Tag: sense

Series: My awakening (part 1)

In the summer of 1990, I was twenty years old. I had decided to take a break from college and join the U.S. Army. During one of our final dress green inspections by my company commander, I blacked out just as he stood in front of me. My drill instructor was angry, and told me it was because I had “locked my knees”. But a week later I was in a military hospital with an infection in my head. The whole left side of my face was swollen and for three days I was in and out of consciousness.

I remember waking up now and then and seeing different faces as doctors would come look and try to figure out what exactly had happened. They would talk, but their voices were very muffled and I couldn’t talk very well at all. I still have no memory of even being released from the hospital. The next thing I can remember is that I was now at my Advanced Individual Training and apparently in good working condition.

In January of 1991, I had completed all of my training and was assigned to an Engineering battalion. I was promptly deployed to the Gulf War a few days later. My platoon was selected to move forward into Kuwait city to help with restoration missions. I was an Electrical Engineer and my tasks were getting power back on at two hospitals.

Tma1he first memory I have of something strange happened when I was walking through a dark corridor at the first hospital. I was assessing the situation and looking for the power center, where I would hopefully find backup generators.

I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. Tension was high, because this was still a combat zone. After a careful search, I found there were no enemies. However, I wasn’t alone. The walls began to ripple like they were underwater and I saw jellyfish darting about. Most were small, like the size of a softball and even a golf ball. Some were bigger, around my size, and they appeared to be walking on their tendrils.

I just stood there. I know my heart must have been pounding, but I couldn’t feel it. The jellyfish moved about as if I wasn’t even there. Either they didn’t notice me or didn’t know (or care perhaps) that I was seeing them. When I thought about retreating, I then  realized I was paralyzed. I couldn’t feel my feet or move my legs. I don’t even know how I was standing but it didn’t feel like I could fall down.

This seemed to go on for several minutes, and then suddenly there was a very loud snap and all of the jellyfish just instantly vanished. The walls were no longer distorting and I could definitely feel my heart pounding now.

I continued to stand there for a few more minutes. No military training gave me any reference on what to do in this situation. Eventually, I calmed down and continued on my mission. Nothing else strange happened after that, but I played the experience over and over in my head, and was pretty spaced out while I worked.

Luckily for me there were no accidents involving electricity that day, either.

The Spirit Sense

We’re all familiar with the physical senses, or our body senses. We know sight comes from our eyes, hearing comes from our ears, scent comes from our nose and so on. We even generally understand what each organ is sensing: the eyes sense visible light, the ears sense sound waves, etc.

The spirit sense doesn’t originate with an organ in the body. It is the interactions of our life force with the energies of the universe. It is non-local, meaning the perceptions do not even have to be near our own physical body.

The spirit sense is our personal window into all the layers of the universe. Why do I think we have this? Because we are part of that system. We are not separate from it and are not excluded from it’s nature.

The shaman has become aware of this sense. We have the ability to temporarily tune out our physical senses and allow our brain to receive the perceptions from the spirit sense. I often use an IT analogy to explain this idea. Computer networks communicate by two methods: wired and wireless. The wired networks use Ethernet cables to send data between devices. Think of these cables as our physical nervous system that connects our body to our brain. All sensory data from our “input devices” travels across the wired network of nerves directly into our brain.

The spirit sense is a WiFi access point to another network. It relays information to our brain, to the same centers that process the inputs that come from our wired senses. So we “see” and “hear” and “feel” things, but they are very foreign to us. In fact, they are so foreign that our brain tries to associate what we experience with what we know. So within the surreal world of the spirit realms, we sometimes see familiar things. We may encounter a spirit being and see it as a wolf or a bear. Or it may be some fantastic creature or even something that may seem like alien tech. Our ancestors saw what they know. They knew foxes and deer and jackals, etc.

We know these things too, but now we know much more as well.