When a voice in your head tells you what to do, the first thing to figure out is whose voice it is.
Clairaudience means getting information by hearing it, sometimes as real sound and sometimes as a voice or a song you hear inside your head. Every channeled message I post has a "Clairaudience (Earworm)" section with the songs that came through, so I think about this a lot. And every tradition I've read that works with voices has a rule about whose voice is speaking and who's in charge while it speaks.
What did the Siberian shamans say about this?
The religious historian Mircea Eliade, in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, retold a nineteenth-century account by the ethnographer Wilhelm Radlov of a séance in the Altai, in Siberia. The shaman was there to guide the soul of a woman who had died forty days earlier. He circled the yurt beating his drum, went to the fire, and called to her. "Suddenly the shaman's voice changes; he begins to speak on a high pitch, in falsetto, for it is really the dead woman who is speaking." For him, the voice is somebody else's, and he gets out of the way.
What about modern mediums?
Suzanne Giesemann is a retired Navy commander who started meditating, and then connecting with the dead, after her stepdaughter Susan, a Marine sergeant, was killed by lightning. She studied at the Arthur Findlay College, a school for mediums in Stansted, Essex, in England. She has written for The Monroe Institute too, a December 2017 piece in its Journeys newsletter called "Evidential Mediumship: Receiving Verifiable Evidence."
In a 2019 online course for The Shift Network, Answering the Sacred Call of Mediumship, she told students that when a spirit fully blends with a medium, "you take on that spirit's wording, phrasing, accent," though she said that isn't the norm. And she warned them: "When we say that the spirit took over us, that gives the impression that we have no control. I want you all to realize, you always are in control." In the same course she said that when she first started, "I felt like I was pulling data out of the air," and that a sitter thinking hard about her late husband could let a medium "pick up things about him, how he passed, what kind of work he did, without him actually having stepped in." In other words, the medium could be reading the living person instead of hearing the dead one, which is the same question I'm asking you to ask.
Has anybody tested where the sense of someone else being there comes from?
Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Ontario, is best known for the God Helmet, a helmet he and Stanley Koren built to put magnetic fields on the temporal lobes. Persinger says at least 80 percent of his subjects have felt a "sensed presence" in it. In a study published in 2005, a Swedish team couldn't reproduce that with a similar helmet and put his results down to "suggestibility," according to Atlas Obscura. Persinger answered that the Swedish team hadn't attempted a faithful replication.
So where does the 80 percent come from? I went looking for the first place it shows up. The earliest I can find is the BBC's Horizon program "God on the Brain," which aired April 17, 2003, and whose program page says "80% of participants reported feeling something when the magnetic fields were applied." He was still giving the number in 2006, when a University of Toronto student paper quoted him saying that "about 80 per cent of subjects experienced a sensed presence," and the journalist Barbara Bradley Hagerty, in her 2009 book Fingerprints of God, wrote that "Persinger claimed that fully 80 percent of the 2,000 or so subjects who have donned the God helmet report feeling a sensed presence." A 2006 paper by Persinger and Linda St-Pierre gets cited for the figure.
Persinger's work turns up in the CIA's files, too. The agency's released remote-viewing collection includes a paper by Schaut and Persinger on geomagnetic activity and spontaneous telepathic, precognitive, and postmortem experiences.
In 1994, Persinger and C.P.L. Johnson tested a Hemi-Sync tape against his magnetic fields. Hemi-Sync is the Monroe Institute's binaural-beat audio, which plays a slightly different tone in each ear, and the paper thanks The Monroe Institute for its contribution to this research. Thirty university men each went into an acoustic chamber, one at a time, and got one of three treatments, about 20 to 30 minutes long: a Hemi-Sync tape, a sound-and-light program called The Mind's Eye, or Persinger's magnetic fields. The men on the Hemi-Sync tape "reported more intense sensed presences and ego-alien intrusions than did the other two groups." Ego-alien means the experience felt like it came from someone other than you. In a second experiment with eighteen university women, the ones on the tape reported a more intense sense of presence than the ones under the magnetic fields. Persinger's explanation is that the presence is your own right hemisphere intruding on the left, and he predicted that in a church or mosque people would call it "a visitation by a spirit or by a god," and alone late at night, "evil spirits, demons, or (the more contemporary variant) alien abductors."
Who else has worked with voices in the head?
Monroe did, and on purpose. The 1988 instruction booklet for his Human Plus tapes, called H-PLUS, tells you to keep the sound so soft "that you can just barely hear and understand the voice, but no louder," and to "Tune the left-right volume so the voice sounds exactly in the middle of your head." His nephew, Robert Emmett Monroe, told the Institute's 24th Professional Seminar that Bob's voice on the tapes was "a sort of carrier wave for a way of being" that "can be caught by the listener, and resonated with, until one is in a similar place."
The Institute's own channeling sessions asked whose voice it was from the other side. On April 23, 1985, in session 62 of the sessions with a group the transcripts call the Friends, the researchers asked, "Anything we can do to gain complete consent?" The summary of the answer reads, "Voice vibrations of the vocal cords that we will set up will help us gain control," and it says the channel "must step completely aside."
Is there technology that can do this or make it seem that way?
A U.S. Army thesaurus entry, last reviewed in 2004 and preserved by the Federation of American Scientists, defines "voice to skull devices" as a "Nonlethal weapon which includes (1) a neuro-electromagnetic device" that sends sound into a person's skull with pulse-modulated microwaves. Voices and subliminal messages are among the sounds it lists. The science goes back to 1962, when Allan Frey reported in the Journal of Applied Physiology that people could hear pulsed microwave energy. Elana Freeland, in her 2018 book Under an Ionized Sky, writes about "the brain-computer interface (BCI) known as voice-to-skull (V2K) or synthetic telepathy."
How do you tell whose voice it is?
Next time a voice in your head tells you something about yourself, write down the exact words. Then listen for whose "wording, phrasing, accent" it has, the three things Giesemann says a medium picks up from a spirit. If you can hear who used to say it to you, it isn't yours.
Before you act on anything the voice told you, wait one day. Giesemann tells her students "you always are in control," and waiting a day is the easiest way I know to remind yourself of that.
In 2022, I wrote that the way out of people-pleasing is to embrace your independence, "being beholden to no one else's opinion of who you should be but only who you are currently and who you most want to be when you listen truthfully to your own inner voice." That's the voice you're listening for.
What do you think Persinger's subjects were feeling on that Hemi-Sync tape, their own brain or someone else? Tell me your theory in the comments.
Telling your own inner voice apart from the others takes practice. I run that practice live on Zoom in Starfire Signals, next on Monday, November 30, 8 PM to 10 PM Eastern. You lie back with the Hemi-Sync audio on, your body goes quiet, and you write down what comes through while it's still fresh.
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