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INTRODUCTION

Would you like to be clairvoyant? To have a sixth sense or psychic powers? To read the tarot? To dowse? To see fairies and auras?

If you've started on this book, the chances are that the answer is “yes”. Anyone who can already do all these things easily doesn't need this book—though they might find some of the exercises interesting and fun.

It's worth remembering, though, that human culture has been heavily influenced by religious and scientific ideas over many centuries, and that means there are plenty of people who do not want to be clairvoyant—either because they believe it to be something wicked and ungodly, or because they believe it to be a load of rubbish and, if they did start seeing fairies, it would only prove they were mad. In fact, the people who don't want to be clairvoyant are probably a majority (but don't tell my publisher, it might make him sad).

So, let's assume you are not one of those people, and that you really would like to be clairvoyant. That raises the following question: What makes you think you are not already clairvoyant?

There are two possible responses. Quite a lot of people have had the occasional weird experience that suggests some sort of psychic ability—a premonition dream, telepathic link or the like. So they get the idea that maybe they have some untapped psychic power, and that thought either scares the shit out of them or else they become curious to find out more—and might buy this book for that reason.

And there are those who find the idea of psychic powers quite fascinating, but have never really experienced anything that could not be explained away. It can range from “I think there's something in it, and would like to see if I can do it myself” to “I don't really believe any of this mumbo jumbo, but who am I to deny it if I've never even tried?”

ISN'T IT ALL A BIT WEIRD?

The idea that there is something weird about clairvoyance and psychic abilities is part of the fascination—it takes us beyond the ordinary and mundane—but it can also be the very thing that stops people having those abilities.

Think about it logically—for the unconscious can be quite logical when it is left to act mechanically. You want to be psychic because there is something weird about it; but if you became psychic it would no longer be so weird, in fact it would become part of your everyday experience. For that reason then, you don't really want to be psychic, so you fail to be psychic even when you try to be, and that makes it really weird. And that makes you want it all the more…

Another take on this process is: you would like to be psychic because that is something that would set you apart from the common herd, because it is different. If you could be psychic, you would be different. But the common herd has a name for people who are different: they are called “mad”. You don't want to be labelled mad, so you don't really want to be psychic even though you think you do and keep trying…

My response to this problem in this book is this: psychic abilities aren't at all weird, they are quite normal. Everyone has them, but many people block them for various reasons, such as the ones I have already suggested. So this book sets out to prove that they are normal by helping you to experience your clairvoyant abilities and to develop those skills.

I apologise for removing the great incentive—the weirdness—but don't worry, because I now offer you something almost as good.

Clairvoyance isn't at all weird, but it can take you to some weird places, should you choose .

Clairvoyance is as natural and normal as walking. Walking can take you to the office—oh how boring—but it can also take you to the scariest mountain top or the wildest scene in town. You can even walk to prison or the insane asylum. It's an ability and it's up to you to use it wisely.

Just in case I've made it all sound a bit too mundane, I invite you now to look at something truly extraordinary.

This amazing picture is a nature deva. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could see and communicate with great beings like this when we walked in nature. What an adventure!

The picture comes from a book called The Kingdom of the Gods (1952) by the theosophist Geoffrey Hodson. I came across this book in Bristol public library in my early teens and thought it was terrific—it has many pages of colour plates like this. I later discovered that Hodson's contact with nature spirits began in Sheepscombe Valley, Gloucestershire, about a mile from my childhood home. And now I live in the Cape Province, where he continued his investigations.

HOW I DISCOVERED THAT I WAS NOT PSYCHIC

As a child I wished I could see auras and nature spirits like these—talk about “added value”! I used to sit on Sheepscombe Common and it certainly felt special, and was very beautiful scenery, but I never saw any of the fairies and devas Hodson described. I read the classic books on seeing the aura from our public library and I tried really hard, gazing with half-closed eyes when in a meditative state…etc., etc.

I had no luck with crystal gazing either. I could sort of sense things sometimes—I have plenty of planets in Fire and am supposed to be intuitive—but I was also an intelligent boy having a scientific education and did not want to delude myself. I would not be satisfied with anything less than real clairvoyance, to REALLY see these things.

Later in life I had similar trouble with tarot reading—the symbols are so complex. If I ask for advice on my physics revision and I get a picture like this in the spread, what am I supposed to make of it? “Get on your bike”? How was I supposed to get a REAL reading from the tarot spread and not just wishful thinking?

