I have always been extremely sensitive to the vibe of my location.
But lacking the sort of mind that eagerly embraces other New Age concepts, I have never really had a place in my mind for these perceptions.
Vibes are real. Of that, I have no doubt whatsoever. To me, the vibe of a location is as real as its temperature,. humidity, and lighting.
The fact that nobody knows what exactly it is that I am perceiving doesn’t matter one bit to me. I could no more deny the existence of vibes than I could the existence of air.
I wonder if that is what religious faith is like for whose who have it. To them, it is equally absurd to deny the existence of God because they feel Him everywhere they go.
Must be nice.
Anyhow, vibes are very concrete and real to me, presumably due to my high level of empathy. To me, it makes perfect sense that the emotions I pick up from people might well linger in a location in some form.
I can’t tell you what a vibe is. or how empathy works for that matter. My best guess is pheromones’, because they objectively exist and yet very little is known about how our mind perceives and processes them, let alone the profound effect they have on our minds, our moods, and maybe even our opinions.
But that theory, while probably true up to a point, feels insufficient to me. My subjective experience of picking up on vibes feels so much like I am receiving some kind of energy like my spine is an antenna (and so is everyone else’s) that I can’t help but wonder if some kind of electromagnetic force is involved.
Probably not. We’re very good at detecting electromagnetic forces and so far nobody has stumbled across this elusive empathic energy.
It is, of course, possible that it’s a very faint and subtle form of energy that encode the information in a novel way that just seems like background EM radiation to us.
But the skeptical scientist in me doubts it. Perhaps the real appeal of viewing it as an energetic phenomenon is that “I feel your emotions” sounds so much better than “I can smell your feelings” to us.
Regardless of mechanism, vibes are here to stay. And there have been many times I have considered., in the abstract, leaving normal life behind and wandering the world in search of those good, good, good…. good vibrations.
And I wouldn’t care where I found them. Whether they can be found at a Baptist picnic or a Saturnalia orgy doesn’t matter one whit to me.
Wherever it is, I just hope they let me stay long enough to soak it all up.
And there are so many things that science cannot readily explain that nevertheless demonstrably exist. How does a riot turn perfectly ordinary law-abiding citizens into raving lunatics? How can we tell if the vibe of an audience we are in shifts? How can we tell our life partner is upset when we haven’t even laid eyes on them yet? How can a parent suddenly know that their child is in danger?
Hell, how the fuck can there even be such a thing as a collective unconscious? How the hell does that work? And what effect does it have on us?
These and other topics are covered in our new Time Life book series, WTF?
Maybe those are the questions people like me, with one toe in the world of the mystical and the intuitive and the other nine toes in scientific realism, to try to bridge that gap and let us consciously understand these unconscious influencers.
Whether I can do that or not, it’s still a damned interesting subject.
More after the break.
I might be indecisive
Just had a negative experience that I feel is worth sharing.
All day long, in a corner of my mind, I’ve been pondering whether or not I was going to bother ordering in tonight, like I often do on a Saturday night.
But this is no ordinary Saturday night. Joe’s been quite ill lately, nauseous and dizzy and miserable, and today, after four or five days of that, he finally went to the ER.
I am, of course, very worried about him. Doubly so because he’s been at the hospital for ten hours or so now, and last I heard he was going to be there overnight, so clearly this is not just some bug
i hope he’s okay.
Anyhow, back to the plot. I was wondering all day if I would bother ordering in. See, I used up all the money on my credit card, and all I have left is cash.
That means the only place I can order from is Pizza Hut because they are the only place I know of that still takes cash.
I’ve mentioned that before, haven’t I?
Now me being indecisive is not news. I have decision issues. I think they stem from a very poor connection to my id, so I am like Good Kirk in the Two Kirks episode of Star Trek : nice, but completely indecisive because he lacked the killer instinct derived from his id that let him make those tough decisions.
But tonight was different, because I wasn’t just vacillating, I fell into this deep funk of indecision. It was like everything in my mind slowed down to a crawl and I was left there in a very strange and unwelcome mental state. It made me extremely depressed. It felt like I was trapped in some dark dimension.
It only lasted about ten minutes, then I unstuck myself, but it was a disturbing incident. My mind has never done that before. And I really hope it never does it again.
For now, I will chalk it up to an effect of how worried I am for Joe. A freaky, one off thing that will never happen again.
But if it does, I know about it now and I know I can power my way out of it when I need to, so whatever.
My life is so weird.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.