Taking a wider view

Your understanding of clairvoyance expands.

May 18, 2026

Clairvoyance is an inherent human ability and muscular skill developed by play, experimentation, and ongoing practice.

It’s the most recognized and studied of several discrete sensitivities that traditionally include clairaudience, clairsentience, claircognizance, and lesser-heralded abilities of clairgustance (psychic awareness via phenomena of taste), clairtangency (psychic awareness via phenomena of physical touch), and clairalience (psychic awareness via phenomena of scent).

All such human skills and practices can best be understood as subsets of an overall clairsentience, in the sense (no pun) of awareness through both material and non-material senses. Aside from this, claircognizance appears to have no connection to (or necessity for) sensation at any level, being uncanny psychic awareness and accurate knowledge simply available in the mind with no apparent external source or trigger. It’s just there for the tapping.

By the way, that’s why I now avoid the popular term download for any experience that makes more sense as an emergence of what’s already there and accessible. When we’re living, more and more, as our Spirit Selves, nothing really needs to be downloaded like a digital file or app, just perceived and recognized for what it is.

And images popping into your mind’s eye are not the only signs that you’re activating clairvoyance. Think about the many ways you’ve already experienced this skill.

It can show up as:

yes, certainly, non-material imagery, static or moving, that may be fleeting or sustained over time
dream imagery
visual experiences during guided imagery meditation, active imagination, journeying, and other therapeutic and ritual practices
seeing into and reading the details of images in the outer world (e.g., such as Tarot cards, visual art, film, dance, physical objects, landscapes, and people)

Suddenly and for reasons unknown, your eyes are drawn to look in a particular direction, intently gazing at something existing in material reality. You realize that call was a psychic signal. It’s a form of clairsentience we might label clairvoyance.

a woman in the dark with her hand on her face — Photo by Tino Rischawy on Unsplash

This insistence on breaking down clairsentience into separate sensory skills can be misleading, though. What’s really going on here? Should we attribute much or all of the experience only to the visual sense?

These kinds of phenomena are often complex, rich, intricate with a subtle overlap and interplay of modes of receiving, communicating, and knowing.

What made you swivel your head just in time to see a huge, vibrant flock of birds lift, all at once, from the branches of a distant tree? (Real story from a birding trip to Belize, btw.) Did you, at the farthest edge of your vision, detect the first lift of a single wing? Or did you receive a tiny whisper—hey, look now—just below human auditory perception?

Or maybe, well, you just knew as you sometimes do.

Here’s an exercise to help condition and finetune your clairvoyance in this more expanded sense.

Select any one of the many works of visual art offered by The New York Times’ 10-Minute Challenge series—including paintings by Rockwell Kent, Frida Kahlo, Utagawa Hiroshige, Romare Bearden, and Gustav Klimt.

Set aside all distractions, and sit in front of your chosen image for as long as you can. I’ve found ten minutes to be ideal. See how much you can notice, absorb, imagine, and ponder in that time.

Of course, you can do the same with any work of art you’d prefer. Here are two from an engaging new exhibition of portraits I visited this morning at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

**Laura Wheeler Waring.** **Girl with Pomegranates** **(1938); The Face of Life: Modern Portraits at The Met. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (photo: Eva Yaa Asantewaa)**

**Elizabeth Catlett.** **Head of a Woman** **(1942-44). The Face of Life: Modern Portraits at The Met. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (photo: Eva Yaa Asantewaa)**

Set a timer for 10 minutes, or your desired time, and pay attention will unfold in front of you. See how deep you can go. I guarantee, with every passing minute, you’ll notice more and learn more about that work and its artist. And you’ll be exercising your clairvoyant clairsentience.

Don’t try to make notes or journal entries during this time. Just observe, letting your eyes take it all in, letting the image carry you, dialogue with you, instruct you, and surprise you.

Notes can come later.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

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