Part II: The People Who See and Feel
Chapter 8: 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, this ability is present from a young age; for others, it may emerge later in life following a traumatic event like the loss of a loved one or a severe accident.
Most people shut down when they hear about psychics. And honestly? They should be skeptical. The field is riddled with fraud — cold readers who fish for reactions, con artists who exploit grieving families, charlatans who make statements so vague they could apply to anyone. The Barnum effect (making general statements that feel personal) accounts for the majority of "psychic readings" you'll encounter. I know this because I watched dozens of supposed psychics before finding anyone credible.
But here's the thing: once you filter out the noise — and you have to filter aggressively — what remains is a small number of documented cases where psychics have provided specific, verifiable information they couldn't have obtained by any known means. Their abilities have been tested, replicated, and in some cases employed by governments and hospitals. The phenomenon is real. The question isn't whether psychics exist — it's how their ability works and what it tells us about reality. And that's the only thing I wanted to know to be honest, talking to passed family members along the way was the cherry on the cake.
How Psychic Communication Works
Here's the mechanics of it, as best as I understand from the sources I've studied.
When you think of a deceased loved one — say your grandmother — the moment you think of her, an instant link is created between you and her. It's as if a radio is tuned to a shared frequency. She can hear you right away. Consciousness doesn't need a phone or an internet connection; thought is the connection.
So when you contact a psychic to communicate with your grandmother, the moment you focus on her, she knows. She can see that you're sitting with someone who can perceive the non-physical realm. So she shows up — presents herself to the psychic.
The psychic then describes to you the person who has appeared. You either validate or invalidate the details. Once it's established that the spirit communicating through the psychic is indeed your grandmother, the psychic will get as much information and details as possible to strengthen the confirmation. For example: "Your grandma is in your living room on the red sofa. She comes every day to visit you and still hears the kids playing in the kindergarten next door. She says you can clean up the garage and sell all her belongings — she really doesn't need them anymore."
This phase is usually shocking in its accuracy. The details are specific, personal, and often include things only you and the deceased person would know.
Once confirmations are established that you're talking to the right spirit (with the psychic doing the translation), you can ask personal questions. After such a conversation, most people feel immense relief and begin to genuinely consider that there is something after death — and that their loved one is safe, happy, and at peace.
The Psychic's Burden
Psychic medium Marisa Ryan offers a vivid window into what this world looks like in practice. Unlike many mediums, she wasn't born with her abilities — they emerged after the sudden deaths of her mother and niece. Her first real psychic experience was jarring: the spirit of a murdered girl appeared in her home, dripping with blood, asking for help solving her case. In this presentation, Ryan explains how spirit communication works, performs live readings for audience members, and describes what souls report about the crossing-over process — including the "life review," where each soul re-experiences exactly how their actions affected others:
https://youtu.be/-zsLyCI45dY?si=ENtXI-lDLjP-wZb5&t=65
Here's what most people don't realize: psychics don't choose when spirits come to visit them. It can be anytime, anywhere.
Imagine walking through a grocery store and suddenly being approached by the spirit of someone's dead uncle, urgently asking you to pass a message to his living niece. You don't know the niece. You don't know the uncle. But there he is, insistent and emotional, begging for help. Now imagine that happening a hundred times a day.
Many psychics are overwhelmed by the constant influx. In order to remain sane, they establish "working hours" — they tell the spirits to only come during specific times, otherwise their lives would be too chaotic. Even then, some spirits don't respect the schedule, just like some living people don't respect "do not disturb" signs.
Emilia Jacobson, in Psychic Development, describes this as the "psychic burden" and makes a point that I think is crucial: "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. It's not a special power granted to a chosen few. It's a natural human capacity that most of us have been conditioned to ignore, suppress, or dismiss. Some people are born with it wide open. Others develop it later. But the capacity is universal.
Notes on How Spirits Appear
A few important details about how spirit communication works that aren't obvious:
Spirits choose how they appear. Souls showing up to psychics select their own appearance — any age, any style, any emotional state they want to project. In the example of your grandmother: even if she was 80 years old when she died and her soul prefers to present herself as she looked at 30, she might still show up looking like the 80-year-old you remember — so that you can recognize her from the psychic's description.
Multiple psychics perceive different aspects. If several psychics are in the same room, they'll all be able to perceive the same spirit, but each may pick up different details. This is because each psychic tunes to a slightly different frequency, so some will capture visual details while others get emotional information, names, or messages that the other psychics missed.
Spirits can impersonate others. This is a danger I'll cover more in the chapter on spiritual hazards, but it's worth mentioning here: not every spirit that shows up is who they claim to be. Low-vibration entities can disguise themselves as your loved ones, tell you things only you know (by accessing your thoughts), and use the trust they build to manipulate you. Good psychics are aware of this and have methods to verify the identity of spirits they communicate with.
Patricia Darre: Woken by a Voice
Patricia Darre is a French journalist and psychic whose story is one of the most compelling accounts of spontaneous psychic awakening I've read.
