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Does Anyone Here Have Psychic Abilities?

Ya, I take offense! So are you going to do something to make amends, or is that a hallow sentiment expressed in your original "just thinking out loud" post?

I assume this is humour?

...what you are asking about is Cartomancy, and fortune telling, not psychic abilities. divination is not necessarily psychic in nature. you could also have your fortune told by a geomancer or a necromancer, you got google, goog will fetch you the definition. Tarot, tea leaves, patterns of flocks of birds, sunrise and sunset have all been used to tell the future. So the fortune teller is expressing their interpretation of the divining medium. Tarot cards, for example, are placed on the table in different spreads (configurations) the different locations of the cards assign that card role. examples would be past, present, future. so if you get the Fool in your past position, Diablo in the present position, and the Towers in the future position. Those are the cards you just pulled. The fortune teller interprets your cards for you. not one ounce of psychic ability was used.

There are many different nomenclatures in currency. You have described one, there are others.

As you concede in your phrase 'not necessarily', for some the difference between ESP and the heightened senses of clairvoyance etc. is one of degree, not type.

I am no expert in divination, but many of those who are do not limit their 'interpretation' exclusively to the 'diving medium' (of whatever kind); it is often that their heightened senses grant the knowledge, but it is channeled through the conventions and symbolism of the media they employ. It's similar to the way that a single thought could be expressed in multiple languages, each with its own accent and idiom, depths and shallows.

We're not really in the realm of scripture carved into stone tablets here.
 
Ya, I take offense! So are you going to do something to make amends, or is that a hallow sentiment expressed in your original "just thinking out loud" post? ...

You seem to have neglected to either (a) include a smiley connoting the challenge is genial or (b) paused to consider whether everyone else categorizes everything the same way you do.


I am not sure who to direct this answer toward since the discussion devolved into references to UK public restrooms and "for a good time call". rather quickly ...

Tangential japing has been eradicated, as the rest of you may expect to occur with increasing regularity in Specialist Topics.


what you are asking about is Cartomancy, and fortune telling, not psychic abilities. divination is not necessarily psychic in nature. you could also have your fortune told by a geomancer or a necromancer, you got google, goog will fetch you the definition. Tarot, tea leaves, patterns of flocks of birds, sunrise and sunset have all been used to tell the future. So the fortune teller is expressing their interpretation of the divining medium. Tarot cards, for example, are placed on the table in different spreads (configurations) the different locations of the cards assign that card role. examples would be past, present, future. so if you get the Fool in your past position, Diablo in the present position, and the Towers in the future position. Those are the cards you just pulled. The fortune teller interprets your cards for you. not one ounce of psychic ability was used. ...

The OP first inquired about "psychic abilities" (unspecified; context-free) and later incidentally mentioned having employed cartomancy. It was never clear the OP was seeking divination per se, and (s)he never sought to re-direct or re-contextualize the suggestion of "psychic" experimentation with respect to divination (i.e., future-oriented clairvoyance).

Having said that ...

I totally agree with you that there are different perspectives on what the term "psychic" encompasses, and I further agree that:

- "psychic" phenomena or capacities need not address or involve anything to do with the future; and ...
- divination / fortune-telling need not be or involve anything "psychic" in nature.

The main problem lies in terminology, and practitioners on both sides of whatever vague boundary (e.g., between "psychic" and "divinatory") one ascribes have been lax in rendering that boundary clear and consistent. The currently common future-oriented (hence divinatory) connotation given "clairvoyance" is in fact a narrowly focused spin on that term's original definition. Fortune tellers label themselves "psychic" even though their practices are performed solely via (e.g.) cartomancy - a misleading self-description I've personally encountered twice within the past year. In its current form "psychic" dates back only as far as the last half of the 19th century, prior to which it had been a common term applied in emerging scientific psychological studies (e.g., psychophysics) for decades and more loosely invoked to gloss descriptions of divinatory contexts and mechanisms for centuries.

It's a mess ...

this should be moved under Fraudulent Mediums/Psychics

Suggestion duly noted.
As Descartes unwisely uttered immediately prior to vanishing before his startled companions: "I think not."

