The Great Quest

This world will tell you what or who you should be from day one.  For the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) and Empath this is a tragedy.  Without knowledge, we HSPs will listen to any idea out there and abide by it just out of sheer loyalty.  Self can get lost.  Some people feel like they need to forgive themselves.  I think they might have gotten their 'self' really lost. It's essential for the HSP to figure out who and what they are so that they can grow and be effective in society.

Its easy to live in someone's reality.  We do it as children.  We get to live in our parents' reality.  We may not get the message that we are to create our own reality.  That is, live in our own world and play our own game.  It may be a frightening thing to start down that road, but start we inevitably must.  Sooner or later we will be without our parents.  We may start our own families, careers, hobbies, and preferences.  I know of people who have the hardest time taking that step.  I recommend to take a deep breath and jump in.  Like jumping in a pool, it may feel awful at first but you soon get your bearings.

I realize it's hard to disconnect from parents, mentors, or even friends.  If you have a great family life, it is harder to disconnect than if you had a bad family life.  If you do come from a great family, being on your own is important to discover yourself and figure out how to better yourself.  Sometimes separation is thrusted upon you like entering the military, moving because of a new job, or even a death.  In such cases, I think it's important not to latch on to anyone else but to become self sufficient and start planning what you want to do.  It's only when your alone can you meditate and figure out your own feelings.


Eventhough you are on your own, your really not alone.  Parents, mentors, friends should be a phone or text message away for advice.  It's good to listen to your guides.  Guides come not only from people in your life, but also from what people say, what papers and blogs write, what books say...etc.  I think the most important guide to listen to is the guidance you get when you meditate.  You can extend your feelers to the world around you and figure out what it coming.  Feelings and premonitions are normal to have.  Too often people ignore these.  It is good to take these into consideration while you observe the physical world.  Of course, one of the most important guide is the plan you laid out for yourself.  That is, the things you want in the future.

Why am I encouraging HSPs to be their own person?  Well, it's because it took a long time for me to realize that that is the better way.  There are groups out there that recruit the unsuspected into their ideology, theology, or 'mission.'  These groups are self absorbed manipulative masters.  No, the HSP is better off on their own and figuring out how to help people in the world around them.  The Quest in this life should be for the betterment of self and community.  Do not waste it on someone else's ideals.  More often than not, if you do follow someone else they usually are sociopaths.  These people have no concern for anyone else but their own goals no matter what it costs others.  That's why I give this warning to all HSPs and Empaths.

Listening To Intuition

Highly Sensitive People (empaths) are nothing if they're not listeners.  We listen to everything and sometimes wish we didn't.  People in general have intuition.  People in general don't seem to listen to their intuition enough.  Dr. Judith Orloff has an article with a test on how much we listen to our intuition (see Dr. Orloff's article).  Do you listen to your intuition?  We get really busy and focused in our daily lives.  It's common for everyone to get tunnel vision and we loose sight of what is going on around us.  When we do that, things may happen that can affect us without us realizing it.  So it's helpful to stop look and listen to intuition.  What I want to do is highlight some things that may prevent us from listening to our intuition.  Through experience, I found out that trusting intuition does not come easy,  interpreting intuition can be hard, and wishful thinking is a hindrance.

In our society we are told not to listen to feelings, hunches, and imaginations.  Well, not in so many words, but over time and the fact that hard cold facts is what gets listened to rather than preference.  So, it's not surprising that we don't trust when thoughts come to us out of the blue and give us information that seemingly has no evidence.   Our overgrown analytical minds want proof.  The reasoning goes nuts without logical steps.  So we blow the information off.  That information is our intuition telling us something.  We must learn to trust it.  It took me some time to understand that my intuition was giving me good information.  Sometimes even now, my mind wants to say that it's just all my imagination.  That's how strong my analytical brain is.  I have strong reasoning abilities and it often clashes with my intuition.  Telling yourself that there could be something to this information and testing the information is one way to start trusting it.

