Seeing in the Spirit: Blake Healy on the Seer Gift

Most people who can see in the spirit don't talk about it. Not because it's shameful, but because they learned early on that it wasn't safe to mention the golden ladies dancing during church or the lights drifting around a drive-through window.

Blake Healy is one of the rare people who kept showing up anyway.

Blake is the director of the Bethel Atlanta School of Supernatural Ministry and author of Profound Good: Seeing Through the Lens of God's Love. He's been seeing in the spirit since before he could articulate what that meant. In this episode of Discovering Truth with Dan Duval, he does something most teachers don't: he gets practical about it.

Seeing in the spirit means perceiving spiritual reality that the physical eyes cannot detect. The Bible treats this as normal for a believer whose inner eyes are open. When the prophet Elisha was surrounded by an enemy army, his servant panicked, because all he could see was the natural threat. Elisha prayed a simple prayer, and everything changed.

Second Kings 6:17 records it this way: "And Elisha prayed, and said, LORD, I pray, open his eyes that he may see. Then the LORD opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw. And behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha." The armies of heaven were there the whole time. The servant simply could not see them until his spiritual eyes were opened.

This is what the seer gift points to. The apostle Paul prayed that believers would have the eyes of their understanding enlightened (Ephesians 1:18), so they could grasp realities beyond the physical. Scripture also lists discerning of spirits among the gifts God gives His people (1 Corinthians 12:10), which is the ability to perceive and understand what is happening in the spirit realm. Seeing in the spirit is not a strange or fringe practice. It is one of the ways God lets His people see what is already real.

One of the first things Blake dismantles is the idea that the seer gift only operates when God decides to activate it. That framework, where the believer is essentially a passive receiver waiting for God to push a button, keeps a lot of people stuck.

The better metaphor, Blake explains, is your hand resting in a neutral position. You can close it completely. You can open it completely. Or you can choose to engage with intention. The gift is there. The question is whether you're extending your attention toward it.

He compares it to driving a car and choosing to focus on the windshield itself rather than the road beyond it. You can see the dust particles and water spots on the glass any time. They're always there. You just aren't always focused on them. Seeing in the spirit works the same way.

This reframe matters enormously for people who experienced a dramatic first encounter with the gift and then spent years waiting for it to happen again.

Blake sees spiritual wounds the way a doctor sees physical ones. Some are fresh cuts. Some are healing. Some are infected, and you can tell the difference.

Infected wounds, spiritually speaking, tend to involve bitterness, unforgiveness, or belief systems built around the hurt. He's also seen what he calls "devices in the wound," things holding an injury open, usually a lie the person has partnered with that reinforces the damage.

His advice is straightforward: we need mothers and fathers in our lives who can help us respond correctly when we get hurt. A child who burns his hand on the stove needs a parent present to give him the right information about what happened, not to conclude that stoves are evil and must be avoided forever. The same logic applies to getting hurt by the prophetic, by a pastor, by a community. One bad experience doesn't indict the whole gift.

He watched two friends with nearly identical backgrounds (abusive fathers, unstable mothers, rough early marriages) go two entirely different directions. One kept pushing his wounds down until they exploded his life. The other went hunting for counsel, for spiritual parents, for people who would keep kicking him back into the game. That friend's wounds healed. New ones came. Those healed too. His marriage is strong. He's in ministry. The contrast wasn't about the severity of what they went through. It was about whether they chose to let healing happen.

One of the most memorable moments in the conversation is Blake's story from the pool. He's there with his family when an older woman arrives wearing children's water wings, a swim cap, a diving mask, foam noodles, and two paddle boards. She's doing her best. She makes it a few feet, huffs and puffs her way back to the edge, then does it again.

Blake looks up. Her personal angel is on the water in front of her, jumping up and down, pumping her fists, screaming go, go, you've got this.

Just to her right, a demon is scratching at the back of her head, and its face is covered in terror.

When Blake asks what's happening, he hears: She almost drowned as a little girl and decided today she was going to get over that fear.

Later his wife talks to the woman. Turns out she's decided this year to stop letting fear keep her from her dreams. She's learning to swim this week. She's going skydiving next week.

What Blake saw was spiritual oppression actively confronting someone, and losing, not because of a formal deliverance session, but because the woman simply decided to face the thing she feared.

Blake's practical steps for developing the seer gift are worth writing down:

Ask the Holy Spirit where to look. Then actually look there, with your eyes open. Don't jump straight to closing them. He's had people see something immediately in those first few seconds with eyes open that they would have missed entirely.

Look for big things, but also look for small things. An outline. A wash of color. A shimmer like heat distortion. These are invitations to more.

If you don't see anything visually, ask the Holy Spirit to tell you what's there. You might get an impression, a knowing, or an image in your mind. That's not a lesser version of the gift. That's still the gift working.

Then ask questions about what you're perceiving. Build vocabulary. The seer gift grows through repeated partnership, not through waiting for dramatic experiences to validate it.

Is seeing in the spirit biblical? Yes. Scripture shows people perceiving spiritual reality, from Elisha's servant seeing the armies of heaven (2 Kings 6:17) to John being in the Spirit when he received the visions of Revelation (Revelation 1:10). The gift of discerning of spirits is listed plainly in 1 Corinthians 12:10.

Can anyone develop the seer gift? Blake Healy teaches that spiritual sight is more common than most believers realize, and that it grows through practice and attention rather than a single dramatic event. Like any gift, it is developed by using it, asking the Holy Spirit for help, and learning from people who already operate in it.

Is seeing in the spirit the same as having visions? Not exactly. A vision is usually a specific picture God gives at a moment in time. Seeing in the spirit is a broader, ongoing awareness of the spiritual reality around you, which can include impressions, colors, outlines, or a sense of what is present, not only full pictures.

Is this a New Age practice? No. New Age spiritual sight seeks contact with the spirit realm on its own terms and through its own power. Seeing in the spirit, as the Bible describes it, happens under the Lordship of Jesus and by the Holy Spirit, for the purpose of love, healing, and truth.

how to grow in the seer gift · the ten senses that engage the spirit realm