On the other hand ...

I've previously expressed concern that divination is a topic of widespread discussion that doesn't clearly fit within the presumptive scope of our Parapsychology section.

I'm open to suggestions for how we might disentangle and better present these somewhat overlapping but essentially distinct topics.
 
An aunt of mine was known for spookiness. One of her tricks was supposed to be putting ideas into people's heads.

I was sceptical until one morning, driving home after a night shift, I had the urge to take an unusual route.

There at the bus stop was Auntie Val, on her way to the other end of town. I gladly took her all the way, much further than the bus would have.

I said 'How lucky I was passing!' and she said 'Luck had nothing to do with it! I just needed a lift and I knew someone would come!'

Val didn't know anything about my job. She was just spooky.
Years ago I read a story about a very poor Russian kid born late 1800s I think. He was hiding on a train as he couldn't afford a ticket, but the inspector saw him and asked him for it. The boy only had a scrap of paper on him, passed it to the guard and willed with all his strength that it was a ticket. The guard looked at it briefly, shook his head, then clipped it and passed it back to the boy and asked why he was hiding if he had a ticket?
Apparently the lad became famous for this and did stage shows etc, and then the KGB heard about him and asked him to come for an interview. Just before leaving the highly secure building, the KGB Officer said that he wouldn't be allowed out without the correct documents and gave the boy just a blank piece of paper. Five minutes later the Officer was looking out of his window and the boy was on the street looking back up at him, waving the paper at him.
 
Years ago I read a story about a very poor Russian kid born late 1800s I think. He was hiding on a train as he couldn't afford a ticket, but the inspector saw him and asked him for it. The boy only had a scrap of paper on him, passed it to the guard and willed with all his strength that it was a ticket. The guard looked at it briefly, shook his head, then clipped it and passed it back to the boy and asked why he was hiding if he had a ticket?
Apparently the lad became famous for this and did stage shows etc, and then the KGB heard about him and asked him to come for an interview. Just before leaving the highly secure building, the KGB Officer said that he wouldn't be allowed out without the correct documents and gave the boy just a blank piece of paper. Five minutes later the Officer was looking out of his window and the boy was on the street looking back up at him, waving the paper at him.
Fantastic!
Reminds me of one of Derren Brown's tricks, where he makes people believe something untrue.

As an example he made a greyhound race track cashier pay out on a losing dog as if it had won, by waving the ticket and declaring 'This is the dog you want!'

She looked a bit stunned as if she knew she'd been had and would be in trouble later!
 
Fantastic!
Reminds me of one of Derren Brown's tricks, where he makes people believe something untrue.

As an example he made a greyhound race track cashier pay out on a losing dog as if it had won, by waving the ticket and declaring 'This is the dog you want!'

She looked a bit stunned as if she knew she'd been had and would be in trouble later!
I saw him do one where he went to a martial arts place and 'punched' a guy without actually touching him and the guy went down like a sack of potatoes. He even did it from the back so the guy couldn't see him- the same thing happened.
 
I saw him do one where he went to a martial arts place and 'punched' a guy without actually touching him and the guy went down like a sack of potatoes. He even did it from the back so the guy couldn't see him- the same thing happened.

Derren Brown killed Bruce Lee! It's beginning to make a crazy kind of sense...
 
Years ago I read a story about a very poor Russian kid born late 1800s I think. He was hiding on a train as he couldn't afford a ticket, but the inspector saw him and asked him for it. The boy only had a scrap of paper on him, passed it to the guard and willed with all his strength that it was a ticket. The guard looked at it briefly, shook his head, then clipped it and passed it back to the boy and asked why he was hiding if he had a ticket?
Apparently the lad became famous for this and did stage shows etc, and then the KGB heard about him and asked him to come for an interview. Just before leaving the highly secure building, the KGB Officer said that he wouldn't be allowed out without the correct documents and gave the boy just a blank piece of paper. Five minutes later the Officer was looking out of his window and the boy was on the street looking back up at him, waving the paper at him.

I don't know whether this is the original version of the tale, but ...

