Clairvoyance (; ) is the claimed ability to acquire information that would be considered impossible to get through scientifically proven sensations, thus classified as extrasensory perception, or "sixth sense". Any person who is claimed to have such ability is said to be a clairvoyant () ().
Claims for the existence of paranormal and psychic abilities such as clairvoyance have not been supported by scientific evidence.Carroll, Robert Todd. (2003). "Clairvoyance". Retrieved 2014-04-30. Parapsychology explores this possibility, but the existence of the paranormal is not accepted by the scientific community. Bunge, Mario. (1983). Treatise on Basic Philosophy: Volume 6: Epistemology & Methodology II: Understanding the World. Springer. p. 226. "Despite being several thousand years old, and having attracted a large number of researchers over the past hundred years, we owe no single firm finding to parapsychology: no hard data on telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, or psychokinesis." Stenger, Victor. (1990). Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses. Prometheus Books. p. 166. "The bottom line is simple: science is based on consensus, and at present a scientific consensus that psychic phenomena exist is still not established." Zechmeister, Eugene; Johnson, James. (1992). Critical Thinking: A Functional Approach. Brooks/Cole Pub. Co. p. 115. "There exists no good scientific evidence for the existence of paranormal phenomena such as ESP. To be acceptable to the scientific community, evidence must be both valid and reliable." Hines, Terence. (2003). Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Prometheus Books. p. 144. "It is important to realize that, in one hundred years of parapsychological investigations, there has never been a single adequate demonstration of the reality of any psi phenomenon." The scientific community widely considers parapsychology, including the study of clairvoyance, a pseudoscience.
Usage Pertaining to the ability of clear-sightedness, clairvoyance refers to the paranormal ability to see persons and events that are distant in time or space. It can be divided into roughly three classes: precognition, the ability to perceive or predict future events, retrocognition, the ability to see past events, and remote viewing, the perception of contemporary events happening outside the range of normal perception.Melton, John. (2001). The Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology. p. 297. Gale Group, Detroit. .
The English connotations of seeing through time are not always present in concepts of clairvoyance in other languages. The French usage, for example, has more emphasis on spatial connotations and arises from the Latin etymology of clear-seeing/clear vision.
In history and religion Throughout history, there have been numerous places and times in which people have claimed themselves, or others, to be clairvoyant. In several religions, stories of certain individuals being able to see things far removed from their immediate sensory perception are commonplace, especially within pagan religions where oracles were used. Prophecy often involved some degree of clairvoyance, especially when future events were predicted. This ability is sometimes attributed to a higher power rather than the person performing it.
Christianity A number of Christian saints were said to be able to see or know things that were far removed from their immediate sensory perception as a kind of gift from God, including Charbel Makhlouf, Padre Pio, Magdalena Gornik and Anne Catherine Emmerich in Catholicism and Gabriel Urgebadze, Paisios Eznepidis and John Maximovitch in Eastern Orthodoxy. Jesus in the Gospels is also recorded as being able to know things far removed from his immediate human perception. Some Christians today also share the same claim.
Jainism
In Jainism, clairvoyance is regarded as one of the five kinds of knowledge. The beings of hell and heaven (devas) are said to possess clairvoyance by birth. According to Jain text Sarvārthasiddhi, "this kind of knowledge has been called avadhi as it ascertains matter in downward range or knows objects within limits".
In China The Chinese term for clairvoyance and clairvoyant is qianliyan (literally, "thousand-mile eyes"). The origin of this usage is Qianliyan, a Daoist guardian deity often depicted as a statute guarding Mazu temples in East Asia. Qianliyan's sight ability carried over to Buddhist representations, symbolizing divine faculties of seeing.
Anthroposophy Rudolf Steiner, famous as a clairvoyant himself,Steiner, Correspondence and Documents 1901–1925, 1988, p. 9. claimed that it is easy for a clairvoyant to confuse their own emotional and spiritual being with the objective spiritual world.Rudolf Steiner, Errors in Spiritual Investigation: Meeting the Guardian of the Threshold, A Lecture Berlin, March 6, 1913, Bn 62; GA 62; CW 62, Mercury Press, Spring Valley, New York, 1983, https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19130306p01.html Quote: "He therefore must learn above all else to know himself, so that when he is able to confront a spiritual outer world in the same way as he confronts an objective being he can distinguish himself from what is truth. If he does not learn to delimit himself in this way, he will always confuse that which is only within him, that which is only his subjective experience, with the spiritual world picture; he can never arrive at a real grasp of spiritual reality."Rudolf Steiner An Esoteric Cosmology Eighteen Lectures delivered in Paris May 25 to June 14, 1906, Bn 94.1, GA 94, France. St. George Publications, Spring Valley, New York, 1978, IX. The Astral World, https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA094/English/SGP1978/19060602p01.html Quote: "Another result of this inverse unraveling of things in the astral world is that it teaches man to know himself. Feelings and passions are expressed by plant and animal forms. When man begins to behold his passions in the astral world he sees them as animal forms. These forms proceed from himself, but he sees them as if they were assailing him. This is because his own being is objectivised—otherwise he could not behold himself. Thus it is only in the astral world that man learns true self knowledge in contemplating the images of his passions in the animal forms which hurl, themselves upon him. A feeling of hatred entertained against another being appears as an attacking demon."
