The Magnetized Man

According to neuroscientist and medical doctor Tara Swart, we have up to 34 different senses. For many of us, the thought of losing one of our five senses is terrifying,. Our lives, our understanding of safety, and our ability to navigate the world or society as we know it  are tied to sensory signals with associated meanings that we’ve built up over the course of our lives.. You know that a red light means stop because: 

• it was drilled into you in kindergarten; 
• you’ve seen the aftermath  of one car T-boning another at high speed
•  or you’ve seen how people who are legally held responsible for somethingbecome social pariahs and experience psychosocial stress.  
• your reckless uncle who doesn’t follow any rules stops for red lights

In other words, even the things that you experience through sensory signals have a cognitive and social dimension. You create a story about them. A story is: This happens, then this happens, then this happens. If you’re following the story of an authoritative source – like a government – you’re guaranteed a specific outcome. And this story becomes “the way things are.” 

 But what about when we don’t have a socially-vetted or government-sanctioned or market-tested story for a specific sensation. We attach a story to it, and when in doubt, we create the simplest story of all time: the story of fear. That tightness in your chest, the tilting of your stomach, that racing heartbeat. They are signs that something has changed, but we’re not sure what. To avoid this feeling of discomfort – and reassure ourselves that we’re okay – we need to tie that feeling to something external, such as getting a diagnosis from a doctor or blaming someone (or something) for our problems. As a result, this explanation becomes the tangible manifestation of our fear: cancer, trauma, etc.

Consider the case of pandemics. During a pandemic,, fear can become just as dangerous and contagious as actual pathogens. And that fear can draw people to create stories in their heads that give them a sense of control, whether that story is scientific or political. If people are not afraid of germs, but they are afraid of government activities, the fear manifests as paranoia and a global conspiracy. If people are not afraid of their government, but they’re afraid of germs, that fear manifests as distance and othering. But that’s only because there’s not a generally accepted sense around pathogens. If everyone had a sense that allowed them to tell when a deadly pathogen was in the air and what amount would harm their particular body,, they would spend time with people for a fixed amount of time and then calmly excuse themselves when they reached their infection window.  Society would create rules of politeness around this, and there would be charities for people who didn’t have this radar, and we would judge people who took advantage of the radar-less. 

The opposite of fear is love. What enables us to feel love in those scenarios? Towards either a perceived corrupt government or love towards the perceived “other”? The suppression of certain neurons. Our obsession with media or our obsession with science causes us to create our own social reality, so we suppress our love towards a group that we don’t understand and, as a result, perceive as a threat. You can imagine then how we may still have access to 34 senses but don’t know how to make sense of them. And this makes sense. Certain social realities that pervade all politics and fear – like money and laws – teach us to suppress those senses, and as a result, fall out of practice with using them. 

To understand this, consider a VR headset. Our feeling of being here and in our bodies comes from something called proprioception. This is the technical term for your brain’s awareness of where your body is located in space. VR headsets use a combination of technology and techniques, including tiny sensors, inverse kinematics, and algorithms like the SLAM algorithm, to make it seem like the body you have in a VR experience is similar to an experience that you’d have in the real world. By ensuring there’s low latency and using advanced computer science to respond to your movements in the real world, the virtual reality can become responsive to your actual movements. Now, imagine if while you were in an incredible VR experience you felt an itch or you felt a hand creeping up your leg or you suddenly felt pain. When you look around the VR experience, you see that nothing virtual can account for that feeling. So you  reach your hands up and ah – there it is. The feeling of something on your head – the VR headset –even though there’s nothing on your head in the VR experience. You pull it off, and and there you are, back in the real world, and there’s an explanation for your feeling and you can take Newtonian action, like scratching the itch or swatting away the hand. . 

