Psychic Development

(Zazen music plays in the background, and Rama speaks to the beat of the music.)

Psychic development. What lies on the other side of seeing? How can you know what someone thinks of you, when they’re not there? How can you avoid the traps and pitfalls that others may set up for you, or see opportunities that might not present themselves to your physical mind and body? How do you develop your intuition, so that you can just know what’s true and what isn’t?


Psychic development—with Zen Master Rama.

We live in a world filled with automobiles, highways of the mind, urban disasters, billions of people living on a tiny planet, sharing the diminishing natural resources of the earth. Pollution—air pollution, noise pollution, psychic pollution—it’s getting dark out there.

But it’s always light in the inner worlds. In the inner-dimensional psychic planes, there is no pollution. There’s endless, infinite, awareness.

Beyond mind, beyond time, beyond space, there’s immortal awareness. The universe is a giant mind. Some people have the ability to tap into that mind. We call them psychic. Others don’t. We call them dull. But they have potential.


So sit back and relax for the next 45 minutes or so, and let’s talk about psychic development. How you can escalate your level of awareness with patience, practice and a good sense of humor. What to expect, what to avoid. How to know what you don’t know. Psychic development.

(Zazen music ends.)


So in a world of psychic development, some people come by their psychic development through a kind of inheritance. It has to do with reincarnation, of course. In a prior lifetime, they developed their awareness field by the practice of psychic development exercises, meditation, zazen, things like that. And that state of mind, of course, stayed with them. They are that state of mind. They were born with these psychic sensitivities.



There are two general modes of perception. There are many, but there are two that we see most frequently in this world, and that’s thinking and feeling.

Feeling, not in the sense of the senses—hot, cold, pleasant, unpleasant, pain, pleasure—but feeling in a more intuitive sense. Feeling love from someone, feeling anger from someone, that kind of feeling—a non-sensorial feeling having to do with the emotional body and the psychic body.

Thinking is analysis, perception, measurement, random association. It’s a way of figuring something out. But to be honest, most decisions are not made through analysis.

As you well know, you may think and think and think about buying that new car, asking someone out on a date, trying a new career, working out and using that new play in a football game—but will you really do it? The ultimate point of decision is usually not rational analysis. To be honest, most people make their choices predicated upon a feeling because analysis really isn’t that good a tool. Ultimately, we can do analysis of the stock market, but it’s not going to tell us what the market’s going to do tomorrow.

A lot of people make fine livings by forecasting through analysis, but unless it’s a simple forecast based on logical deduction or induction upon, let’s say, a company’s performance, their net worth, likelihood of the current market—those things you can kind of analyze and make a projection for, or you can make an overall projection of the market due to consumer spending, certain signs and indicators—ultimately, [that] really doesn’t mean a whole lot. Otherwise, everybody could simply figure out what the stock market is going to do and everybody would become wealthy. And that isn’t the way the stock market or anything works.

Then there are those people who get a feeling and if they follow the feeling, they will usually succeed.

Now, there are all kinds of feelings, of course. You can get the wrong feeling. You go to Las Vegas and you get a feeling that number 21 black is going to come up on the roulette table, and it doesn’t. In some cases, the odds are not with you and in some cases they are. Naturally, when you’re playing at Vegas, the odds are heavily against you and you have to be pretty psychic or intuitive to win consistently. But in an even situation, a person who has developed a psychic sensibility will usually come out ahead, depending upon how sensitive they really are, how psychic they are.

The psychic perception, then, is a feeling, as opposed to a thinking. Not a feeling that’s engendered through emotion necessarily. Emotion may accompany the feeling or may be associated with it. But it isn’t really that kind of a feeling. It is not, let’s say, feeling that we’re lucky or feeling that we’re happy because emotion will color psychic perception. It will interfere with it.

Psychic perception does not come through the thinking mind, nor does it come through the emotional body or emotional feelings.

It comes from the psychic plane of intuition, which is another stage of our mind. It’s another avenue within mind and to reach into that avenue, a stillness has to be developed and cultivated because the impressions from the psychic plane, which is a plane of direct and immediate seeing or intuitive perception, are clouded over by emotions and thoughts and the general dullness and malaise that develops in our contemporary world through the lifestyle, population density, pollution and cultural and social conditioning that most individuals experience in the modern era.