Interpreting the information gleaned from intuition can be hard to do.  Interpretation is a function of the analytical brain.  To interpret intuition, we need to have a "common frame of reference".  Yeah sure, I took that one from Spock in Star Trek IV The Voyage Home (see quote).  You do have to have a common frame of reference to have practical information.  I see most of the common reference is learned in life as we associate feelings with situations.  Intuition comes in the form of emotion, and emotion is a language in and of itself.  Some things don't translate.  Some things are hard to put in words.  Some things you can only describe.  Some things are a driving force for action.  I went to a balloon race last weekend, and there was a large crowd with a festival.  There were lots of vendors of food and drink.  There were even some student dancers.  I picked up on the overall intuitive emotion int the area and my mouth relaxed and the ends of my mouth were edging upward.  That told me people were relaxed and were enjoying themselves overall.  Sometimes intuition comes like that.  I interpreted that one based on how I reacted to the emotion.  It's quite an art to interpret intuition. 

Wishful thinking is an enemy to intuition.  It will try to override the intuition information.  What I mean is that if you want something bad enough you may try to wish it into existence.  It's important to distinguish between what you want and what your observing.  I use this word observing in the sense of picking up information from intuition.  I have a hard head, as my wife would say.  That means my will is a strong one.  I blame genetics for that (thank you parents).  So, what I have to do is to get into a meditative state and listen for the intuition.  Sometimes, this takes a while.  I don't think it's because the intuition doesn't come to me.  I think it's there all the time.  It just takes a while to quiet down my analytical hard head.  By the way what I call analytical mind Dr. Orloff calls linear mind.  I use that word because I understand that the brain is very very complex, more than science understands.  So I don't think the work linear quite describes it.  Wishful thinking is a function of the analytical mind and it's made when we establish an intent (wish, desire, manifestation, prayer) we made earlier.

So, trusting intuition, interpreting it, and handling wishful thinking can help you listen to intuition.  As you listen, you come to realize that everything changes.  Then the more they change, the more they stay the same.  Sure, it's a paradox.  I think life itself is a paradox as well, but don't ask me to explain it.  The more you listen, the more you will change, and the more you become yourself  and you shed the facades you have in life.

Liars

I came across someones blog post a while back stating that empaths always know when someone is lying.  I hate absolutes.  If someone uses words like always and never and other absolute words, be assured that there are exceptions to what they are saying.  One thing I know about people and empaths is that there are not two alike.  There are those who are similar but there are many variations of characteristics.  I would like to make a case about my opinion on empaths and liars.

Can I tell if someone is lying, well sometimes.  It really depends on who.  Can I tell if a hardened liar is lying, well I have not had any success at it yet.  Perhaps it's because I grew up with one.  Or perhaps it's because they are so good at lying that their emotions don't fluctuate when they do, but rather their emotions do fluctuate when the truth comes out.  Emotions are hard.  It really depends on the person and what choices they have made and how they have trained themselves.  Can an empath be trained to detect hardened liars?  Well, I have not heard of any limitation an empath can train to do in detecting emotions.  So I have to say yes.

I hold to a certain truth, that people have two brains.  They have an analytical brain which is the one we are used to, and they have an intuitional brain which is a mystery to most people.  Using the intutional brain, the empath feels other peoples emotions and/or pains.  Based on that information he/she can deduce what is going on.  It takes knowledge of emotions to figure out what the emotion means.  Much of this knowledge is based on self knowledge via experience.  Another source of this knowledge can come by observing the individual's behavior or situation.  It takes analytical knowledge to be able to interpret emotions to give an analytical conclusion.  The interaction of the analytical and the intuitional brains is where the rubber meets the road for empaths and their ability.  The ability to detect if a person is lying depends on knowledge and training.

The empath has to also figure out the levels of emotion.  People have their own emotional signature.  You can tell one from another based on their emotional signature.  It's kind of like seeing their face.  You can also tell what their current emotional state they are in.  These can be done on the fly in a matter of seconds.  To get deeper information requires more time, and may require a deeper state of meditation.  Given all the time in the world, an empath could write a lot on a person's past, present, and future.  The empath also needs to be in a good meditative state to be able to get to a depth of knowledge.  The ability to detect if a person is lying depends on time and meditative state.

