My arguably nerdiest passion led me to meet a unique character — creative and insightful — who lives inside all of us. The problem? We’re silencing this part of us by default.
Today I’d like to tell you what I’ve learned about a very specific part of our inner world, which is essential to unlocking our intuitive and spiritual capacities, and I need to get extra nerdy to do so.
Ready? Let’s go.
I believe inside each of us lives a charming, witty, perceptive — even wise — character who’s absolutely pivotal to us getting reliable clarity from our intuition and a solid sense of our spiritual connection.
This character knows so much we don’t — and we are in dire need of what they know.
There’s one catch though: most of us don’t really speak this character’s language.
What’s more, they are creative, sensitive — yet only barely verbal. But they’re our official translator, tasked with coming up with the metaphors and symbols that encode information coming into our awareness, both from deeper layers of our own inner world, and from the field of consciousness outside our individual bubble of self.
To do so, they rely on sending signals in ways we’re not used to decoding, through no fault of our own.
Neuroscience might label this aspect of us our right brain hemisphere. I lovingly refer to them as our “Invisible Friend”. Allow me to take you on a journey to get to know this Friend a bit better.
Why This Matters Now
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Collectively, we’re experiencing a tidal wave of interest in, and acceptance for, the reality that human beings are psychic creatures (my previous essay explores a framework on how we’re all psychic, even if we don’t know it). After all “psychic” comes from “psyche” — the Soul.
The awe, delight, and emerging curiosity around ESP feels to me like an evolutionary impulse: the more we lean into these exploratory feelings, the more will be revealed. Realities which, at our current vantage point, are as yet unimaginable.
We are at an evolutionary threshold, and who can say what dimensions of possibility will open up as we cross it?
And, the more intuitive we become, the more exquisitely attuned we get to the fabric of connection and lifeforce that — behind and beneath our ordinary perception — is the true ground of our existence.
Despite the mainstream idea that spiritual gifts are for a select few, what I see is that we’re way, way more psychic than we realize.
But we don’t notice, or give weight to it, because we’re illiterate on how the pipeline that carries psychic information into our conscious awareness works.
We’ve inherited that illiteracy through a culture that has reduced and ridiculed the psychic reality to beyond the margins of the “normal” and “acceptable”.
This bias feels akin to being forced to move through life with one arm tied behind our back, not knowing (or, for some, adamantly denying) that there is a version of reality where we can use both arms freely. We lose a whole swath of our innate abilities to navigate life with more grace, connectedness, satisfaction and delight.
But this one-armed life also can also make spiritual teachings and knowledge a matter of pure theory rather than intrinsic experience — where we should be building up a storehouse of “gnosis”, or direct revelation.
The same channels that allow us to glean information from our psychic senses help us feel and know as reality the spiritual, mystical, loving soul of the world. When we’re cut off from them, spirituality is no more than an intellectual exercise, a verbal description of a place we’ve never been.
But spirituality is a basic need. Connection to the Greater; Cosmic Love: irreplaceable nutrients. When we don’t have awareness of, or ownership of the intrinsic avenues through which we live out that connection, they can easily be hijacked.
Spiritual need, unfed, becomes a hole inside us that we try to fill with substances, objects, achievements, and people instead.
Spiritual hunger can become a gaping space inside, which wounded, misguided or manipulative “teachers” can exploit.
Spiritual need can be displaced, becoming obsession, the toxic version of romantic “soulmate” projections, or the epic search for the perfect, meaningful career.
My guess is that, if you’re reading this, you’re no stranger at all to spiritual connectedness. You have a feel for the inner channels and parts of self I’m about to describe, whether you’re new to them or an expert.
(And even myself, as a seasoned intuitive, need reminders about what I’ll share below, so I hope that if you’re not a newbie you’ll still find it meaningful).
Because you also have to live in a world that, while starving for the gifts that these inner channels bring, more often than not thwarts them, rather than facilitating them or celebrating them.