It is very, very difficult to hear a radio station that might have wonderful music if there are two larger stations next to it on either side of it on the dial. They are blaring out music that you don’t like. The signal can be lost in the disturbance.

So within you there is a continuous signal. A continuous perception is taking place deep within the mind. But it’s hard to hear that signal because it is blurred over by your own thoughts, your desires, your fears. It is blurred over by your emotional swings. And as you live in this world, unless you live a very different type of life, you lose your sensitivity. You become dull.

Sensitivity can be regained by leading your life differently. People who are involved in psychic development, in Zen, in what I loosely call self-discovery, lead different types of lives. The lives they lead are not necessarily the lives of renunciation. You are not living up in the hills and trying to get away from everybody. It could be in the urban metro plane, with active careers and families and all that sort of stuff. Rather, it’s a structuring of the elements of your life in a particular way, for a particular purpose—a structuring or restructuring, a continual restructuring of your mind that enables you to develop and cultivate the feelings that come from the psyche, hear them, act upon them, benefit from them.

Psychic perception is a much more efficient and accurate method of seeing and knowing reality.

You may suppose that there’s someone outside your door. They haven’t knocked. You could think, “Gee, there’s somebody outside my door,” but you don’t know. You can’t tell from within the house, unless you go over to the door and open it and see who’s there. You can analyze and think, “Well gee, logically maybe someone will be arriving, maybe someone won’t be arriving,” but your analysis won’t tell you anything until you have the observable fact. You may go and open the door, and there’s somebody there whom you don’t want to see, and by opening the door you now have to deal with them. If you are psychic, you can tell that they’re coming. You’ll know. You don’t need physical information. And you can avoid that individual if you choose to.

If you’re psychic, you can see into the minds of others, and you can use that opening to aid somebody. Sometimes someone’s trying to tell you something and they don’t even know what it is. If you’re psychic you can perceive that, and know. Someone may love you and they can’t show it. Someone may seek to harm you and they mask it.

If you are dependent upon your ability to deduce information logically through direct observation, through the senses, you can be fooled.

The car looks like a good car when you buy it. But then, after driving it from the dealers, it breaks down—nothing but problems. If you had been psychic, you would have been able to touch the car, look at it, feel it and know that it was a lemon, it was a turkey. You would know that the job that you’re applying for is not the right job for you. It might look good, the offer might sound great, but in some way it’s going to cause more problems. It’s going to drop your energy level. It’s not going to work out—the company is going to fold, the pressure on the job will cause you to be too stressful, whatever it is.

Being psychic does not necessarily mean seeing the future. Some people have visions of the future. They apprehend that something is going to take place. Great. But that really is not the larger part of being psychic. Being psychic doesn’t necessarily mean seeing an event that has not yet occurred, per se.

It’s rather seeing the inner nature of something. In other words, I don’t want you to get involved with the world of psychic development so you can be another Nostradamus and forecast the future. You may have that ability. Great. But what good is that ability ultimately going to do you? It’s not going to change anything.

You see that there’s going to be an atomic war in 1999. Fantastic. Now that’s not going to change anything. You might be able to move out of the path of the missiles. That might be of some use, yes. But it’s not going to stop the war because if you see it and that’s the future, then what can you do about it? It might be helpful a little bit, but by and large, you know and I know, if there’s a massive atomic war, it’s not going to matter where you are. Also, it’s hard to do that, by the way.

Just read the predictions of psychics in your local, national, whatever it is, newspaper, and you’ll realize that most of them don’t do too well. They did an interesting study at a university. They had the freshmen class make the same number of predictions that some of the well-known psychics do every year, and they found that the freshmen class did better.

If you figure out all the predictions that most psychics make, you know once in a while they will hit one and you will hear about it, but they probably miss nine out of ten. That doesn’t mean that it was random chance that they saw the one that came true. They really did see it. But what I’m saying is—it’s very hard to perceive the future on a regular basis simply because the future changes.

There are probabilities and a person who is psychic is following a line of probability to see a probable future, and that probable future occasionally becomes the actual future. But it can change. They can see something that was a probable future, but another causal fact will interfere and that future won’t happen. In other words, it’s risky business.

