I was talking to Ora Nadrich, the gifted author of books about spirituality. We were mulling over the disturbing state of the world. Given that she is at home in the more mystical realms, I let down my guard.
“I feel,” I blurted out, “as if in the last few years, the physical world has almost melted away, and that the institutions we thought were permanent have visibly collapsed; and now what has emerged into obvious, palpable form are primarily positive and negative energies.”
I try never to share these kinds of observations with anyone but close friends, and only with those who I know are open to such discussions.
I thought she would look at me as if I had two heads.
But Ora said something like, “Exactly.”
We delved into how we both sensed that the world itself—not just history, not just human behavior—but the planet; the dimension in which we found ourselves; time and space, and our relationship to them—felt to us as if they had somehow changed in the last three years or so; leaving us—us humans—uprooted; trying to make a home again, in a place that was now unfamiliar and new; a place that was shifting; one that was hard to navigate or to understand.
Ora embraces the change and is ready for a new world. Many people in the spirituality community feel that the previous world (pre-2020) was deeply corrupt anyway—the corruption was just better disguised and better dressed—and that it is bracing to see at last the unmediated nakedness of all that was wrong, so that change can come about quickly in the old world passing away and the building of the new.
I wish I had her courage.
But I am uneasy. I feel as if my whole life I have lived on dry land and now I have somehow stepped onto a lurching boat, and I do not yet know our destination. Yet others seem not to see these massive changes at all.
When I read in Ora’s book Time to Awaken that she believed we as humans on the planet were living in parallel realities, this had the shock of verisimilitude for me, though it was a pretty startling notion.1
As Ora explained, we shouldn’t be concerned with those whose perception does not contain the “invisible”—that which they cannot see. As it is now, we have come to know that there are those who “see” what is going on, and those who don’t.
Ora describes that we are living in a parallel universe, so perhaps there are the “seers of the invisible” and those who cannot see what is not visible to them because they can only live in the visible realm, and even in that realm, there is so much they still do not see.
How else could some millions or billions of people see so clearly the abyss of lies, coercion, and tyranny of the past three years, and the other millions or billions saw nothing but the snooze-worthy status quo?
How is it that we keep speaking directly past one another? We do seem to be in different realities.
Or if not two dimensions, what if humanity is now divided into two modes of perception, which is—even trippier—essentially the same as our inhabiting two worlds?
And even beyond that alarmingly intriguing hypothetical, there is the possibility of a major metaphysical shift overall, of some still-to-be-understood kind.
I think it is really possible that the world has indeed changed and shifted in some mysterious way, such that we are blinking into new awareness in a time in which more than ever before, “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”2
I think we need to break the taboo, in our educated, Western discourse, against talking about metaphysical energies, both positive and malevolent.
I believe the world has indeed changed—recently—in such a way that the taboo against such discussions is disempowering to us.
The idea that the world in which humans find themselves changes energetically—that there are palpably different “ages” that bring with them different qualities—is familiar to all great civilizations except our own, post-Enlightenment, mechanistic, Newtonian culture.
The Vedic world believes that time brought humans, about 5,000 years ago, into Kali Yuga; that we are in the middle of “the era of the demon”—of vice and darkness, of conflict and hypocrisy.3 Astrologers, whose art derives from Mesopotamia, India, and China, believe that we entered the Age of Pisces about 2,000 years ago, and that in the next few hundred years (there is debate about just when) we are due to enter a golden age, the Age of Aquarius.4 The Aztecs, for their part, believed that there were four ages of creation, each lit by a different sun.5
The bottom line is that other civilizations have seen this planet and its environs and humans themselves in relation to their planet and era, as being always in a state of existential flux. It is only our post-Copernican worldview here in the West that, anomalously among cultures, insists that we inhabit a stable, measurable planet.
But might physical reality itself be subject, as most other cultures have always believed, to era-level change?
Our Western modern culture insists that only phenomena that we can see and explain are real, and that human perception must be contiguous and must universally be the same.
But what if that is not true?
I’ve always been intrigued—as have many scholars of the Greek—with Homer’s description in The Odyssey of a “wine-dark sea”: “And now have I put in here, as thou seest, with ship and crew, while sailing over the wine-dark sea to men of strange speech.”6 Scholars have wondered if the ancient Greeks actually did not perceive color the way we do.7
Could people have actually seen differently than we do, in former times?
