In addition to logical intelligence, emotional intelligence, and various other forms of intelligence, we have psychic intelligence. Psychic intelligence is a measure of how intuitively perceptive you are and how willing you are to trust and act on those perceptions.

Here are some key components of psychic intelligence.

Awareness

There are certain colors I cannot perceive because I’m colorblind. When I look at what other people refer to as the color purple, all I see is dark blue. I can’t even imagine purple — how do I imagine a color I’ve never seen before?

Unless you’re blind or colorblind, your color intelligence is like magic to me. You probably don’t even know how you do it. You just know. You can patiently explain to me the difference between purple and blue, but I just won’t get it. I can look at the same images you see but only detect a subset of the information you can detect. Sometimes I’m tempted to label people who claim to perceive clearly fictional colors like purple as crazy or deluded. You must be on drugs or something. There is no purple!

You can try to prove to me that purple exists, but I may only half-believe you. I won’t even look at your data because you’re so obviously wrong.

This (albeit exaggerated) story of my color perception is how many people regard psychic intelligence.

I have friends that vehemently deny the existence of psychic phenomena. They don’t believe we have a valid sixth sense because they have no personal experience with it. I generally don’t waste time trying to convince them otherwise because from their perspective, they’re right. That would be like trying to convince a deaf person that she could really hear. Such people often regard those who believe in psychic phenomena as crazy, deluded, or naive… just like I do with those purple-pushing fanatics. 😉

I also have friends who’ve had abundant psychic experiences throughout their entire lives. Such people just take their sixth sense for granted; to deny its existence would be like denying the existence of sound. How can you ignore sensory information that you can perceive so clearly, and why on earth would you want to, especially if the information is useful? How do you react when I claim that purple doesn’t really exist? What if I accuse you of making it up? You’ll probably just roll your eyes at me, although you can probably empathize with my situation and understand why I believe what I do. That’s generally how my psychically intelligent friends react to denials of something they simply take for granted. When we discuss such experiences, it’s like talking about any other routine subject. There’s no hint of doubt in our language, unless of course someone claims they clairvoyantly see something purple. 🙂

In the case of one very psychically intelligent woman I know, a psychic impression likely saved her life; she saw the car that was about to hit her in her mind’s eye and averted an accident that she could not physically see or hear coming. For her not to tap her psychic abilities on a daily basis would be like walking around with her eyes closed.

Then there are the late bloomers, myself included. I didn’t grow up experiencing any notable psychic phenomena, so I proudly counted myself among the nonbelievers. But in early 1994, I met a few people, including my wife, who somehow served as catalysts for me. Just being around them seemed to open up my third eye, and very shortly I started picking up intuitive information that either wasn’t there before, or I just never noticed it. Now I’ve seen and experienced way too much to possibly deny it.

Acceptance

Awareness is the first step; acceptance comes later. Even after I became aware of psychic impressions, I strongly resisted them. I often didn’t like the info that was coming through, so I didn’t want to believe it was real. Since I didn’t know how to live as a six-sensory person, I largely suppressed those impressions for the next decade. Eventually, however, these perceptions became loud enough and clear enough that I just couldn’t ignore them anymore.

I think it’s unlikely for anyone to accept the existence of psychic phenomena until they’ve first developed an awareness of their own intuitive perceptions. I give a lot of credit to those people who haven’t had any psychic experiences themselves but who are able to accept it as real.

Fortunately, we do have some tools to validate psychic impressions, but they just aren’t that advanced yet. When my wife was doing filming for an upcoming episode of the Criss Angel show (it should be aired as the 11th episode of season 2, but I don’t know the exact air date), she sensed the presence of a spirit sitting in a particular chair in an otherwise empty room. A team of experienced paranormal investigators was with her, and using their technology, they were able to detect an electro-magnetic disturbance in that same location. They loved working with my wife because her psychic impressions were able to tell them where to look, so they didn’t have to scan the entire hotel at random. It will be really fascinating to see what happens when technology catches up in this area.

Similarly, I’ve been able to use technology to validate the mysterious existence of purple. Even though I can’t perceive it with my physical senses, I can differentiate it from blue by using a computer and an image editor. I can take a digital photo of a scene, load it onto my computer, and have the computer tell me the RGB values. That’s how I can tell blue from purple. To me purple isn’t a color I see — it’s a numerical RGB value.

Imagine what it would be like to don a special pair of glasses and see non-physical beings floating around wherever you go, plus a special set of headphones that would allow you to hear them.