Being psychic, then, does not really involve, by and large, seeing the future. In the popular mind, that’s what the psychic is all about, but being psychic means rather simply seeing and perceiving things as they are. The car is a lemon, it’s a dud, OK, and it’s going to have all kinds of problems. You don’t have to see the future to see those events occurring. The car is already a lemon, meaning it wasn’t constructed properly. When you use your physical eyes and you look at the car, you can’t see that because you are just seeing the shiny polished exterior. If you’re psychic it means you’re using another part of your mind to look at the car. You are not seeing its future. You are seeing right now. Right now, you can see that the welds weren’t done properly. You can see that the valves aren’t running well. You can see and therefore forecast that information, based upon the way things really are, that the car is definitely going to have problems. Therefore, you don’t buy it.

So the psychic ability is really not so much to do with forecasting futures, but seeing things as they are now. Seeing beyond the surface—that’s psychic.

There are all kinds of psychic arts. Healing, OK, and da-da-da-da-da-da. You know, it goes on and on.

But today we’re looking specifically at how to develop the ability to see things as they really are. This is a very handy ability to have. There are plateaus of awareness, planes of consciousness, worlds. There is the physical world that we live in, which we perceive through the senses, but there are other worlds.

Right in front of you there are other worlds right now. Most people can’t see them. Those worlds are as real, if you will, as the physical world that you normally perceive with your day-to-day awareness.

There are occult worlds, psychic worlds. All kinds. We have different names for them.

The psychic world, or psychic plane, is a dimension. It is a dimensional plane that you can gain access to, and it’s a dimension of feeling and clear seeing. As I indicated before, the hindrances to being psychic are a general dullness that develops from living in the material world—and being a material girl—or one’s own thoughts and emotions that are uncontrolled.

The way to change that—and develop your psychic ability—is by learning to create a shield between yourself and the sensorial and vibratory bombardment that we experience in our modern world, and also to be able to create a sense of discipline, togetherness, energy and power—a precision within the mind; control of the emotions.

By control of the emotions, I simply mean not letting your moods take you wherever they will, but rather a sense of being the helmsman. You are directing your ship. The winds may be blowing south, east, north, or west. But you are directing the ship. You are not just letting those winds blow you wherever they will. You are directing your sails and your rudder so that you don’t capsize; you don’t just get blown all over. You get where you’re going. Most people don’t do this. The winds of life blow them where they will.

Psychic development, in other words, is not a fanatical, freaky study which has to do with just predicting the future and talking to UFOs and being able to find out curious facts that are basically irrelevant to one’s time in life. That may be the popular view of psychic development. I’m suggesting this certainly isn’t the Zen view. It is not the view of advanced self-discovery.

Psychic development is a very important and necessary skill in leading a successful and happy life because your intellectual processes, inductive and deductive logic and other forms of logical analysis, and your senses—seeing, feeling, tasting, touching and smelling—don’t give you enough information to be able to tell the real from the unreal—the “what’s going on?” with your day-to-day life.

If you knew that a friend of yours had cancer, you can advise them to go to the doctor. There may not yet be a visible sign. Maybe they’ll have a check-up, the doctor will find it. If you waited for a visible sign, it might be too late.

If you knew that there are those around you who are engaged in psychic manipulation, using the power of mind to invade your mental privacy, to drain your energy, to interfere with your life, to cause you not to succeed—if you’re psychic, you can perceive that, and you see that the smiling faces aren’t smiling at all, inside. And you can eliminate those individuals from your life and cancel their effect.

If you’re psychic, you’ll know that there’s a certain area that you can move to, in a city, in a country, on the earth, that will empower you, and there are certain areas that can drain. You can see those differences. You can feel them.

If you are psychic, you will know the proper career to follow that will empower you. You will know, or be drawn to, people whom you will benefit from and whom you will benefit.

If you’re psychic, you will become much more aware of the beauty of life.

Psychic perception doesn’t simply mean seeing something always in a de facto, this-is-how-it-is sense. If you’re psychic, when you look at a rose, you will see and feel the essence of the rose in a way that a person who simply looks at it with their eyes and touches it with their fingers will never know.

