So C is for Clairsentience or “empath” and means ‘clear feeling’. If you’ve ever had a ‘hunch’ or just known something wasn’t quite right (or was) you’ve experienced this. Most people have and I believe some experience it more or less, to varying degrees than others.
“In the field of parapsychology, clairsentience is a form of extra-sensory perception wherein a person acquires psychic knowledge primarily by feeling.[27] The word “clair” is French for “clear”, and “sentience” is derived from the Latin sentire, “to feel”.”
I told my mother when I was a child that I must be “partially psychic” and she laughed and thought that was funny, as she believed that you can only be psychic or not. I was trying to describe “clear feeling” and in my mind, it was ‘partial’ because I didn’t see visions, as that is usually all people know of in the “psychic” sense. Really that is just clairvoyance, only one of 4 psychic abilities.
I was correct though and really sensing something real. I believe “it” is like anything else, varying degrees and all people experience clear feeling or “hunches” and some more than others or less. I also think science will someday explain it. What seems like wizardy at times, because we don’t understand something right now, doesn’t mean it is necessarily spiritual but to me it feels that way.
Science continues to prove things and reasons behind many of the things we celebrate and already do as Pagans. The “Law of Attraction” is our Creative Visualization, we were doing this hundreds of years before ‘The Secret’ . We were aligning our bodies and minds with the earth long before it became ‘green’ to do it. We were treating our bodies as temples and meditating long before it became ‘hip’.
I have no doubt this is similar, we know when we clearly feel something to be true and it just ‘is’. How do we know? That’s another mystery unto itself, I’m not sure how I know things and it can creep me out, at least it did when I was younger. Now, I just try my best to embrace it, even if it scares me sometimes because of the startingly accuracy of most of my feelings about people and events.
This is also a funny thing about seeing the future, in any sense or predictions and knowings of things..if you stop something bad from happening, you can’t prove to anyone (or yourself) that you were right. I battled with this in my 20’s and let things happen (to me because I knew I could handle it) and was right..every time.
I suppose the lesson of ‘clear feeling’, for me, was to know to trust my feelings and impressions, at times back it up with any data to be sure but overall to not ignore things that come up, especially the feelings that come up over and over again.