So to say that an empath can always tell if someone is lying is a farse.  An empath can learn to detect if people are lying, but it takes time, meditative state, knowledge, training, and on the liars ability to lie.  Nothing is cut and dry.  Everything is fuzzy, as in fuzzy logic.  We try to approximate truth with our analytical minds, but truth is more elusive than we like to think.

Being Me

If there is one thing that defines this era since the 70's it's being ourselves.  Since World War II, the idea that individual sacrifice for the good of the group was prominent.  That's why companies have their employees travel all over in blatant disregard of family life.  I don't like that.  I'm not like that.  I'm independent.  I choose to be me and nobody else.  I gave up the responsibility of being anyone to everyone.  That's why I do not follow one established belief system.  That's why I'm make one for me. 

In my past lives, of what I know, I have been a part of Magick.  I resonate with much of it, but I cannot go back to it in its entirety.  The problem is that any belief system has truth in it with a measure of legend and useless theology.  Out of most belief systems the basics tend to be true.  Humans are powerful beings and are for the most part live lives that are ignorant to such power, therefore they need to be taught.  Humans also have the basic choice of doing good or harm.  There are many other belief systems that have similar basics to Magick such as Reiki and others and most Asian martial arts.  The difference is that the Asians hold to building yourself up with these techniques and intent, while Magick tends to focus on the outer world of the human.  Regardless, when a belief system is around for long periods of time, it tends to get corrupted.  That's why I don't adhere to any, though I may adhere to all in one aspect or another.

So what do I do?  Like my grandfather said, I steal with my eyes.  I take the basic principles and try them out.  So I take a practical approach.  As an empath, I first had to figure out the chaos I was picking up.  The practical advice from other empaths and empath psychologists really helped.  I've tried different techniques such as shielding, pushing out emotion, and others for my own protection.  I've experimented with intention and started to analyze it with my empathic insights.  I came up with a working model of intent.  I also found things that I think some don't realize.  The difference and struggle the analytical brain has in dealing with the institutional brain is astounding.  I often here radio commentators say things like "I don't understand how but a mother found superhuman strength to pick up a car to save her child."  I wonder how is it that people don't understand that the nature of the analytical brain and its limitations.  So this is what I do, I prove all things for myself.

Being myself is the greatest adventure I've been on.  Sometimes it's hard because of the influence everyone else has in your life.  I find it is worth it though.

Emotional Freedom

I am currently reading Emotional Freedom By Dr Judith Orloff.  It's a great self help book on how to become emotionally free.  Well that seemed rather obvious.  What makes this book stand out is that it integrates Psychology and Intuition to produce a well rounded solutions to emotional problems people tend to have.

As a follow up of my last blog about Balance, Emotional Freedom can help in the area of becoming more balanced by integrating intuition into your life.

Dr. Orloff take you down an educational road where you learn more about yourself than you may have in a very long time.  There are self examination tests that help you understand who and what you are.  Thereby she also gives suggestions of what you need.

She spends a some time about developing the inquiring dreams for information technique for example.  She also has a part of what type you prefer to be when dealing with emotions.

I have not finished this book yet, but I am enjoying it and finding more about myself than I could have hoped for.  Its worth the read.

Balance

After the Second World War, Society enjoyed a time of building and engineering that lasted well into the 70's.  By the time the 80's rolled around there were talks that engineering field was in trouble.  Schools were failing at teaching upper and basic math.  A low hum of chaos was slowly creeping in.  Society was changing.  We had NASA a great pillar of math and science, we had studies coming out for this and that.  Numbers whizzed around conversations.  Computer jobs were promised to the young generation coming out of high school.  But  things still changed.  Now engineering jobs are not as abundant, the IT world has shunned older workers from the 80's and 90's for younger workers, outsourced to other countries, and require a bigger skill set from their workers.  NASA struggles to keep the public's attention.  Science research struggles to get funding.  You have to wonder what happened to common sense?  Where did it all go wrong?  Where was the future we were promised?  Our analytical and digital dreams smashed on the rocks of economic failure and shortsightedness.  The United States was riding on a waive of technological innovation since World War II.  That surge of tech innovation has now petered out.  What we are left with is an imbalance.  We have analytical knowhow and digital equipment but lack in the intuition to promote life.  People in society needs to strike a balance if we are going to make it into the future.