Most people are blind. Just as the blind person can’t see a rose, they can only touch it, and you can see all its wondrous colors and formations—so the psychic person lives in a world of blind people.

That is really how it appears.

There are all these people running all over the planet, totally deluded beings, who don’t “see” what life is for, what their own lives are about, because they don’t see psychically. Therefore, they miss most of the beauty of life.

The psychic awareness lends a true perception not only of events—whether the car is a good one or not, whether the job is good or not, what the person thinks of you—but just of life itself. It is its own raison d’etre.

In other words, you can just see the beauty of everything, which is really there, but most people miss it because they’re so clouded by their thoughts and emotions and their conditioning.

They get you when you’re young. It’s true. When you’re young, when you’re a kid, you are conditioned. You are taught language, customs, right and wrong. You are filled with fears. You are taught to appreciate certain things, to avoid other things. And this conditioning, this mental conditioning, interferes with your psychic perception. If, instead, you were taught how to develop your psyche, you would come to know the things you should avoid by feeling them, and the things that you should be drawn to.

The teaching that we receive is not necessarily very accurate. By that I mean the value systems that our cultures have developed are not very open. They are very restrictive. We live in an age that is not enlightened. Crime rate, wars and so on, indicate that this species on this planet is not very enlightened. So there are all kinds of practical advantages to developing your psychic perceptions. And then there are some that aren’t practical, in the sense of day-to-day success, but rather they’re more personal.

When you live in the psychic state of mind, you’re happy. You don’t have to do anything. Think of it this way. Right now, you’re on the earth. Let’s say there’s a lot of cloud cover, it’s not sunny, it’s gray, you’re depressed. The clouds may come in for a long time. But if you get in an airplane and you zip above the clouds, everything is sunny and wonderful. Unrestricted visibility. The clouds are the desires and thought forms and conditioning, the dullness that develops by leading the type of life that most people here lead. They live in these clouds all the time. Beyond the clouds, there is a psychic dimension, and when you go beyond the clouds it’s always sunny. It is always beautiful.

Life is always beautiful, but we don’t see it when we enter into lower states of mind that are, in effect, cloudy. Our perceptions aren’t clear, or let us say, not accurate.

How do you develop your psychic abilities? Well, to begin with, naturally, you have to want to and believe that it’s possible. Now, I assume that you want to and believe it’s possible, otherwise you would not have acquired this tape. So you fulfilled the first two requirements.

As I suggested, there are really just two steps, or perhaps three, in psychic development.

So let’s consider these three conditions, and they’re all obviously completely interrelated.

First and foremost, it’s important to build a shield between yourself and the world. The way you do this is by allowing yourself a kind of a buffer or cushion in which to grow. If we have a little tiny plant and we want it to develop, we put it in a greenhouse. There the little plant will perk along and grow and be real happy. If we were to put it outside in a windy world with harsh elements, the little plant might not develop. It might croak. It might die. Eventually the plant will become really strong, and then maybe we can transplant it outdoors.

There’s something very fragile about the beginning stages of psychic development. Eventually, one becomes very strong, and the cushioning isn’t as necessary. It is still logical because we live in an abrasive world. We don’t live forever. We have limited personal power. We have limited energy. We have a limited life.

And you can’t use your energy for all things. You have to determine those things that you direct your energy towards, otherwise you get yourself in too many places and nothing succeeds.

Life wears us down. We all die here.

Depending upon the way you expose yourself to energies and powers and forces, both physical and non-physical in this world, you will determine whether you have a lot of energy or you lose energy. Some places drain you. Some people drain you. Some enhance you. Some situations will empower you. Some will take your power away.

It is necessary, rather than just kind of arbitrarily bouncing around in the world and letting whatever happen may, to start to pick and choose among the numerous opportunities that life affords you.

The overall purpose, which is kind of understood, is that you wish to develop your psychic ability. With that as a forethought it will now be easier for you to make choices because that will be the point of decision. Will this job hinder my psychic development or help it? Not simply, is it a pleasant job? Does it give me immediate satisfaction? Will this relationship hinder or help my psychic development? Will this practice? Will this pleasure? Whatever it is. That is the cutting edge that you use in psychic development.

Naturally, you practice psychic development when you make that analysis because you have to feel, since things are not always apparent, whether it will or not.