In September 1995, shortly after the birth of her son, Darre was woken in the middle of the night by a masculine, grave voice speaking directly into her right ear:
"Leve-toi, prends un papier et ecris." ("Rise, take a paper and write.")
What followed was automatic writing — her hand moved across the paper, producing text she wasn't consciously composing. The handwriting was different from her own; the letters touched each other in unusual ways; there were spelling patterns that weren't hers.
The message she received:
"A partir de maintenant, tu es en contact avec l'autre dimension." ("From now on, you are in contact with the other dimension.")
And then came the restriction — a boundary set by whatever intelligence had awakened this ability:
"If ever you were tempted to manipulate, to make commerce, to take power, this ability would be immediately withdrawn from you."
This wasn't a gradual development. It was a switch being flipped. One day Patricia Darre was a normal journalist; the next, she was in contact with non-physical beings who communicated through her hand and, increasingly, through her perceptual awareness.
In the week before the voice, she had experienced 7 consecutive nights of the same dream: being in a castle room, encountering a man in a redingote and black pants who identified himself as Daniel. The dreams were precursors — previews of the contact that was coming.
Darre went on to write several books documenting her experiences, including Un souffle vers l'eternite ("A Breath Toward Eternity"), which chronicles her journey from skeptical journalist to practicing psychic, and Mes rendez-vous avec Walter Hoffer ("My Meetings with Walter Hoffer"), which documents her ongoing channeled communications with a specific spirit entity.
Christophe Allain: The Third Eye Opens
Christophe Allain provides another extraordinary account of psychic awakening in his two-volume Journal d'un eveil du troisieme oeil ("Journal of a Third Eye Awakening").
Allain experienced a kundalini awakening — a sudden, explosive activation of spiritual energy that rose through his body and blew open what yogic tradition calls the "third eye" (the sixth chakra, located in the forehead). The result was immediate and overwhelming: he was suddenly flooded with perceptions — seeing auras, sensing energies, perceiving non-physical beings, experiencing the multidimensional aspects of everyday reality.
But here's the critical detail: the perceptions were too much, too fast. Allain describes being completely overwhelmed, unable to understand what he was seeing or how to use it. It took 10 years of purification — clearing emotional and mental patterns, removing distortions in his perception, building the psychological stability to handle constant multidimensional awareness — before his perceptions became reliable and clear.
As he wrote:
"The perceptions are always there, waiting for an intention to connect with any aspect of the universe."
This is a profound statement. Psychic perception isn't something you have to go looking for. It's always present, always available. What changes is your ability to access it, interpret it, and handle it without being overwhelmed.
Allain's journey is a useful counterpoint to the idea that psychic awakening is all bliss and light. It can be disorienting, frightening, and socially isolating. The 10-year purification process he describes is essentially the work of integrating a new operating system while still running the old one.
The U.S. Military Psychic Spy Program
If you think psychic ability is just New Age fluff, consider this: the United States military spent decades and millions of dollars developing and deploying psychics as intelligence assets.
Lyn Buchanan, in The Seventh Sense, provides a firsthand account of his service as a "psychic spy" in the U.S. military's remote viewing program. Remote viewing — the ability to perceive distant locations, objects, or events using only the mind — was researched, developed, and operationally deployed by the U.S. government through programs with various code names, most famously Project Stargate.
Buchanan describes how psychic intelligence was used in actual military operations — locating hostages, identifying hidden facilities, gathering intelligence on foreign weapons programs. The government wouldn't have funded this for decades if it didn't produce results. And the fact that they eventually declassified the program (rather than destroying the records) suggests they weren't embarrassed by the outcomes.
Russell Targ, a physicist who was one of the founders of the Stanford Research Institute's remote viewing program, wrote Limitless Mind to describe the science behind remote viewing and its implications for our understanding of consciousness. His core argument: the mind is not confined to the skull. Consciousness can access information across any distance, without any known physical mechanism. This isn't belief — it's experimental data, gathered under controlled laboratory conditions and replicated hundreds of times.
The implications for our understanding of psychics are significant. If remote viewing works (and the evidence says it does), then the human mind has non-local perceptual capabilities that current physics can't explain. Psychic perception isn't supernatural — it's a natural ability that most people haven't developed, operating through mechanisms we don't yet understand.
Everyone Is Psychic
Jacobson's claim that "everyone has the ability to be a psychic" is supported by the military research (ordinary soldiers were trained to remote view), by the channeled teachings (Abraham-Hicks describes intuition as a universal navigational tool), and by the sheer number of people who develop psychic abilities later in life, often after trauma.
The 7 steps to developing clairvoyance, according to Jacobson:
- Release your fear (of being crazy, of what you might see, of social ridicule)
- Formulate specific questions (don't ask "show me something" — ask something precise)
- Concentrate on the third eye chakra (the space between your eyebrows)
- Take note of any images that arise, no matter how faint or random they seem
- Increase the image (focus on it, let it develop, don't dismiss it)
- Interpretation and clarification (what does it mean?)
- Trust in your sight (this is the hardest step — believing what you see)
The biggest barrier to psychic development isn't ability. It's the belief that you can't do it. Remove that belief, and you've already cleared the biggest obstacle.