As an adjunct to discussing the psychic sense it is important that we learn something of our usual senses for it turns out that they all have something in common. Take your vision, your ability to see, when you look at your loved ones, what do you see? You are seeing a nothing. Electromagnetic frequencies from the visible part of the spectrum are exciting specialised cells in the back of your eye, which transmit this information to the brain. Remember, our bodies are nothing more than energy frequencies. The brain, then starts to match this mass of different frequencies to other sets of stored frequency sets and presents this to your consciousness along with any other information it has associated with that frequency set. This is why, when you see someone you love you see much more than a physical form, you experience a whole raft of feelings as well. Now, if the brain is presented with a frequency set similar to one stored in memory, it may well deliver up those associated feelings as well. If some one looks like your Mother they may well summon up feelings you have associated with your Mother or mothers in general.
It can work the same way by looking at strangers, the brain tries to find a match and it will deliver to your consciousness feeling associated with that match, if that match is to someone we dislike we may well get a uneasy feeling about some stranger while not knowing why. If there is only a very slim match the feelings may not even register on the conscious mind but will still be there, hidden just under the surface, out of sight, but still affecting us in some way.
You can see this matching at work more clearly with objects which have no associated feelings, in the form of optical illusions, what happens is, the brain registers something which does not make sense and so will try to make sense of it, even if it has to alter the image presented to consciousness. If you feel that your brain is lying to you, don't, it is simply a survival issue. The same is true of all your other senses, if you doubt it, look it up.
It is important for your survival that you make sense and gain as much information as possible about the world around you. However, when the brain was evolving these techniques the world was a very different place than it is today, particularly for those living in the so called developed nations. Evolution is a lot slower than the changing world we live in today. But that does not mean that our brains/senses are out of date, Our Brain/Sense system is capable of a lot more that we give it credit for.
Imagine you are in a crowded room, a party, a wedding reception, you can just about hear what the person next to you is saying and everything else is just background noise. Suddenly out of this background noise someone mentions your name, speaks it no louder than normal but it is no longer hidden in the background noise, you hear it crisp and clear and you are very aware of it.
What has happened is that your brain/sense system has detected everything in the room but it felt that most of it was not important to you but then it registers your name and so decides this may be important so brings it to the forefront of consciousness. This happens with all our senses. We are walking through a sea of information all the time, more information than we could cope with in our normal consciousness so the vast majority of information is filtered out.
The question is then who or what controls what gets filter out and what is brought to consciousness? It is partly to do with what has proved useful in the past and what has been programmed by our parents, society and ourselves. What has been acceptable and what is necessary for survival. As I have said our survival needs may have changed and we need not live in a world ruled by outdated mores. We can re-write the programme, we can choose what is important, what we need to become conscious of. Ponder on this and reprogramming will be discussed next month.