How do psychics know they’re talking to a spirit guide and not just their own imagination?

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Oh man this turned into a long one.

At first you can’t know. As time goes on and you continue building a relationship with the entity you eventually go one of two routes. There’s the Buddhist practice of investigating everything, if you start asking hard questions of your spirit guide, then it becomes increasingly difficult for it to prove that it’s actually separate from mind.

So if the psychic is invested in exploring and enjoying the new psychic world that they have worked so hard to enter, generally they won’t start asking hard questions that they really don’t want to know the answers to. Or they’ll ask a few questions and be satisfied with the answers.

But the real answer to this question is strange and interesting. I’ve conclusively determined that a person cannot directly experience anything that is outside of mind. That doesn’t mean you can’t indirectly experience things that are outside of mind. You do, after all, have senses. Nerves react to things in the environment and send signals that wind their way tortuously up to the brain.

The brain is this weird instrument that’s starkly different from other parts of the body. There are a number of barriers in place that keep the unwanted from getting in. Experience itself rests in electrical signals running across the brain, and down the spinal column. It’s not altogether certain where experience ends and the rest of the world begins.

Experience is affected by the nature and character of those electrical signals. Structures in the brain build up and corral and shift the signals, otherwise it would be just a big mess. The brain comes up with its own rules for operation, rules that don’t have to have anything to do with the outside world. This gives us free will and an inner life.

I just went on this wild two-paragraph tangent from the topic of spirit guides because I want to impress upon you just how different that lump of flesh is from, not just the rest of your body, but the rest of the universe. Nothing else we’ve ever discovered is like the brain. We think of it as a black box where thinking happens, but when you actually look at it and have the realization that “it’s all just electrical activity,” well, that’s a profound epiphany.

What sorts of things affect electrical activity? Well, just about anything, including physical objects. Why not spirit guides?

I can say that it takes a lot of effort to learn how to communicate with one. And if you don’t keep the saw sharp, the brain slowly loses the ability, though it’s a bit like riding a bike so once you decide to pick it back up again, it doesn’t take half as long.

The line between imagination and nonphysical entity communication is blurred to the point of nonexistence. Like I said, there’s no possible way to directly have an experience of anything not in your nervous system / brain. All you can do to enforce separation is to decide not to explore that junction. But as you keep doing it, the separation starts to fade all by itself and the spirit guide can just show up in your daily life.

So, how do you contact a spirit guide in a way that feels real? Well, you go deep into trance. Trance harmonizes the brain with the nervous system of the body, and distances the focus of experience from the outside world. There’s a number of tricks you have to learn in order to reduce what I call “body identification.” If one part of your body is giving you trouble, you might tense it up really hard and then suddenly relax it, this will allow the mind to let go of it.

As you go deeper into trance, you’ll discover a small world of body sensations that are just hiding under the surface. A lot of people find that their jaw retains a lot of tension. Latent body tensions are one reason why yoga is considered a spiritual discipline. Torturing the body with calisthenics makes that aspect of the body much easier to ignore when going into trance.

Eventually with your body “distanced,” (you still feel your body but the sensations won’t be identified with as ‘ordinary’ ones) you’ll start having all sorts of sensations and imaginations. This is where the things you’ve read about spirituality start to take root. If you’ve read about spirit guides, one might appear. If your focus was on chakras, those might start presenting themselves to you. You’ll have a number of experiences, and then your mind will naturally start shifting out of the state.

If all of that stuff was “just imagination,” then they’re exceedingly interesting imaginations to have and to try to figure out. Like I said earlier, the Buddhist way is to get very serious about investigating them, they believe this provokes enlightenment. Their understanding is that content, the actual stuff of mind, is an illusion and is nonexistent, and that the mind itself is similarly nonexistent. My own belief is that the Buddhists go too far with their dogma and that the stuff of mind can point to meaning, where things can have permanence despite their illusory and impermanent nature.

So if you ask me, I don’t see any harm in believing your spirit guide is real, note that this sort of thing is problematic if you have a schizoid condition. Just push through to and try to get meaning out of your experiences while you are having them. What sorts of things can you discover about yourself?