That story is associated with Polish / Soviet psychic Wolf Messing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Messing

It's recounted in this book (accessible at Google Books):

The Twenty-First Century: New Reading of New Testament
Nataliya V. Poullo, 2011
 
I once experimented with friends to try to see if any of us exhibited any psychic abilities.

We tried detecting various psychic phenomena but this example was for Telepathy.

Over the course of several sessions it became apparent that some people can 'Send' things to others and some can 'Receive' but none of us could do both.

I turned out to be a Receiver.

If by `psychic abilities` we are to include some sort of general E.S.P then I would say that I have. Like Earthworm I have, at various times in my life, experimented with people to see if we can send telepathic images to each other. Many of these experiments seem to have been a success. It seems that I am a Receiver too - with the proviso that the thing sent must be a visual image associated with a certain emotional response (eg a sequence from a film). This way, I have received some quite detailed images `sent` without any kind of verbal back-up or any other kind of clues.

There have been two occasions where someone who has been more or less a sceptic about this has then been stumped by my ability to do this.
There have also been a few random occasions in my life where this `ability` ssems to have been turned on - although never really to my advantage. (In fact there seems to be no practical use for it at all, so far as I can see).

I make no great claims for this. My guess is that E.S.P in some form is a latent animalistic ability (maybe left over from a time when it might have helped us to survive) that is present in everybody. I am a fairy introverted and left-brained sort of a fellow and I a imagine that a more people-orientated and right-brained type would be much more obvuiosly `receptve` than me.

I also suspect that the reason that scientific trials of E.S.P have not been as succesful as many of us would expect is that they are being approached in a too prescriptive way. Take Zenner cards, for example. They are pictures of shapes that contain n o significant emotional impact - why then would the animal paer of our brain respond to them? I can imagine a scenario where, for example, a sender is trying to concentrate on, say, a picture of a circle - and send this to a receiver. Now the Receiver may be `picking up` all amnner of stuff swirling about in the senders mind - but not the circle, which is more or less irrelevant. Thus the experiment would be judged to have a negative outcome in terms of testing for E.S.P.
 
... My guess is that E.S.P in some form is a latent animalistic ability (maybe left over from a time when it might have helped us to survive) that is present in everybody. ...

I also suspect that the reason that scientific trials of E.S.P have not been as succesful as many of us would expect is that they are being approached in a too prescriptive way. ...

I tend to agree with both these points.

I've often been accused of psychic capabilities, but I've always remained skeptical about framing my most indisputably extraordinary experiences in terms of popular categories (e.g., ESP; remote viewing).

One reason for this is that the canonical categories of psychic phenomena have come to be encrusted with presumed factors or implications (not to mention outright woo-woo BS) that don't fit my experience, and I refuse to passively validate the extra baggage just to correlate my experience with that of others.

Another reason is that some of my experiences others have attributed to psychic abilities have been more readily explained by simply paying close attention and projecting obvious possibilities or trajectories of events based on good situation awareness. If something was clearly the most highly probable outcome or state of affairs at a distance I can't bring myself to claim I'd foreseen or detected it by extraordinary, much less extra-sensory, means.

The remaining set of multiple incidents to which I cannot apply or accord any such skepticism or alternative explanations are similar in the sense they involve a quite deeply embedded (gut-level; intuitive; emotional) character that can't be attributed to perceptive thinking at all. The most notable of these are the "detecting a ripple in the Force" incidents in which I've been stopped in my tracks or jerked out of sleep by trauma or death at a distance of up to hundreds of miles and at the very moment (to the minute) something awful occurred or someone close to me died.

As such ... I, too, suspect that any such abilities are deeply embedded in some manner lower or more fundamental than the level of conscious / rational cognition at which we operate with self-awareness. In turn, I also agree that many of the attempts to detect ESP phenomena have relied too much on higher-level cognitive processes (e.g., recognizing and mentally visualizing arbitrary images) that aren't even involved in the phenomenon being sought.
 
