The Six "clairs": Identifying and developing psychic senses
Remember learning about the five senses as a schoolkid? Psychic ability is often considered to be a sixth sense, and that's one way to think of it. But there is a more precise construction, which posits five psychic senses that correspond to the five physical senses. These are sometimes called "the five 'clairs,'" after the French word stem that they all share. Today, we're going to define all five, and discuss how they're used and different ways to develop them.
Clair = Clear
The term “clair” has a French origin, translating to “clear” in English. Which, when used psychically, is incredibly ironic, because psychic information tends to be subtle, and often-times is anything but clear.
The most common and well known of the psychic clairs is clairvoyant. Building on the translation of “clair”, clairvoyant is translated from clair (clear (adj.)) + voyant “seeing,” present participle of voir, from Latin videre “to see” to literally mean “clear seeing” or “clear sighted”.
Clairvoyant originally was ascribed to someone who had great insight, typically a particularly astute doctor, but instead of a positive connotation, the term typically was used to infer “quackery”. In the mid-1800s, the term became synonymous with a person who had psychic gifts or the ability to see beyond the physical.
Psychic Medium Communication Types
Once you understand that “clair” literally means “clear”, it is easy to translate all of the related terms into easily understood psychic abilities. There are six clairs that can be attributed to one’s “sixth sense”.
- Clairalience (clear smelling)—Smelling scent (e.g., perfume, cigarette smoke)
- Clairaudience (clear hearing)—Hearing words, phrases, and songs!
- Claircognizance (clear knowing)—Psychic knowing or direct thoughts
- Clairgustance (clear tasting)—Tasting a substance psychically
- Clairsentience (clear feeling)—Bodily feelings and sensations
- Clairvoyance (clear seeing)—Receiving images and visions, typically in your third-eye
1. Clairvoyance – clear seeing
Clairvoyance is an inner seeing. It’s the most well known, but least understood intuitive gift on our list of psychic abilities.
I would describe it as watching a little movie inside your head.
Someone who is clairvoyant is not necessarily seeing the future or having dramatic psychic visions like you see in the movies.
Rather, clairvoyance can be very subtle. For example, you may just see a color, a number, or even a symbol. You may or may not understand what these images mean, and they are not always meant to be taken literally.
On the other hand, you may get a full blown premonition. Like the old saying goes, “I saw that one coming!”
Other terms for clairvoyance: third eye, psychic eye, psychic vision.
2. Clairsentience – clear feeling
Clairsentience is the ability to receive intuitive messages via feelings, emotions, or physical sensations. Empathy (feeling the emotions of others) is also a form of clairsentience.
Here’s a great example of a clairsentience:
My daughter is fourteen and for the last two years, I’ve homeschooled her. Prior to that, she struggled at school, in part, because she’s extremely empathic and clairsentient. When someone is sad, angry, or ecstatic, she feels it.
She is so sensitive to energy that school would leave her feeling exhausted, anxious, and overwhelmed.
You may feel that way, too. Whether you are at school or at work, you may feel drained or pick up on the moods of people around you. You may feel exhausted being around someone who is negative and it may be difficult for you to watch the news.
As a clairsentient, it may be very easy for you to know when someone is lying to you – you can just feel it somehow. And you may even feel the physical ailments of others.
Other common terms for clairsentience: empath, spiritual or intuitive empath.
3. Clairaudience – clear hearing
No list of psychic abilities would be complete without clairaudience.
Clairaudience is a way of receiving intuitive messages without using the physical ears. I know, that sounds weird. Let me explain.
Think of clairaudience as an inner hearing. For example, you may suddenly hear that little voice inside you say, “go right!” or “stop!”.
When a highly sensitive person – such as a psychic or medium – is clairaudient, they are able to hear things that others cannot, such as spirit voices, sounds, and even music.
For example, spiritual mediums are often clairaudient and can hear words, phrases, and names from those who have passed on.
Most times, the medium will hear Spirit speaking inside his or her own head in her own voice (it sounds like when you are reading silently to yourself). On some occasions, the medium may also hear the actual voice that the spirit had when they were living.
4. Claircognizance – clear knowing
Claircognizance is the ability to just know something without logic or facts. It may help to think of it as an inner knowing.
Like if you know that you shouldn’t trust your new neighbor or get on that airplane, but you don’t know why, that is claircognizance. It’s an important extrasensory perception, so it makes it into the top four on our list of psychic abilities.
These claircognizant feelings can be very strong. They can also come in the form of intuitive thoughts that can pop into your head at random.
For example, my husband (who is not psychic) was driving on the highway with some co-workers. He says he didn’t know why, but all of a sudden he knew he had to tell everyone to buckle up.
Less than five minutes later, their vehicle was rear ended from behind by a car going 65 miles an hour. The seat my husband was sitting in broke in half.
This is a great example of an intuitive thought coming through in the form of claircognizance. He didn’t know why everyone needed to buckle up – he just knew they had to do it immediately!
But he could have received that intuitive message in another way. He could have had a vision of an accident. Same message, but received in a different manner. That’s the concept for you to grasp here today while reading this list of psychic abilities.
5.Clairalience – clear smelling
The last two "clairs" are the least often discussed, but they can be very useful, especially as supplementary skills. Biology tells us that smell and taste are our oldest senses, the ones connected with our animal past. In human beings, they're somewhat atrophied. Most other creatures routinely gather information about their environments through smell, but for us, this ability is so rare that it seems to border on the supernatural.
In folklore, clairalience is most often associated with spirit presence. It's very common for the dead to announce their presence with a whiff of a familiar perfume or tobacco. In the realm of ceremonial magic, scent also plays an important role. Many spirits, gods, and astral places have fragrances that are associated with them, and the proper incense or perfume can be used either as a tool to draw them near, or as a signal of their presence.
If you want to develop your sense of psychic smell, try meditating to get back in touch with this vestigial sense. When you smell something, you're actually taking molecules of it into your body through the air. How weird is that? (And yet, its an apt description of how we move through the mundane and psychic worlds alike, never isolated, always taking in and putting out stuff.) Close your eyes and see how many smells you can discern in the room around you. You can also practice "visualizing" (or recalling) familiar smells, trying to recreate them in your mind as vividly as possible.
6.Clairgustance ("clear tasting").
Clairgustance is the least-discussed of the five "clairs"--I've never met anyone who claims to be a gifted third-generation clairgustant. I once heard a phone psychic describing the experience of tasting the peanut butter sandwich one of her clients had been eating before the call--but that's the only example I can think of. Taste and smell are very similar, biologically speaking, so I would imagine that anything said about clairalience would also apply to clairgustance.
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