Types of Psychism

It is known that certain states of mind make one more receptive to incoming psychic energy, and certain other states make one more expressive of outgoing psychic energy. The former is a relaxed, sleepy, or meditative state, while the latter is a highly focused state of directed concentration.¹

People tend to either be receptive and affected easily by psychic energy, or are expressive and able to easily effect other people and/or things by psychic energy, or both, as can be observed in the difference of abilities in different psychic practitioners. Receivers of psychic energy (such as telepaths and clairvoyants) tend to be more common, while those who can express psychic energy in the physical (such as psychokinesis, levitation, or materialization) are not nearly as common.

We all direct, and are all directed to some degree, through psychic energies. We are not normally conscious of these energies affecting us or of us having an effect on the external world through them, but with the awareness and understanding of these energies, we can learn to detect them, and by this means develop them in ourselves and become more in control of them.

Highly emotional and sensitive people tend to be natural receivers. Also helpful for expressing or receiving these energies is the ability to temporarily suspend one’s beliefs, or to not hold strong beliefs in what is commonly accepted as the more fundamental underpinnings of our reality.

Further, those with strong psychic abilities are often highly educated people, although not always within the established educational system, but rather through self-education driven by their own personal desire to understand the world. Perhaps a wider and more self-directed education allows these people to remain uninhibited about psychism, which an established education will tend to discourage.

Artistic talent is also predominant in those who show psychic abilities. There is a definite difference in the modes of thought between logically inclined people and those who are more artistically inclined. This has often been talked about in terms of left- and right-brained thinking, which indicates that some people can access their deeper subconscious faculties of the right-brain better than others, and that logical, left-brained thinking interferes with psychic abilities. Essentially, artistic, right-brained thinking tends to open us up to our psychic channels.

Although we all have psychic abilities to one degree or another, most of us are unaware of it, and therefore unable to control them consciously. It has been found, through laboratory experiments, that many people fall into a group that are referred to as ‘psi negative’, which means that they tend to cause the opposite effect of what they attempt to do through psychic influence. For instance, in predicting the toss of a coin, they will show a tendency over many trials to get more wrong predictions than the expected average, rather than more right predictions. This suggests that these people have psychic ability, but confound themselves, perhaps through self-doubt or second-guessing. However, either way, they show that there is a natural psychic ability in us, and we are able to open up our psychic channels further through better understanding and development.

Whether predicting a coin toss is indicative of precognition (perceiving what state the coin will be in at a future time), or of psychokinesis (causing the coin to end up in a certain position) is unknown, but in either case, it is a form of psychism.

In order to train our psychic abilities, it would be advantageous to start by practicing with many such coin-tossing tests, and to keep a record of all tests in order to later compare total successes against total failures. The coin-toss test is a good one to use, because the odds are exactly 50/50, so achieving anything consistently above or below normal (either way, an indication of psychic ability) will be easy to spot. The more tests that are recorded, the higher the accuracy rate will be, so it is important to accumulate as many test results as possible. The more potentially pertinent information that is recorded at the time of each test, such as the date and time, mental and physical states, even the current weather conditions, will later give you a chance to look for correlations and patterns between them and your abilities. Anything that you might think of that might be affecting your abilities would be worth noting. However, since the analysis of ourselves and our environment is counter-conducive to psychic reception (because it causes us to use our logical functions rather than to suspend them), it is better to not focus on collecting any of this information except before or after the actual testing is undertaken.

As coin-toss test results accumulate into the thousands, the balance between right predictions and wrong predictions will even out more and more, but there will always be an overall leaning towards one or the other. This might signify whether a person is psi negative or psi positive, but unless he or she is achieving overall results that are 5-10% above or below the median 50%, it may just be chance. Even those people with very strong psychic abilities will usually achieve no better than 75%, so it should not be expected that a beginning practitioner with no previous training will necessarily achieve such extreme results, although it is not uncommon.

Beyond just looking for a sign of any developed psychic ability at all, these and other tests can be used in learning to strengthen and gain better control of these abilities. This is where more detailed information regarding each test becomes useful, allowing us to refine our understanding of what influences our abilities, how it feels when we are doing it successfully, and what processes we go through in tapping into our psychic channel.

It appears, from the greater predominance of telepathic abilities over telekinetic abilities among the greater population, that mind-to-mind influence is easier to accomplish that mind-to-matter influence. This suggests that reading a person’s mind or giving a person a mental suggestion is far easier than causing an object to physically move. The latter is thought to entail many years of specialized training and development, although there are many cases of psychics, such as Uri Geller, who learned of their abilities early in life and have always been able to influence matter with little effort. Others, such as the Russian psychic Nelya Mikhailova, on the other hand, lost three pounds in weight in half an hour of psychically affecting matter, and had to put much effort into causing objects to move.

What about that third type of psychism, which covers clairvoyance, premonitions, etc? This third type relates not to influencing anything, whether mind or matter, but instead relates to the access of information from the past, present, or future. This type of psychism seems to be the most commonly recognized, with telepathy second and telekinesis third. This type of psychism is purely information based and therefore subjective in nature, whereas telekinesis is purely physical and therefore objective, while telepathy may lie somewhere in between, being perhaps a little of both. Seen in this way, we might be able to measure the development of our abilities on such a scale. If not, we can at least test ourselves for each type of psychic ability, and focus ourselves on developing the one that we seem to have the most promise with.

1 The focused concentration of the expressive state of mind requires the cyclic repetition of a single concept as we hold it in our thoughts to the exclusion of all others. This sets up a resonant field that is sustained for as long as we repeat the cyclic energy of our single thought.