February 2008 Archives

Feelings and Trips:
Here is a description from my experience of the feelings I frequently get. These descriptions are pretty personal and may differ vastly from others. These are mostly general feelings with some trip reports as well. Detailed trip reports of specific places or organisms would probably be more useful so others could visit and report their feelings or findings as well. The truth is that you do not need drugs to trip. All you need to do is project your consciousness with your intent. A drug acts like a wedge in your consciousness that temporarily expands your awareness into the shells (layers) of its chemical space, or spirit, and beyond. With drugs you have no control of your ability to "come down" at your discretion. By projecting your consciousness you can more or less return to the body when you want, depending on how far out you go and how good you are at grounding, although you are still tripping and there are many unknowns. So, by first floating, losing some awareness of the body, and then projecting, you can travel in your consciousness to wherever you like.

I would make a distinction between a "trip" and general empathic feelings. Usually just going about your daily business in an expanded state of awareness and picking up on some people's feelings, but with no real intent, is standard empathy/clairsentience. Once I start to tell myself to project into some tree or star or spider and start experiencing the discrete and distinct levels of that space then I would call that tripping. The line is, of course, not entirely set in stone.

Anger:
If someone is holding anger in their belly area I feel a stinging fiery burn it in the left side near/underneath the belly button. If someone is holding anger or sadness in the heart/chest area I feel a mild but uncomfortable burning pain in the left side of my chest.

Sometimes when there is just general (chaotic) anger or frustration I feel like my body is being pierced by 100 tiny searing hot needles spaced out like the polka dots in this picture. I call these barbs. This kind of searing heat feeling is similar to when you are outside in cold weather with no shoes and then come inside and take a hot shower. I feel this when listening to many rock songs; it could be described as feeling like white noise or "staticky." If people are really angry then these barbs can stick in you for a while.

Some people who may not be following their heart or for some other reason they are drenched in a very lava like burning feeling. I get that from some people. Ever hear the phrase your "blood is boiling" -- well that is what it feels like.

Mad Dog / Grounding:
When going into shells of pain I have felt some weird perk/holding in the lymph/mouth area. It feels like a dog looking down at a toy it is going to destroy. It feels like you just want to rip apart flesh with your teeth. (sides of mouth kind of go up to expose the teeth, like Dick Cheney pictures). The desire to vomit, expressed/felt in the mouth area, may be present. This is what I feel when I set my intent to ground into my body fully. I have been told this is due to frozen blockages. I am not quite sure if this is true yet.

Liars:
When people are lying, judging me, or feel in someway violated by something I said then I get a flush of shame. It is kind of like a flare of heat in my facial area.

Pride:
This is a band higher than shame as it feels like a slightly different kind of heat.

Whole Body Shame:
In one of my classes several years ago I did not do the entire reading for class and neither did many other people, which was quite obvious from their responses to the professor. I remember the professor asked me some question and I just sat there and didn't say anything. I felt a huge surge of shame and embarrassment throughout my whole body. It felt like a huge release. After class several people came up to me and basically told me how they didn't like the professor. When people refuse to really express themselves in a group then it can overload an empath and comes out through them. Now I understand why I was so irritated and even very angry by one particular group of 30+ people; their mass consciousness was a disturbing entity. There are many other similar stories about this kind of thing.

Nervousness/Fear:
If people are nervous about making small talk I can feel it in my stomach right below the belly button. Usually people are hesitant in this situation so I can feel it several seconds before they open their mouths to chat. It is possible for this nervousness to change to fear if I say something they can't handle. (This can be something very innocuous for some people.) My stomach feels very black/dark when this happens.

Peace:
Last time I felt this deeply was with a spider. I think it was heavily in my navel. Very peaceful there.
One particular favorite tree of mine is very peaceful too. More in the heart and head with the tree though. Very much in the bridge of the nose. It makes me feel a kind of mild enthusiasm. I saw a woman that was pregnant recently and I felt very peaceful just looking at her.

Bowling ball head/Brain Dynamo:
This one is almost impossible to describe. It is like a mix between emotion, feeling, and sensation, but not actually any of those things. It feels like a slab of granite or a bowling ball moving slowly inside your head. "Brain Dynamo." I have felt this on two occasions visiting a particular person's head space. I felt this several times spontaneously in my own head space a long time ago. I also felt this sensation upon exiting my cat's head space so it seems to be a head space specific feeling. More investigation is needed to make any real conclusions about what this is. Finding a bit more of a distinct pattern of coming into it and going out of it would probably clarify things.

Traveling into my cat's head space was brief but interesting. Sometimes animals will look at you in an innocent way. When I entered my cat's head I felt as if I was inside that feeling but looking outward as if that feeling were my own. Then I left and felt the bowling ball head feeling and then I could tell that my cat was pissed because I started to get a bunch of the above mentioned anger feelings near my feet/legs, which I get when she is mad and near that part of my body. If I leave her outside too long or do something else that pisses her off I get the same response without fail, every time. I decided not to go into other beings minds without asking first now.

Cats can have a very thin presence. They can be difficult to detect if they want to be. Their presence can permeate space very evenly.

Tripping Among the Stars:
To do this I just go outside on a clear night and look into the stars and tell myself to project there.