Aptitude

On a scale of 1 to 10, let’s assign colorblindness a 1 and normal vision a 10 (for the sake of this analogy, let’s not consider anything outside this range such as total blindness). Now imagine what the world would be like if all of us were in the range of 1 to 6. That’s what I see as the current state of our collective psychic aptitude. Most of us are 1s or 2s. Edgar Cayce might be a 6. I’d estimate I’m around a 3.2, and my wife is about a 3.7. Think of this as a logarithmic scale by the way, not a linear one.

Through education we develop our logical intelligence. Through exercise we develop our kinesthetic intelligence. Through socialization we develop our emotional intelligence. These are all common activities. But psychic intelligence remains a dormant, underdeveloped skill in most of us. Why? Largely because we don’t put the same amount of effort into developing it. How many people do you know that go through 12-16 years of psychic education? Most of us have to learn this on our own, and it’s hard to learn it from books.

We all have some degree of innate psychic ability, but some people are clearly born with stronger skills than others. Some people are physically uncoordinated. Other people are very poor at expressing their emotions. And some people are very weak in their ability to receive accurate psychic perceptions.

Your overall psychic aptitude is a combination of your inborn skills and your learned skills. We may not be able to change the former, but we can certainly change the latter.

Trust

You’ve probably learned to trust your basic five senses. If you smell gas, you’ll likely take action based on that perception, even if none of your other senses can validate it. But we generally don’t have that same level of trust in our intuitive perceptions. It’s like the story of the boy who cried wolf. If we act on those perceptions and find that they were inaccurate, we’ll soon stop listening altogether.

A significant aspect of psychic intelligence is having the courage to trust and follow its guidance. You may be tempted to discount your intuitive perceptions because they’re too often wrong. But this is how you build skill in any area — you have to go through that awkward period of making frequent mistakes in order to train yourself to become more accurate.

Imagine learning to type. In the beginning you’ll make a lot of errors. Do you observe all the errors and conclude that typing is just too error-prone to be useful? No, of course not. You work through the errors and get better. Then you can successfully apply the skill for life. The same goes for developing your sixth sense. When you first start tapping it, you may be wrong more often than you’re right. That’s perfectly OK. Your accuracy will improve with practice, and then you’ll be able to rely on it more heavily.

Integration

I find it especially difficult when my five physical senses tell me one thing, but my sixth sense offers a dissenting opinion. As my accuracy has improved, I’ve gradually learned to trust those single-channel impressions, just as I learned to trust a sound I hear whose source I can’t see or feel.

Once you become aware of your sixth sense, accept it as real, and develop some basic competence to the point where you’re able to trust it, the next step is integration. This is where you make the full shift from living as a five-sensory person to living as a six-sensory one. It’s a very gradual process to be sure.

Imagine what it would be like to be blind since birth. I happen to know someone like this. He relies heavily on help from friends who can see, but he can also do quite a bit on his own by using four-sensory strategies that compensate for his lack of sight. Now imagine how his life would change if he were to regain his sight. It would be a big adjustment for him, and there would be a lot of old habits that no longer served him. But he wouldn’t immediately rise to the level of full five-sensory living. It would take him some time to integrate this new sense. For example, he could learn to drive a car, which would completely change his freedom of movement. He might look at his clothes and decide to dress differently. He might want to move to a new neighborhood if he doesn’t find his current one visually appealing. He might decide to pursue a certain career. He might pursue a romantic relationship. Enormous, life altering changes would be possible for him. But more than that, his new sensory data would push him to expand.

Despite his initial happiness upon regaining his sight, it would take him a very long time to integrate this new data… probably many years. After living a four-sensory life for so long, the addition of this fifth sense would push him far outside his comfort zone. It would take a lot of courage and effort for him to fully embrace five-sensory living, even if it was something he always wanted. And in his case, he would have plenty of help from other five-sensory people.

I think this is similar to what we face when we attempt to shift from five-sensory life to six-sensory life. I must say it’s been a real struggle for me personally, especially when my sixth sense still has a long way to develop compared to my other senses. I’ve spent so much time outside my comfort zone that I don’t even remember where I left it. 🙂

Today I often make decisions based purely on psychic impressions that can’t yet be validated by my other five senses. It took me years to develop that level of trust though. I’m gradually getting used to this, and I’d never want to lose those valuable, albeit sometimes confusing, intuitive perceptions. However, I fully understand that when you’ve built your entire life around five senses, you might have mixed feelings about whether or not you really want that sixth sense to come through.

You’ll have to decide for yourself what role you want psychic intelligence to play in your life and how much you wish to develop it. This year I’ve decided to really push myself in this area, so I hope you enjoy the ride. Can you believe this is actually what I do for a living? 😉