Michelle A Belanger - The Psychic Energy Codex: Awakening Your Subtle Senses

First published in 2007 by

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

With offices at:

500 Third Street, Suite 230

San Francisco, CA 94107

www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright 2007 by Michelle Belanger

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

ISBN-10: 1-57863-385-0

ISBN-13: 978-1-57863-385-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request

Cover and text design by Dutton & Sherman

Typeset in Goudy and ITC Legacy Sans text and Vibrocentric display

Cover photograph Cody C. Andresen

Printed in Canada

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When I was little, my mother and her sisters would regale me with tales of their premonitions, encounters with ghosts, and other paranormal experiences. They had grown up together in a haunted house in Lakewood, Ohio, and both of their parents had experienced unusual phenomenon of their own. The reality of psychic sensitivities was never doubted in the Belanger household, and I was encouraged to share my own unusual perceptions from early childhood on.

Because the women in my family were so open about their experiences in those early years, it came as a surprise to discover that many of them were unsettled by my research into these abilities later in life. It seemed strange that it was acceptable to have psychic experiences but at the same time unacceptable to study how those experiences worked. One aunt warned me that my studies edged into the territory of witchcraft and the occultterritory she believed was dangerous for anyone to tread. Their brother, my favorite childhood uncle, went so far as to refuse to see me when my mother was dying because he viewed my studies as Satanic, fearing that somehow the taint of my forbidden knowledge would pass to him.

This is pure ignorance, yet psychic abilities have been so mystified and marginalized in our culture that his reaction, however lamentable, is nevertheless understandable. It is rare for someone with psychic sensitivities to approach these abilities as something they can ultimately understand and control. Because many psychic abilities fall outside of the range of current technology's capacity to measure, most people maintain the attitude that they are like fairytale magicsupernatural powers whose mechanism is ultimately mysterious and unknowable.

Are psychic abilities magical? Any study of modern witchcraft quickly reveals that much of what a witch calls magick is just the intentional use of abilities that others label psychic. Most of the arts witches practice are nothing more arcane than a conscious application of psychic abilities through the use of symbolic actions and words. A Christian mystic harnesses the same abilities when healing through a laying-on of hands. Likewise, a Yogin of the Hindu faith is tapping into the same fundamental source when expanding the mind to achieve the experience of samadhi.

A big problem with psychic phenomenon is that we often approach it solely in terms of religious experience. Many of the books that offer instruction in harnessing these abilities present them within the context of a religious belief system. This can sometimes create a problem by inextricably connecting a use of the abilities with the moral invectives of that belief systemsuch that someone who harnesses the abilities for a use not sanctioned within that religion is seen as transgressive or Satanic.

A bigger problem, in my opinion, is that tying psychic abilities to any specific religious tradition has a tendency to make those abilities seem specialized, privileged, and beyond the ordinary person's controlespecially if the person is coming from outside of that tradition. How many people still have trouble accepting meditation as a useful skill beyond its traditional context in the Hindu or Buddhist faiths? Not all that long ago, there was an outcry in the Midwest when a public school system dared to teach students meditation as part of one of their classes. Angry Christian parents declared that their children should not be exposed to such a religious practice in a public school. And yet the mechanisms that lay at the heart of meditationrelaxation, controlled breathing, a stilling of the mind, and conscious, inward reflectionare all techniques regularly used on a therapist's couch independent of any religious tradition.

Psychic abilities have remained mysterious to us because we consistently regard them with a kind of superstitious dread. Too many of us presume that there is no way to learn how these abilities function, and therefore we allow ourselves to be passive participants in our own experiences. For some people, it's as if they are victims of their sensitivities, despairing of any level of control and seeking only to have the experiences come to an end. My grandmother told me about premonitions she had as a child. Having little context to interpret these perceptions within her Catholic faith, she feared them. When she foresaw the death of a beloved neighbor in graphic and gruesome detail, she became convinced that her perceptions were some kind of curse. She prayed for weeks, asking God to take them away. She is hardly the first person to pursue this solution to spontaneous and uncontrolled psychic abilities, and unless something changes in the way humanity in general approaches these skills, she will hardly be the last.

It is my goal to take these abilities out of the shadowy and mysterious realm of the occult and reveal them for what they truly are: natural perceptions tied to a measurable, predictable, and scientifically knowable aspect of our world. That aspect is the world of vital energy, sometimes called prana or chi, often called psychic energy by the New Age traditions here in the West. In my own works, I refer to the collective level of psychic energy that flows within and throughout our more familiar physical world as the subtle reality.

Whatever word you care to put to it, this level of experience is non-physical but nevertheless perceptible, given the right circumstances. In many ways, it can be equated to the part of our world through which radio waves travel. Unheard and unseen by our ordinary senses, these invisible transmissions can nevertheless be picked up and interpreted by the right instrument tuned to just the right frequency. In the case of psychic energy, we are the instruments. Some of us are quite naturally tuned in to the right frequencies so we can perceive and interpret at least some of the information carried on these invisible waves. The exercises in this book will not only allow a dedicated student to develop a better level of reception, but when properly applied, will also allow one to harness and willfully transmit his or her own signals.

In most religious traditions, the ability to do this is seen as the logical conclusion of a spiritual path. It is not my intention to suggest that these abilities have no place in religion or spirituality. On the contrary, I feel that practical experience can reveal to us the how of these abilities, but it is the purpose of religion and spirituality to explain for us the why. Even so, I feel that cloaking the core principles by which these abilities function in religious, occult, or otherwise esoteric terms has accomplished nothing beyond obscuring the truth about the abilities themselves. Psychic awareness is not a supernatural privilege. It is simply another aspect of our very natural interaction with the world around us.