The first time I did this I was high for three days and I felt quite a bit of anger. This was before I learned how to ground and come back down to my body even a little. This was at a time when I was reading about siddhis (spiritual powers) and was curious about them. After tripping with the stars I had a dream where Osho appeared by a stick of RAM. There was also someone from my high school there who had a very depressed/negative attitude throughout his life. The depressed guy was basically saying, "Oh he thinks he can fly in real life because he can fly in a dream." Osho's message to me was basically, "at least you have the sense not to try to gain siddhis." This was before I actually realized that being able to expand my awareness and merge with things is more than I can handle already! I was doing it without knowing I was doing it. Funny enough, during that dream I was flying a couple times and the conversation between the three of us was about flying.

The second time I did this I felt somewhat thin and also very high. I went and laid down on my bed and it felt like my whole body was buzzing.

The third time I did this, Feb 3rd, I felt stinging pain in my left nostril. I was pretty spacey and just started laughing, sitting at my computer, for no reason at all. Just giggling. After getting ready for bed I thought, "Ok trip is over time for sleep." I laid down and attempted to ground myself back into the body. However I started feeling like I was having 100 thoughts per second and then I heard some sitars and Indian men talking. I just apologized for entering this space. I felt a small rush of fear that stayed in my stomach. It occurred to me that by entering a star's consciousness I am actually entering the presence of a very high being. It also occurred to me that expanding like this is not something I should toy around with so casually. The idea of me being "in control" of the trip was pretty much eliminated. These beings can very easily tell when you enter into their space. It is probably akin to a drunken person busting into your house at 3am and making a racket. A clear intention the requisite respect is something to think about before tripping/projecting.

An interesting side note to this last story was that my nose still had quite a bit of pain on the left side the next day; it was a sharp stinging kind of pain. I must have still been in a very expanded state because that day I had a funny telepathic experience -- something that never happened to me before! My interpretation of the nose pain is that my body was telling me I was expanding beyond my capacity.

Changes in Pressure:
Many people experience this. I am not sure why. One time I was in a restaurant and two very large people were sitting to the left of me. After they paid the check they both stood up at once and I went deaf in one ear for several seconds. It felt like the pressure in the whole space changed. I have also, however, experienced this when there has been no noticeable drastic physical change in the space around me. So something more subtle may be occurring in these instances.

White Crown:
Sometimes when my friend Matt or my sister visit me I get a kind of tapping on the crown of my head. It feels pleasant. Recently, a pregnant woman smiled at me and I felt the same thing.

Misconceptions about Empaths and empathy:
A common misconception about empathy and empathic sense is that it is limited to emotion. I have seen this description on quite a lot of websites; it is almost like the pop psychology explanation that just scratches the surface. The truth is that you can selectively expand your consciousness and merge on other levels, such as the body, mind, void, etc.

An even broader misconception is that emotions and feelings are the same thing – or that there are no feelings beyond emotion. There are so many feelings beyond emotion that words fail very quickly. People are very disturbed by this kind of ability or gift if you tell them about it because you are saying that these socially conditioned boundaries are not really there. Most people's response will be, "this is all in your head." This may be their only way of dealing with such a threatening idea. You could introduce this kind of experience to someone by just telling them that it is a very limited emotional sensing and then explain more as they warm up to the idea. In truth however, a skilled empath can in theory feel the raw physical power of another persons energy, their emotions, their thoughts, and their mental space.

More than just people:
The biggest misconception I read about empathy is that it is limited to people. In other words it gets brushed off as a hallucination based on physical and linguistic cues. Empathy and projection into shells is not limited to people though. Basically any object that exists can be projected into. Trees, stars, clothing, jewelry, seeds, bugs, animals, etc, etc. When you start having some of the more intense experiences with non human objects then it becomes very apparent that you are dealing with an expanded state of consciousness. You can access deeply intense states of joy, understanding, peace, and voidness by expanding your consciousness into trees.

An empath is not limited by space or time. He or she can tune into how someone feels thousands of miles away or many years ago. Most likely unseen objects can be seen into as well. For example, transpersonal objects or states of mind. I have not yet tried doing that though. My cousin said he would like to go back in time to a particular period and I am definitely curious what kind of experience you would have if you tuned into that transpersonal/transtemporal space. As for objects you can see today, jewelry is interesting to tune into. Toyoko Matsuzaki says, "When enough hado [energy] is imprinted on an inanimate object, it starts to have its own energy or heart...objects that have a long history, such as masterpieces, have more than a heart; they have a spirit." - The Healing Power of Hado (p. 25, 31). This is such a strange sight to behold! For these objects with long histories, you can actually see a face if you close your eyes and enter the object's shell.

Lines in the sand:
The socially acceptable form of empathy is between to people that love each other; it would not be abnormal to say that you can "tune in" and share emotions with your spouse. Where it starts to get abnormal is when you claim to be able to do this outside this kind of relationship. And where it starts to get even more abnormal is when you claim to be able to do this on non-human objects or organisms. I would say that empathy is merely the ability to expand your awareness out of your own system and into something else.

Actually after you have some of these more bizarre experiences with stars and trees at will it becomes apparent that demarcation between what is inside you and what is outside you is provisional; in other words awareness is everywhere at all times and you can choose to erase socially installed boundaries at will. It is not that the boundaries don't exist -- they do -- they are just entirely provisional.

Spelling:
Many visitors to this site are misspelling clairsentience. They are typing in "clairsentence" instead.