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Dear Soul Arcanum:

I am a psychotherapist but have never believed in the spiritual world until I had a patient who experienced past lives. I attended a seminar with Dr. Brian Weiss and am impressed with the reports of his clients. Personally, however, I have never felt or encountered anything supernatural, and I’m curious as to why that is.
Frieda

Dear Frieda:

While I’ve been deeply blessed with all sorts of amazing spiritual experiences, it wasn’t always this way for me, which means that you can go from living an ordinary life to one that is rich with magic. Let me explain:

While most people report never having had a psychic or paranormal experience, I think it would be more accurate to say that they haven’t had any that they can consciously recall. Most (if not all) small children do have such experiences. In fact, little kids are known for sensing monsters under the bed and having so-called imaginary friends. Though adults may not recognize what they’re talking about, many relay memories from past lives, communicate telepathically with their caregivers, have premonitory dreams and encounter spiritual beings.

The manner in which adults handle such experiences greatly impacts a child’s openness to similar experiences in the future. When children are made to feel wrong, foolish or frightened, they learn to filter out perceptions that could bring further emotional pain. Strange experiences aside, over time, we’re all trained to focus more on physical reality and to ignore the magical fantasies of our imaginations. So instead of asking why everyone doesn’t have paranormal experiences, maybe we should ask why some people do.

Of course, just as some people are naturally artistic or athletic, there are some people who are born sensitives, and they tend to have unusual experiences simply because they can sense things that others can’t. For example, they may consciously encounter a ghost where another person may feel uneasy or remain totally oblivious.

Additionally, outside influences do factor in here. Someone who lives in a haunted house is more likely to encounter a spirit than someone who does not, and someone who works in hospice care is more likely to have an amazing spiritual experience than a plumber or a construction worker.

Just as there are some people who have impaired hearing and vision, there are plenty of people in the world who may never have a paranormal experience simply because they aren’t equipped to pick up on subtle input. At the same time, however, there are many people who do have the innate ability who block their conscious awareness of certain phenomena because they were trained to do so as children or because they actively disbelieve in such things or have simply never given them much thought.

Regarding the relationship between belief and paranormal experiences, we are all more or less caught in a Catch-22: we don’t believe in things we’ve never experienced, and we rarely experience things we don’t believe in. Research has shown that the expectations of the observer affect the outcome of the experiment, so when it comes to paranormal phenomena, if we expect something to happen, it tends to happen, and if we expect nothing to happen, that is what tends to occur. Thus some lives are full of magic and spirit while others are just routine.

It is only after something startling or mind blowing occurs that most people wake up to a whole new realm of possibility. Some people begin to awaken after experimentation with drugs reveals new modes of perception; others may awaken with the tragic death of a loved one or some other shock to the psyche. It is at these rare junctures when something anomalous to an individual’s belief system breaks through that dramatic changes in their personal beliefs may take place.

This is what happened to me: when my first love died, all sorts of incredible things happened that tore my existing belief system down to the foundation. I had never questioned the nature of reality until then, but after that it seemed like anything was possible, which left me wide open to all sorts of other phenomena. I was full of wonder and questions, which naturally led to new discoveries.

When people are launched on a spiritual journey by some incredible event, they tend to do things that encourage further strange events. By asking deep questions and following their curiosity off the beaten path, they may make startling new discoveries. They may read lots of spiritual material, and by giving their attention to these subjects, the law of attraction draws more related experiences their way. Many take up meditation and other spiritual practices, through which they become psychically sensitive, which opens up new realms of spiritual experience.

Of course, not everyone who has a mind blowing experience is launched on a powerful spiritual path. When people don’t experience anything mind blowing until later in life, it’s harder to integrate experiences that threaten to shatter their existing beliefs. They may then reject strange experiences as false, or assume that their mind is playing tricks on them when something doesn’t fit with what they’ve already decided to be possible.

Many people filter the paranormal experiences they do have from their conscious memory because their egos can’t handle all the inner rearranging that would have to take place to integrate them. This means that we may have had any number of amazing experiences that we can’t consciously remember. We all filter our memories and experiences in light of our beliefs and feelings, and through hypnotic regression, may discover all sorts of buried memories both paranormal and mundane that were too uncomfortable for us to maintain conscious awareness of.

So what can you do to encourage your own experience?

First, tell the Universe wholeheartedly that you want to have a mind blowing paranormal experience. State that you want it to be clear and unquestionable, that you’re ready to open your mind to new possibilities in light of such an experience, and that you’d like it to be positive, uplifting or beneficial.

Read up on such matters and immerse yourself in these ideas. Explore others’ experiences and let your intuition guide you. Listen within more. Allow your imagination to run wild. (The more grounded we are in the physical, the harder it is to perceive other planes.) Let go of needing to be right about anything, and instead, make your goal to discover something new.

Begin a regular meditation practice. This will lead to greater psychic sensitivity and a higher threshold of conscious awareness while in an altered state. Also, begin to work with the many methods available for remembering your dreams, for often initial psychic experiences occur in dreams. Another great way to have a really amazing experience is to begin working with techniques to have an out of body experience. You must be devoted and patient, however – it can take months to consciously get out of body for the first time.

If none of this works, you might try sleep deprivation. As your mind grows too tired to rigidly maintain its normal filters, you may begin to see or hear things that others cannot. Since you’re a trained therapist, you may be tempted to label these hallucinations, but as someone who has seen such things both when sleep deprived and not, I can assure you that they are as real as any paranormal phenomena. This is not the most pleasant way to go, but it may spark the breakthrough you need to open your belief system to new realms of possibility.

– Soul Arcanum

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