Cognitive scientists are confirming that this different color palette could be a real thing, and caused by differences in language practices: they are finding that if a culture does not have language to describe a thing, the brain does not perceive it as clearly, or sometimes not at all. In “Effects of Language on Visual Perception,” Gary Lupyan, Rasha Rahman, Lera Boroditsky, and Andy Clark find that:
Effects of language on perception can be observed both in higher- level processes such as recognition and in lower-level processes such as discrimination and detection. A consistent finding is that language causes us to perceive in a more categorical way. [emphasis mine] Rather than being fringe or exotic, as they are sometimes portrayed, we discuss how effects of language on perception naturally arise from the interactive and predictive nature of perception.8
So—could humans have gained different ways of seeing over time, through the development of new languages involving new layers of distinction? The cognitive sciences conclude that this is certainly possible.
Cognitive scientists, and now also quantum physicists, are confirming what mystics from many traditions have long understood: that there is more to reality than flat material being-ness. Kabbala, for instance, one mystical tradition, sees sparks of the Divine as being hidden within all earthly matter. Even though Hollywood has appropriated a weird distortion of it, and the name, it is, if properly understood, in its traditional form, an established part of the Jewish people’s faith history; not “occult,” but rather a rich discourse of practical mysticism. The Zohar, the foundation of Kabbalism, is a set of medieval commentaries on the Torah. Kabbalists believe that Yahweh is on a continuum closely involved with humans and earth and that the Divine (as well as its oppositional force) can be exposed within humans and within material reality. The Zohar sees evil as separation from the Divine: and, “[a]ccording to the Zohar, evil is like the bark of a tree of emanation: it is a husk or shell in which lower dimensions of existing things are encased.”9
These insights about good and evil inhabiting our material world are shared in similar terms by other mystical traditions, including Christianity’s and Islam’s.10 Here, for instance, is Saint Theresa of Avila, who also was able physically to perceive both divine and hostile forces: “I used unexpectedly to experience a consciousness of the presence of God, of such a kind that I could not doubt that he was within, or that I was wholly engulfed in him.”11
On a related note, could modern, secularly trained humans have lost certain abilities to perceive the world and the divine or malevolent powers manifested within it, as certain ways of describing reality, including certain words and concepts, have been abandoned, or have atrophied?
What if we have lost our abilities to discern energetic changes and to adapt to them? What if we have lost sophistication in sensing and reacting to—many things that were palpable to our forebears in many nations?
What if we have, through disuse and the abandonment of language for it, lost our ability to see—the spirits of animals and trees and water, which ability is universal in preindustrial societies? What if we lost our ability to see and to hear the voice of God—which ability also was commonplace in earlier times, and around the world? What if we have lost our ability to detect and react to what can only be called beneficent and malevolent energies and entities?
Just as every other culture except ours believes in cycles of time with different attributes, every other culture but ours has a highly developed discourse of positive and negative energies and entities here with us on the planet. We, though, in the modern West, are not supposed to name, and therefore are not supposed to perceive, any of this.
These positive entities, found in all other cultures, can be called angels, guides, archangels, or divine beings. The positive energies from higher positive realms are called blessings, or states of holiness; the positive energies can be found in a location—like a shrine—or maintained in a talisman or amulet, like a mezuzah or a Hand of Fatima, or conveyed to a person, as in a baptism, or with relics or holy water.
Negative entities and negative energies, in every other culture but ours, are described with just as complex a discourse and have just as elaborate an iconography; devils, or Djinns, rebellious spirits in Islam; banshees in Ireland; or “hungry ghosts” in Japan. Places can be possessed by negative entities. People can be possessed. In India, today, negative vibrations are taken for granted as being so real that there are advice columns about them in daily newspapers.12
We, though, in the modern West, were taught that the coming of monotheism wiped out all notion of negative entities from our Western civilization, or made them tame and manageable.
But the Hebrew Bible actually shows that this process was a dynamic battle.
The Old Testament, as I am learning by reading the Geneva Bible and Chabad.org’s Hebrew, does not describe the pagan gods, the “graven images” that Yahweh assailed, as being useless or lifeless or inert, though that was how they were mis-described to me in the versions of these stories that I was mis-taught in Hebrew school.
