I'm claircognizant, are you?
One of the reasons I had always been jealous of a lot of people in my life was due to believing that I did not possess any gifts of my own, of a spiritual nature. I remember being told “you can do this or that” referring to mundane work. I would always reply in a cynical tone, I can’t connect with the dead. I can’t read people’s futures. What the fuck do I have to give. I think I always held spirituality so close that I almost cursed the fact that others seemed so much more in tune. I didn’t know then that it takes time to open up to your spiritual gifts. We all have them, but we can be blocking them. I believe the more we evolve the more we become open to these supernatural gifts. So how much work have you done on yourself - if none, then yeah you’re probably going to feel dead inside (i.e. not magickal) like I did before taking a hard look at my life, behaviors, and relationships.
I first thought about claircognizance when I began getting readings by mediums/tarot guides and astrologists alike. An aside: I will always be a huge believer in readings. There is so much insight to be found about yourself through them. Finding someone by word of mouth is best in my opinion, but even a random fated find works because that person was probably meant to be a part of your expansion in some way. I was told by one of them that I possessed clear knowing. “You have the gift of claircognizance, you get a lot from clear knowing, you don’t know how you know but you just know, it’s your intuitive superpower.” I thought about this for a while but didn’t think much of it. I do just get a sense of things sometimes, I thought to myself. But that was all I could tap into at the time.
After I re-listened to the reading I started thinking about instances in which I heard very specific things in my head. The truth would be appearing when I wasn’t asking to know it, and sometimes it was so ugly I felt like I had to tell the person like hey your husband’s a piece of shit, he doesn’t care about you. Or hey that teacher, she uses children, she’s using your daughter for her own benefit. I started to tell people everything out of concern, but no one would understand so it became stressful, this was a long time ago when I didn’t even know I was experiencing this. I struggled with boundaries but eventually realized I can’t tell everyone what I know even if I can see what they can’t (and I could). People are also on their own journeys. It wasn’t my job to tell them what they should be doing with their relationships/life.
One day it happened to the point where I could not breathe I was getting so bombarded with information. I came home from work one day and heard my family talking in the other room. One of them was on speaker on the phone and as she spoke my mind raced with information behind what she was saying. I became hyperaware of this because it was happening not just at a rapid pace in my head but in a way that was TMI. I was sitting there saying to myself I don’t care about any of this it’s none of my business I don’t want to know! I became so stressed to the point where I had to put headphones on to distract my mind from the incoming info. That was when I remembered my reading and what the woman said, and started digging deeper for myself into the Internet to find out more about this.
Claircognizance is the ability to have a clear knowing or understanding about a person, situation, or event without the need for external information or evidence. It comes into one’s mind as a sudden, unmistakable awareness - instantaneous and unexplained knowledge. It also appears as flashes of inspiration or knowing during every day life. ~Jothi Ramesh (Nirgunavasi)
It’s having an intense thought pop into my head with no logic, reasoning, or emotion. ~person on Reddit
For me, it shows up less as receiving information about the future and more as gaining insights into the true nature of people and situations including the motivations of others. To be specific, in the situation above with my family what was coming to me was information about all the people I heard talking, and as they spoke, the meaning behind their words. Not just that but also why they said and did anything. Why they responded this or that way. What they were feeling and thinking, as they spoke. It’s like I could hear everything that wasn’t being said. It’s like I was in their minds.
Even after being so exposed to all this and analyzing it I still struggled with trusting it, and then I found a Reddit thread that helped a ton. The person who started it emphasized that “you really have to be able to trust yourself, you have to be able to decipher if something is claircognizance or your own imagination/paranoia.” I gathered the following tips and tests from it that you can use for yourself, to know if you have it or to help yourself find out:
Trust that you know what you know and try not to talk about it with people who don’t believe because they’ll only discourage your gift.
Do auditory cleanings to become more in tune with it, that way you’re not confused as to what’s what in your mind. Use hertz sounds such as from Meditative Minds on YouTube to clear your thoughts and allow space to receive insight.
Do shadow work (look up Carl Jung to dive deeper). The more evolved you are, the more in touch you will be with your abilities.
Go outside often to connect with the earth/nature to clear any blockages/confusions.
Ask yourself, does what just came to me relate to what I am thinking about right in the present moment or not? And if it doesn’t, it’s probably your clear knowing.
Good example from another source:
(thinking): The dog wants to go out. I need to walk the dog. I’ll put my shoes on. Is it cold out? JENNY REALLY SHOULDN’T TRUST HER NEW CO-WORKER, THEY’RE A THIEF AND LIAR! Should I get my coa… wait what?
I love this last example because that’s exactly how it happens to me. Jenny in this case would have told me a short story in the past about her new co-worker, but I would suddenly as I’m out in the world on a completely different day at a completely different time just have sudden thoughts exposing the truth about her co-worker, getting inundated with information I was not thinking about nor had any evidenced knowledge about.
Any thread I’ve read has been so helpful because it makes me feel like I am not alone. There are a lot of people with this ability out there.
Lastly, this podcast episode of Sounds True: Judith Blackstone, was also helpful but only gave a bit (maybe her books give more, I haven’t read them) about the many types of spiritual sensitivities, one being cognitive sensitivity where you are able to know what’s going on between people, where you can see the big picture. Blackstone mentions that starting out such as in the case of a child who possesses this gift “can be a tremendous challenge to a child who sees what’s going on, and yet [their] parents either don’t see what’s going on or don’t want to see that clearly, and so [they] negate the sense of the child’s reality.” It reminds me of the way I’ve had to discern what I reveal to others about what I know. Although she doesn’t give much, at the very least cognitive sensitivity and spiritual sensitivity are now new terms I will be looking into going forward relating to claircognizance, and you can too.
Jennifer Diane is a witch scholar, writer and model based in New Jersey. She’s authored Folk Horror, Rural Horror, Devil’s Manifesto, Emotional Horrorshow, and will release Salvation in February of 2024. You can find her on Instagram.