My wish is that by articulating these often overlooked keys to a deeper sense of overall connection, we are paving the way together for:
a) You to find a new level of ease, skill, ownership and joy with them, and;
b) For us to, together, dispel — not through blind belief, but through tangible experience — the stubborn myths that deny us our birthright when it comes to connecting to the invisible realms.
Remote Viewing Lights Up the Edges of Perception
In addition to doing psychic readings, I practice something called Remote Viewing (RV for short, though unlike psychic readings, which I do professionally, RV is more of a passionate hobby).
In a reading I’ll typically be “live” with a person — either face to face or on zoom — who’s come for some guidance or clarity on particular life questions.
Remote viewing is a whole different beast.
It uses the same psychic senses, but it’s built around a protocol consisting of a series of structured steps. RV was originally developed for the US military during the Cold War in order to acquire intelligence by non-ordinary means — i.e., “psychic spying”.
Not that I apply it in the same way, but that’s where it comes from! (my psychic practice is based on serious ethics, so absolutely no spying for me).
What makes remote viewing unique is its application to gain information about something objective and concrete: a place, an event, an object or a person.
(Stephan A. Schwartz’s Alexandria Project is a fascinating chronicle of applied remote viewing in archaeology, if you’re interested in real life application examples).
During an RV session, I’ll be looking to acquire information about something called a “target” — you can just hear the military origins there — which is the object of the session(s). I may be working on an assignment, which typically involves a team. If I’m just practicing for fun or to keep my senses sharp, I’ll go looking for an assignment in one of many online databases maintained for this very purpose.
As a viewer, (ironically), I’m “blind”. I won’t know what the target is in advance. For all I know, it could be anything in the whole world. Since I know nothing about my viewing objective, a string of numbers or letters stands in for it, which I’ll use to focus my attention. Like a phone number, it’ll serve to route my consciousness to where it needs to go. And yes, believe it or not, that works.
The target might turn out to be a historical event, an activity, like a sport or occupation; a geographical location such as a natural or urban landmark, a recurring event such as a seasonal celebration, a convention or a competition. Some databases simply pull up a random image out of an archive and my job is to describe what I’ll be shown in that image, whatever it may be.
There are many RV methods; some involve meditation, or sketching; jotting down with pen and paper or on a white board; sculpting with clay; sitting in trance, or just plain old staring into space and letting impressions stream in.
My go-to method involves sitting in silence with pen and paper, eyes open, sketching and writing down everything that starts to appear in my awareness regarding this random string of numbers.
I may see colors, sense depth and three-dimensional space; hear sounds and sense mood and atmosphere.
I may feel how my viewing target relates to my own body in terms of scale — can I hold it in my hands? Is it much bigger than me?
I may notice people or animals, the presence or absence of vegetation; the weather; nearby materials and substances such as water, metal, rock or wood, and so on.
By scanning and exploring, I may be able at the end of a session, to describe the target, and share my information with others if I’m working as part of a group. If I’m just practicing by myself, I’ll head over to the online database I’m using, reveal what the target was and compare it to the information I collected.
In this way, RV is different from a psychic reading. A reading happens over an hour or two, as a face-to-face (or digital) encounter between the reader and client. Besides addressing concrete issues, it often involves the client’s lived experience, their subjective state, and their perception of personal struggles, questions or concerns. It is highly personal. In contrast, RV is a patient process of documenting psychic impressions in a structured manner, sometimes taking multiple hours of sessions for one target — and focusing primarily on verifiable fact-finding.
In addition to its merits as a mode of acquiring hidden or hard to access facts, it’s the relative objectivity of remote viewing that I find extremely valuable, especially for those of us looking to develop our intuition. When we eventually receive feedback about our sessions, we’re provided with tangible information to reflect back to us the extent and the quality of our psychic perception.
When we’re succesful, the strict nature of the process makes it intensely undeniable that we are receiving information we should not be able to know by ordinary means. This is stark and mindblowing in ways that other intuitive practices might not feel.
And because RV sessions “isolate”, so to speak, the idiosyncracies of perception, it’s allowed me to witness remarkable cognitive processes at work.
