When I settled down to watch the playback of a live stream the other evening my ears (appropriately enough…) pricked up to hear the host observe how her ears always get so hot and red when she does one of these live calls. It wasn’t, she thought out loud, because she was nervous or excited but it happens every time…which is something many of us (who are similarly sensitive and observant) notice about using video calling. So why is this any different to watching any other sort of video, we may ask; what are our ears  and, for some of us, our faces and chests, even our whole bodies, trying to tell us? What turns us so red?

Its been on my mind because, with my daughter now living away from home, I’ve been pressed into more than my usual number of such video calls lately. Even though I do them using a desktop and with an ethernet connection, I too notice this highly energetic component of the call; which either limits how long or how often I can make them or means that, sometimes, I just have to be firm and say “not now”.

It floated into my consciousness this morning, having received two or three such calls yesterday (and having such a hot-ear problem in the night) that, perhaps, our vulnerability lies at the energetic level of how we communicate with one another, which is an area of study receiving a lot more attention, finally. Perhaps, at such a level, we anthropomorphise the equipment with whom we are, seemingly, engaged in meaningful communication during these calls. I see it in my mind’s eye as though we, as it were, unfold some sort of satellite antenna when we engage with another being via live stream in a way that we don’t when we, say, watch the playback or any other sort of video. This antenna being a subtle piece of our human “kit” that we always use when we meet other people; used to read their energy field and ascertain certain pieces of quite crucial information about them before we even open our mouths. But what if that “person” is actually a computer screen generating a powerful electro-magnetic field? As we suck-in that mistaken “prior assessment of person” frequency into our own field, how does this impact our nervous system?

This reminds me of something quite profound about how we all engage with other beings (whether we are aware of this or not). Assuming first assessments – which take place in a millisecond after meeting – are favourable or, at least, optimistic, we drop our barriers, let in their essence, sucking that frequency in for as long as it takes to make a next assessment of what frequency they are carrying (are they friendly, angry, feeling sad…). When we watch a video of a person, of course, it’s not the same thing, even when it’s a YouTube video (and we don’t expect that it will be) but when its live stream we know, somehow (back to those subtle senses) that this is taking place in same time, if not same place, so we open those barriers up to let in…what, exactly? Whatever it is seems to make our ears get very hot.

So, running with this theory, what other times do we let in too much manmade electro-magnetic sludge, mistaking it for an essential component of being “in relationship” with something alive. Well, in my own case, two far-out examples are in my relationship with the moon and the sun. The moon and its cycles have affected me and my health far more profoundly in tandem with how much I have come to regard it as an energetically animate “thing” which, I suspect, was pretty early on in my life yet it only increased as time went on. The more weight I assigned to the moon, the more weighty its effect, you could say; and this was deep-deep-down in my psyche, not at the surface level. Same with the sun, as I woke up to the sense of a “spiritual sun” I only became more affected by its behaviours, the solar flares and such which I am now so very attuned to. In line with that development, I have only become ever-more sensitive to the effects of technology; so, is this because I am more aware of them, having opened up my receptors to allow in a fuller awareness of cosmic frequencies; or because technology’s effects, in our environment, have only become more and more aggressive over that same time frame?

If there seems to be something unhealthily anthropomorphic about this trait I describe (and I have always been somewhat prone to this) then, perhaps, anthropomorphic tendencies are a necessary byproduct of spiritual awakening. Because to assign such feelings to so-called inanimate objects is a sign of realising that all life is energy…and all energy is life. And the sun, yes even the moon, are far from static objects in “the sky”; the same goes for the significant levels of radiation that we have generated all around us, associated with the equipment we use to communicate every day; this, too, is a living thing that we have unleashed and brought into very close proximity. After all, there is nothing new in this universe; it’s all energy…

Perhaps some of us are more prone to sensing this about our world than others and, as ever, it falls to the sensitive types, and the synesthetes. I had an interesting experience last night. I had, unwittingly of course, inserted the batteries into a movement-sensor lighting device “the wrong way round” in my half-asleep state. At some point in the night, I “heard” a distinct crack and saw in my mind a very potent image that comes back vividly to me as I describe it; of a red curtain of sorts, like a heavy velvet drape, which suddenly sustained a gash like a sword had cut through it, leaving its edges blackened and smouldering. It abruptly woke me up, as though this crack had taken place inside my head, and was enough for me to declare outloud “what the hell was that!” It felt as though my head had gone “pop”: but, more logically, as though something electrical had blown in the house but, bear in mind here that, due to my electrosensitivity we flip off the mains electricty over night to gain me a more recuperative level of sleep.

Though the house was all quiet, nothing going on, I lay there unable to sleep for the longest time. Eventually, I gave up and went for a stroll around the house to clear my head…and went to the room where the device was. Bothered by the fact it didn’t seem to be working, I unscrewed it to find the brand new batteries had leaked all over the insides; they had apparently ruptured. It was then I realised they had been put in “the wrong way”, a confusion caused by the spring mechanism being a completely random way up in each battery socket (the penalty, I suppose, of cheap manufacturing) and, reading the instructions, noticed that wrong insertion might cause device failure or could even destroy the device.

