Psychic vs. Spiritual
People often assume that psychic abilities are an expression of some spiritual knowledge. As a teenager, I too assumed that. Having had psychic experiences (read an early psychic experience), I was fascinated by the psychic world, and to me it held the promise of the future. However, in college when I had a profound spiritual experience (Click here for one story) I started to lose interest in finding deeper meaning in the psychic realm, and years later upon reflection I’ve come to see that they are very different.
Psychic experience or ability is simply the ability to access certain types of information in consciousness. It does not have anything to do with our intention – good or bad. This explains why there can be psychics who use the information they access to manipulate people in order to get money from them, or to exploit people in power games. I often say a person can be psychic and be very self-serving, while a person can be spiritual and generous of spirit, but have no psychic abilities.
In a materialistic paradigm, having access to knowledge that others don’t have appears to be very spiritual. But knowledge, however extraordinary, has nothing to do with how big our perspective is, and how expanded our consciousness is in relationship to that knowledge. It also has nothing to do with our intention with regards to our lives. Developing spiritually on the other hand, is not so much about knowing specific information about reality, but it is a capacity to become conscious of how vast life really is at a level that is deeper than intellectual understanding alone.
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