Clairvoyance is the apparent ability to gain information about an object, location or physical event through means other than the known human senses. It is considered to be a form of extrasensory perception.

Current thinking among proponents of clairvoyance suggests that most people are born with clairvoyant abilities but then start to subliminate them as their childhood training compels them to adhere to acceptable social norms. Numerous institutes offer training courses that attempt to revive the clairvoyant abilities present in those early years.

Precognition denotes a form of extrasensory perception where a person is said to perceive information about places or events through paranormal means before they happen. A related term, presentiment, refers to information about future events which is said to be perceived as emotions. These terms are considered by some to be special cases of the more general term clairvoyance.

Those skeptical of the existence of precognition believe that the human memory naturally has a tendency to remember coincidences more often than other non-coincidences and thus individuals tend to remember more frequently when they were correct about a future event and forget the instances when they were wrong.

J. W. Dunne, a British aeronautics engineer, undertook the first systematic study of precognition in the early twentieth century. In 1927, he published the classic An Experiment with Time, which contained his findings and theories. Dunne’s study was based on his own precognitive dreams, which involved both trivial incidents in his own life and major news events appearing in the press the day after the dream.

When first realizing that he was seeing the future in his dreams, Dunne worried that he was a freak. His worries soon eased when he discovered that precognitive dreams are common. He concluded that many people have them without realizing it, perhaps because they do not recall the details or fail to properly interpret the dream symbols.

The existence of precognition is disputed by skeptics who believe that there is a lack of scientific evidence supporting the existence of precognition and who contend that examples of what are commonly thought to be precognition can be explained naturally without evoking supernatural abilities. Skeptics point to the fact that the human memory has a tendency to selectively recall coincidences and forget all of the other examples.

Examples include thinking of a specific individual right before the individual thought of calls on the phone. Human memory has a tendency to remember the instances where the individual thought of calls and forget the instances where the individual calls when not thought of just prior to calling. This is an example of selection bias and skeptics assert that examples of precognition are better explained using psychology and natural human tendencies opposed to supernatural or paranormal powers.

According to many Taoist related practices, abilities such as clairvoyance and many other abilities are by-products of spiritual awakening and the realization of divine consciousness. Buddhist teaching says such powers may arise in someone who has developed high states of mental concentration, but such powers are in no way seen to be a prerequisite to enlightenment. In fact, they can act an obstacle in that they may divert the practitioner from the goal.

Integral to spiritual and mind expansion is breathwork and meditation. By expanding lung capacity and learning to use the lungs to direct energy around the body and open the subtle energy channels we also naturally expand the mind and refine consciousness. This is how these seemingly miraculous powers develop, though they are not truly miraculous. They are considered to be latent abilities that everyone possesses but need waking up.

Claims for the existence of paranormal psychic abilities such as clairvoyance are highly controversial. Parapsychology explores this possibility, but the existence of such paranormal phenomena is not accepted by the scientific community outside parapsychology.