The most important capabilities in laying ghosts are whatever best facilitate communication with spirits to better understand the causes of their obsession. Cultivating competency in the ability to perceive, see, hear, or receive spirits' emotive impressions are all pertinent to resolving a sciomantic investigation. People can be too ready to believe that these skills must be entirely innate or revealed due to the advent of extreme circumstances, such as loss or trauma. The truth is that while in some people an aptitude or talent may be inherent, it is possible for anyone to develop a working efficiency through the diligent and continuous practice of certain simple exercises.

Hearing
The first ability you should develop is hearing the voice of spirits. Sciomantic investigation demands a knowledge of the attachment underlying the obsession disturbing a location. The ability to hear spirits is an invaluable faculty in an investigation that is more immediate and dependable than capturing recorded electronic voice phenomena or using other voice tools. It opens a direct avenue of communication, therefore potentially expediting an explanation as to the cause of the spirit crisis.

Sensing
Cultivating the ability to sense a spirit's presence is the next faculty you should develop. A sciomantic incident is rarely static; the spirit is constantly moving around, either unaware of the commotions of the living or in hope to either avoid or confront whomever is seeking them. The reliance on devices and instruments to capture spirit activity in modern paranormal investigation often means investigators learn of any phenomenon after it has already occurred. Developing the skill to confidently sense the presence of a spirit in real time allows you to act immediately and dynamically. Additionally, the ability to sense anomalies in a subtle environment is invaluable. Most people naturally have this sense, so it is only a matter of learning to discern the differences and know when a spirit is present or if there is another type of anomaly.

Psychism
Another useful skill is what has become known as psychism, the ability to receive impressions from a spirit, person, item, or environment. You may receive these impressions in any number of ways, such as through mental pictures, emotional empathy, touching relevant items (psychometry) or in dreams (oneiromancy).

These extra sensory impressions can be incredibly pertinent during an investigation, providing connections in logic between disparate pieces of evidence. However, be mindful that psychic impressions very often need a level of interpretation and are therefore open to potential errors.

Seeing
We are not discussing the ability to see a spirit in a physical sense but rather to perceive it in detail in the mind and to be certain it is authentic. Pursuing the capacity to effectively see or perceive a spirit will allow you to access critical information that otherwise may remain undiscovered. The spirit's clothing or hairstyle can often indicate the period in which the entity lived, and a description of the facial features might lead to a confirmation of identity when compared to a photograph or video uncovered through research. The spirit may also attempt to communicate through gestures or behaviors once they realize you can see them.

A Technique to Build Subtle Senses
There are a variety of resources available that can help you develop your subtle abilities. We have found the exercise included here to be the most reliable because it makes proper use of three fundamental skills: discrimination, the imaginatrix, and passive perception, all to teach you how to tell with certainty when an insight has been received from an external source.

Discrimination
The faculty fostered in this exercise and necessary for its skillful application is discrimination. As they are perceived, the physical and the spiritual interweave to never separate. Every preternatural aptitude is only an extension of a natural and familiar faculty. What we imagine seems real to our senses. Learning to differentiate with certainty whether a message or communication is truly external and not a creation of our own making is critical to success as a sciomancer.

Imaginatrix
Those who train to develop magical skills will be familiar with the process of visualizing and projecting tangible conceptualizations. However, hearing, seeing, or feeling the presence of spirits are purely passive proficiencies, which is to say you must remain receptive to the influences and communications exerted by an outside source. This understanding is critical in cultivating these faculties as it is counter-intuitive to try to mentally project outward to make spiritual contact.

Part of the exercise focuses on recognizing the feeling of projecting an internally constructed idea. Through discrimination, knowing what the experience of projection feels like allows you to recognize when you are receiving an external stimulus that would otherwise be difficult to quantify. Essentially, if it feels like a projection, it is self-created; if it is an experience originating from outside of the magician's mind, it should feel foreign.

Passive Reception
Nurturing passive skills can be difficult because our minds want to work at filtering and arranging information, therefore trying to remain entirely receptive is all but impossible. One technique is to give the mind a task to concentrate on. Keeping the intellectual mind busy will allow passive acceptance of external communication. In the following exercise, we encourage you to intensively focus on the region of the body that will serve as the point of reception to occupy the mind—that is, your ears for hearing, eyes for seeing, and solar plexus for feeling spirits.

This focus will activate your physical faculties and repurpose them to a more subtle function, creating a tangible experience out of a usually intangible stimulus. Training yourself to trust that an external stimulus is working upon your passive faculties (sight, hearing, or feeling) is the fundamental goal of engaging in the exercises that develop these capabilities. It can be otherwise difficult to acquire these skills, as the intellect always wants to qualify and quantify an experience. Conversely, if the desire to achieve communication is too great, the imagination can express itself too freely. Prudent experimentation and earnest, healthy criticism are imperative in attempting to cultivate passive faculties. Seek to evolve trust in your own abilities through the experiences you accrue in a diligent and continuous application of relevant training.

Exercise: Honing Your Senses
The method described here is to build clairaudience, but you can apply the same principles to develop the ability to see and feel spirits. Practice is required to complete each step.

Step 1. Imagination

• Verify what it feels like to project a sound from your own imagination.
• Choose a distinct sound which is memorable and repetitive, such as a ringtone. Replay the sound in your head over and over until it is completely familiar.
• Put all your focus on the inner ear, choose left or right. Replay the sound, imagining that you are hearing it with your chosen ear.
• Continually practice until you are hearing the sound in your ear.
• Commit the sensation to memory and practice regularly.

Step 2. Passive Reception

• Next, learn to open your mind to perceive sounds without pre-judgement.
• Relax in the quiet hours of night or while meditating. Lightly focus on the same inner ear and open your mind to receive sounds.
• At first there may be nothing or you might experience ringing or discomfort. In time you may start to experience voices and sounds.
• Simply observe; do not discern between real and imagined or ask questions. Try not to become overwhelmed or to pay attention to any particular voices.

Step 3: Discrimination

• Finally, practice identifying voices and learn to listen at will.
• Start trying to focus on a single trusted voice, such as an ancestor or guide. Experiment by asking a question and listening for a response.
• Apply the skill learned in step 1 to eliminate projections of the mind. It may take many consistent attempts and practice to fine tune this ability.

The perception of spirits should always be approached with an element of ars remissionis. By developing a formula for receiving communication from a spirit, we can extend a bridge that can be withdrawn when the interaction is complete. Without such a method, a person who has natural ability will suffer from intrusive thoughts and overwhelming emotion when a spirit tries to impress their message upon them.

Excerpted from Unquiet Voices, by Rob and Nonie Douglas.