No, the Hebrew text (and the Geneva Bible) describe them rather as transmitting real powers of their own, but also as transmitting powers that are bad and dangerous.13
The Hebrew Bible’s text makes stunningly clear (though later mistranslations into English do not so simply) the premise that right action aligns people with a moral universe, and that engaging in acts of righteousness is a kind of technology that elicits blessings and abundance from heaven; and that crime, violence, sexual immorality, and hatred put humans at cross-purposes with divine laws, and that it is this—and not the pettiness of a punitive, irrational God—that inevitably draws crisis, chaos, and annihilation—the effects of a curse—onto these individuals and communities.
Why this preamble? Because I think it is time to break the taboo against talking about energies, positive and negative, in this world. Why? Because I think that these forces’ emergence into the light of day—the battle between existential, cosmic good and evil, the dueling between forces that extend beyond the mechanistic, beyond the material, beyond the political—is the battle of our time.
We had better learn to resee these energies; to rename them; if we are to survive.
This metaphysical battle is now the defining Weltanschauung—world-spirit—of our time. The term, made famous by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, is literally “world-intuition” or “being-in-the-world,” according to the Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon. “Heidegger understands worldview existentially—that is, as a modality of Being in the World, in which a particular stance (Haltung) or way of having a hold on the world predominates.”14 Heidegger too, shamanistically, warned that human perception affects “reality,” and coined the term welten or “worlding”: the making of a world.
But Weltanschauung, too, was mistranslated into modern English, mechanistically and reductively—as so much formerly potent language related to metaphysics has been—as “worldview.”
The world-spirit now is overtaken by the struggle between good and evil. Nothing stands in between.
You can’t stand in between any more.
Everything else now on the planet is secondary to this battle; everything else is a symptom, a byproduct and manifestation, of this metaphysical world-conflict.
Most people I know have had experiences about which they never speak in public; these involve either majestic and beautiful and inexplicable—or scary and negative and inexplicable—forces or energies, that our Western mechanistic worldview does not accept as being real.
As a result, most people are scared to discuss these experiences, lest they be dismissed as flaky or fanatical or mentally ill.
I’ve been afraid to discuss these matters.
But I must face this last taboo.
I feel I must explore this question of “energies” on this planet, both positive and negative; explore questions about how to recognize both good and evil forces; and investigate how we can become alert to and aware of these flavors and gradations of unseen reality once again, so as to keep ourselves spiritually safe and strong and on the right path, in a time of grave spiritual danger.
I am, as I often insist, a devoted rationalist. I believe in the scientific method. I believe in facts and I cherish the verifiable.
I know that there are real dangers in opening the door to discussion of that which cannot be proven by two objective witnesses; dangers of fanaticism, of hysteria, of group hallucinations. All you have to do is look at history, from the Inquisition to the Salem witch trials, to see how assertions about the unseen, about good or evil forces and the metaphysical, have been perverted into savagery or collective lunacy.
That said, I do believe that the world in which we could manage quite well enough by never talking about metaphysical energies—blessings or curses, angelic or demonic forces—has died away.
I feel it gone, in all of its dumb, familiar, reassuring solidity. I miss its stolid, lumpen thickness, its cozy materiality, its prosaic predictability.
In this old world being destroyed and this new world being born, I believe we will need to start telling the truth about the energies we feel and that we encounter.
I believe we need our prophets and our shamans back; our guides; our Josephs, our dreamers; our poets and our interpreters.
We need our spiritual practices, and thus our spiritual discernment, back.
We need to remember what it means to see and name the invisible color “blue”—all the levels of meaning and being that we have been told are not really there—if we are safely to forge this tossing, mighty sea.
I sought my entire career to secure a reputation as a serious, academically trained intellectual in the post-Enlightenment tradition. I did largely achieve that.
However, that came with a cost.
For this tradition—especially now, since World War Two—is a thoroughly mechanistic one. If you are a “serious person,” in the discourse of the West, today, you cannot possibly believe in anything that cannot be objectively measured—and measured, to take that one step further, with the physical instruments that currently exist. If you believe in anything beyond the purely mechanistic, materialist Newtonian universe, you are a rube, a fantasist, credulous, ignorant, deceived.
So—like many people—I have taken care to censor rigidly the fact that all my life, I have also had experiences that were dramatic, and that made deep impressions upon me—but that went beyond what the physical universe could contain or explain.
I have recently come close to death (a story which I’ll soon relate), and am, as a friend put it, “playing with House money.” Meaning that I have a second chance at life, and I have nothing left to lose.