Parapsychology
Early research The earliest record of somnambulist clairvoyance is credited to the Marquis de Puységur, a follower of Franz Mesmer, who in 1784 was treating a local dull-witted peasant named Victor Race. During treatment, Race reportedly went into a trance and underwent a personality change, becoming fluent and articulate, and giving diagnosis and prescription for his own disease as well as those of others.Taves, Ann. (1999). Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James. Princeton University Press. p. 126. Clairvoyance was a reported ability of some mediums during the spiritualist period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and psychics of many descriptions have claimed clairvoyant ability up to the present day.Hyman, Ray. (1985). A Critical Historical Overview of Parapsychology. In Kurtz, Paul. A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology. Prometheus Books. pp. 3–96.
Early researchers of clairvoyance included William Gregory, Gustav Pagenstecher, and Rudolf Tischner.Roeckelein, Jon. (2006). Elsevier's Dictionary of Psychological Theories. Elsevier Science. p. 450. Clairvoyance experiments were reported in 1884 by Charles Richet. Playing cards were enclosed in envelopes and a subject under hypnosis attempted to identify them. The subject was reported to have been successful in a series of 133 trials but the results dropped to chance level when performed before a group of scientists in Cambridge. J. M. Peirce and E. C. Pickering reported a similar experiment in which they tested 36 subjects over 23,384 trials. They did not find above chance scores.Hansel, C. E. M. The Search for a Demonstration of ESP. In Paul Kurtz. (1985). A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology. Prometheus Books. pp. 97–127.
Ivor Lloyd Tuckett (1911) and Joseph McCabe (1920) analyzed early cases of clairvoyance and concluded they were best explained by coincidence or fraud.McCabe, Joseph. (1920). Is Spiritualism Based On Fraud? The Evidence Given By Sir A. C. Doyle and Others Drastically Examined. Chapter The Subtle Art of Clairvoyance. London: Watts & Co. pp. 93–108Tuckett, Ivor Lloyd. (1911). The Evidence for the Supernatural: A Critical Study Made with "Uncommon Sense". Chapter Telepathy and Clairvoyance. K. Paul, Trench, Trübner. pp. 107–142 In 1919, the magician P. T. Selbit staged a séance at his flat in Bloomsbury. The spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle attended and declared the clairvoyance manifestations genuine.Baker, Robert A. (1996). Hidden Memories: Voices and Visions From Within. Prometheus Books. p. 234. Christopher, Milbourne. (1996). The Illustrated History of Magic. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 264.
A significant development in clairvoyance research came when J. B. Rhine, a parapsychologist at Duke University, introduced a standard methodology, with a standard statistical approach to analyzing data, as part of his research into extrasensory perception. A number of psychological departments attempted and failed to repeat Rhine's experiments. At Princeton University, W. S. Cox (1936) produced 25,064 trials with 132 subjects in a playing card ESP experiment. Cox concluded: "There is no evidence of extrasensory perception either in the 'average man' or of the group investigated or in any particular individual of that group. The discrepancy between these results and those obtained by Rhine is due either to uncontrollable factors in experimental procedure or to the difference in the subjects." Four other psychological departments failed to replicate Rhine's results.Jastrow, Joseph. (1938). ESP, House of Cards. The American Scholar. Vol. 8, No. 1. pp. 13–22. "Rhine's results fail to be confirmed. At Colgate University (40, 000 tests, 7 subjects), at Chicago (extensive series on 315 students), at Southern Methodist College (75, 000 tests), at Glasgow, Scotland (6, 650 tests), at London University (105, 000 tests), not a single individual was found who under rigidly conducted experiments could score above chance. At Stanford University it has been convincingly shown that the conditions favorable to the intrusion of subtle errors produce above-chance records which come down to chance when sources of error are eliminated."Hansel, C. E. M. The Search for a Demonstration of ESP. In Paul Kurtz. (1985). A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology. Prometheus Books. pp. 105–127.
Crumbaugh, J. C. (1938). An experimental study of extra-sensory perception. Masters thesis. Southern Methodist University.