I have some baby level skill at water witching obtained at the feet of my expert grandfather when I was a small child. That’s about it. Despite a lifelong interest in the paranormal, it avoids me completely. No ESP experiences, never seen a ghost, no UFOs, no cryptids(other than one unexplained pants-crapping sound a long time ago).
 
This description fits the first Fortean experience I remember having. Might you be persuaded to expand on yours?

Mine was more cryptological in nature. Here’s my Ist post on this board about it, where I basically just copied a post I made on a Bigfoot forum about the experience. Not that I really think it was a Bigfoot. I have no idea what it was. It was a strange sound, low and guttural, rhythmic. Like a repeated motorcycle kick start that doesn’t turn over. Weirdest thing was ours and the dogs, reaction.
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...ing-of-my-most-memorable-fortean-exper.49519/
 
Mine are very spontaneous and I have very little control over them. Also things nearly only happen when family are involved.

I think a good analogy is an ignored, neglected muscle, a lot of people ignore their physical health and even more people ignore (or have no knowledge of their psychic ability) their subtle/inner health. Think of your psychic faculties as a weak muscle, the more you force yourself to train it, the stronger it will become. Then the question is ''how do I train psychic ability?'' I think it really is as simple as trying it out, have fun experimenting with clairvoyance, the more you try the stronger your psychic muscles will become.
 
To me, it's a bit like a radio signal - sometimes it's easier to tune in than others. Then again are those moments of gut-level knowledge that @EnolaGaia mentioned - they seem to come out of nowhere.

Being a tarot reader, I agree that a person doesn't have to be psychic to do so. I do need to pick up a person's "signal" to get a very accurate reading, though. If I can get the signal, I don't specifically need cards, anything else can be used as a tool. I do need a tool through, it brings focus to the information.

My technique is to keep my most parts of my attention engaged with other things while keeping one small area of attention open for the reading. Put too much attention on it and the reading is sure to be convoluted.

I've heard a theory that psychic awareness is higher when geomagnetic activity is lower.
 
I don't have a psychic gift but more a psychiatric gift!Being mental health nurse for a number of years I have have had to assess hundreds of people. People wilh all types of issues and illnesses from all walks of life . I think in a way it has increased my ability to read people and what they might do for a living etc. My assessment starts as soon as you see the person. Gut instinct plays a large part also. I think nurses/medical professionals may just have enhanced observational skills, which probably Police Officers have also. My female colleague is exceptionally observant. One time we met socially in a bar and were people watching, guessing what people done for a living, what type of person they were etc. We were observing{sounds dodgy}a young woman, who I guessed to be a nurse{we were not near a hospital or anything} and my colleague said "I reckon she is a student nurse". I found this funny at her being so precise, that we had to ask. My female colleague asked her as she was passing did she know her from some where and was she a nurse, the girl answered "not quite I'm a student nurse" My colleague and I had never met her before despite being nurses ourselves. I found this amusing and my colleague couldn't explain it. I think we all have that instinct that we can sharpen and enhance, that has always been there.Soldiers also experience a 6th sense in combat situations, where they know something is going to happen. It may be down to the speed our brain works at, picking up loads of information and seeing something out of place, not processing it quickly enough, but enough to know there is something wrong.
 
I don't have a psychic gift but more a psychiatric gift!Being mental health nurse for a number of years I have have had to assess hundreds of people. People wilh all types of issues and illnesses from all walks of life . I think in a way it has increased my ability to read people and what they might do for a living etc. My assessment starts as soon as you see the person. Gut instinct plays a large part also. I think nurses/medical professionals may just have enhanced observational skills, which probably Police Officers have also. ...

Great post! I strongly agree with this. I spent 8 years as a public contact representative for a social welfare agency, interviewing and interacting with clients all day. I noticed the same sort of effect - a progressively richer and / or more reliable intuitive feel for individuals as early as first viewing from a distance. This particular knack for reading people is something that can be nurtured and developed from some measure of innate sensitivity / perception we all seem to have but few recognize and refine.

This is not to say this reading-people knack is all there is to the range of subliminal / subconscious / tacit processing and inferences we do.

