A clairvoyant is essentially a person who possesses the ability known as clairvoyance. This is a term that is typically used to refer to an extraordinary ability to sense things that cannot be perceived through the scientifically recognised five senses.
The term comes from the French words clair, meaning clear, and voyance, meaning vision. Clairvoyants have the ability to know things that are happening far away, either in time or space, and though scientific reports on this phenomenon remain highly controversial, anecdotal evidence has existed all through history of people who are able to perform feats using clairvoyance.
In history, clairvoyance is often associated with religious figures. In ancient Hindu religious test, clairvoyance is a quality that is found among those who have perfected the art of meditation and personal denial. This is simply one example that can be found in history, but there are many others. In Europe, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a fashion for spiritualism and clairvoyants might be called in to perform for people who had questions about things that could not be seen or even to contact the dead.
The existence of clairvoyance is something that is often hotly debated by scientists and people who are active in the metaphysical community. On one hand, at this point in time, there is no quality that can be measured or tested that proves the existence of such phenomenon. On the other hand, argue people who believe in clairvoyance, there is no reason to believe that something does not exist simply because it cannot be measured at this time. They point to the fact that the tools to detect and measure this quality may simply not exist at this point and that the future will bring them about.
While clairvoyance most commonly refers to the ability to sense things before they happen, the truth of the matter is that the term can be used describe a wide array of abilities when it comes to sensing things which would otherwise be obscure. For instance, one type of clairvoyance refers to the ability to pick up psychic knowledge through the sense of touch. Some people refer to this as the ability to take readings from the vibrations that people and things emit. In another example, some individuals can learn things through the scent that they admit, and can foretell events when they detect a certain scent.
The reality of clairvoyance is something that has been a source of fascination for many years. As recently as the Cold War, for example, both the United States and the former USSR experimented with clairvoyance in an attempt to use it for information gathering purposes. Even today, there are many people who are convinced of the idea of clairvoyance, just as there are people who are convinced that it is something that could not be real. Understanding this phenomenon is something that will happen far in the future, if it happens at all, but it is still something that is a source of great interest.
Author Resource:
Keith Ward is the Founder and Director of the Circle of Professional Clairvoyants, which offers Psychic Readings with fully qualified Psychics and Senior UK Clairvoyants: http://www.psychicreadings.org.uk/readings.htm