The world is a very noisy place when you’re hypersensitive. Colors are brighter, the shades more distinct. Sharp sounds can be painful, but music can become a river that carries you away. Scent can make you gag, or transport you to a happy time. I can still smell my horse on his old blanket that I cut down. He died over ten years ago.
When I was young, my friends called me crazy. Admittedly I was somewhat lacking in social skills, but I always had friends. I was just that weird friend. I learned not to talk about the brush on my skin that spoke of other presences, unseen to my age mates, and I didn’t talk about the stars singing.
But those things were there. Even if I did wonder if I was insane from time to time. Years later, I worked in a mental health rehab and realized that if I was paying rent and car insurance and holding down a job, then I could reasonably be called sane. None of my clients could do those things. The voices in their heads were loud and nasty, their visions distracting and disruptive. I had learned to control the volume and intensity of what I perceived. I even turned it all off for a few years when I lived in California.
What I felt, and saw, and heard was kind, nourishing to my soul and heart. It was knowledge that came out of the blue, it was reassurance that life would get better, and sometimes it was a rush of joy and a certainty that I was part of a greater whole.
Humans have a specific place in our brains where we experience the sense of peace, unity, or ecstasy of god. ‘God’ need not be defined as Jehovah, or Yahweh, or Allah, or Jesus, or Shiva, or any of the numerous aspects of the unseen world that humans address. It’s been my experience that most people aren’t aware of this unseen world. Yes, I’m hyper-sensitive but all humans are equipped with the same brain structures. So, why when I finally felt brave enough to ask people about this, did I mostly get blank stares?
Practice is required. Buddhist monks meditate, nuns pray, and Pagans do ritual.
In 2008, Dr. Andrew Newberg and Dr. Eugene D’Aquili published Why God Won’t Go Away, where they described their examination of what happens inside the skulls of people who routinely practice whatever it took to achieve the mental state of unity with deity. They examined the electrical activity in the brains of both monks and nuns when they had reached a state they subjectively thought of as ‘union.’ In all cases, the same area of the brain would light up in a storm of electrical activity.
It would be easy in our Enlightenment world for them to have argued that this meant that those experiences are literally, ‘all in our heads.” Newberg and D’Aquilli didn’t take this track. Instead, they humbly admitted that they didn’t think this was proof of any such thing. The most that could be said was that we have the architecture in our brains to experience something greater than ourselves. Because there is limited space in the cranium and a limit to how much energy we can expend, there are no doubt sound biological reasons why such a capacity exists.
Newberg went on to examine the benefits of consistent spiritual practice, and there are many such benefits, including, but not limited to, greater happiness, lower blood pressure, and better sleep.
My ability to feel the world is closely linked to this experience of unity, of the awareness of something greater than myself that ties us all together. Not every Pagan feels this, but in my experience, the majority do. It was a delight to find other people who saw the colors, felt the sounds, felt the vibrations of an unseen world.
And while the perception of such things has been scorned and even called mental illness,* it is now understood there are patterns in things that humans had only seen as random. Chaos theory is the mathematics that describes things like a Malkus-Lorenz waterwheel, or ocean turbulence. Quite a few people see this as proof that god exists.
I don’t need proof. I know something greater than me exists. I know that whatever you choose to call it, or how you experience it, it wants the best for us. My experience of this unseen world is both immanent and transcendent, both immediately present and stretching far beyond what I can ever understand. Sometimes I get a better view.
What I do in between is faith.
*To be clear, real mental illness exists, but perceiving more than other people do doesn’t define it.
Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments do creep in. She lives with her husband, and is Mother of Cats; four boyz and one cranky gurl. Selina has written The Young Woman’s Goodlife Guide: Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 20. Or… Learn From My Pain, and How to Train Your Cat: Using a Clicker and Leash to Keep Your Indoor Cat Happy and Healthy. She’s currently working on the Goodlife Guide to Nutrition.
I love this! ❤️