Just that is the practice, you see?

Doing that every day, with every situation, not in a real intellectual way, not sweating over it, worrying—that will only drain your power and energy—but just feeling from moment to moment what you should do, and doing it.

Again, this feeling is the sensitivity that you will develop in time, and I think it’s always wise, particularly in the beginning, to balance your new intuitive and psychic understandings with good old common sense. The two should not be different. A good psychic perception follows your common sense. So I wouldn’t launch on your career of psychic perception and start to make a lot of random choices based upon your new-found psychic abilities, without first subjecting them to the analysis of common sense. Some day you might become very, very psychic and very sensitive, and you don’t have to bother. But in the beginning, common sense should, in a very premeditated way, arbitrate your psychic perceptions.

Suddenly you have a psychic perception to quit your job and move to India. That might not be a psychic perception. You might be getting carried away. It might be a faulty perception. Then common sense says, you don’t have enough money, you need the job, you don’t know what India is like, and so you decide not to do it. This might be smart. If your psychic seeing was very developed and you practiced it for years and found that, through a trial and error process, you could now determine what is a psychic intuition and what is psychic garbage, then sure, if you get the feeling, do it. But I suggest caution, because you can’t tell.

Don’t listen to voices, don’t listen to voices!

If you hear voices talking to you, forget it. Disregard the information, even if it’s right occasionally. You are dealing with non-physical forces that are trying to influence you, that come from outside of yourself, and who knows what they will have to say and why.

For the same reason, I suggest that you do not get involved in what I would call channeling, tapping into spirits that are not physically present and all this stuff. Your own psyche, your own mind, has the ability to properly reflect and determine through feeling what is correct and what is not.

You don’t need anybody to tell you what’s right or wrong. What you do need, perhaps, is someone to show you how to come to those understandings, which come from meditating, learning to be more aware, overcoming mental conditioning and cultural conditioning, learning how to do systems analysis of your energy and these sorts of things—the arts of Zen and self-discovery —which will enable you to unfold that psychic ability.

Again, from my point of view, the psychic does not have much to do with channeling, spirits and things like this. All you’re doing is getting information from a source which may or may not be accurate and which may or may not have underlying motives for your harm or perhaps for your good will. But it seems to me, when you can do something yourself, it’s better to do it yourself.

In the psychic process, we’re not trying to bring others through our minds.

We are trying to eliminate everyone else from our minds—their effects, their energies and their influences. We are going to do a house cleaning and get everybody out of the house, so we’re there by ourselves, so we can see what’s what and feel what’s what, without influence of others. “To thine own self be true and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst be false to any man.” Shakespeare—he knew.

It is necessary to come to a sense of inner truth, and no one can do this for you. I can’t do it for you, your friends, your family, spirits, forces. We like to pass the buck and have somebody else take responsibility, but that doesn’t solve the problem.

You need to develop your psychic ability so that you can tell what’s what, what’s real, what’s not, what’s helpful and what’s harmful. It is a fun process, actually.

Going to a psychic isn’t necessarily going to help you. It might. Again, there are people with psychic abilities, and you might be in a jam and your mind is very confused and you can’t see what’s what. That person might give you a helpful insight, but then again, they might not. If you get a good psychic, you’ll get a good insight. Still, that will only help you for the moment. Tomorrow you will need another insight, and you don’t want to become addicted to using a psychic. You want to become a psychic yourself .

That is why I suggest that you take the time and devote the energy to developing your own mind, and then you will be able to do whatever you need to do. That’s the way of Zen. The way of Zen is to become independent and strong, and not to rely on others for our own perceptions of our life or truth, but to do it individually. And to go to a teacher of Zen to learn how to do that, not to get answers for individual life situations, but rather to learn how we do that. Then, once you can do it, you’re all set. You are on your own and you go lead your life, whereas, in some traditions, there seems to be a sense of reliance on someone else.

Zen is very closely allied with Emersonian self-reliance in that sense. Anyone who practices Zen for some time, if they practice it properly, will gradually develop their psychic sensibilities. Some people may develop those sensibilities more, some less—it depends on many different factors. But anyone who meditates for a period of time will gradually become more sensitized to all of life.