What is striking a balance?  Its really quite simple. To illustrate I will tell you a story. There once was a powerful man in northern Africa. He had wealth and means and live like he did. His doctor one day told him he had just six months to live because of a terminal disease for which there was no cure. He decided to alter his diet. He ate a little of everything that he could find. He set up a dietary regiment of a variety of foods and drinks. The man not only beat the disease but lived to be a good old age. He chose a diet of balance. He did not major on one item. He majored on all items equally.  He chose to go with his intuition regardless of what doctors said.  Another example is my Graduate Math Professor showed the class that applying intuition to a problem to see how it goes together makes for a faster and more complete solution.  Striking a balance with intuitive thinking and analytical thinking is rewarding.

What is the nature of intuition?  How does intuition differ from analytical thinking?  We all think with our brains.  We are all taught in school to put our thinking caps on.  That's the analytical thinking we were taught.  But no one has taught us how to use our intuition.  Where the analytical brain estimates truth, intuition knows.  Where analytics demands evidence, intuition requires non.  Where analytics requires a busy mind, intuition requires a quiet mind.  Where analytics caused frenzies, intuition promotes calm.  In many aspect intuition and analytical thinking are opposites.  So intuition become seemingly contrary to our busy hectic analytical way of thinking.  Yet, intuition can be used in a way to complement analytical thinking.

How can we put the intuitional and analytical thinking to use to better our performance?  When you come across a problem to calm yourself, scan your feelings about the problem, scan possible causes  of the problem that pop into your head, and come up with a possible solution.  Then take that solution and work out a way to figure the details out with the analytical brain.  This may involve pen and paper and/or use of calculators and computers.  When you are working on a problem that is big and you come across a road block, sleep on the problem.  Before you go to bed that night pose your question to yourself and then record what you dream about.  Sleep brings about dreams and intuitive thinking.  You can often find guidance to a solution with this method.  One more thing to do.  On a lunch break go out for a walk, let your mind enjoy the sun, the birds, the plants, and any fountains or bodies of water.  You can go back to work refreshed and ready to tackle the rest of the day.  During this time let you mind wonder free.  It will use intuition to sort out things and give itself a time of healing.  These are only a few ideas you might want to try to incorporate intuition more in your life.

Since we grew up in a society that maximized analytical thinking, we often forget we are also intuitive beings.  Understanding that a balance needs to be struck to better ourselves and our performance, understanding what intuition is, and applying practical ways to incorporate intuition can give us the much needed balance in our lives.  When you start to strike a balance you may feel a little more joyous, or perhaps some relief.  Our society depends on each one doing their part to strike a balance and teach the young to do the same.

Transformation

Earth is undergoing a transformation.  Its a transformation that's in our faces.  It involves the weather, economy, politics, social, and spiritual. 


Tidal And Weather Change
Its not hard to figure out how our weather is changing.  Mega hurricanes, enormous tornadoes, and tsunami's have been in the news in the last few years.  Many people have lost their lives.  In the 70's we had it mild compared to how it is today.  We didn't know if tsunami's were real back then let alone a F5 tornado or a Category 5 hurricane.  We had never seen these.  The weather is definitely changing.

Economic Change
If you  were off planet Earth in 2008 and 2009, you might have missed the Recession.  Some have tried to call it a depression.  It has cause many around the world to loose their jobs, loose assets, and cause shutdown of companies.  Some have reportedly committed suicide.  With new global players and consumers the shift of wealth has been very painful for many.  Perhaps some still hold to the illusion that things will come back the way they were.  This is only a fantasy.  Economies will build back up, but they won't resemble what they were.  Its going to take time for economies to get in sync and grow steadily.  There is economic change in the world.


