Hello, anybody there? After the talking toilet I’m surprised anyone is still reading, really. After I started having the weird experiences described here and here, as you have probably already gathered, I started hanging around in the New Age community. I associated with a lot of healers and psychics. More than once I was warned that as an empath I would have to be careful, because of my tendency to feel other people’s pain, and also that people would be happy to “leave their pain with me.”
Music, apropos of nothing-I just like it. :-)
Again, I thought it was a boatload of crap; you would think by now I’d given up on just assuming because I didn’t like something, or didn’t understand something, that it was not so. But I seem to be a pretty sloooooow learner.
For the longest time, I denied it was possible to feel other people’s…stuff. When my friends would complain about taking on their client's issues I was sure that it must be an addiction to drama that actually made them think they were feeling other people's pain. Bullshit is bullshit, right? I kept having experiences showing me how wrong I was, it was all in my head I thought, more bullshit.
For example, I knew a woman who was severely arthritic who always insisted on hugging me. It never failed after she hugged me my hips and lower back would ache terribly for the rest of the day. One day she confessed that she loved being around me because she always felt so good afterwards. It was a fact I always felt dreadful after she hugged me. But I still didn’t want to believe one person could actually, literally feel someone else’s pain. (It just sounds too bizarre to be true, doesn’t it?)
Then one day I was driving to work at 5:00 AM on a dark lonely road. Mine was the only car on the road until a car pulled out of a driveway and turned into the oncoming lane about a quarter mile in front of me. I immediately began feeling itching and burning in a very particular place. The closer that car came the more intense it became. By the time our cars met and passed each other I felt the swelling of a foreign object literally pop out and a sharp pain in that same place. As soon as we passed each other the symptoms began to abate; they continued to lessen the more the distance between us increased until the feelings disappeared completely. In those few moments I understood the raison d'etre for every Preparation H commercial I had ever seen. Holy mother of Thomas Crapper! It was definitely not all in my head anymore, heh.
It always struck me funny that the house the car drove out from was apparently home to some fundamentally religious folks. They had a huge wood cross in the front yard with signs about the second coming and rotating warnings: you better not shout, you better not cry-oh wait, wrong warnings, you get the idea. It always made me wonder if being a tight-ass was a precursor to hemorrhoids. But I digress.
That experience, so grounded in my physical body, was stupefying and undeniable. (Some of you are probably thinking I never recovered after being stupefied there, eh?) After it I had to finally accept that it was not only possible to literally share another person's experience, but that I was susceptible to it and I had better learn how to live with it.
Visual, auditory and kinesthetic are the predominant ways we have of processing sensory data, like three different sensory bands, and they are also the ways people like me “get” sensory data. I don’t think there is anything supernatural about what happens to me, it is simply a matter of me receiving sensory input from a wider bandwidth than others. Humans all have the same five senses, but each person’s sensory apparatus is uniquely tuned. For example, some people like to eat spicy hot food, some can’t stand it; some people wear fragrances they enjoy, while other people become ill from those same scents. A more extreme example of differences in sensory tuning might be color blindness. So even though we are all here in this common environment, perhaps witnessing the same things, we are still having widely divergent experiences of life, partly because of these subtle differences in processing sensory stimuli.
In my case these sensitivities carry over into life in challenging ways. For example I am supersensitive to drugs, both prescription and over the counter. If I get ill I can take antibiotics, but after I start to feel better they will make me sick, I can’t take a whole cycle of them without becoming very ill. I can actually just hold a container of antibiotics and sickness will resolve, and I can even get sick from holding a bottle of antibiotics too long. (Yeah, I know, WTF?) On the other hand, homeopathy and other vibrational healing modalities work really well for me, while for many other people they don’t work at all.
When it comes to life, because of the obvious agreement we comprehend on the grosser levels, we humans make the mistake of assuming other people are sharing the exact same experience we are, yet this is rarely the case. Beyond differences in sensory tuning, there are “hardware differences.” Whether we inhabit a male or female body makes for an extraordinarily different experience of human life. A masculine body is solid, the male frame is composed of bigger bones and more muscle tissue. Feminine bodies have smaller bones, more fat and water. Generally, if you walk up to a man and push him, the body is firm and he will stand solidly in place, but do the same to a woman, the body will yield a bit and she will likely move along with the push.
Let’s try a fruitcakey experiment. If you are a man try imagining what it feels like to inhabit a body that is soft, changeable and physically yielding. Imagine being in a body that sways in adjustment to the forces around it. Try to imagine your body going airborne after being bumped by someone walking at a good clip.
If you are a woman try imagining what it feels like to inhabit a body that is physically dense and solid, unyielding even, and able to stand its ground. Try to imagine what it must feel like to be able to stand firmly in place after someone bumps into you traveling full speed ahead.
If you’ve given that a go and gotten into the experience, can you imagine the kind of differences that might result in you from inhabiting the opposite type of body to which you are accustomed? Without going into detail, we should consider that cognitive and emotional differences can change our experiences and understanding also. When it comes to human life, human experience is highly diverse.
Hopefully in these first four posts I’ve been able to demonstrate through sharing some of my freaking unusual experiences that human capability may look the same on the surface, but below the surface subtle but remarkable differences exist that can result in completely dissimilar experiences of life and reality. If I’ve failed at that then relating these stories has been little more than metaphysical masturbation…and all y’all have been my witnesses. ;-)
Here finally, I feel I’ve introduced myself and the difference of my experience of life sufficiently to start writing about the things that really matter to me. I am Ooooh, I lean pretty far to the left and my passions are observing how human behavior is influenced by the ego driven human mind, exploring the diversity of human experience, building bridges to understanding and creating community among people who are different than me. I think that the complex problems we face today will never be solved by politics alone. I think if we claim to value diversity we need to be more aware that the diversity of human experience, while perhaps not immediately apparent and subtle in nature, can create profound differences in people; in my opinion, in order to help repair the deep divisions in our society we need to be more open to understanding how honest, good hearted people can look at the same things and come to completely opposite conclusions; we need to stop letting ourselves be divided and conquered by being reduced simply to our politics, and we need to begin valuing each other as human beings regardless of our differences.
Oh yeah…and just in case you haven’t already guessed I have a passion for laughter. In conclusion I will confess that I’ve actually only heard voices two times, so I figure that keeps me firmly in the normal camp, right? …RIGHT? Huh…crickets.