Part II: The People Who See and Feel

Chapter 7: Psychics, The Translators Between Worlds

A psychic is someone who can see, hear, or sense non-physical beings: deceased people, spirits, entities from other dimensions. For many, the ability shows up early, sometimes in childhood. For others, it arrives later, triggered by trauma, sudden loss, or a physical crisis that cracks something open.

Before we go further: skepticism here is required. The field is full of fraud. Cold readers who fish for emotional reactions. Con artists who prey on grieving families. Charlatans who say things so vague they could apply to anyone. The Barnum effect, the psychological tendency to accept general statements as personally meaningful, accounts for the vast majority of "psychic readings" you'll ever encounter. I sat through dozens of them before finding anyone worth taking seriously. The filter I applied was aggressive and deliberately uncharitable. Most people failed it.

What survives that kind of filtering is a small body of documented cases where psychics provided specific, verifiable information with no conventional explanation for how they got it. Tested. Replicated. In some cases, employed by governments and hospitals. The phenomenon holds up under scrutiny. The question I cared about was never whether psychics exist. It was how the ability works and what that implies about the nature of reality. Talking to passed family members along the way turned out to be, as I once put it to a friend, the cherry on the cake.

How Psychic Communication Works

The mechanics, as best as I can reconstruct them from everything I've studied, work something like this.

The moment you think of a deceased loved one, say your grandmother, a link is created. Instant. No delay. Consciousness doesn't require a phone or a network; thought itself is the connection. She can hear you the second you focus on her. When you sit down with a psychic intending to reach her, she already knows you're there. She can perceive that you're in the presence of someone capable of receiving her. So she shows up.

The psychic describes what they're perceiving. You confirm or you don't. Once the identity is established, the psychic works to gather specific details that tighten the confirmation. The kind of thing that stops you cold. Something like: "Your grandmother is sitting on the red sofa in your living room. She's there every day. She can still hear the kids from the kindergarten next door. She wants you to know you can sell her belongings, she has no use for them anymore."

That level of specificity is what separates genuine communication from a Barnum performance. The details are personal, grounded, and often things no stranger could reasonably guess. Once that threshold is crossed, you can ask your own questions. Most people who go through that process describe what they feel as relief, sometimes deep relief, the kind that comes from knowing someone you loved is somewhere, intact, and not suffering.

The Psychic's Burden

Psychic medium Marisa Ryan is a useful case study in what this looks like from the inside. She wasn't born with her abilities. They emerged after the sudden deaths of her mother and her niece.1 Her first real experience of spirit contact wasn't gentle. The spirit of a murdered girl appeared in her home, dripping with blood, asking for help identifying her killer. Ryan's subsequent work covers live readings, the mechanics of spirit communication, and what souls describe about the crossing-over process, including the life review, where each soul re-experiences the precise emotional impact of their actions on others:

https://youtu.be/-zsLyCI45dY?si=ENtXI-lDLjP-wZb5&t=65

Psychics don't choose when spirits come to visit them. That's the part most people never think about. The contact isn't scheduled by the psychic. It arrives.

Picture yourself in a grocery store, comparing olive oils. Suddenly the spirit of a stranger's dead uncle is standing beside you, urgent and emotional, asking you to relay a message to a niece you've never met. You don't know either of them. He doesn't care. He just needs someone who can hear him. Now multiply that by a hundred occurrences per day.

To stay functional, many psychics establish working hours. They instruct spirits to make contact only during designated windows of time. Some spirits comply. Others, predictably, don't. The parallel to living people ignoring "do not disturb" signs is one that psychics themselves make with a kind of exhausted humor.

Emilia Jacobson, in Psychic Development, names this the "psychic burden" and then immediately complicates it:2

"Being a psychic is a gift and not a curse, but what most people don't know is that everyone has the ability to be a psychic."

Everyone. The capacity isn't a rare mutation handed to a handful of unusually wired people. It's a natural human faculty, one that most of us have been systematically conditioned to suppress, dismiss, or quietly bury. Some people come into the world with it wide open. Others find it cracked open by grief or trauma. The underlying capacity is universal, and that reframing changes a lot about how you understand the subject.

Notes on How Spirits Appear

A few things about spirit contact that tend to surprise people, even people already open to the idea.

Spirits choose how they appear. A soul presenting itself to a psychic selects its own appearance: any age, any emotional register, any version of itself it wants to project. Your grandmother, who died at eighty, might prefer to present herself as she looked at thirty. But she may still appear as her eighty-year-old self during a reading, specifically so you can recognize her from the description the psychic gives you. Recognition, apparently, takes priority over preference.

Multiple psychics perceive different aspects. Put several psychics in the same room with the same spirit and they'll each pick up something the others missed. One captures a visual impression. Another gets a name. A third receives an emotional tone or a specific message. Each psychic tunes to a slightly different frequency, and the spirit's full picture emerges only in aggregate.

