Dear Subscribers,

We were taught that there are five senses. Actually there are probably as many senses as there are levels of awareness, but that might be jumping ahead a bit. If one lives underground, such as burrowing animals do, the sense of smell must be much more developed than the sense of sight. The sense of smell is related to the earth element and in my sessions with my animal communicator, it became very clear that moles and worms depend to a much larger extent on the sense of smell than do humans. The sense of smell is related to the first chakra and adrenal glands and is deeply related to the survival instinct. When we are stressed, it is common that sensitivity to odors is heightened and what we easily seemed to tolerate under better circumstances becomes intolerable under adverse conditions. Looked at from another angle, we could say that with our coping margins eroded, obnoxious and potentially dangerous odors become not just more annoying but possibly also more life threatening since the capacity to detoxify is diminished when our limited resources are allocated to dealing with the primary stressors.

When I adopted Savika, the first thing she did was the normal border inspection that most canines regard as important. Then, she inspected the house, including cabinets and closets. She actually woke me up in the middle of the night to "ask questions". She showed me the places that Tundra had frequented and assured me there is another dog in the house and insisted I open every door and cabinet to prove I was not hiding the other dog somewhere. Fortunately, her body language was very easy to interpret, but she eventually became an encyclopedia of smells and when Tundra was finally found and returned, she complained to the animal communicator that Savika's cataloguing of smells and middle of the night reports were boring and she did not want to cosy up to such a uninteresting dog. As Savika's history unfolded and was explained to both Tundra and me, Tundra changed her mind and decided to show compassion for Savika.

For me, these were adventures into a world I never visited before. The explanations made perfect sense and therefore the need to take the information seriously set off synapses. We know from war dog accounts that dogs have such a highly developed sense of smell that they can detect a transparent wire simply by the wind blowing over the wire. There is enough residual in the air that dogs smell it — and probably the footprints of those laying the booby traps — but such facts give an entirely new meaning to off-gassing. They also, of course, help us to understand that as our energies sink into the survival chakra, our own sense of smell becomes more acute, but no doubt this occurs at the expense of other senses since there is just so much energy in our circuitry. If that energy is moved around, it changes our focus and perceptions of the world around us. We easily grasp this if we think of people who for one reason or another are lacking one or more senses. They rely heavily on the senses that are operative. At the same time, their interpretation of the world around them is affected by what they perceive and how they perceive.

We could leap to the senses we have that are not counted as senses, such as intuition. I had someone checking on my birds while I was in Ecuador. The recent eclipse was on her birthday, so another Piscean! She kept Niko at her house but had some questions about observations she had made about the birds. I was telling her about some of reports from the animal communicator. Two were particularly interesting. Celeste used to beat her wings and chase something into a corner, always, of course, in the middle of the night. There was actually quite a lot of ruckus. I would get out of bed to see what was going on, but I never saw anything. I asked the animal communicator to ask Celeste if she sees ghosts. She said, "I don't see things that are not there." That was not exactly the answer to my question so I got a little flippant and explained that this was not a psychiatric question; I just wanted to know if she sees ghosts. She calmed down and said there is lady who looks a lot like I used to look when Celeste first came to live with me, but the lady is not me. She is walking around with a blue and white coffee cup that is empty. Well, I was absolutely in shock because there was a Wedgwood coffee cup that had been in the family for generations and the agreement with all the female descendents was that when we had afternoon coffee, a tradition in Sweden, that cup would be placed in the middle of the table and offered to our ancestors. My mother died in my home on my 44th birthday on a full moon. By the time I brought her ashes to Hawaii, the Wedgwood cup was nowhere to be found so I did not uphold the agreement. You can imagine how compelling Celeste's explanation was.

As I said in the last post, my mother reincarnated so I asked the mother of the young reincarnation to ask her daughter to walk more slowly when she travels at night to see the birds. Interestingly, there was a story. When the mother-to-be was pregnant, she went to a shop owned by a very psychic lady. The shopkeeper said, "Your daughter is very fond of birds, please take this parrot to put in her room when she is born." It was some kind of art object. The point here is that there are senses that are operative but not apparently for everyone.

