Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Belleruth Naparstek is a practicing psychotherapist, author of Staying Well with Guided Imagery and Invisible Heroes, and creator of the bestselling Health Journeys guided imagery audiotapes.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

You know the feeling -- deja vu, already knowing what someone will say before they speak, a gut instinct that overrides logic, hearing from a distant friend you'd only just thought of that day. It happens to everyone, but few of us acknowledge these occurrences as manifestations of our own psychic ability. Now, bestselling author Belleruth Naparstek reclaims the world of psychic phenomena from its sideshow trappings, examining scientific data and showing each of us how to tap our own latent powers of awareness and perception.

Naparstek, one of the country's leading teachers and speakers on developing the powers of the mind and heart, has trained thousands of individuals in using guided imagery techniques for psychic development and improved health and healing. Her powerful techniques have reached a wide audience--from "the intuitively gifted to those whose third eye seemed virtually cemented shut."

With Your Sixth Sense, Naparstek shares her proven methods in a guide that is both practical and wonderfully informative. Based on her own experience, her work with clients, and interviews with more than forty highly skilled "intuitives," or psychics, Your Sixth Sense provides both a thorough exploration of the nature of psychic ability--how and why it works--and a step-by-step guide filled with specific suggestions and exercises carefully designed to help you foster, track, and illuminate your own rich output of psychic experience.

In an engaging, conversational style, Naparstek tackles the subject so often shunted to the realm of cut-rate fortune tellers, psychic hotlines, and television exposes on the paranormal, offering a thoroughly accessible scientific explanation of the physics of ESP, a detailed description of what happens in the mind just before and during an intuitive "pop," and much more. Your Sixth Sense is the only guide you'll need for recognizing, utilizing, and expanding the dormant powers of your own mind.

This is a book about how to recognize, cultivate, and direct the natural gift that we all are born with: our sixth sense. When all is said and done, our ability to know things in a way that leaps over "normal" cognition and perception and just shows up as a sudden intuition or a pop of psychic awareness is an altogether logical, natural, and predictable human skill. This book shows you how the sixth sense is simply standard-issue equipment, along with our eyes, ears, tongues, noses and skin. It is only as magical and as ordinary as they are--which is plenty magical enough--but no more and no less.
--from the Preface

" I loved this book. Reading it was an experience of remembering my own intuition and learning to trust it even more. Belleruth's insights are practical, grounded, validating, and helpful. This is a well-researched, thoughtful how-to-book, filled with stories and exercises, and accessible at any number of levels. There is truly something here for everyone."
--Christiane Northrup, M.D., author of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom

"Belleruth Naparstek's penetrating study of intuitives has transformed this brilliant classic, which unites the logic of the mind with the wisdom of the heart. Her wit, intellect, and compassion not only illuminate the science of the sixth sense but also provide a sound, practical framework for the development ;of psychic potential. Grounded in the cultivation of empathy, the exercises in this book will open your heart and expand your sense of intimate connectedness with this remarkable universe."
--Joan Borysenko, Ph.D., author of Minding the Body, Mending the Mind and A Woman's Book of Life

"I do not know of any other book that combines the wisdom of a psychotherapist, the knowledge of a scholar, the skill of a master hypnotist, the sensitivity of a psychic intuitive, and the memories of a remarkable collection of gifted practitioners. This book is a treasure!"
--Jeffrey Mishlove, Ph.D., president of Intuition Network and author of Roots of Consciousness

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Your Sixth Sense

HarperSanFrancisco

Clarifying Some Terms

As I said in my Introduction, the general territory I'm looking at is what parapsychology researchers call psi--the knowing and sensing that overleaps logic, analysis, and rational thought and just shows up. This is called intuition, esp, psychic ability, telepathy, clairvoyance,1 high sense perception, and paranormal intelligence.

For my purposes here, I'm much less interested in other aspects of psi. For instance, I won't be spending a lot of time in this book on the phenomenon of psychokinesis (pk), which is about making things happen from a distance with our intention (as in healing, prayer, and the more mundane tricks of spoon bending, table tipping, and the like). And I pretty much ignore the ghosts, goblins, and spirit aspect of things, too (phenomena that also get subsumed under the category of psi), except when some research in this arena helps me make a point about esp. What interests me most is how we get useful information that bypasses "normal" cognition, perception, or logic.

Clarifying some of my terms will help establish the territory I am talking about. I differentiate among three ways of knowing that often get confused and interchanged. The first is what I call the knowledge that comes from experience; second is intuition; and third is what I refer to as psychic knowing. Even though later on I use the terms intuitive and psychic interchangeably (particularly because so many people in my study had such an antipathy toward the word psychic and beseeched me to please not use it when referring to them), I'd like to distinguish them here.