That was my problem with dowsing too: if I got a friend to hide something in the room and I set out with the pendulum to find it, I'd find myself thinking “I bet he hid it under that cushion” and sure enough the pendulum would then swing in that direction. In other words, the pendulum was simply following my conscious guesswork while I was trying to develop REAL divining skills from my deep unconscious.

So what was all this business about REAL REAL REAL?

Looking back, I'd say that I was blocking my psychic abilities in the manner described above. I very much wanted to gain psychic powers, but I did not want to be crazy. That meant my psychic powers had to be real and provable, not just delusion. So when I began to experience anything psychic, how could I be sure it was not a delusion? Only by testing it thoroughly.

What if I was trying to see fairies and I caught a glimpse of something odd out of the corner of my eye? Rather than just experiencing the oddness from the corner of my eye, I would stare hard at it. Then: “Oh well, I guess it could just have been a leaf moving in the wind…”

Basically my process was this: I want to experience the paranormal. How can I be sure that what I am experiencing really is paranormal? Only by exhaustively testing it to make sure it is not just a trick of the light or whatever. Then how do I know when to stop testing? Only when I have convinced myself it is normal, because if it still seems to be paranormal it might mean that I have not tested it hard enough. So I set out to discover the paranormal, but any glimpse of paranormal activity presented me with a problem that could only be solved by proving to myself that it was not paranormal. (What I have described is one of the basic paradoxes of any scientific investigation of the paranormal.) So I was blocking the paranormal, and I continued to do that until many years later when I began to discover the techniques described in this book.

Over the years I have managed to whittle away much of this resistance to psychic noise, to the point where I can do pretty good tarot readings, use the pendulum regularly, and have even sometimes enjoyed seeing fairies and human auras. It isn't quite what I was hoping for as a child, but it certainly adds value to my existence and I believe it could do the same for you.

So this book is about how I did it. A series of simple exercises or practices that you can explore in everyday life to allow your intuition more room to play in. I'm pretty confident that you will be able to see fairies by the time you finish these exercises.

ABOUT THIS BOOK—PREPARATION AND MATERIALS NEEDED

This book is based on a six week online course that I ran during 2008 at Arcanorium College. It consists of an introduction and six weekly sets of course notes with exercises for each week. I have modified the notes for this book and have added sections summarising some of the feedback with my responses and extra thoughts.

When the course requires some materials for the exercise I will explain what is needed, but here are some preliminary notes so you can prepare in advance.

For the fourth lesson it will help if you already have a fully pictorial tarot deck. What does “fully pictorial” mean? Many tarot decks have a combination of cards, some with pictures and some with abstract symbols—typically you have the twenty-two trump cards with pictures, and the court cards (King, Queen, Prince and Princess)—but the remaining cards, like The Six of Wands, just show a pattern of six wands with no people in the picture. What you need for lesson four is a deck where nearly every card has a picture with people in it. The Waite/Rider deck is a common and readily available example. My personal favourite is the Crowley/Harris deck, but it is too abstract and symbolic for the exercises in this book where we require simple people pictures on each card.

Another related project is to start collecting postcards or photographs, also for use in lesson four. Try for a range of at least twenty to thirty images with distinct, strongish themes. By that I mean don't just collect twenty landscape postcards, or twenty pictures of buildings, but go for a real mixture—say a postcard of a cathedral, one of a hillfort, one of a pretty flower, of a car, of a train, a ship, a mountain, an office block, a busy street, a beach, a humorous theme…and so on. By all means include several in the same category as long as they are each distinctive. For example, there is nothing wrong if your collection includes several car pictures, as long as they have very different styles, such as a sports car, a family saloon, an off-roader and a hearse or whatever.

For lesson three you'll need a dowsing pendulum. I'll explain in the lesson, so this won't be any problem, but by all means look out for a nice one in advance if you feel like it. You might also like to try other divining tools, but in this book I only describe using a pendulum for the sake of simplicity.

You see, this book isn't really about teaching you to dowse, or to read tarot, so much as using those as tools in order to reveal that you really do have clairvoyant abilities so that you can then recognise them and go on to develop and use them in your own way.

Quite a lot of the exercises are best done outside in a garden or in nature, but there is plenty of flexibility, so you need not feel bound by that.

FIRST, A LITTLE BIT ABOUT MAGIC

This course was first presented online at Arcanorium College, a website for people with a general interest in magic and the occult. Although the course did not call for any prior knowledge, I did assume it would be taken by people with some familiarity with magical culture. The same probably applies to most of this book's readers but, just in case, I'll begin with an extra introduction to the magical mindset.