So I am putting a match to my reputation once again, by sharing my conviction, and attesting to my lived experience, that the world is awash with “energies,” both good and evil, and that these affect humans—and probably animals, and the planet itself—in profound and important ways.
Ever since I was first conscious, I was aware that I perceived some things differently than did many of those around me. In kindergarten, I realized (without, of course, having the word for this) that I had synesthesia—the condition in which one sense spills over into another; people with this form of perception hear colors, or taste sound, or in other ways activate different senses at the same time.15 In my case, I so vividly saw numbers as colors—“1” as yellow, “2” as green, “3” as red, “4” as brown, “5” (my least favorite number) as black, “6” as light blue, and so on—that I was astonished to discover that this way of seeing the colors of numbers, was not experienced by everyone in my class. That was the first time I felt ashamed and embarrassed when I realized that my perception made me different from the peers with whom I wished so much to fit in.
Somehow I managed to suppress this “odd” way of seeing numbers—a suppression which also, sadly, later made it quite difficult for me to enjoy numbers (or, as a result, to do math).
Though I managed to censor my synesthesia, my awareness as a child that perception was fluid, and that currents of all kinds were continually flowing around us all—and that the physical world was illuminated and glowing and magical, but also that it contained dark and scary forces—could not be suppressed.
Luckily I was born into a family of eccentrics, and of people who believed in and respected the creative fire. My father knew the literature of the mystical poets and of the Transcendentalists very well. He knew that the way I saw the world was not that unusual, and that plenty of reasonable people—from Walt Whitman to Henry David Thoreau to Emily Dickinson—had similar sensibilities. My dad knew his William Blake, so he was fine with his weirdo daughter’s tendency to see “a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.”16 My mother, when I was a child, was a folklorist. Nothing I shared, as a child, was too weird for my folks.
The world of intellectuals has not always been as divorced as it is today from mystical perception. In the nineteenth century, for example, intellectuals pursued mysticism: indeed, there was a word for it: the perception of, or the artistic capture of, “the Sublime.” Instead of mocking those who were aware of the larger currents animating the physical world, many nineteenth-century aesthetes, and certainly our own Transcendentalists, actively pursued awareness of the Sublime; they read poems and looked at paintings to hone their sensibilities in that direction. It was understood then that anyone could perceive the Sublime, and that doing so ennobled the observer.
Here is Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass:
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.
I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots . . .
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,
(They do not know how immortal, but I know.)17
By the time I was coming of age, though, those days were gone. I grew up in a jet age, a Jetsons age. The Transcendentalist poets were passé.
My family, when I was a child, accepted me, but the larger world would be a problem.
If you could not measure it, it did not exist.
When I was nine, I invited a little friend to see the “magical place” that I knew was hidden like a gem in a corner of a sedate garden. It was a garden that dated to the beginning of the twentieth century; there were stone garden walls rising up to the magical place, and they were covered with moss; there was a little concrete bench set into the wall, at an angle outward into the street, crafted in that 1910 style. Parts of the ancient garden were overgrown—an elegant, elderly lady lived in the lovely old house and rarely emerged, but when she did, she was as beautiful as her forgotten garden.
This little grotto was a miniature land of dreams.
If you stood on the bench and looked into the corner of the garden, which was raised up, you could see nasturtiums made of tongues like fire—with apricot and russet, lemon-yellow and radiant orange petals; all of them were streaked with deep red at the hearts, and all bore tiny cups of honey.
You could see pale-blue bluebells too, bending their necks like dancers. The nasturtiums and the bluebells were like two companies of ballerinas, clothed in different costumes. There were shafts of sunlight somehow within that circle of nasturtiums and bluebells. And all of this treasure was contained somehow within another circle, one made up of dark green—of wet, tangled, protective grasses, that overshadowed and enclosed the secret place.
The magical place looked like a ballroom for fairy dances.
The glow of its magic was palpable to me.
My little friend asked her mom if she could go see it; and her mom—who as I recall was something really glamorous and cool and slightly intimidating, like a flight attendant—was excited, in spite of herself as an adult, to see this magical place of which I spoke.
So the mom drove her daughter over. And they got out of the car. And I showed the grotto to them.
And there was silence.
And more silence.
Neither of them had any idea what I was talking about.
After a beat, I could feel that my friend was confused, and that she was a bit sorry for me. There was nothing to see!
