Your Sixth Sense: Activating Your Psychic Potential

By Belleruth Naparstek (Harper:San Francisco, 1997)

Naparstek is a professional social worker and before writing the above book she produced a series of guided imagery audio tapes to help patients deal with a variety of medical problems. The following quotes are all from the above entitled book.

Psi or "…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" (p. xiii).

"…as my attention becomes caught up in the person sitting across from me, my mind automatically clears itself of whatever was preoccupying it just a few moments earlier. I experience that person with a kind of freshness and curiosity. My usual judgments are put on hold, and my normally urgent sense of time somehow drops away. I become calm and patient….But even though I'm very relaxed, I'm also very alert. I pick up subtleties, hear unsaid sentences, feel unexpressed feelings, and even see images of the people and places that are being described…I might focus on the colors that pulse around the heads and shoulders of the client. A few years into my practice, I began to see 'lights' around my clients---whitish auras that were like soft, bright halos---and then, over time, they evolved into colors of varying intensity, especially pinks, greens, blues, violets, and yellows…I'm so empathically attuned to my clients when I'm in this state, seeing what they see and feeling what they feel, that I'm aware of an overall, generalized feeling of what I can only describe as love for them…(This doesn't mean I'm not thinking clearly; on the contrary, my thinking is clearer than usual. But at the same time, I am deeply touched by them in this generalized way.)…in this state compassion crowds out judgment…And most of all, I feel very alive…once enough technical skill has been learned to master the basics, this is how the job gets done" (pp. xvi-xviii). I cannot emphasize enough the importance of that last sentence: "once enough technical skill has been learned to master the basics." So often people do not have the technical skills and fly by the seat of their pants. They sometimes get away with it and then sometimes they damage clients. I encourage you to develop your psi, however, while you are doing so, and before you use that psi, you should be putting even more energy into developing your basic social work skills.

"My distinction between intuition and psychic knowing is this: intuition is a natural extension of normal, sensory perception, going beyond the individual boundaries of our skin and picking up what is happening in the environment or in the hearts, minds, and bodies of others. It's a greater sensitivity or empathy than we might normally expect, but it doesn't feel extraordinary in any way. It's our same old senses, just stretched over a larger terrain. On the other hand, what I'm calling psychic information is a sudden, cognitive pop, an instantaneous awareness of a whole idea, sometimes a whole set of ideas or a complete conceptual system, that bypasses anything we would consider to be the normal process of thinking. These pops---sometimes instantly apprehended, sometimes first spoken aloud and later understood---will later strike us as odd, although at the time that they are popping, they feel perfectly normal and natural. They are the stuff that has us asking, 'Where on Earth did that come from?' (pp. 22-23).

"…we are all wired for psi from birth, but it is also true that some of us are more wired than others…With focus and awareness, however, we can all expand our current level of psi functioning to an impressive extent" (p. 29).

Although Naparstek does not cite the legendary Joe Dimaggio as an example, she does mention how it can apply to sports. (See page 33). Dimaggio was in part great because he knew where the ball was going to be hit before the batter hit the ball.

"…meditation, yoga, chi kung, self-hypnosis, various martial arts, breathwork, focused performing arts and athletic activity, biofeedback, prayer, and guided imagery. All these activities accelerate the development of psi ability" (p. 39).

"Focused attention alters brain wave patterns and releases serotonin into the bloodstream, leading to a quieting down of ego activity---those executive functions of the brain that include environmental scanning, decision making, assessing, worrying, and analyzing. Once ego activity quiets, the subtler inner cues of psi can become more prominent" (p. 41).

"Sometimes people develop their psi capacity in a slower, gentler fashion, simply by cultivating the practice of keeping their hearts open and working with conscious compassion. Human service workers who stay involved with their clients and who remain energized by their work, avoiding the burnout that so often visits their colleagues, are people who have been working with an open heart…Mostly, heartful practice is about keeping the heart open to the world around us---to people, places, ourselves, and the divine. It means coming from a place of empathic attunement. It's about seeing the connections, the interlocking webs of energy among people and things, and residing as much as possible in that place of no separation. The neurohormones that this state of being generates are the rich, mellow serotonin varieties, resulting in a steady, alert, nourishing, full, natural high" (pp. 48-9).