In the real world, though, we can’t take off our headset, so we have to invent a story whenever we have an unusual, inexplicable, or uncomfortable sensation. This helps us feel less helpless, stupid, powerless, or panicked. We have to use things we’ve observed before, memories we’ve had before, experiences we’ve had before, and take action even though nothing in our external reality links to the new external action we take. Suppose  you’re out with a new group of friends. Internally, you start to feel anxious that you are not accepted in this group, even though no one has said that. You feel deeply uncomfortable, and your upbringing or societal condition has limited what you feel you can say –such as, ‘I feel like I’m not liked here’ – and so instead you create a story in your head, ‘They don’t like me because I don’t have enough money.’ ‘They don’t like me because I made that joke a minute ago, and maybe they don’t think it’s appropriate.’ ‘They don’t like me because they believe I’m a pretentious this or a racist this or a sexist this.’ And you then use this story to take action. Maybe: 

• You hear someone speaking badly about a person in the group who didn’t give you attention and you gravitate towards them, because this’ll make you feel better that you’re not alone.
• You wait until your internal story is dramatic enough to justify an outburst and say something unkind that then prompts a reaction and proves your point about these people not being great, so you can leave feeling like the good person. 
• You decide to not come back and don’t provide any explanation. 

All of this leads to a chain of events where you’re technically comfortable again, but you don’t have as many friends and you don’t have what you want. 

The sensations you were feeling could have been because of any one of the 34 senses that Tara Swart talks about. Maybe you were hungry. Maybe you were tired. Maybe you needed to use the bahtroom. But we aren’t taught to listen to these senses. In fact, we’ve typically dealt with this senses under structured conditions in structured environments like school or the workplace.   When you’re in new environments, you no longer have defined acceptable behaviours or clear schedules to focus on instead of your personal story.. You use that self-focused energy to find a “justifiable” wayto feel comfortable again. . This is where having a clear, non-self-focused purpose can help. 

When you have a clear purpose, focus, or goal, your energy is thinking about how it can meet that objective, rather than how you can make yourself feel as comfortable and as validated as possible. For instance, if you need to pay bills, even if your personal story has you convinced that your co-workers don’t like you, you move through the feeling and find ways to adapt. You take comfort in the fact that there are laws protecting you or that the job itself is not that bad and that your bills are getting paid. You may even eventually find that your personal story is wrong. If you’re determined to build a business, you create categories in your mind (these people are my friends, these people are my customers) and you change the criteria that you use to evaluate whether someone can be in your presence and someone can’t be in your presence. You decide how much care to give different people, and how much you can tolerate. This doesn’t mean staying in spaces that are clearly harming you. It means accepting that you often “activate” the versions of people that you’re scared of based on your own fears and beliefs and that having something to focus on, other than yourself, can help you transcend this.

That said, feeling can feel very much like facts sometimes. This is what’s known as “affective realism.” There are certainly many evidence-backed strategies for dealing with this through psychotherapy or psychiatry, but if you cannot afford those things or you’re wary of those things, giving it over to God can help. For instance, you’re convinced that something negative is going to happen based on your model of people, but there’s no tangible evidence. By the way, this is not about lying and telling yourself that these things won’t happen. You’ll know that you’re lying to yourself and you’ll either do something risky where your sudden remembrance of the truth will lead to harm or, as described above with the friend group, you’ll make the bad thing come to pass as a way of feeling comfortable again. Instead, what if you asked God to make the thing you’re really scared ofhappen not happen while you worked on the thing that you really want? If you want a job or to start a business, why not ask God to take care of all the things you’re worried about (people blaming you for something going wrong because you’re working on this other thing) while you take even the tiniest steps towards that goal? Here’s the thing: you could very well be right. You could be right that someone will blame you or that someone will judge you or that someone will mock you, but what makes them God? If that is their character – and you do not play the matching drama – they will find someone else to play that game with until they decide to change. This is why, rather than lying to yourself, you need to learn how to put faith in something higher. 

So intuition is just our body responding to stimuli through senses that we’re not familiar with. If our minds are focused on the self and fear, our intuition will help us avoid scary things. If our minds are focused on goals and love, our intuition will help us move towards things that will potentially help us get what we want.