The question that my critter sitter posed was how the animals communicate. I said, they send telepathic pictures, just about as detailed as the digital attachments we send to friends via mobile devices and the Internet. I related another story from Sky, obviously, Celeste's partner. He simply wanted to chime in and said he found my "experiment with lights" very interesting. I asked him to explain himself. He said that he was watching the man who works in the garden and me when we were comparing lights. He then recommended that I find the book "we were reading" in the house we used to live in that was solar. He explained the drawings and position of the pictures on the page and the relevance to light. Sky often sat on my shoulder while I worked at the computer or read books. This all happened more than two decades earlier, but his recall of details was perfect and absolutely relevant. I was, of course, blown away because I thought he was just being sociable. He would take his claws and comb my hair and snuggle up against my face. I had no idea he was reading my books. I expressed my surprise and Sky said, "I don't know why you are so surprised. Don"t you think we are a lot alike?"

Well, his memory seems to be better than mine, and I was, of course, quite humbled by these revelations. The point however is that he has a photographic memory, which I also had as a child, and the capacity not merely to send pictures wherever he wants but to do so without dependance on Android devices, but he could also interpret the experiences that did not seem to bear directly on his own needs. He understood that we were concerned about light and he had a perspective on it that Dan and I were missing, but the question then is how exactly the sense of sight works and how might it be related to supersensory perception. The human sense of sight functions in exactly one octave, the 49th vibratory range, where we see from red to violet. We can divide that spectrum however we want, but we do not see infrared nor ultraviolet. Extrasensory perception, such as the ability to see auras, usually begins in the low ultraviolet range and usually can only be unfolded if the person is already farsighted. Clairvoyance may not even use the same chakra; the type of communication Sky uses to exchange understanding with the animal communicator may use the third eye.

The purpose of these stories, parts of which have been told before, is to question some of our communications. In a "normal" human sensory world, we rely much less on smell than our friends in the animal kingdom but we rely very heavily on sight and sound. We "verify" reality by reference to the seen world, and if we cannot see it with our own eyes, we have microscopes and telescopes and fancy cameras that make at least some of the unseen visible. However, if we cannot see something, we tend to deny the reality and sometimes to diagnose those who see what we do not see as psycho somethings. Textbooks are full of foolish statements by psychoanalysts who determine rationality based on their own understanding rather than learning from their patients how to navigate the full landscape of the psyche. Granted, some people are not in balance, but labels do not help them to interpret or overcome the imbalance. All thoughts and feelings have a context and a matrix to contain the details of the constructs found in the psyche. No one can understand the details without reference to the context. Sometimes some scaffolding is missing and we use various techniques to penetrate the vaults where the memories and missing pieces can be found. These techniques also depend on use of the senses because in the manifest world, we are constantly interpreting reality through the senses. We ought, however, to be using the senses more wisely. We should also try to recover the missing senses.

Where am I going with today's thoughts? First, I am alarmed at the distortion that is occurring in our world. In former times, let's just say before telephones, radios, television, and high speed communications, we used to sit down and talk, face-to-face. We heard voices, observed body language, saw laughter and tears, and could reach out and touch someone if we felt moved to do so. In today's world, we started more or less with letters, written words without sound or pictures. Words can be very rigid compared to a blush or smile. Then, we came to depend more and more on radio. All the information imparted came via the interpretive faculties of people we did not know, and truth be told, we had no reason to trust those who were filling our living rooms with noise and commercials. The net effect of decades of mass media intrusion into our lives is that people are more passive and less in touch with themselves and the natural world. With the advent of mobile communications, we have an entire generation, perhaps three generations, of people who consider a text message or emoticon a form of communication. Of course, there are some brilliant people out there making wonderful contributions to our world, but there are also billions of people who are simply regurgitating whatever was downloaded into their psyches.

I am as much as others a victim of this degradation in culture. For example, in my early teens, I was the editor of the church youth newspaper. It was mimeographed and was in black on white paper. In the late seventies, I started a little "magazine", again in black and white without pictures. In the late nineties, I launched my first web site but was told a page could not have more than 13 sentences or it would load too slowly. Last night, I went to a meeting of our homeowner's association because they are putting fiber optic cables in the ground as I speak. The streaming is going to be awesome, but what are the ramifications?