The mom turned away with a brisk motion. “Come on, let’s get home.” She was terse and annoyed. There was nothing there.
And to my amazement, I looked at the magical place and—there was indeed nothing there!
The magic had fled at the denial of perception.
What had happened? It was nothing now, it was utterly banal, it was just a tangle of grasses, a dim mess of foliage.
I was—again—horribly humiliated and embarrassed. No one saw what I saw! I was such a weirdo.
I was never invited over to play with that child again, and she never came over again to my house.
So yet again, I tried to put away my troublesome perception.
Many experiences in my life as an adult followed this theme—that the world is animated with energies, for good and evil, and embroidered all over with magic; and I sustained these experiences but did not discuss them. I also learned that lots of people suppress similar experiences along these lines.
Once in a while I would tell a story about a metaphysical experience—one that really had happened to me—and then everyone else—lawyers, editors, journalists, scientists—would rush to share their own stories of the metaphysical. So I learned that lots of us are not talking about important experiences, from which we could all surely learn important lessons.
And when I ask these folks why they don’t talk more publicly about their experiences, I get the same responses that I recognize in my own inhibitions: no one wants to be seen as hallucinating, or not credible, or unbalanced. Two-thirds of people, according to Yougov.com, say that they have had a paranormal experience.18 About half of Americans, according to Pew Research, say that they have had a mystical or metaphysical experience.19
That is a lot of Americans who are, understandably, keeping quiet.
We are awash with energies, good and evil, beyond those for which postwar science has names.
Some of these energy fields are beautiful and miraculous. Perhaps they are even healing.
When I went to visit the grave of the “Lubavitcher Rebbe”—Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, one of the most revered holy men of the twentieth century—I was directed to the Ohel, or “tent,” a gathering-place in Queens, built adjacent to the Rebbe’s gravesite. This is a destination where people from all walks of life gather to pray at this saintly person’s final resting place.20
“The Rebbe keenly understood that our every action is part of a bigger picture,” explains Chabad.org.
Every good deed we do brings humanity closer to the ultimate goal, the era of cosmic perfection and universal awareness of G-d, known in Judaism as the time of Moshiach. The Rebbe spoke tirelessly about this time, demonstrating how the world is heading closer and closer to this special era and how every person can actualize it by increasing in acts of goodness and kindness.21
I was early to my appointment. So I walked for many blocks around my destination. And the further away from the gravesite I wandered—block after block, into the peaceful Queens suburbs—the fainter grew the aura or force field of holiness.
But as the time of my appointment drew closer, and I walked toward the Ohel—the closer I drew to the sacred location—the more intensely one could feel the magnetism of great holiness. It was like a giant ziggurat of sacred energies, ascending to a peak over the quiet cemetery in Queens; and gently sloping off into all directions, like a mountain of emotional gold.
At the gravesite itself, the vibration of sanctity was so palpable I felt as if I were in the presence of an aspect of the Divine.
So many places are vortices of sacred energy.
When I visited the Scottish island of Iona, I was an ill-informed, day-tripping tourist. I had done no research on the island; and this visit was before cellphones or the internet. To my amazement, the moment my feet touched Iona’s earth, I wandered the island in a state of joy and exaltation; in a daze of glory. Was that what heaven felt like?
I did not realize—until I boarded the tourist bus again, and the bus driver explained—that Iona was a sacred island. It always had been, back to pre-Christian times, and right up to the present. The sacred presence on the island had been described and testified to, over and over, for centuries. It was believed in the traditions related to the place, that Christ had visited Iona—and would reappear again on that sacred island.22
Some people react like that, explained the bus driver—most people; most wander around in a state of exaltation and joy.
And some people simply cannot take it, he said; the energies burn them; and they need to get off the island as quickly as possible.
Some of the energies out there are simply alarming.
The leadership institute I cofounded long ago in the Hudson Valley was housed in a fine old building on 300 acres of land. I recall that the real estate broker would not get out of the car when she first showed the building to me.
She sent me in alone.
Once my colleagues and I bought it, we realized it was truly haunted.
Kitchen cabinet doors would swing open of their own accord. There was a spot in the library that was always icy cold. Lights would flicker off and on, and doors would bang shut in empty rooms. Retreatants would have troubled dreams.