The mindful methodology of RV created a one-of-a-kind setting for me to self-witness that very same inner character — which I’ve called Invisible Friend above — which jumped into the spotlight as the purveyor of psychic information.
The Friend seemed not to be a part of me I could consciously control, rather a quiet, playful part of my unconscious mind. But it seemed to reach out to my conscious mind to establish a two-way connection. If you’re wondering, I also don’t feel like this is an external presence, like a spirit guide — nor a split personality phenomenon. Others report recognizing this part of self as well.
I learned to realize that to be objectively successful in my RV sessions — and honestly, everywhere else in life — I needed to get to know and work with the Invisible Friend, recognize its unique quirks.
It gave me true information but not always the way I thought it would arrive. It started to feel as though they were playing charades with me, and I needed to learn to play with them.
A Real-life Example
Here’s a very typical experience in remote viewing.
Author Richard Bach, in this short ~ 7 minute video, recounts to interviewer Jeffrey Mishlove a remote viewing exercise, with Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff, scientists who are two of the original founders of this psychic modality.
In this exercise, Bach was meant to perceive, at a distance, where Puthoff was located and what he was doing, without having any information about his whereabouts in advance. Watch for the full experience, but I’ve transcribed the main point below.
B: “ When I closed my eyes I saw Hal Puthoff walking into a tiny little building, and as he walked into the building, it was a travel agency. There was a map, there’s a counter — there was a map behind the counter, and there was some large company logo on the wall. And I was saying this into Russell’s tape recorder: it’s a very complex…it’s a city map, Russell. And Russell said, ‘don’t call it a map; if it’s a maze of lines call it a maze of lines. It may be a maze of lines but not a map.’”
M: “All right, so it’s ‘watch out for the intellectual overlay.’ “
B: “Exactly right. Yeah and don’t call it a travel agency. All right, well this is what I see, and then I reached a point where it just stopped. I said that’s it — well, no wait, there’s one other thing. There’s a strange colored light at the roof of this place and I have no idea what it is. It is blues and greens and what’s it doing at the… it’s not electric light, Russell. This was very important. It’s not electric light. (…)”
“(…) Hal Puthoff hadn’t been in a travel office at all. He had gone to a church. He had gone to a hypermodern church and he had walked to the altar — that wasn’t a counter, that was an altar. Behind the altar was a filigreed wooden inlay work, very complex. It was not a map of the city, but it was a complex line. The company logo was not a company logo: it was a cross, a giant cross. Up at the ceiling: stained glass, blue and green — not electric (…)”
“As you said, had I tried to intellectualize, to label what these things were, I couldn’t have done it. But when he came back… the company logo, I had to laugh!
What kind of playful part of me has these wonderful capacities? Is it attached to us, like a balloon by a string to a child ? Does it come with us wherever we go? Does it have these powers and we don’t feel it because we never ask?”
Playing Charades with Ourselves
My own experiences in remote viewing parallel Bach’s — sheer sense of awe included!
I too, quickly began to wonder, “who is this playful part of me?”, which in sessions, would deliver information in interesting, quirky ways. Yes, lots of times I’d get a solid, clear, literal “hit” — if my target was a sports event, I would sense bodies, motion, competition, a gathered crowd.
But other times, there would be this sense of analogy or symbolism or… for lack of a better way of putting it, like part of me was playing charades: “looks like”; “feels like”, “sounds like”, and even “reminds me of” or “rhymes with”.
I could just imagine a small character in my head, like the cute emotions in the Disney movie “Inside Out”.
And this one — just like your charades partner at last week’s family dinner — was miming, repeating the gesture, getting agitated, pointing, while my conscious mind tried to make sense of it all.
Over time, from talking to other remote viewers, reading the literature, participating in training, mentoring clients in psychic development, and simply just talking to others about how their intuition works, I came to realize this is a feature, not a bug, of the psychic process. Though it often gets snagged, and turns into a bug, which I’ll cover below.
For context, first, let me unpack some overaching principles of psychic perception, using Bach’s experience as a jumping-off point.
