Magical Thinking and Our 360 Senses

Ancient Egyptians believed that full humans (which may mean people who have run the gamut of initiations) have 360 senses. Mind Scrambling. My marbles roll confusedly on the floor just thinking about it. Okay, so we've got five down...more or less. Rupert Sheldrake tells us that sixth sense has been appropriated by scientists to categorize the way that animals use the magnetic, gravitational and electric fields to detect migrate, detect prey, etc. (and there has to be at least a few senses stirred in there). Sheldrake goes on to coin the term "seventh sense" to engulf all the other extra-sensory perceptions like clairvoyance, precognition and telepathy (the three that he focuses on) and describes how difficult it is for researchers to tease these three apart.

Those of us who have taken classes from Betsy Bergstrom knows that there are different types of extra-sensory perception like clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, clairolfaction, instant knowing, etc. If we stretch everything out to its extreme, we may come up with almost 20 senses that we know of. The implications of this are immense.

Ancient Egyptians had an understanding that we do not know a concept or thing until we knew all aspects of it. Quick calculations say that the most astoundingly psychic of us would know only about 5.5% of anything. This is where humility and the Great Mystery come in.

Do you remember when you were little and you made something, a picture perhaps, and you showed it to someone who didn't appreciate it or thought it was just clutter? If this happens on a regular basis, eventually that special something that we had (that we put into the picture) withers and goes dormant for lack of recognition, acknowledgement and feedback from the outer world. It's like it didn't exist. Eventually, we ourselves forget about it. This, my friends, is soul loss. Lack of perception can engender soul loss.

What happens when we walk the world, appreciated only for the quantifiables: money, possessions, appearances, career, etc.? What happens to all of those non-goal-oriented parts of us? What happens to the peach-lick toed, mudlicious, creamy nougat, juicy joy parts that could: feel what Christmas Morning was, sniff the change of seasons, eat the sunshine in an orange or allow the undulations of the sea run through our bodies as we stand on the beach?

This is what makes life worth living. Jobs and possessions allow us to live so we can experience the world in our own way, to feel these things and thereby become one of the tongues of God/Goddess/Allah/All-That-Is that's busily licking our own scoops from the 5-gagillion flavors of the Great Baskin-Robbins of Life.

Such people, each in their own way, contribute to the experience of the greater whole of which we are all a part. So it behooves us to help people find their destined scoop of life and regain their abilities to enjoy it--because at the deepest levels (where our commonality finally trumps our divisions) we are enriched by their experience too.

Magical Thinking

In neo-Spiritual thinking, we are awash with messages of love and light. And while they may provide temporary solace for many, only spiritually actionable thinking can actually change something of this world to better suit and reflect us. Real and persistent forces are at play in the world, and while most of us feel powerless to do anything about larger societal issues, we ALWAYS have sway over our own. And if we feel powerless over our own issues, then we return to our proverbial drawing board and see what has stopped us from recognizing the choice we have over each decision we make.

All of us (who are honest) have gone through periods where we feel small but palpable influences that seem to wear away at our sense of selves, our sense of being engaged with our destiny and the world, and the understanding that we have the power to do something about it.

Could it be that magical thinking, the childhood mechanics that we're constantly told to put away in our adult years, be the place where our power lives? Or perhaps magical thinking is simply a haven where all of our powers go after we've been called ridiculous or idealistic too often.

Note: Magical thinking is NOT the same as fantasizing. We fantasize when we feel powerless and we need some avenue of not-this-world-ness to give vent to unrealistic stories of how we're going to get our power back--such as winning some love who represents who we want to be, or becoming suddenly popular and famous and showing those bullying former classmates what is what. When we think magically, we KNOW that we are in our power and that the actions we take (even in those small and simple ways) change the world around us in non-cause-and-effect ways: you know that helping that beetle out of the watering can has somehow made the world warmer and friendlier, or that wishing upon that star made something happen. And that is what I think (for now) is at the heart of shamanism.

If you were lucky enough to have childhood moments when you felt the wonder of such things (and you're not so repressed that you've blocked them out), then you know what I mean. If you haven't had these moments, or you don't remember them, then it's probably a good time for you to get yourself over to a professional Magical Thinker and Doer, a.k.a., a shaman (or in this society, a shamanic practitioner). Because honestly, I don't think that people can have a sense of their own real power without some experience exercising their magical machinery (and I'm not talking about the domination flavor of power which is ultimately false--although it can wreak havoc nonetheless).

You practitioners, this goes for you too.