One example of a separate but influential additional / auxiliary capability is simply observation skills. Observation skills are a set rather than a single thing, and some folks are better or worse at one or another aspect of this set than their equivalent peers. Some folks are better at noticing individual details, others are better at connecting the dots those details represent, and some are remarkably proficient at arriving at an overall evaluation or conclusion without consciously noticing or correlating details.

These three distinct capabilities, in the order I listed them, are a summary sketch for a discriminable progression that generally aligns with a person's experiential progression from novice to expert with respect to a given subject matter area.
 
I don't have a psychic gift but more a psychiatric gift!Being mental health nurse for a number of years I have have had to assess hundreds of people. People wilh all types of issues and illnesses from all walks of life . I think in a way it has increased my ability to read people and what they might do for a living etc. My assessment starts as soon as you see the person. Gut instinct plays a large part also. I think nurses/medical professionals may just have enhanced observational skills, which probably Police Officers have also. My female colleague is exceptionally observant. One time we met socially in a bar and were people watching, guessing what people done for a living, what type of person they were etc. We were observing{sounds dodgy}a young woman, who I guessed to be a nurse{we were not near a hospital or anything} and my colleague said "I reckon she is a student nurse". I found this funny at her being so precise, that we had to ask. My female colleague asked her as she was passing did she know her from some where and was she a nurse, the girl answered "not quite I'm a student nurse" My colleague and I had never met her before despite being nurses ourselves. I found this amusing and my colleague couldn't explain it. I think we all have that instinct that we can sharpen and enhance, that has always been there.Soldiers also experience a 6th sense in combat situations, where they know something is going to happen. It may be down to the speed our brain works at, picking up loads of information and seeing something out of place, not processing it quickly enough, but enough to know there is something wrong.

When I worked in kids' homes I could spot what sort of background newcomers came from, in terms of how they'd been treated by adults. It gave them a certain attitude towards women and men. Unmistakeable and very sad.
 
When I worked in kids' homes I could spot what sort of background newcomers came from, in terms of how they'd been treated by adults. It gave them a certain attitude towards women and men. Unmistakeable and very sad.
Very sad indeed. I've known a couple of people in the past who suffered from adults , were put in childrens homes and suffered there even more. Utterly dreadful, unforgettable experiences which coloured the rest of their lives. How they managed to carry on , I've no idea.
 
I think that everyone has "psychic" experiences, but the word on its own tends to imply abilities or powers...thats to say the displays are exceptional, can be conjured up at will, and are under some kind of control. Whether anyone falls into that latter category is something i'm constantly in two minds about. On the one hand ive never found any such individual except in the pages of books, and believe stage mediums to be offering something impossible.... they may indeed have experiences but conjuring them up reliably for a random paying audience doesn't strike me as terribly likely yet they're obliged to do so, so some form or self delusion and/or faking it till you make it has to be employed.

On the other hand ive got to accept that any skill or ability will vary in intensity and aptitude from one person to another. We can all run, some can run fast, but only a few are olympians...and all the training and dedication in the world will not change the fact that someone has to be better than others. So its reasonable to assume that if psychic experiences exist -as they appear to do - then some people may be far more adept at displaying them. If this is so the problem remains , i think, that the temptation to expect these "powers" to be more useful and reliable than they really are is hard to resist. In movies and comic books psychic powers are definite and clear...telepathy is saying words in your head and someone else hearing those words in theirs. Precognition is a movie screen in the mind showing a literal event. And talking to the dead is exactly that...vocal-audible conversation in English. In real life all of these things are generally experienced as impressions, notions, ideas, flashes. Which is nowhere near as sexy and hardly ever likely to be useful.
 
Very sad indeed. I've known a couple of people in the past who suffered from adults , were put in childrens homes and suffered there even more. Utterly dreadful, unforgettable experiences which coloured the rest of their lives. How they managed to carry on , I've no idea.

Abuse makes children feel worthless and as you've noticed, they grow up feeling that way. Most, if they have children of their own, are fiercely protective and make wonderful parents.
 