It’s important to realize that our psychic intuition delivers accurate sense impressions, but not always a fully formed panorama, at least not at first.
It explores elements of the objective at random, giving us scattered glimpses of what we’re connecting to. We cannot expect to know the whole at once, but we can take time with the exploration patiently, and collect those elements to, eventually, describe the objective more fully.
As a rule, all psychic information flows in spurts, in stops and starts.
It flashes by faster than the speed of thought. It runs whisper-quiet behind our much more noticeable day-to-day thoughts and feelings.
And above all — for most of us— it is natural for it to arrive as images, textures, moods, colors, feelings, relationships between elements. We might “get” words but they’ll often be short, brief messages. We can expect all of these to come in as initially disassembled pieces of a whole, which gain more clarity, definition and connection the more we stay with them in exploratory not-knowing.
One of the most important jobs we have when engaging in this realm is to spend time with the signals we’re receiving, describing what they’re like without labeling them.
Bach perceived accurately that Puthoff had gone to an indoor venue, though he overlaid the idea of a travel agency onto this venue. A more experienced viewer might have stayed with the more neutral description of “indoors” versus labeling the place from the get go.
He spotted a “complex maze of lines”, which was an accurate sensory description for the filigree wooden inlay behind the church altar. He also reported very clearly describing the qualities of the blue and green light coming from the ceiling — which was decidedly non-electric in nature. He picked up on the flat, horizontal surface of the altar, though, labeling again, his mind made it out to be a travel agency counter.
We tend to intellectually want to categorize “what the thing is” that we’re tapping into with our intuition, much like the proverbial blind men and the elephant.
But we can only hope to arrive at a clear-enough understanding of what our intuition is trying to tell us via low-level, bottom-up, sensory and emotional elements of perception. With enough clues, we can put a whole elephant together.
Just like charades!
Yet most of us, when we don’t know better, tend to come at our intuition with an expectation of a spectacular reveal of sharp, fully formed, and linearly organized information. The full name and address of our next romantic partner. The lottery numbers. The objectively correct job that will deliver instant financial freedom and soul satisfaction within the next three weeks before unemployment benefits run out.
I’m being facetious, but you get it — and I also have a point. Our intuition does not work like a search engine.
I see both beginners and seasoned intuitives getting bogged down in how their intuition doesn’t deliver literal, exact information under tight “asking parameters” — and then we conclude we must not be that psychic at all.
In addition to the intuitive workflow consisting of building up a full picture by assembling glimpses and clues, from the bottom up…
… I’ve learned our intuition tends to be quite blind to numbers, text, abstract symbols, serial order, and complex language. (There are exceptions, but stay with me, as this is a very reliable rule of thumb). Which brings me to our next stop on this journey.
The Left and Right Brain
I believe the Invisible Friend is, in fact, the personality of our right brain hemisphere.
You’re likely familiar with this popular personality-typing idea: the notion that someone could be a left-brain or right-brain dominant person. A left-brained person is supposed to be analytical, good with words and numbers, rule-bound, organized, rational: making decisions based on facts and logic.
A right-brained person is meant to be the total opposite: creative, artistic, led by heart and emotion, intuitive, apt to go with the flow, spontaneous, and tolerant of chaos and disorganization.
This concept has since lost traction, based on the fact that science has mapped how we use both sides of our brain at all times, in concert —rather than developing just one and letting the other hemisphere lie dormant in the background, so to speak.
Hyper-reductive personality typing aside, the brain hemispheres are indeed asymmetrical in terms of form and function, and their differences aren’t just about a division of labor.
The left hemisphere is responsible for complex language, abstract categories, linear time. It reduces complex processes and webs of connection into parts. It’s black-and-white, certain of what it thinks it knows, and very bad at nuance and paradox. It sees a mechanistic world populated by “things”: separate, discrete objects.
Meanwhile, the right hemisphere perceives things as a whole in context, noticing the relationship between parts. It sees connection. It is responsible for our ability to notice emotional tone, subtlety and nuance, as well as humor and symbolism. While both hemispheres are needed for language, the right hemisphere is verbal in a basic way, and primarily processes — and expresses itself — non verbally. It “speaks” in pictures and symbols instead.