Political Change
The Middle East countries are going through severe transformations with their multiple freedom revolts.  Barack Obama became president of the United States.  No small feat considering he was an unknown twelve months before the election.  He's African American and that rubs many people wrong.  Older conservatives don't like it, thus they started the Tea Party movement.  They may argue the contrary but Obama is more of a moderate than Clinton was.  The existence of his Presidency shows that politics in the US is indeed changing.

Social Change
Younger generations have started to come into the work force and adulthood.  These grew up with computers and the internet.  They not only understand the importance of having their voice heard, they expect it and demand it.  They are also suffering with the lack of jobs.  They have to make due with less.  Much like the generation that was ready to work during the Great Depression.  That was the Great Generation.  They went through the Great Depression and World War II.  They sacrificed a lot.  They are also the parents of the Baby Boomers.  Thus, the younger generations are suffering now.  How they take over the world will be the subject of history books in the future and debate for many years to come.  At their hand the societies of the Earth are changing and will continue to change.  It will be fascinating to watch.
 
Spiritual Change
Many people today are of the mind that the Human Race is going through a spiritual transformation.  They call it an awakening.  Though its a spiritual awakening, its is not a religious awakening.  In the 18th Century there was The Great Awakening.  It was a Methodist revival and it was supposedly to offset the Age Of Enlightenment  The Age Of Enlightenment is where we get modern science, thus it was a freeing on analytical thinking.  The Great Awakening was a religious in name but it was also spiritual in nature because of the many miracles reported and the emphasis on the Holy Spirit and the like.  The Awakening that is going on is purely spiritual.  Meditation, grounding/centering, and emotions are the cornerstones of this one.  Experiences with dreams, seeing the future, and communicating with the departed have been increasingly reported as well as other things.  It doesn't seem to matter where your from, what you look like, or what religion you claim to be.  Its an awakening of the human soul and spirit.  Its no surprise that this is occurring when you consider that for the longest time the global society have been concentrating on science and engineering, both of which are purely analytical.  I believe this is brought about by our very nature.  We are both analytical and intuitive.  If we major on one then later the other will impose itself on society.  If we can strike a balance then perhaps the swings in this pendulum will decrease.

There we have it, transformation.  The Earth is transforming but into what?  Well, were all along for this ride and we will see the end result.  Rest assure that the human race will continue and find a way to keep this planet afloat.

2011 and other years.....

Being an Empath, I should include a post about what I've recently sensed.  Weeks ago at the just before New Year's 2011, I put my feelers out to see what the year would be like.  2010 was a very rocky and worrisome year.  Since then I got an impression an aspect of what the coming years will be like, then I will mention what how the 'future' behaves.

Starting with my first impression of 2011.  I felt a year of slow growth.  Jobs will come, and we have started to see that already.  The economy will grow.  But it will be moderate growth.  It will also be a year with a *sigh*.  What do I mean by that?  I mean we will get to the point of some rest after being through a storm.  We may not see that yet, with all the democratic revolutions going on and such around the world.  Before the end of the year or maybe in the summer we'll be sighing.

While 2011 will see moderate economic and social growth, more growth will be felt in the following years 2012, 2013, and 2014.  That growth will be following something of an exponential curve.  I describe it as a frenzy.  Mind you too fast of a growth is just as harmful as too slow of a growth or even as a declining growth.  There will be casualties in the way.

You may ask how does the future behave?  I mean, reading the future would seem to require a predestination paradigm.  I don't think so.  I see that the many worlds theory originally proposed by Hugh Everett has relevance to reality.  In such a case there is scale of the future that can be tapped into to a limited point in time.  The more general the scale of the predication the further out in time you can go.  Sounds weird doesn't it?  How can there be many copies of you all living under slightly different conditions?  Well, you have to study the theory and quantum mechanics.  Now I also see that this theory gives rise to the possibility of yourself ending up in a particular world with a particular result, thus implementing an intended path by the means of 'manifestation', or by simple action, or decision making, or even by a self fulfilled prophesy, or just by planning.  Therefore to say that the future is not written, as the old saying goes, is quite right.  Only the past can be written.