Well, the first, of course, is that there will be a huge financial hit, no one has the exact number yet but close to ten grand (over 20 years and, of course, with interest). The second is that for as long as I might still be where I am, which is not long, I hope, it is realistic to launch live webinars that will have voice and pictures, i.e., more use of more senses and thus more integration of the relevance of the material. This is important to me because I reached the point while in Ecuador where I truly never wanted to see another cell phone as long as I live. I confess to owning such devices and even sim cards, but I really hate the phones as well as what passes for communication. If we just see a word or emoticon, we cannot always interpret just how happy or angry or on board someone is. This said, I am not delusional, and I know technology is here to stay so we are converting web sites in order that they are mobile compatible, but I want to enrich the content while "upgrading" and one way to do this is to have live interaction.

While on this topic, I have some pet peeves with the software that produces sounds in robotic accents and usually almost illiterate ways so I will try to figure out how to prevent pirating of material and its conversion to youtube entertainment with annoying dubbing. It is not that one cannot figure out what the software is generating, obviously it is no more difficult than listening to foreign accents, but the style is dehumanizing, and we need to feel more in touch with the subjects that interest us. There are hugely creative possibilities with technology, but we must make sure that the means we use to communicate allow the authenticity of the ideas to survive the technological intrusions.

My goal in starting these series will be to empower people to become their own healers and to do so in a manner that restores confidence in our ability to perceive our realities accurately. There are some strategies I use that are subintentional but helpful. For instance, as many dots as I connect, there are ones that are missing links. This builds intuition. As I say, I don't do this deliberately. It happens because I am very intuitive and often do not even realize when I crossed a river without showing others where the bridges are. It takes an editor with an earthy approach to communication to tell me where to put the stepping stones and safety nets and all that. I think very fast and write very fast and often leave people stranded. The formal parts of the live presentations will have the bridges where they are needed, but who knows what will happen in the Q & A sessions.

Now, on a completely different note, something a little strange and exciting happened the day the Sun crossed my Ascendant. I got a Skype message from the owner of a hostel in Ecuador. It is called La Casa Verde and it would have been my first choice for a clinic if we were to expand in Baños. It was built by a couple from Downunder. Rebecca is from New Zealand and Doug is Australian. The quality of construction is far superior to what one usually finds in Ecuador and their concept was very ecologically appealing. A hostel is sort of like a bed and breakfast place or small hotel. I can't remember exactly how many rooms they have, about 11. It was for sale in the half million dollar price range, a bit higher than $500k but I don't recall the exact number. After their children started school, they decided they had to return to New Zealand so they relied on absentee management. We actually discussed becoming the absentee managers but they have very high ratings on Trip Advisor and other booking sites so they did not want to risk a conversion to a healing center. Anyway, they came up with a raffle idea. They wrote an e-book and everyone who buys the e-book is automatically entered in the raffle. If they do not sell enough e-books, the winner will get half the proceeds of the sales. In short, they only have to sell two e-books for the winner to recover his or her purchase cost. Of course, only the winner wins! I know a few of you already bought the e-book, but I thought to share the link in case others want to read the book or enter the raffle:

http://www.winthelifestyle.com

I met Doug in person. Friends of ours, the people with whom we stayed in Cuenca, cooked a Sri Lankan dinner and served it to some people at La Casa Verde. We went through every room several times, about three visits there. It's a very nice place but not close to downtown. It is not fancy nor rustic, somewhere in between. I would say it is functional and solidly built. There is a small edible forest between the hostel and river, mostly fruit and some vegetables, all, of course, organically grown. Even the bedding is organic and cleaned with apple cider vinegar. The resident massage therapist also makes her own soap and a few herbal teas.

As you can see, the muse has returned and I will be posting more on the various topics that are dear to my heart. Many of you are subscribed using plain text. You are missing pictures. You can use the links at the bottom of the e-mail to modify your preferences.

Blessings,

Ingrid

Copyright by Ingrid Naiman 2017

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