It is important, then, to build that buffer around yourself. You need to start to think about your life and the way you lead it. Ask yourself, “Does your household create a feeling of beauty and sensitivity?” [Does it give you] what you need? You are trying to become sensitive. If it doesn’t, redecorate it, move to another location.

Do the people you associate with engender that sensitivity? Are they harsh and abrasive and generally unaware? Start to associate with people who are more aware. Meet them. Take a yoga class, study different forms of self-discovery, whatever. You will meet people who are drawn to those things. Some people are crazy and fanatical—avoid them. They won’t help. But people who are more balanced and calm and introspective, associating with them will raise your energy level.

Physical disciplines are very helpful—studying martial arts, dance, running and things like that. As you gain more discipline over your body, you will find that a corollary discipline will develop in the mind because the two really go together. Those of you who are already adept at some disciplines of the body will find that the study of Zen and meditation will give you much more control than you now have. You will be able to take your art to higher levels.

Naturally, the practice of zazen meditation is paramount to this development of the psyche and the restructuring of one’s energy [as well as] doing an energy analysis—topics which are endlessly involved in fun, and which I certainly can’t go through entirely here. I’ve developed tapes on those subjects.

Meditating everyday is essential. If you meditate every day and learn to control and stop your thoughts, you’ll become psychic. It’s that simple.

If you start to give more thought to the world around you and stop exposing yourself to situations which drain your energy, and instead do things for yourself that make you feel better—make your body feel better and your mind feel better—you will discover through a trial and error process that you will have more energy.

Then you need to begin the third part. You are meditating every day now. You are looking at things and not just doing them, but you’re asking yourself, “Is this beneficial? Is this helpful to my sensitivity and my awareness, or am I just wearing myself out?” Great.

Then you have to learn to control your emotions, to be able to glide through them. Again, meditation will help you here and particularly concentration exercises. By practicing concentration exercises and meditation, zazen, you will find that you will gain the ability, when strong emotions strike, to not be swayed by them.

If suddenly you get depressed, it doesn’t have to throw you or change your course of action. You won’t necessarily give up. You can push those emotions aside eventually, or you can cultivate happy emotions or become emotionless at times when you need to be very, very sensitive. You need to develop a quiet mind and a happy life. You need to shield yourself from the bombardment of the world at some times. And then, at other times, you go right out in the middle of it and have a great time with it and be unaffected by it, in the same way that you learned to be unaffected by emotions.

You don’t want to become so sensitive that you can’t interact with people in the world. If you get to that point, you are not practicing psychic development. You are running away from the world, and you’ve made yourself weak.

Psychic development makes you strong.

It develops a common sense attitude in which you don’t expose yourself to forces and people and situations that would drain you, not because you’re afraid, but because you’re smart. Why waste your time being around people who drag you down? You don’t live forever, at least in this life.

So practice meditation, concentration exercises, and begin to think more about regaining your sensitivity by avoiding draining situations. Not because of fear but because of intelligence.

Try to be still inside. Learn to quiet and stop thought, and you will find that you will be able to develop your mind. Your psychic intuition will start to come about, and [you should] practice it. In every situation, feel before acting, just for a second.

Look for a feeling, and you’ll learn through a trial and error process when it worked and when it didn’t.

You will feel it’s a good car and you’ll buy it, and it won’t be. Then you know that that wasn’t the right feeling. You will feel that this could be a good person to know and it will work out well, and that was the right feeling. Eventually you’ll learn to isolate that feeling, through practice. That is how you become psychic—through practice.

(Zazen music begins.)

Music is largely psychic. It’s a feeling. It is not logical. It’s a feeling. Art, life, why we live—feelings.

As you evolve and develop your psychic abilities, you will enter into perceptions of life, truth, beauty, and you will gain a power—a power to live your life in an intelligent, perceptive and strong way.

You will gain the competitive edge in daily life.

So this is Zen Master Rama, encouraging you to develop your psyche, to become more aware, to become more sensitive to life, to become strong. And to figure out whether that’s a good car to buy or not, whether that’s a good gal or guy to be with or not, and to open up the higher dimensional planes so you can penetrate the mysteries of existence and enjoy the wonder of being—the wonder of being—you!

The wonder of being you. Have fun with it.