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, of TED talk fame, is a neuroanatomist who experienced a stroke in her left-brain. The stroke took offline her ability to “do” the left-brained things I just mentioned — and she chronicled her recovery and subsequent transformation in her book, My Stroke Of Insight.
She experienced a complete personality change as a result of the stroke, and this led her to want to revitalize the understanding that yes, our brain’s hemispheres do each have their own personalities, proclivities, and unique ways of processing information. In her book, she writes:
“Prior to this experience with stroke, the cells in my left hemisphere had been capable of dominating the cells in my right hemisphere. The judging and analytical character in my left mind dominated my personality.
When I experienced the hemorrhage and lost my left hemisphere language center cells that defined my self, those cells could no longer inhibit the cells in my right mind. As a result, I have gained a clear delineation of the two very distinct characters cohabiting my cranium.
The two halves of my brain don’t just perceive and think in different ways at a neurological level, but they demonstrate very different values based upon the types of information they perceive, and thus exhibit very different personalities.
My stroke of insight is that at the core of my right hemisphere consciousness is a character that is directly connected to my feeling of deep inner peace. It is completely committed to the expression of peace, love, joy, and compassion in the world.”
Our two brain characters are in a constant dance of negotiation with each other, both through inter-hemisphere communication as well as inhibition, that is, mechanisms to silence the other in any given process. Ideally, this would create a system of checks and balances, giving us access to the faculties of each hemisphere in an integrated and harmonious way.
However, in his book, The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist makes the compelling argument that Western culture has fostered the left hemisphere’s ways of knowing and doing to such a great degree, that we’ve taken on its unilateral errors as rock-solid reality, with terrible consequences.
My response to McGilchrist’s take is that it seems self-evident: our whole world caters to the dogmas of the left brain untethered from the context and connectedness of the right.
Productivity, the world of work, the idea of “normal”; calendars, schedules, social hierarchies, the measurement of health, wellness, and achievement… all children of the left-brain, designed to compare, analyze, rationalize, reduce and mechanize.
Furthermore, he argues that it’s the right hemisphere that should be running the show, where the left hemisphere should be there in a supportive capacity, yet always in service of the right hemisphere’s aims. But the left hemisphere has hijacked the balance and it — having direct access to complex language — has stolen the narrative, discrediting the right brain’s processes as less-than.
This is how we come to be illiterate of our right hemisphere’s Invisible Friend and their own way of communicating with us.
Indeed, this insight feels especially poignant now, at a time where so many of us are suffering in this historical moment’s multi-crisis. At a time of chaos, fear and uncertainty, we need the right hemisphere’s nexus of connectedness, even though our collective left brain might judge the attempt as frivolous, unsubstantial, or “unattuned to the real world”.
Analytical Overlay
In his remote viewing experience above, Bach tended to want to say “it’s a map of the city” when he saw an image of a complex maze of lines. This is a typical left-hemisphere knee-jerk reflex: to reduce a rich, but “messy” sensory impression to a tidy category or label, versus taking time to articulate the elements of that sensory impression.
In the interview, Bach and Mishlove call this “Intellectual Overlay”. When I first started practicing RV, I quickly learned about this concept too, though it’s more commonly known as “Analytical Overlay” (AOL), so I’ll stick with that name.
This is a well-known artifact of the remote viewing process, which we learn to identify and manage as we progress as viewers.
Earlier I hinted that the playful, charades-like nature of our intuitive flow can “become a bug” versus behaving like a feature. This is the bug.
It’s about how our left hemisphere can get stuck in taking the Invisible Friend literally, rather than symbolically, and thus shortcircuit the RV process.
How it was first explained to me was that, as our psychic senses explore something completely unknown to us, some part of us detects the incoming information and tries to pattern-match it to something more recognizable to us.
We could say this is the left hemisphere wanting to hijack the characteristically slow, tentative process the right hemisphere is engaging in as it relays psychic information.