But first, I'd like to say that I know perfectly well that the word psychic has a rather tinny sound, carrying with it some fairly cheesy associations with seances, table tipping, and things that go bump in the night. The negative connotations of the word have been exacerbated by the recent appearance of a spate of tv psychic hot lines of dubious reputation and skill.

The word intuition, though still suspect, is on a bit more respectable ground and can be carried more easily into a mainstream venue. When dressed up in its masculine garb and called gut instinct or hunch, we can take it almost anywhere.

Because of the discomfort that the word psychic generates, it often gets downplayed or called by the name of its weaker but more respectable cousin intuition, even when psychic is what people mean. Several of the people I interviewed, in fact, told me that they avoided using the term psychic, even though it probably best conveyed what they could do, because of all of its unpalatable connotations. They preferred calling themselves intuitive counselors, seers, spiritual advisors, or empaths--anything but psychics. (Frankly, I question whether these alternate terms provide a whole lot more positive cachet.)

What was most interesting to me was how much discomfort, embarrassment, chagrin, and repugnance surrounded the term psychic. That's a lot of heat on one small word. I suspect it reflects our culture's intense ambivalence toward the whole topic. We're all a little intrigued and embarrassed, I'd say.

All of that notwithstanding, psychic really is the word that immediately and unambiguously describes certain things. Psychic is the elaborate but sudden "pop" of information that comes all of a piece, seemingly from nowhere. Like intuition, it bypasses rational thinking and just presents itself. But unlike intuition, it also bypasses our five senses and doesn't even bother to dress itself up as a sensory fragment. Because of this, psychic knowing is odder, more striking than intuition, and its appearance might reflect a stronger connection or deeper state of mind. Psychic information tends to be more defined and complex, and it's harder to ignore it or palm it off as a logic-related anomaly. It's intuition--only more so.

It has been my experience that, in spite of the fact that psychic knowing tends to be more dramatic and flamboyant, generally more astonishing and impressive than intuition, it does seem to come from the same preconditions and circumstances. It takes the same methodology to invoke it--only perhaps more of it, in more concentrated doses, over more time. In other words, psychic knowing comes from the same well, only deeper down.

The knowledge that comes from experience can be as fast and as smooth as intuition or psychic knowing, but it's not the same thing. It is the product of logical thinking that has simply become quick and automatic. It's cause-and-effect common sense, accelerated by repetition. Sometimes a dash of intuition is thrown in, too, but often it exists all by itself.

For instance, knowing to cross the street when an innocuous-looking but in fact dangerous stranger is approaching might at first glance look like an intuitive choice, and possibly it is. But it could also result from a combination of memory and analysis, the brain having first made a quick assessment of an atypically stealthy gait, some shifty eye movements, or a certain way of holding the arms and hands and then, based on past experience, associating this particular body language with danger.

Students of intuition call this quick, subliminal processing chunking,2 and it takes place when certain perceptions, through repeated experience, become so automatic as to feel intuitive. Chunking, in fact, often combines seamlessly with intuition.

Clinicians rely on this kind of information all the time, as do seasoned workers in any field. An example of it happened recently with a new client, a beautiful, chisel-featured woman of sixty-one, a successful writer with badly metastasized lung cancer, who was seeking guidance for holistic therapies after a failed course of chemotherapy. The overriding impression that I got from her was that she seemed very, very tired.

While taking her history, I asked her a couple of standard questions about what she had to live for and how much emotional support she was getting. At some point in our conversation, I became aware of feeling a vague sort of discomfort, a very familiar feeling that I'm used to experiencing in my sessions: the best way I can describe it is as a nonspecific sense that something important had been skipped over. I could feel my attention being yanked back to something that she had almost said a couple of questions earlier. But I couldn't place exactly where it was or what it was about.

Invariably when this happens, with barely a conscious thought my interest gets activated, and, before even knowing why, I become like a heat-seeking missile, going back and forth, circling around, scanning for the buried hot spot. At the same time, and possibly quite unconsciously, my artful friend was doing her best to steer me away from the place. And so we danced our little dance for several minutes.

Somehow, my questions began circling around her relationship with her husband of thirty-six years, gently poking and prodding here and there. With each of her answers, she dodged me elegantly, offering graceful, oblique responses, couched in her impeccable manners.

Our little pas de deux finally resolved itself when I leaned forward, elbows on thighs, and asked, "So, is...