Clairvoyance - Usage

Usage

Within parapsychology, clairvoyance is used exclusively to refer to the transfer of information that is both contemporary to, and hidden from, the clairvoyant. It is very different from telepathy in that the information is said to be gained directly from an external physical source, rather than being transferred from the mind of one individual to another.

Outside of parapsychology, clairvoyance is often used to refer to other forms of anomalous cognition, most commonly the perception of events that have occurred in the past, or which will occur in the future (known as retrocognition and precognition respectively), or to refer to communications with the dead (see Mediumship).

Clairvoyance is related to remote viewing, although the term "remote viewing" itself is not as widely applicable to clairvoyance because it refers to a specific controlled process.

Bruce Main-Smith writes, "It is unfortunate, indeed careless, that clairvoyance has come to be indicative of all/most forms of purported mediumship." There are four primary channels, clairsensing, trance, healing and physical, plus a whole raft of others that do not fit neatly into any one primary channel. Clairvoyance (seeing) and clairaudience (hearing) for example are both kinds of clairsensing and belong in that main group. Many mediums who are good clairvoyants may well have little or no clairaudient capability even though both "gifts" belong in the primary channel of clairsensing. Remote viewing is a facet of clairvoyance and usually appears in practitioners suffering from arrested development.

Trance is the ability to communicate with, and mainly to receive from, other entities, incarnate and discarnate, and may sometimes be independent of time; it is usually divided into deep trance (obliterative and so dangerous, where the operative abdicates the throne, quite common) and light trance (a high or even total degree of awareness and thus safer for the practitioner, and extremely rare when well-done).

Healing is the ability to induct health benefits from some usually unspecified higher source where the healer can direct the effects to the beneficiary. Contact healing involves the healer being in the closest proximity but not necessarily touching. Absent healing is explained by its alternative name of distant healing and is independent of spatial distance.

Physical mediumship includes events such as table turning, production of quasi-physical objects (even personages) and sometimes involving so-called ectoplasm. It is often said to require either total darkness or at the most a weak red light.

There are many further mediumistic events, still unfortunately too often dubbed clairvoyance, which do not fit neatly into any of the four main channels. These include psychometry (establishing the history of an object), slate writing (common in Victorian times), extras appearing in photographs (seemingly no more; possibly since the advent of compound camera lenses using plastic as well as quartz-glass) and a long list of other curiosities.

It is most unusual for a medium to have more than one primary channel "open" and under control.