Everyone has it, Rob; on the usual Bell Curve, from duffer to Jeshua-the-Nazarene-carpenter level of genius; but we all have it to some degree. It’s just that we live in a weird, aberrant social order which has specialised for a century or four in denying its very existence. And which, as a result of that blanket denial, indoctrinates and relentlessly trains growing children to regard such things as nonsense, and put them out of mind.
We don’t altogether though: Two examples of what really persists beneath the current Western conventional wisdom about psi:
Dean Radin, Chief Scientist at the Institute Of Noetic Science - IONS - reports that whenever he’s lecturing to a live audience - pretty well always a packed house, btw - and asks for a show of hands for people who have had paranormal experiences - usually quite small, inconsequential incidents - and quietly, without advertising the fact too widely, do indeed believe - or should I say know - that such things are real, he always gets a forest of hands. One of Dean’s recurrent jokes when he relates this fact is that, if he’s addressing an audience of mainly lay people, his hit rate is about 95%; but if it’s an audience of scientists, the rate will be about 97.5%! Even though they all know as a matter of practical priority that it’s iffy to admit such things in scientific circles, and carries a risk of career-death, they still grasp, privately, that it’s real. Direct personal experience, spread over years, will do that to you.
The second instance is that of Hella Hammid. She worked with Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff - two bona-fide, time-served hard-physicists previously working with lasers - who were contracted in the 1970s by the CIA to investigate ‘remote viewing’ aka clairvoyance, for its possible use as a spying tool! Sic! Several years of fully-funded contract work for the CIA to investigate these matters!
In the set up which Russell and Harold set up, one of the hired staff was Hella Hammid. She was doing some line of administrative work for the research team, and - note this! - she affirmed that she had never had any idea that she might have a psychic talent herself; the idea had gone down the memory hole before she was ten years old, and never resurfaced.
Then, at one work session, Pat Price (I think it was), a veteran and known-to-be-gifted psychic, was held up and unable to get in on time. Russ asked if anyone would volunteer to work with him through the psi-induction method which he’d evolved and polished up well by this time. Hella, though protesting her complete lack of the ability, volunteered. And whaddya know: she was brilliant at it! A run of beginner’s luck put her into the star category straight away. And neither she nor anyone else had dreamt it, until she tried!
We all have it, on the Curve. And when actually encouraged to believe that fact, and to develop whatever level of gift we happen to have, the results are often striking, especially over the long term; as my own history of outrageous good luck in this lifetime exemplifies… ‘Coincidence’ magic!
And this practical benefit, to self and to the world around, especially to your nearest and dearest, is available even when your personal psi-gift is only as so-so as mine is.
But you have to clear off your negative childhood indoctrination, and then commit to a dedicated period of work, to develop your own gift to its best polish. I often compare it to a Westerner learning to speak, read and write Mandarin fluently.
Or alternatively, with psi being such an inherently elusive and fundamentally un-tameable thing, you can use a simply-beautiful video on YT as a metaphor for how to coax psi into your daily life. The vid is ‘Touching The Wild’, and it shows the extended campaign by a solitary man living somewhere wild in the US Mid-West, who slowly gains the trust of a herd of wild deer, so that eventually they come to take gifts from his hands, and to have their heads stroked, and to bring their fawns to meet him… The story of Albert Green and Raggedy Ann, the Mule Deer matriarch, is deeply touching; but it’s also an excellent metaphor for the dedication it takes to get on everyday-familiar terms with your own psi gifts:
Never - ever - imagine that practical psi is like Harry Potter: you wave a little stick, and the power of god flows from you hand, compelling reality to obey! Doesn’t work like that; never biddable. Coaxable, sure! And to great advantage for any serious practitioner of white magic. But not tameable. And woe betide anyone foolish enough to attempt black magic; or even to fool around with the grey areas… Remember why we’re here: to help by our actions to lower the entropy of the whole system, aka to grow towards love; like this man with the deer.