When I worked with Doreen Virtue, she talked a lot about the four 'clairs' - clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience and claircognizance. Even then, ten years ago when I edited her column in Woman's World, these labels struck me as ... off, slightly sideways of what intuition actually felt like to me.

This didn't make sense because I knew that intuition was a part of me like my right hand, my left ear, my face. It was... mine.Years earlier, when I was studying psychology, I had the same instinctive objection when professors talked about ego, id, superego. Anything that breaks the mind into pieces and labels the parts creates opposition. Now there is an 'other' to fight with, repress or kill. This becomes a problem when the opponent is a part of our own consciousness, like the ego which, we are often told, needs to be trained, subordinated, dissolved. There was another way that those 'four clairs' made me uncomfortable. When people used them to claim special powers, as in, "Oh, I'm claircognizant so I just know things... about a situation, about the world, about you."Ick! Ewww... Get out of my energy, please! (Same is true of anyone claiming to have transcended the ego.)This isn't spiritual mastery and it isn't intuition - it's a grab for power, for a spiritual 'brand' to elevate one person over another (so that she or he can sell you things).