It got so bad that we expected the presence in the house—everyone agreed that it was a masculine one—to act up at certain times during retreats. When we lit the Shabbat candles, the candles would flicker. Or one candle would be snuffed out.
At one point, two serious witnesses—neither prone to exaggeration—described a Shabbat candlestick dematerializing. It simply disappeared.
By now, we had learned that the long-ago owner of the home had been murdered (in the library), by his tenant, who had lived in a smaller home on the property.
The house subsequently had had so much supernatural activity, that, in the 1940s, there had been an actual old-school exorcism. This exorcism had been matter-of-factly reported in the local newspaper.
I was at a loss. The paranormal activity was taking a toll on everyone. I described this disturbing situation to my then-therapist, a spiritually oriented gentleman. He suggested that the being in the house seemed to be trying to get our attention when we lit the Shabbat candles.
He suggested that we say the Kaddish next time we lit the candles—the Jewish prayer for the dead.
We did. We said Kaddish.
The house filled with peace.
The unsettled presence seemed right away to have moved on—and nothing ever bothered anyone in that house again.
Other energy fields, I have no doubt, are just pure evil.
I visited Guantanamo, in the first six months of President Barack Obama’s administration. I could feel the presence of what one might call Satan; or of some other magisterial, high-level administrator of evil.
I felt that presence. Not in the service men and women assigned to that post, not in the housing for reporters; not in the cynical mock-up of the courtroom on the site; not in the prison yard—where I could see the men who had been penned up for years without charge or trial, and I could hear their roar of distress and outrage.
Rather, I could feel the presence of Satan—or some other adjudicator of evil on earth—standing right behind the “doctors” and the “nurse” and the “psychiatrist,” in the pristine “medical facility,” where “difficult” prisoners were housed. That facility was part of the creepy tour that the US government had arranged for reporters who were covering the prison.
These “healers” in the medical bay were showing me rather proudly how they forced tubes down the throats of the recalcitrant prisoners who went on hunger strikes. They showed me—as if this selection were a treat—the range of flavors of liquid nutrition—chocolate, strawberry, vanilla—that they pumped into the unwilling bodies of striking prisoners.
A prisoner who had been on hunger strike, and who was being force-fed, died of starvation while I was at the facility.
I could almost smell the evil of the force field that surrounded those “doctors” and “nurses” at that scene. There was something huge, and awful, and terrifying, and intelligent, and dark—just behind them; inhabiting them; all around them.
We are in a time of extraordinary change—the nature of reality itself is changing, as you now know I believe—and if we are to survive this time and indeed if we are to evolve safely to wherever we are supposed to arrive next, we need to talk honestly about good and evil energies; about healing and killing energies; and about sacred and profane energies.
This discussion is not even as metaphysical as it sounds. Brian, my husband, who very early in his military career worked in “SIGINT,” or “Signals Intelligence,” points out that everything has a vibrational signature or frequency—and that mapping those signals is how many technologies work that scan a field to gather intel through the interception of those signals.
So many technologies use various energy fields that we scarcely notice how weird they would have seemed in an era before their mechanisms were understood. Is it so weird to grapple with energies?
Sonograms send sound energies into our bodies to give our doctors intelligence. Ultrasounds also use sound waves.
Given all this, is it surprising that we “vibe” with some people and that our energy fields “clash” with others? Is it surprising that people who are happily married have heart rates that align when they sit side by side? Is it surprising that stories about relatives who know at distances of thousands of miles that something bad has happened to their loved ones, are as commonplace as stories of finding bargains at a mall?
We live in a mysterious world. Mechanics do not explain the totality of it.
We are held together human to human, by energies of love that are as strong as death. Our lives are held in the palm of the Divine, like leaves on the surface of water.
Who knows all that is around us and that animates us?
Our ancestors dealt with these mysteries by inviting and seeking and invoking blessings, and by assiduously avoiding curses.
Every culture except our own has amulets, phylacteries, prayer shawls, talismans, Yad Fatimas, invocations, prayers for protection.
Every culture except our own seeks the blessing of positive energies, and respects the miraculous nature of positive powers.
Every culture except our own fears and dreads curses and maledictions; is wary of the workings and powers of negative energies; and seeks divine protection from them.
Is our denial of powerful energies—especially in a time of great pressure and great change—a form of cultural suicide?
Are we super-enlightened?
Or just really incredibly dumb?
It is time for us, too, urgently to relearn some ancient wisdom.