If you don't need this section, by all means move on to the start of the course.

MAGIC AS A DIFFERENT CULTURE

I mentioned previously that in recent centuries human society has been heavily influenced by religious and scientific thinking. In fact, it has been dominated by science and religion to the extent that art has been largely subjugated and magic almost driven out.

To illustrate what I mean, consider the way that society accepts religious censure of art—whether it is christians denouncing modern art as pornographic, or moslems attacking literature or cartoons depicting Mohammed. Imagine what would be the response if the situation were reversed and artists demanded that catholic shrines be purged of their “bad taste” kitsch imagery or that the bible needed to be rewritten to iron out the narrative discrepancies between the gospels. The first situation is so familiar as to be taken for granted, but the second sounds outrageous, because art simply doesn't have the authority accorded to religion in our society. On a bigger scale, remember how religious extremism—and the term includes modern “religions” such as Nazism and Communism—assumes the right to lay down rules about what sort of art is acceptable or not.

So much for art—magic has fared far worse. According to religious culture, magic and psychic powers are positively evil or at least ungodly. Although acceptable to more liberal faiths, even practices such as yoga, alternative healing and astrology come under fire from many religious organisations. And in terms of scientific culture magic doesn't even exist except as fraud or self-deception—to claim to be a magician either means you are mad, deluded or a charlatan. Fortunately we live in relative tolerance, otherwise the authorities would have put me either in gaol or a mental asylum for writing this little book.

My “art” example focused on religious domination, but what about science? Surely science has not tried to suppress or dominate art in the same way?

No, not in the same way, but there has been a more subtle tendency for science to belittle art by implying that it is not necessary. The invention of photography could partly be blamed for the crisis in nineteenth and twentieth century painting that lead to the many modern movements and -isms as artists sought to rediscover their purpose.

The most extreme manifestation of this I remember in the 1950s when there were even some scientists suggesting that subjects such as art appreciation and literature could soon be dropped from the university curriculum, because they would become redundant once the parameters of artistic merit had been properly analysed and programmed into a computer. Already in the 1960s “Tin Pan Alley” in London was using computers to generate tunes for potential pop songs, and some thought that was the end for composers.

But what happened instead? A scientist and writer, C.P. Snow, published a speech in which he analysed art and science as “two cultures”, suggesting that they represented two different ways of addressing the world, ways that were better seen as running in parallel than in conflict. So science, for all its certainty and wisdom, would never replace art, because art fulfilled a totally different, yet equally real, human need. In this way the potential battle between art and science was defused, and since the 1960s scientists have felt comfortable about enjoying artistic hobbies without feeling obliged to rationalise or explain them in scientific terms.

The funny thing is that religion did not feature in the debate about two cultures. It was only really towards the end of the century—and religious expectations for the millennium—that a conflict began to emerge again, this time between scientific and religious thinking. Although it was not resolved in so many words, it is clear that most thoughtful people came to a similar conclusion: that science and religion were not really at odds, but were two different and parallel cultures serving contrasting and yet real human needs. So that now gave us three cultures: art, science and religion.

What I have been suggesting for many years is that the picture needs to be completed with a fourth culture—magic. Magic also meets real human needs, it is as natural to humanity as religion, art or science, and is best recognised as a culture in its own right. I argued that a lot of things are done by human beings that seem very silly because the denial of magic means that they can only be done in the name of science, art or religion, in whose terms they make no sense—but if they were recognised as magic, they would make perfect sense.

Imagine that some respected sociological research institute came up with a very strong correlation between people who read this book and subsequent marital breakdown. There would be a public outcry for this book to be banned as a danger to society. Even the sociologists would be split between those calling for a ban in face of such incontrovertible scientific evidence, and those insisting that it was unscientific to conclude that this book caused marital breakdown (because maybe people moving towards marital breakdown are those who become more interested in clairvoyance). Both argue that they are being scientific, but in fact those arguing for the ban are not being scientific, they are being magical.

Whereas science argues from causes—so my book must be proven to actually cause marital breakdown—magic works from correlations. So if this book and marital breakdown “go together” you could ban this book to reduce marital breakdown—that's called “sympathetic magic”. It isn't scientific but it does represent a real human need. If it did not, there would never have been the public outcry for the ban. If this difference between science and magic were recognised, the schism in the scientific community could be resolved by the simple recognition that such threats to society often demand an immediate magical solution, backed by a longer term scientific solution once the real cause had been identified.

