Psychic Ability Versus Intuition

Back in April, Vice posted an article about a recent study in which almost one in five American claimed to have psychic abilities. I actually don't find that number particularly surprising, since the question was about psychic ability in general. Lots of people have experiences that seem psychic, which is why paranormal beliefs exist in the first place. Psychic abilities are "real" in the sense that people keep experiencing them. The debate is over what their actual nature is.

A new survey of 2,000 adults from Talker Research found that 19% of respondents straight-up believe they have psychic abilities, another 71% lean on intuition at least some of the time, and over the past year, the average person logged around 18 moments they’d describe as psychic. Only 11% said they don’t buy into it at all. So what’s actually happening?

Nobody was predicting earthquakes or lottery numbers. The experiences people pointed to were more like: knowing something was off before anyone confirmed it (33%), clocking that someone was lying (28%), or just feeling like it was time to leave a situation (26%). Twenty-five percent had a bad feeling about something before it went awry. Twenty-four percent thought of someone right before that person texted. Psychic or just paying attention? Depends on who you ask.

Adam Dickinson, a former FBI intelligence analyst, didn’t dress it up. “Intuition is your body compressing years of experience and pattern recognition into a clear signal you can feel right now.” The people who sensed dishonesty before it surfaced, or finished someone’s sentence before they got there—they’re reading data. They’ve just been doing it long enough that it no longer feels like work.

The part of the survey that deserves more attention is the anxiety overlap. Thirty-five percent of respondents said they genuinely can’t tell the difference between a real gut feeling and anxiety spiraling. Dickinson’s way of separating the two: get still, get neutral, and notice whether the inner voice feels steady or frantic. “That urgent, demanding tone is usually anxiety trying to control uncertainty,” he said. Not intuition. Just the nervous system doing its thing.

While this is a skeptical take that assumes psychic senses could not possibly exist, otherwise I don't really disagree with most of it. There is a difference between psychic awareness and intuition, but a lot of the time what is happening when you get "a feeling" about something is definitely the latter. Psychic abilities aren't called "paranormal" for nothing, after all.

Much of the discipline of being a magician is working with your mind to the point that you can feel the difference. Likewise, one of the most challenging aspects of spirit communication is sorting out your own thoughts from information you receive by psychic means. Meditation is a good practice for this, since it lets you observe your thoughts more clearly and distinctly. But even that provides no verification of the information you feel like you are receiving.

Testing psychic information is also important, especially when communicating with spirits. There are a couple of ways to do this. One trick involves gemtria - that is, numerology. Ask a spirit to give you a number and check its numerological associations in a reference like Aleister Crowley's Sepher Sephiroth or Godwin's Cabalistic Encyclopedia. If the number is associated with something related to the message you received, that supports its validity.

For example, if you get a message that has a theme that strongly resonates with the element of Fire, but the only associations you can find for your number are related to Water, it is possible that you are dealing with your own thoughts and ideas. But if the number resonates with Fire in a way that you could not have possibly known, the information is likely coming from somewhere else. Magicians who report spirit communications who do not do this should be immediately suspect. Who's to say they're not just talking from their own imaginations?

Another method for doing this is checking real-world information against your psychic impressions. You can do simple tests like draw a random Tarot card and see how often you can guess which card it is at a rate higher than chance. You can also ask questions about something happening in the world, and then check the news or some other source to see if the information you got was correct. The point is that real psychic insight provides you with information that you did not previously know, not something you could easily imagine.

It is likely that intuition plays a role in genuine psychic insights too. Psychic senses are one more channel of information that can be fed into the brain's intuitive processing, and that information can help produce highly accurate ideas about one's situation and circumstances. This ability will serve you well both as a magician and in your everyday life.