Spirits can impersonate others. This one matters, and I'll go deeper on it in the chapter on spiritual hazards. Low-vibration entities can present themselves as your deceased loved ones. They can access your thoughts, which means they can produce details that feel like confirmation. The trust they build is then used to steer you. Experienced psychics are aware of this and use specific methods to verify whoever is communicating. The phenomenon is real, and so is this particular wrinkle inside it.

Patricia Darre: Woken by a Voice

Patricia Darre is a French journalist and psychic, and her story is a striking account of spontaneous psychic awakening.

In September 1995, a few weeks after the birth of her son, Patricia Darre woke in the middle of the night to a masculine, grave voice speaking directly into her right ear:

"Leve-toi, prends un papier et ecris." ("Rise, take a paper and write.")

She got up. She wrote. Her hand moved across the paper producing text she wasn't consciously composing, and when she looked at what came out, the handwriting wasn't hers. The letters touched each other in unusual ways. The spelling patterns belonged to someone else's hand.

The first message:

"A partir de maintenant, tu es en contact avec l'autre dimension." ("From now on, you are in contact with the other dimension.")

Then came a condition, a boundary stated plainly by whatever intelligence had just switched this on:

"If ever you were tempted to manipulate, to make commerce, to take power, this ability would be immediately withdrawn from you."

That's a strange thing for a hallucination to say. Hallucinations don't typically arrive with ethics clauses.

The awakening had been signaled the week before. For 7 consecutive nights, Darre dreamed the same scene: a castle room, a man in a redingote and black pants, who told her his name was Daniel. Seven nights in a row, same man, same room, same name. The dreams read less like coincidence and more like a briefing schedule.

Darre was a working journalist when this happened. She went on to document all of it in several books, including Un souffle vers l'eternite ("A Breath Toward Eternity"), which traces her path from professional skeptic to practicing psychic,3 and Mes rendez-vous avec Walter Höffer ("My Meetings with Walter Höffer"), an account of ongoing channeled contact with a specific named spirit entity.4

I used to assume that stories like this fell into two clean categories: either the person was fabricating, or they were unwell. That taxonomy feels lazy now. Darre's account is specific, documented, and structurally consistent. I can't verify it. I also can't dismiss it on the grounds that it sounds strange, because a lot of things that turned out to be true sounded strange first.

Christophe Allain: The Third Eye Opens

Christophe Allain opens a different angle on all of this in his Journal d'un eveil du troisieme oeil ("Journal of a Third Eye Awakening").5

Where Darre's awakening arrived as a voice and a hand moving across paper, Allain's came as something more physically violent. He experienced a kundalini awakening, a sudden surge of energy rising through his body that blew open what yogic tradition calls the third eye, the sixth chakra, located in the center of the forehead. The perceptual gates opened all at once. Auras, energies, presences, layers of reality sitting inside ordinary reality. Everything, immediately, at full volume.

The perceptions were too much, too fast. He describes being completely overwhelmed, unable to parse what he was seeing or do anything useful with it. The integration took 10 years. A decade of clearing emotional and mental patterns, steadying his psychology, learning to handle constant multidimensional input before his perceptions became reliable rather than just relentless.

He wrote:

"The perceptions are always there, waiting for an intention to connect with any aspect of the universe."

That sentence carries the whole model. Psychic perception, in Allain's account, is a background signal that's always running. The work is building the receiver, not generating the signal. What changes across those 10 years is the person's capacity to tune in without blowing a fuse.

Allain's story complicates the cleaner narratives. Awakening, in his telling, was destabilizing and socially isolating before it was anything else. The 10-year process reads like debugging a system that's receiving too much data with too few filters.

The U.S. Military Psychic Spy Program

My most predictable response to psychic claims was: show me a controlled experiment, show me replication, show me institutional accountability. So the part of this investigation I found hardest to dismiss wasn't the channeled voices or the kundalini journals. It was the U.S. government's budget line.

Lyn Buchanan served as a psychic spy. He documents that service in The Seventh Sense, a firsthand account of working inside the U.S. military's remote viewing program.6 Remote viewing is the trained capacity to perceive distant locations, objects, or events using only the mind, no physical signal, no sensory contact with the target. The U.S. government researched, developed, and operationally deployed this capability through programs carrying several code names, the most famous being Project Stargate.7

Buchanan describes operational use: locating hostages, identifying hidden facilities, gathering intelligence on foreign weapons programs. Governments don't fund programs for decades because they're interesting. They fund them because they produce usable results. The eventual declassification of Project Stargate, rather than quiet burial of the records, suggests the outcomes weren't something they were running from.7

Russell Targ, a physicist and co-founder of the Stanford Research Institute's remote viewing program, built the scientific case in Limitless Mind.8 His position: consciousness reaches beyond the skull. Information becomes accessible across any distance without any known physical mechanism. Targ frames this as experimental data gathered under controlled laboratory conditions and replicated hundreds of times, not as philosophy.

