, you may speak a little bit of a foreign language, so if you are telepathically dialoguing with someone who speaks primarily that other language, you may able to piece what they are saying together much as you would if you were traveling in another country.
As for the difference between a psychic and a medium, the psychic speaks a particular language but lacks the equipment to use it to connect with other realms. This is like being fluent in English but not having a phone with which to call people far away. Usually, one progresses from psychic to medium, though sometimes mediums don’t realize they are psychic until spirit communication spontaneously occurs for some reason. (This reason is often the death of a loved one and a strong desire for a sign or message on either party’s part.) To follow through with our metaphor, this is like being able to speak a language like English or French being a prerequisite to being able to pick up a phone and use it to communicate with someone far away. (Hand gestures and body language won’t help you with this sort of communication; you must be able to communicate on a metaphysical level.)
You are right that mediums have different ways of relaying messages from spirits. When psychics are first learning spirit communication, they do tend to read the spirit much like they might read a person living in this dimension; since they have already developed that particular skill, it is what comes naturally. This enables them to visually describe the spirit if they are strongly clairvoyant, relay the spirit’s name or other information if they are primarily clairaudient, or describe the way the spirits feels if they are strongly clairsentient. (We see this in mediums who tune in to a spirit and say something like, “I feel pain in my chest; did this person die of a heart attack?”) Someone whose strongest psychic sense involves smell may relay that they smell cigar smoke or a certain perfume or other scent when tuning in to a particular spirit.
Of course, the more a psychic develops her various psychic senses (learns other languages), the more she will be able to access psychic information from a variety of angles and thus get a clearer sense of what she is perceiving. Being “multi-lingual” also means she will be able to connect with a wider number of spirits. If both the medium and the spirit are highly visual, communication will take place in a visual way. If one is visual and the other auditory, communication may be difficult. If the medium is able to see, hear and feel metaphysical information, she will be able to communicate with spirits who speak any of these telepathic languages. (Not speaking the same language is a key reason why a medium may not be able to clearly connect with a certain spirit.)
The more skilled a psychic becomes at spirit communication, the better she will get at linking with the spirit and allowing the spirit to channel messages through her instead of reaching for information and then trying to interpret what is perceived. This sort of channeling requires a profound shift in vibration and a deep, unbroken trance state; in order to maintain that state, the use of one’s psychic senses must be natural and easy. Most mediums who are able to do this are also particularly adept at clairaudience, which is why they are able to “hear” what the spirit wants to say and verbally relay that. These are some of the various reasons that not all mediums work in the same way or produce the same types of readings.
Since all of these processes are subtle and extraordinary, it is hard to describe them in words. I hope the above has cleared up some of your confusion!