One of the great gifts that we can discover at a certain stage in our self-development is how, with patience, we can receive information from virtually everything around us. It seems that, as many indigenous native peoples on the earth have believed for millennia, the world is indeed alive. What sometimes comes as a surprise is that even objects we would ordinarily class as not being of Nature which have been man-made can be heard to offer words or phrases for highly sensitive individuals to receive. But often those words don’t come across in ways that you and I recognise as language.
Take trees for example. We all know about tree hugging, but if you have ever talked to any trees or spoken to somebody that regularly talks to trees about the way the information is conveyed to them then you will find the information comes to the human brain as a packet of information, in what some call a “download”. Usually our brain then interprets that download in an instant into words that we recognise and understand. The skill is to maintain the link so one can assemble fairly long sentences.
Why is the information not as a language though? I think the most likely explanation can be found if we take ourselves right back to the source of our relationship with the world around us (including all the chaos found through all the different media channels) and consider human beings as simply organisms interacting with their outer external environment using a system of biological processes that create emotional responses within us. Bottom line: that’s all we are.
Being obvious: words are learned. Language is not a natural a part of us as humans. Words and language have been developed so that we may share our experience of the world about us and the world within us, with each other. And a very effective system it is too.
When we receive downloads from the things about us like trees, they are using the natural information exchange that we all have as fellow beings of the earth. In that respect we share with them an ability to exchange information.
Humanity continues to evolve and create. The world most of us now live in is an urban environment that is man-made. And it’s very clever and very useful and practical and serves most of us very well. However, it is separating us from the roots of who we are as mobile bits of the planet interacting with the other bits of the planet. Information found in urban areas (take supermarkets for example) is not gently ushered out of to us, but rather it is shouted out and blasted at us. It can be overwhelming. Often to cope with modern urban living sensitive people will automatically “turn down their reception” often blunting those receptors without realising it. Those that are “in the know” will have taken control of such sensors and can turn up the volume and turn it down again at will. In this way they remain able to be open to the subtleties of the beings found in nature that we were partly designed to interact with.
One of the modern channels for blasting information at us is social media. Social media is a very powerful thing and has a role to play in the development of our species as it enables physical connections of the people throughout the world. The problem is that we have not yet learned how to manage it, individually or as a global culture. For the individual the potentially unhealthy power of the internet lies in its ability to seem so personal to each user. Unlike Television or radio or dare I say it, newspapers, the internet can seem a very private place and feel as though what one sees, reads or interacts with is directly for each of us. And that includes how we interact and potentially empathise with relative strangers. When we empathise we link to them. In linking to them we are making a connection which is not necessarily a healthy one for us as we give away a part of our emotional “energy”. It follows that when we see people in trouble, we empathise. So if during the course of a day we feel empathy for a hundred people who seem in their own ways to be having trouble in life then we are connecting with a lot of emotional turmoil! Some people can’t switch off from that and it has an effect upon their mental well-being.
When we speak to somebody on the phone our awareness, our point of concentration, goes to that person and we are less aware of our present place. When we text a person the same thing occurs for the time we are texting or reading a reply: our attention is with that person. On Facebook or Twitter and the like we touch upon so many lives most of whom are coping OK but some of whom are coping less well. And of course behind every contact online no matter through which branded channel there is usually a person telling a different degree of truth.
Contact with this amount of people is not something we are yet used to dealing with and the amount of sleep problems, stress problems and nervous stress related incidents that the ever increasingly young are facing, is growing. The question has to be asked what is the way to cope?
Fortunately at least part the answer seems to lie in the also ever increasing fields of meditation and mindfulness. These develop a person’s ability to switch off and relax, to stop the brain inputs, to change the thought processes, to detach and be present in a moment of stillness in which they can find their inner space and in which eventually their inner voices will appear.
Our hope for the species sits in the simple practice of listening to the quiet voices within at every opportunity. If we respond with true and thorough honesty then we will start to see change that we can really embrace with our hearts.
A final word on the internet. Most of us recognise that the internet is built upon what are known as algorithms, so with every click we are building a profile somewhere related to our presence online. Unless we are computer savvy most of our online experience directly reflects what we click. This includes the information Google, as a massive data storage device, perceives we want to see, experience and empathise with. Facebook works in the same way and is increasingly blunt in its developments of these algorithms. The presence of automated ‘bots’ that are programmed to react to tweets with certain trigger words or that browse facebook posing as humans is growing and many people attribute the unusual results in recent elections and polls to the influence of swarms of bots. By highlighting and stirring people’s base fears the result was action where previously there had been only apathetic inaction.
Believe it or not I really believe that it’s all fine and dandy. We will learn to live in the new era and future generations will, I hope, learn that one of the ways to live with the artificial intelligence of the future is to recognise what it means to be really human! Being human is about recognising our powerful part in the continued existence of the planet on which we are born by remaining true to our inner selves and taking time to listen to what the world around us is quietly whispering, not the parts that are shouting.
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Workshops for 2017
Next year I will be hosting a selection of workshops at our home in North Yorkshire, Storthwaite Hall, DL11 6EX (accommodation available locally but not included in price). All workshops are £145 for two days, with soup lunches included.
Please click here for more information
March 18th & 19th
Improving your Intuition – Introduction
April 22nd & 23rd
Dowsing for beginners
May 20th & 21st
The magic of Geomancy – Making your house a home
June 24th & 25th
Improving your Intuition – Advanced
July 15th & 16th
The new reality – how to survive the stress of modern living