How Clairsentients Can Feel The Unseen
March 09, 2024 1:00 AM ‐ Paranormal • Psychic Readings
Photo: © Ilona Panych
Clairsentience is a type of extrasensory perception (ESP) that is said to allow someone to feel the emotions, energies, or physical pains of others without the need for the traditional five senses. This could be the emotions of a living person or, in many paranormal claims, the residual emotions or sensations left behind by spirits or entities.
The word rolls together two French words, 'clair' meaning clear, and 'sentience' which refers to feeling. The term might seem familiar due to its similarity to the much more widely known term, clairvoyance. Together, clairsentience and clairvoyance form a group of ESP abilities, each with a different way of perceiving or obtaining information beyond the limits of the standard human senses.
While clairsentience deals with feeling, clairvoyance involves receiving insights visually, clairaudience is linked with the traditional sense of hearing, and claircognisance is the ability to know things intuitively. All of these can give the receiver an insight into, not only the world beyond normal human senses. but also the spirit world.
It's difficult to understand how clairsentients experience these 'clear feelings' as the concept of experiencing external feelings is quite alien to those of us not gifted with this ability. According to those who claim to have the ability, it's like walking into a room and instantly feeling sad or anxious for no apparent reason, or getting goosebumps and sensing that someone is there despite being alone.
Essentially, they might receive insight through physical sensations in their own bodies, such as a sudden feeling of temperature change, unexplained emotions like sadness or joy, or even physical pain that has no apparent cause. For example, a clairsentient might walk into a room and unexpectedly feel a sharp pain in their arm, which could be interpreted as a connection to someone who once suffered an injury in that same space.
Another thing that's difficult for the non-gifted to understand is how clairsentients distinguish between psychic feelings and personal emotions, or empathy. Being empathetic means you can understand and share the feelings of another through observation and social interaction, but clairsentience goes a step beyond, involving an intuitive, physical response.
The feelings a clairsentient receives might not align with their current thoughts or situation, providing a clue that the feelings may be psychic in nature. This is why it's important to focus on self-awareness by regularly 'checking in' with their own emotions and physical state. By becoming highly familiar with their personal baseline feelings and reactions, clairsentients can start to identify when something they're feeling doesn't quite belong to them.
You may have also heard of the term 'sensitive' in relation to psychic abilities. Sometimes the terms are used interchangeably with clairsentient, and although some would argue they are different abilities, they are very similar, if not identical. A sensitive is described as someone who can pick up on the 'energies' of a room, detect the presence of spirits, or have heightened intuition. These are all, more or less, traits of a clairsentient, too. Again, this might be a case where those of us without either ability can't understand the intricate differences.
Others argue that the difference between being a sensitive and a clairsentient is the focus of the ability. While clairsentience is considered to be a fully-fledged extrasensory ability that focuses on feelings, a sensitive is someone who is merely more open to psychic phenomena or paranormal activity in general. This doesn't just include feelings or sensations but can also extend to clairvoyance, clairaudience, or claircognizance, albeit to a lesser extent than those with these individual abilities might have.
Many paranormal investigation teams find clairsentients useful on ghost hunts due to their ability to potentially perceive feelings and emotions that are not detectable by conventional observation or ghost-hunting equipment. For example, a clairsentient might enter an old building and feel an overwhelming sense of sadness in a particular room, suggesting to the investigators that something tragic may have occurred there.
Although the term clairsentience isn't as widely known as clairvoyance, it does often form a part of stage mediumship and one-on-one psychic readings, as does clairvoyance. In these settings, a psychic may rely on their clairsentient abilities to connect with the emotions and physical sensations of the spirit world, which they then interpret and convey to their audience or individual clients.
Like other forms of ESP, there's no understanding of how clairsentience might work in terms of the mechanism that makes receiving these feelings and sensations possible. One possible explanation is based on the concepts of energy and vibration. All living organisms emit weak electromagnetic fields, which can be detected by medical technologies like EEGs and EKGs. It's not entirely far-fetched to propose that some individuals could have a heightened sensitivity to these bioelectromagnetic fields, allowing them to perceive emotional states or even health conditions in others.
Others think that clairsentients don't possess supernatural abilities but instead have a heightened ability to process and interpret information subconsciously. They might notice subtle cues in their environment - body language, atmospheric changes, scents - that others miss, translating these into more tangible feelings or intuitions. This doesn't require any new physics or unproven science, just an advanced ability to subconsciously find patterns in behaviour based on initial or limited observations.
Skeptics might attribute clairsentient experiences to coincidence, suggestion, or other psychological factors. However, in the realm of the paranormal, it continues to be a subject of debate and hints at the possibility that there may be more to our senses than we currently understand.
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