For the left hemisphere is absolutely not OK with uncertainty. It will confabulate rather than let you stay with “I don’t recognize this”.
In this way, we stop being receptive to the actual psychic signal, and start imposing “what we think it must be” on it — creating noise in the signal instead. We try to “judge” instead of purely and openly “perceiving” — in the language of Jungian cognitive functions.
To illustrate further:
Let’s imagine I was asked to explore the objective XYZ — there’s my neutral string of characters, behaving as a handle that points me to the target.
Unbeknownst to me as yet, XYZ is an ancient tree. In my session, I connect with XYZ as my target and notice in my awareness the color brown and a deeply grooved surface.
My mind, faster than I can blink, offers me an image of a wrinkled, sun-tanned individual.
Having perceived nothing more than the (real) tree trunk’s color and texture, it’s now jumped the gun and eagerly telling me,
“I KNOW WHAT IT IS!!!
It’s brown! It’s furrowed!
It MUST BE an old person with tanned, wrinkled skin!!!”
Or, imagine this scene from the TV show Friends, where Joey stands for our left hemisphere:
This, of course, is how we shortcircuit the process of receiving psychic impressions, by jumping to conclusions.
We all do this whenever we tune in to our intuitive senses.
Heck, we do this constantly during regular ol’ waking awareness, as our “fast thought” — Kahneman’s cognitive “System 1” in Thinking, Fast and Slow— is constantly jumping to quick, yet inaccurate judgments and approximations unless we consciously engage “slow thought”.
While no amount of practice erases that reflex, we can get better at slowing down, recognizing when it’s happening and setting those quick, hyper-certain judgments aside.
Tell-tale signs that we’re likely not in our intuition, but in an analytical overlay, are, in fact, a sense of pushy certainty; or a too-complete, too-fleshed-out narrative.
Intuitive information often makes no sense to the left hemisphere, so a feeling of intellectual certainty should give us pause. The difference between left-hemisphere “certainty” and right-hemisphere “knowing” develops with practice.
Cleansing the Doors
In the interview snippet I shared above, Richard Bach marvels at the “playful part of him” that would make a church out to be a travel agency, complete with a company logo behind the counter — the cross.
Now you know what I think of this part: that we all have it, and that it’s our neglected, non verbal right-brain personality with all its creativity, relational orientation, yes-and-ness (rather than either-or-ness), humor and subtlety.
Before we complete today’s exploration, I want to have a final zoom-in to how brilliant our Invisible Friend is at metaphors and symbols.
Because, exactly, Richard: how cool is it that your mind made a church into a travel agency?
Isn’t there humor and creativity in the parallel?
Doesn’t it actually illuminate something about what a church could, ideally, represent?
Couldn’t we say of religion, at its absolute best, that it “transports us”?
Don’t we often speak of “being on a spiritual journey”?
Your Invisible Friend, if you’ll entertain them, will readily throw similar delightful and insightful metaphors at you. They’ll, quite literally, have you seeing life in a different way.
It’s also true that in the delicate balance of exploring an intuitive signal, we can get derailed by our left hemisphere’s craving for the known — and that can look like taking the metaphor at face value rather than taking time to tease apart what it’s highlighting.
But if we’re aware of leftie’s hijinks, we’re free to play and tap into the unknown with our Friend.
I invite you to make a project of getting to know its storehouse of interesting, multi-layered, and illuminating symbols: your Friend likely uses a symbol-language that is utterly unique to you.
If you remember your dreams, they are already revealing those symbols while you’re dreaming. But you can also reach out by simply getting quiet and asking a question in your mind. Notice what comes, in the spirit of what we’ve explored thus far.
Don’t forget, though, that the right hemisphere does metaphor, but doesn’t do abstract categories, numbers, or complex language.
If we were all just a tiny bit more patient, a little bit more giving with our Invisible Friend, just a smidge more understanding that, truly, symbols are the only way it can tell us things —we might stay with the process long enough to “cleanse the doors of perception”, after all.
