Clairvoyance, clairaudience and clairsentience (clear seeing, clear hearing and clear feeling) are terms from psychic and mediumistic work for perceiving spirits or hidden information beyond the ordinary senses. Therapeutic Shamanism does not use them, because journeying is not a special psychic gift but a natural human ability, which uses every sense, often works by simply knowing what is there, and is about relationship and healing rather than receiving messages.
What are the “clair” senses? #
The words come from French: clair means clear. Clairvoyance is clear seeing, perceiving images, spirits or events not visible to the eyes. Clairaudience is clear hearing, hearing voices or sounds from beyond the ordinary world. Clairsentience is clear feeling, sensing presences, emotions or information as feelings in the body. A fourth, claircognisance or clear knowing, is sometimes added for information that comes without any sense of how it was known. Together they are sometimes called the psychic senses or spirit senses, and they are the everyday vocabulary of mediumship, psychic readings and much New Age spirituality, where they are usually treated as gifts that some people have and others can develop.
Do you need psychic abilities to journey? #
No. Being able to journey is our natural state. For the overwhelming majority of human history we lived as hunter-gatherers, aware of both everyday reality and shamanic reality side by side, and it is only very recently that we lost that awareness.1 The imagining that leads into journeying is something the majority of people can do. Where it seems not to work, the right brain is usually doing it fine, and the trouble is the left brain getting in the way, dismissing what comes as “just” made up.2 Journeying is a learnt skill resting on an ordinary human capacity, not a rare talent.
Do you have to see things in a journey? #
No. Many people expect journeying to be like watching a film, and some people’s journeys are quite visual, but not everybody’s. Many people who think they cannot journey are in fact journeying, but dismissing what is happening because it is not visual. “It is important to learn to pay attention to the non-visual.” When a journey seems to stall, turning the attention to the other senses, asking what can be smelt, heard, tasted, sensed or intuited, is usually enough to get it going again.3
The drum helps here. Shamanic drums are usually tuned to give many overtones and undertones, which tend to produce synaesthesia, a crossing-over of the senses, so that the drum’s sound starts to be perceived as colours, images, sensations, smells and even tastes.4 A journey is a rich, many-sensed experience, not a feat of inner sight. See What state of consciousness is used in journeying, and do journeys have to be visual?
Is “just knowing” a psychic sense? #
Not in the psychic sense of the word. Very often what is there in a journey is simply known, without being seen or heard. Recognising one’s Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer is like that: “You just know. You know it in your heart. It is a recognition, a rightness, like something clicking into place”.5 This kind of knowing is not mind-reading, seeing the future or a special psychic channel. It is an ordinary human way of perceiving. See also What is intuition, and can we trust it?
Is hearing spirit voices the same as shamanic work? #
No. Shamanic healing is different from mediumship, from “doing a reading” and from other kinds of healing that people practise, and the key difference is that it “is categorically not about getting messages, advice or guidance, or predictions about the future. It is simply about doing the healing.” It is quite rare for GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this to speak in words at all. “Words are middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer things.” They have little place or use in the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer and the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer, particularly not in the Lower-World, and they tend to pull us back into the left brain, whilst how real a journey is depends on how far we can let the right brain take over.6
So a stream of spoken guidance, however welcome, is not what journeying aims for, and it is more likely to be a sign of the middle-world than of the deeper realms. Mediumship, which does seek to talk with spirits, usually works with the dead, and the unquiet deadUnquiet dead. The middle-world self become ghost: the ego that, having no body left to anchor it, lingers among the living instead of moving on to the Land of the Dead. Unhealthy for the living, and moved on by psychopomping. More about this are in the middle-world. See Is mediumship healthy from a shamanic point of view? and Why are there no words or symbols in the Lower-World?
Why does Therapeutic Shamanism not use these terms? #
Because they frame the work in a way it does not fit. The “clair” senses are usually presented as special gifts, held by some people and not others, and used to bring back information: messages, readings, predictions. In Therapeutic Shamanism the ability to journey belongs to everyone, the senses involved are the whole range of ordinary human perception, and what is sought is not information but relationship with the Guides and the other-than-human Peoples, and the healing that comes from it. See What is shamanic healing? and How do humans communicate and build relationships with the other-than-human Peoples?