That replication number matters. Hundreds of controlled trials. If this were a pharmaceutical result, it would be in clinical use. The fact that it sits in a category labeled "paranormal" is more a function of institutional discomfort than of evidentiary weakness.

Everyone Is Psychic

I came into this expecting psychic ability to be a property of rare, unusual people, a quirk of specific neurology or specific pathology. What I found was a consistent counter-argument from multiple directions.

Jacobson's claim that "everyone has the ability to be a psychic" gets structural support from the military data (ordinary soldiers were trained to remote view, selected for trainability rather than pre-existing ability), from the channeled teachings (Abraham-Hicks frames intuition as a universal navigational system, built into everyone),9 and from the documented pattern of people developing psychic abilities later in life, frequently after trauma.

The 7 steps to developing clairvoyance, according to Jacobson:2

  1. Release your fear (of being crazy, of what you might see, of social ridicule)
  2. Formulate specific questions (don't ask "show me something", ask something precise)
  3. Concentrate on the third eye chakra (the space between your eyebrows)
  4. Take note of any images that arise, no matter how faint or random they seem
  5. Increase the image (focus on it, let it develop, don't dismiss it)
  6. Interpretation and clarification (what does it mean?)
  7. Trust in your sight (this is the hardest step, believing what you see)

Step seven is where most people stall. The ability may be functional. The belief that it's functional is what collapses. The evidence for non-local human perception is stronger than I expected, and the main thing standing between most people and that capacity appears to be the assumption that they don't have it.

That assumption is worth examining. It's doing a lot of work, and I'm no longer certain it's earning it.

Sources

  1. Marisa Ryan, "About Marisa," Awareness Institute (marisaryan.com). Confirms her abilities emerged after the deaths of her mother and her 21-year-old niece, two days apart, in 2000; she has since worked on murder and missing persons cases. https://www.marisaryan.com/about_marisa
  2. Emilia Jacobson, Psychic Development: Expert Guide to the Secrets of our Sixth Sense - Mastery of the Third Eye, Intuition & Clairvoyance (2016). Source of the "psychic burden" discussion, the "everyone has the ability to be a psychic" quote, and the 7-step clairvoyance development sequence. https://www.amazon.com/Psychic-Development-Intuition-Clairvoyance-Telepathy/dp/1534650512
  3. Patricia Darre, Un souffle vers l'eternite: Je voudrais partager mes messages de l'au-dela (Michel Lafon, 2012). Her firsthand account of the 1995 nocturnal awakening, the automatic writing, and her path from journalist to psychic. http://www.michel-lafon.fr/livre/1022-Un_souffle_vers_l_eternite.html
  4. Patricia Darre, Mes rendez-vous avec Walter Höffer (Michel Lafon, 2021). Account of her channeled contact with the spirit Walter Höffer, begun during the March 2020 lockdown. https://www.fnac.com/a15772632/Patricia-Darre-Mes-rendez-vous-avec-Walter-Hoffer
  5. Christophe Allain, Journal d'un eveil du 3eme oeil, tome 1: 90 experiences d'un autodidacte du spirituel and tome 2: Esprits et Monde Spirituel (Editions Atlantes, 2011). Firsthand account of his kundalini awakening and the decade-long integration. https://www.amazon.com/Journal-dun-eveil-3eme-oeil/dp/2362770028
  6. Lyn Buchanan, The Seventh Sense: The Secrets of Remote Viewing as Told by a "Psychic Spy" for the U.S. Military (Paraview Pocket Books, 2003). Firsthand account of nearly a decade in the Army's remote viewing unit, including operational tasking during the Iran hostage crisis and the Gulf War. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Seventh-Sense/Lyn-Buchanan/9780743462686
  7. CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room, STARGATE collection. Approximately 12,473 declassified documents from the 25-year remote viewing effort, published online by the CIA in January 2017 as part of the CREST release; includes session records, training documents, internal memoranda, and program reviews. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/stargate
  8. Russell Targ, Limitless Mind: A Guide to Remote Viewing and Transformation of Consciousness (New World Library, 2004). Targ co-founded the Stanford Research Institute remote viewing program in 1972, funded by the CIA and other agencies. https://www.amazon.com/Limitless-Mind-Viewing-Transformation-Consciousness/dp/1577314131
  9. Esther Hicks and Jerry Hicks, Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires (Hay House, 2004). Presents the Abraham teachings' emotional guidance system as a built-in navigational faculty available to everyone. https://www.hayhouse.com/ask-and-it-is-given-paperback