ESP (extrasensory perception) is the ability to pick up information beyond the five physical senses. Think of intuition, gut feelings, precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance and remote viewing. I believe everyone has it to some degree. Most people never learn to notice it, let alone train it. And like anything else, it grows with practice.
I developed ESP as a side effect of how I was living and the practices I did. It eventually included contact with people who had passed away. This blog post is not a guide, but a direction to look at: an eye opener, and a reminder to follow your heart rather than your ego mind.
A word of caution first
Every life path is unique, so what worked for me may very well lead you to ESP, but it is in no way guaranteed. More important: be sure you want it, and know how to turn it down. For me it became too much, so I stopped certain practices, which reduced the ESP input significantly.
Why most people miss ESP signals
I think everyone has the capacity for conscious ESP. But most minds are too occupied with thinking and mental chatter, which creates an unbalanced mind and likely an overactive nervous system as well.
To me the mind has many faculties. Picture them as a music band. Say the lead singer's microphone is set to volume 10 on the mixer, and all the other band members are at 0.5. You hear only the lead singer and have no perception of the rest. Now the sound engineer turns the lead singer down to 0 for a while. You start to hear the other band members. Once you pick up those sounds, you can focus on them and hear them more clearly. And when your hearing has adjusted, you can still hear them when the lead singer comes back in.
That is the whole point: getting to know your non-physical senses and adjusting to them.
The start: getting to know myself
It started with the intention to really understand myself. I wanted to know how my system works, so I began investigating my thoughts, emotions and behavior, and the relationship between them. This was years before I did Monroe's Gateway Voyage.
The first thing I noticed was the sheer amount of mental chatter. It was far too much to work with, so I limited the input of new information: no TV, no digital entertainment, no social media, no radio and only limited music. I started in winter, when the days were short and I enjoyed making a fire. A good moment to begin an inward journey.
When you limit new input to the bare minimum, the mind starts to calm down within one or two weeks. A rushing stream of thoughts becomes a calm, gentle flow. It slows down even more when you start asking the question nobody asks.
The question nobody asks
In this blog post I explain that we miss 80% to 98% of our thoughts. Yes, you read that correctly. The vast majority of your thoughts are invisible to you.
The question I started asking myself was: “How did I get to this thought? What did I think before?” It made me see a whole flow of thoughts behind each thought, typically 5 to 7. The main takeaway: most of my thoughts are mental filler, and at the beginning of this practice they consisted primarily of scam and random bullshit. I leave it to you to judge your own hidden thoughts; that is not up to me.
The more consistently I asked it, the more the stream of thoughts slowed down. And once I knew how much was hidden, I started paying attention to it more and more. Over time I became aware of nearly all the thoughts that arise in me. That is my own estimate, not a measurement, but I knew my own thinking like the back of my hand.
Mental hemi sync
The work of Thomas Campbell and his adventures at The Monroe Institute inspired me to synchronize my left and right hemispheres with a mental practice. I connected with a point in my left hemisphere, drew a line to the mirroring point on the right side and connected it back: left, right, left, right, and so on. I was continuously connecting left with right, and right with left. At first I did this during meditation. Later I found I could do it all day long, whenever I did not need to think.
The effect was a heightened level of awareness (presence) and a meditative state of clarity throughout the day. Every thought I noticed was an invitation to synchronize my hemispheres. From time to time I meditated properly for about 20 minutes, doing the mental hemi sync without a single thought interrupting the flow.
This brought the next level of awareness. I became highly sensitive to changes in my system. Because I was familiar with my thoughts and their effect on me, I started to notice when I picked up a thought from someone else. This is sometimes more and sometimes less obvious from moment to moment. It is most obvious when you pick up a thought about something you have no affinity or connection with. The moment I realized I was picking up thoughts from others, ESP started to unfold.
The kinds of ESP I experienced
In random order:
- Mind reading. I picked up people's thoughts, most easily one on one.
- Picking up fantasies. Now and then I saw randomly weird images. At a supermarket cash register I once saw, in my mind's eye, people being thrown violently through the store.
- Planting thoughts. I played with planting a thought or idea in someone. Nothing wild, like projecting a kind invitation to a rude person to be friendly. Always in a way that left room for the other person's autonomy and always in line with my heart intuition.
- Feeling a person’s brain state from a distance. I could sense whether someone’s brain was relaxed or tense, even from a distance. A few times I checked with the person what he or she had been talking about or thinking of, and the answer matched the sensation I had picked up.
- Smelling what someone was thinking of or working on. The smell was clear, but physically not present.
- Contact with people who passed away. By far the most intense one. It started suddenly. I felt the presence of someone's father who had died some 30 years earlier, and I felt that the father was really eager to make contact through me. The moment I allowed it to unfold, words of regret, sorrow and love poured out of my mouth, while I felt the father's intense emotions. His son was in tears, and it helped him deal with his father's death. After that I had 20+ more of these encounters, always with people who were new to me.
The contact always started with energetic goose bumps on my right arm. The stronger the will of the deceased person to connect, the longer I perceived these goose bumps. If I allowed contact to take place, I first placed an energetic shield around me so as not to lose my own energy, and then I would “open the line.” This always involved heavy emotions. I could clearly tell they were not mine, because the physical sensation of their emotions was more painful than my own. So you can imagine that I wasn't always up for it.
Enough is enough
In the beginning it was interesting because it was new. Over time it became too much. I never consciously desired these skills and had no interest in other people's thoughts, state of mind, fantasies and business. So I stopped meditating and started taking in more digital entertainment again. In terms of the band: I turned the lead singer back up and ignored some of the other band members. That brought me more peace.
What it was really about
Many people feel they have to help others once they discover a gift that can benefit them. I felt the same. When the contact with deceased people began and I saw the positive effect on the bereaved and the deceased, I thought I had to do something with it for others. I wanted to help those in need of closure.
But when I consulted my Total Self (higher self) about this idea, the answer was crystal clear: “This is not about others, this is about you. You have these experiences to develop the skill of communicating with the spirits of people who have passed away.”
So I used most of these experiences to train myself and improve my contact with these spirits. After more than 20 encounters, it stopped by itself. Nowadays I can still feel when someone is connected, but there is no longer the feeling to facilitate contact.
I do not want to encourage or discourage anyone to pursue ESP. I do suggest you consult your (heart) intuition on whether it is something for you. The ego mind loves this kind of stuff, but it should not be the one deciding. The thinking mind is a great servant, but a terrible master.
Nowadays
All these experiences were useful on my path, and nowadays I enjoy and trust the sensitivity of my intuition. During my guided OBE or astral projection sessions, I often see, feel and hear what the person experiences before he or she is able to share it with me. However much I trust my intuition, I make sure I don’t project these signals onto the person I am guiding. I do this by turning down their volume, or by blanking my thinking mind. This keeps the person’s experience authentic.
Benefits for OBE and astral projection
An active thinking mind, lack of focus and a stressed nervous system are the main hurdles to a successful OBE or astral projection. Even if you have no interest in ESP, you may benefit from the practices in this post. A well-developed intuition is useful as well.
Final thoughts
One more factor may have contributed to my heightened awareness: my diet. In those years I took no refined sugar (only natural, unprocessed sugars), no processed food other than some whole grain bread, limited alcohol and only organic food. I include this for completeness. Our diet and digestive system influence our mental activity, and frequent use of sugar and alcohol create a kind of subtle mental fog.
If you feel ESP is something you want to acquire or improve, go for it and enjoy it. But always be present in what you do, stay grounded, and be sure it aligns with your intuition and the Golden Rule (don't do to others what you don't want others to do to you).
Feel free to reach out if you would like to explore more.