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Psychic Consciousness        by R. J. MacDonald        November 16, 2006
Psychic consciousness, at least to some degree is a personality characteristic that is probably within all human beings. What identifies an individual as being "psychic" is really the degree of natural ability and the perhaps, to an extent, the spiritual development of that characteristic rather than the exclusive possession of the characteristic itself. It is perhaps somewhat analogous to the activity of tennis in that we can, virtually, all play tennis but it is the quality of the performance that really makes up the difference and allows some to make the claim that he or she is a "psychic" when asked, for example, what they do for a living or when an individual is recognized for having an ability that is significantly strong along those lines. There are many different forms of psychic phenomena and I will herein address what validly constitutes the term "psychic" and what does not. The following and most probably unexhausted array of terms and frames of reference may generally make-up the bulk of ESP or extrasensory perception:

psychic, clairvoyance, clairaudience, mediumship, telepathy, precognition, intuition, prophesy, prophet, dream consciousness, dream interpretation, astral consciousness, astral projection, the tarot, palmistry, numerology, clairsentience, psychokinesis, telekinesis, channeling, the 4th dimension, transcendental, transcendence, transpersonal, clairvoyant, medium, telepathic, clairsentience, intuitive, numerologist, psychic readings and tarot readings.

The term "ESP" is perhaps the most general and all-encompassing term for those experiences which are essentially independent of our common sensory system. The common sensory system of course includes the senses of touch, taste, hearing, smelling and seeing but the extrasensory "system" includes the experience and the acquisition of information that does not occur through those basic channels and yet has parallels that are quite similar. For example, supposing you have a dream in which you are in someone’s kitchen in which there has just been the baking of an apple pie and you can, in the dream, smell the aroma of the freshly baked pie that has just come out of the oven. Could that dream experience be said to be truly "experiential?" In the psychological sense it definitely is because it unquestionably has an experiential component but we do not refer to dreams as being formally real, in other words they are not "real" in the conventional sense of our common meaning of the word "real." Another example involves a principal that is operative in our lives every day in both waking life as well as in sleep and that is the use of our imagination. Even though our memories are often the basis of our imagination and those memories do store real past experience we nonetheless use those memories to generate images which then in certain combinations can give rise to a whole new array of imaginative possibilities and scenarios in the relative future. For example, supposing "Anne" has had the experience of eating cherries but has never eaten cherry pie. She will have the memory and thus the experience of cherries in taste, sight, smell, touch and texture. So although her memory lends itself to the basis of her imagination (of the pie,) it is in fact her imagination that causes her to move in the activity of making a pie and then, later, to experience the pie. Her imagination, in it’s vague image of what she will produce and ultimately consume represents reality, with some degree of approximation to the real thing, that is a real cherry pie, that she will experience after first imagining it. The imagination is quite powerful and does have it’s own efficacy - anyone who has eaten, for example, a turnip can then imagine something of an approximation to a turnip pie and that very product of our imagination alone may then serve as the basis for making a decision and rejecting that particular project (of making a turnip pie) on the basis of what we imagined. Like it or not we live in a parallel universe of the external and the internal, of the "inner" and the "outer." It is the inner that lies at the very heart of the psychic world - even if the psychic phenomena demonstrated involves future earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis and the like - those very external phenomenon that have the most dense, physical reality. Experience begins and ends with the psyche, the mind. So the term "ESP" is a kind of an odd term, a funny term in that it is ironical insofar as it includes the word "sensory" because, in fact, it is really not, in the conventional sense, sensory at all, rather ESP is metaphysical and is rooted in the mind whereas the "senses" are rooted in the physical. All the same it is an acceptable term in that the adjective "extra" modifies the word sensory and allows it to be a kind of parallel world where all the movement and experience takes place within the mind and not on the outside in the form of physical events. It’s actually very similar in intent and meaning to the word "metaphysical" because that word also attempts to describe that which is not physical as such, yet which as mental correlates to the physical word, including "abstraction." You can recognize that 3 + 2 = 5 but you don’t really find the pure, universal form of that mathematics principal in the real world, only "infinite" particular variations of it, such as 5 rocks, 5 snowflakes, 3 peaches + 2 peaches = 5 peaches, etc.. Incidentally, atheists, agnostics, and non-spiritual people in general have had difficulties with "metaphysics" because they like to think in physical, scientific, "real world" terms and yet cannot possibly avoid that part of life that is metaphysical. Philosophy sometimes attempt to explain it away and often science is used to support the anti-psychic or anti-metaphysical arguments but the irony is that often it is not the scientists nor real science that takes the opposing view but individuals who are not that familiar with science and who seem to have some type of need to refute the existence of the spiritual world. And wherever personal needs come into play one ought to be immediately warned of pending or actual subjectivity and personal projection. Ironically the last to see their "need" agenda are those who harbor it but Sigmund Freud explained that about a century ago in his explanations of the psychopathology of everyday life. (.....to be continued next week......)