I think that everyone has "psychic" experiences, but the word on its own tends to imply abilities or powers...thats to say the displays are exceptional, can be conjured up at will, and are under some kind of control. Whether anyone falls into that latter category is something i'm constantly in two minds about. On the one hand ive never found any such individual except in the pages of books, and believe stage mediums to be offering something impossible.... they may indeed have experiences but conjuring them up reliably for a random paying audience doesn't strike me as terribly likely yet they're obliged to do so, so some form or self delusion and/or faking it till you make it has to be employed.

On the other hand ive got to accept that any skill or ability will vary in intensity and aptitude from one person to another. We can all run, some can run fast, but only a few are olympians...and all the training and dedication in the world will not change the fact that someone has to be better than others. So its reasonable to assume that if psychic experiences exist -as they appear to do - then some people may be far more adept at displaying them. If this is so the problem remains , i think, that the temptation to expect these "powers" to be more useful and reliable than they really are is hard to resist. In movies and comic books psychic powers are definite and clear...telepathy is saying words in your head and someone else hearing those words in theirs. Precognition is a movie screen in the mind showing a literal event. And talking to the dead is exactly that...vocal-audible conversation in English. In real life all of these things are generally experienced as impressions, notions, ideas, flashes. Which is nowhere near as sexy and hardly ever likely to be useful.
I've yet to be convinced that psychics talk to the dead- my view (simplistic as it may be) is that if they did, surely the mystery of life the universe and everything would have been revealed by now. As you know gattino I'm a firm believer in psychic ability but quite what goes on, I don't know.
 
if they did, surely the mystery of life the universe and everything would have been revealed by now
Why would it? I mean there's an assumption there that leaving your body, entering some afterlife realm of existence, would give you godlike omniscience. It's not obvious why it would. You could certainly expect to know more than you currently do - specifically that there is an afterlife, and how your new surroundings appear to function, and seemingly some kind of clairvoyant awareness of events back on earth with family members, if you take mediumistic communications at face value - but beyond that there is no reason i can see to assume you would know anything about "life, the universe and everything". You may even remain as unsure as you ever where if there's a god or not.
 
Why would it? I mean there's an assumption there that leaving your body, entering some afterlife realm of existence, would give you godlike omniscience. It's not obvious why it would. You could certainly expect to know more than you currently do - specifically that there is an afterlife, and how your new surroundings appear to function, and seemingly some kind of clairvoyant awareness of events back on earth with family members, if you take mediumistic communications at face value - but beyond that there is no reason i can see to assume you would know anything about "life, the universe and everything". You may even remain as unsure as you ever where if there's a god or not.
Don't know about godlike omniscience, but surely even the most dim dead person should be able to confirm whether there is an afterlife, whether they met their creator and how they fill their time.
 
But..they do. I mean if you accept the idea of communication through mediums etc then those questions have, purportedly, been asked and answered a million times. Well certainly the fact they're communicating in and of itself is hte answer to the first question! If they're really doing so tehn there is indeed an afterlife. As for its nature...certainly the communications of the kind im always referring to with the victorian and edwardian researchers repeatedly dealt with those questions and there are any number of books describing what the purported dead have said about the afterlife experience. Its vague in parts (particularly how exactly they are communicating from their perspective) but more or less consistent. Whether its true is a different matter, but they - if there is a they - certainly do offer up answers to those questions.

Perhaps your thinking of the more pointless seeming utterances of the modern stage medium, telling us nothing but that your nan is proud of you and tell George thanks for the flowers at the funeral.
 
When I worked in kids' homes I could spot what sort of background newcomers came from, in terms of how they'd been treated by adults. It gave them a certain attitude towards women and men. Unmistakeable and very sad.

This reminded me of something Orson Welles once said in an interview. He was talking about when he set himself up as a fake medium, and found he started to guess things correctly. He then talked about a hotel clerk who said if you've been doing the job for a short while you can get to the point where you can tell when someone walks through the door if you are going to give them a room or not. Then, if you have been doing the job for a long time you only need to take a single glance at the person. But then if you have done the job for a very, very long time you don't need to look at the person at all.

Welles put all this down to the powerful internal, 'computer' processes that the mind is capable of.
 
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