PREJUDICES AGAINST MAGIC

You are setting out, with this book, to develop your psychic powers. The psychic powers in question—clairvoyance, tarot reading, seeing fairies, etc.—are all part of the culture I call magic. But, as I suggested earlier, we live in a society dominated by religious and scientific thinking, one in which magic doesn't exist or, if it does, is something very evil.

So you are setting out to experience something that at some level of your being you believe does not exist and cannot be experienced.

You may protest at this and insist “but I do believe in magic”, yet I suggest that you don't really, because not even the most experienced magicians really believe in magic. If you don't believe me, then go to some magical get-together and listen to magicians chatting. You'll constantly hear things like “I did this money spell and—it's incredible—the very next day I got a rise at work!” The word “incredible” means unbelievable, and it really does in this context because magicians never cease to be amazed that magic works. You wouldn't hear a scientist say “I mixed hydrogen and oxygen and lit it and—it's incredible—it went bang and turned into water” because scientists really believe in science.

That is one of the paradoxes of magic, what makes it so alluring. If something that you really believe in works, it's boring, but if something you don't really believe in works, it's amazing. Nobody really believes in magic, and so we have given it enormous potential to surprise and thrill us.

Follow this course faithfully and I'll blow your mind.

But we do begin with a problem: I am trying to help you to experience something when at some level you believe it is wrong to experience it—either because it doesn't exist, or even because it is evil. To achieve this, the first lesson will focus not so much on reason, or intuition, or feeling, but on the senses.

REASON AND SENSE

At its best, scientific culture is both reasonable and sensible. But, like any culture, when it has been in power for too long it becomes a line of least resistance for lazy people. In the case of scientific culture, it becomes an excuse to opt for reason and become less sensible, or more detached from reality. To be told that science is not sensible is hard for some who confuse reason and sense, so I'll need to give several examples.

If someone in awe of scientific culture is suffering from backache and I suggest a homeopathic remedy that worked for me, then I can expect a very sceptical response along the lines “that homeopathic nonsense can't possibly have healed you, it's nothing but water.” That's a reasonable reply, but it isn't particularly sensible not to try something that others recommend.

If I point that out, I'm likely to be reminded about double blind tests on homeopathic remedies that demonstrated no noticeable healing effect. In other words, people needing healing were given something and did not know (single blind) if it was a remedy or just a dummy pill, and the researchers giving the pill also did not know (double blind). Then it was found that those who actually did get the remedy fared no better than those who got the dummy, therefore it was decided that the remedy was no help.

This is very reasonable, but not at all sensible, because the double blind test has nothing to do with any real-life healing process. How would you feel if you went to the doctor and he said “I'll give you some tablets chosen at random so that I don't know if they are the remedy or not—because I don't want to prejudice your cure with expectations”? Wouldn't that be silly?

Healing involves explaining your illness in a secure environment to an authoritative, sympathetic person who then gives you a remedy that both of you trust—anything less would be cause for complaint. Homeopathic doctors understand this holistic need better than most, so the healing process is halfway there before anything has even been prescribed. It is very sensible, immediate and realistic—it's good magic, unlike woolly objections based on irrelevant tests carried out in some far distant laboratory.

Next, imagine that I become known as someone who always opts for “natural” remedies—herbs, Reiki, meditation or whatever, rather than prescription drugs. Then I get cancer and opt for chemotherapy. My “scientific” critic would find this very funny—”so much for all that natural nonsense, as soon as anything serious happens, he runs straight back to conventional medicine!”

The suggestion is that I am being silly, but truly it is the critic who is being silly. For humans are herd animals with strong social ties, and it makes sense for the survival of such animals to wander forth and explore when there is no danger, but to run back to the herd when there is danger. So it is utterly sensible to explore alternative medicines when faced with minor ailments, and even more sensible to resort to conventional medicine when feeling truly threatened.

I could go on with these examples, but the point is merely to illustrate that the scientific culture has become so familiar that it becomes a line of least resistance for lazy thinkers who rely so much on what is considered to be reasonable that they forget to be sensible. In saying that, I am criticising lazy thinking rather than scientific culture, because in the much rarer circumstance when magical culture has become too familiar, then lazy thinkers begin to rely so much on feeling that they too are just as likely to forget to be sensible.

So my opening exercises will concentrate strongly on the senses. The idea is that we tune up our powers of observation to the point where they are less likely to be influenced by reason. And we do not do that in order to abandon reason, but rather to hold it in check until something has been observed. We no longer refuse to see something simply because “we know it cannot possibly be there”.