So, this minor energetic event occurred quite some distance away, in a different room and yet I received notification as a distinct sensory experience, colours, bright light, even a sense of implied smell, as though it happened in the vicinity of my head. I feel it is only fair to add that there was a significant geomagnetic storm last night; the first one of this level for a while, and these make me acutely sensitive to a number of anomalous triggers. Yet this visceral effect of the energetic event my nervous system picked up on (in other words, it was translated into the language of my five senses…) is, I suspect, what some synesthetes have the ability to do if they are also highly sensitive. In other words, they pick up on energetic subtleties…frequency, if you will… and they assign them a much-more relatable sensory equivalent. So, imagine what our inbuilt yet bewildered human-energy-reading gizmos might, potentially, translate EMFs into, as sensations in our body; having mistaken them for a “living being” with whom we want to communicate. Whilst this might be the transition phase of humans getting used to working more closely with technology, such cross-referencing of sensory data might be a very real effect and cause some fairly bewildering symptoms while we get used to it.

We might be at less risk of this when the technology we use is “just” regarded as this piece of machinery, a block of plastic and wires that we use for some useful purpose. However, perhaps when the expectation is to communicate, as in during a video call, we are more vulnerable than ever to making the mistake that the EMFs we detect coming off the “machine” we are talking to are, actually, the benign, even loving, human energy force coming our way from the person with whom we are communicating. In other words, we assign them a personality of sorts; anthropomorphic behaviour in a nutshell.

This topic crosses over, of course, with cybernetics and all the potential pitfalls that this aspect of human ambition is rife with. It begs the question, what constitutes “life” and how far do we let such evidence of life “in” to our own energy field, dropping all our shields? Do we, for instance, entertain thoughts of having relationships with robots (a dubious area darkly explored in the recent film Zoe starring Ewan McGregor). What, indeed, are the markers for sentience and when will we recognise these as being amply present in animals and birds, for instance, before we launch into recognising them in our own creations made-up of plastic and wire? We are already giving names to our “intelligent technology”; Siri and Alexa are obvious examples. Like some people name their cars, is this all done tongue-in-cheek or does it signify something about the human being; not just about their psyche but about the way we are energetically “wired”? In other words, we seek to have energetic exchanges with others and, as long as we find energy coming back at us, we consider that thing to be, well, alive!

What happens then? Do we open all our energetic doors, welcome it in, start to merge with it at some level? You don’t have to have a chip put in your arm to do that; over-exposure will do it to you without you even realising. When we trust the face on the screen, how much more do we open up and say “come on in”? The brainwash technology behind much television programming has used this for decades but what I am talking about here is so much more than subliminal messages; it’s the frequency omitted by the devices themselves.

You might say, but surely when we speak to someone on a video call, we know they’re not there, that they aren’t real in that sense…its just a screen with a facsimile of a visage and a voice. Well, yes, at the level of intellect but we are talking about energy exchange here; this is the domain of the subtle energy body we each have and it speaks in frequencies. At that level, the assessment might be as basic as “alive” or not; and if there is energy pouring off this machine then who knows how we might gobble it up. This might be affected by whether we have ever met this individual in person (if not, this “reading” we are getting of them is all we have every known) or how long it has been since we met that person “in the flesh”. Potentially, the energy we receive off the device comes at us much more forcefully than the person to whom we are speaking; or perhaps we receive both, depending on the charisma of whomever the conversation is with, I should imagine. Given that it is already well-documented that humans (no less animals) can tune into each other over vast distances, do we then experience the human energy and the technology energy all in one hit? No wonder our nervous system feels overloaded enough to go red and fire up.

Also, numbers of people connecting on a call might be a factor. If one person is hosting a call addressing, say, 100 people in a live stream, does this potentially overload the person’s nervous system? Do other people on the live-call (I know I have) feel it too? Back to the red-hot ear phenomenon, which I have long felt is connected to the vagus nerve (see my big-juicy post on that); perhaps our in-built satellite receivers are maxing-out or, at least, more so than if this was a “shared frequency event” (conversation) with just one other person. As more and more people join the call (“wow, I have over 200 people attending tonight…”), do they/we just get hotter and hotter? Like when we sense someone is talking or even thinking about us (which we do), only to a factor of many multiples and cranked up by an electro-magnetic charge, which makes it, somehow, all the more tangible. There’s no mistake to the age-old phrase to have your “ears prick up”; this ability is related to the vagus nerve and is one of our most basic sensory devices as we feel into our relationships with “other”. Yet, whereas a hundred years ago, we might have had daily or even weekly dealings with the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker, these days we have so many more interactions in a single morning, or even an hour or two, than that…many more than we can count when we add in all those people we regularly connect with across the other side of the globe, even if ony in a social media or business sense, and who may be thinking or talking about us at any moment.

The collective shared-frequency potential is a phenomenon that the HeartMath Institute have more-than touched upon in their cutting-edge research and which has been used to good (and demonstrable) effect to focus intentional mediations, joined by very large numbers of people, at healing world situations. In such cases, the sheer potency of the energetic charge I am talking about is just what we need to cultivate as a power force (or love weapon) of sorts; used as an instrument of positive change and healing.

Going back to the topic of live streams, the “feeling the energy of your audience” aspect is somewhat like being on a stage in front of a large audience, you could say yet, really, it’s not. We are never so intimate and open on a stage; we keep to a format and, to some extent, our barriers remain up because our senses tell us there is a vast crowd of people with their eyes upon us, watching our every move. Over eons of behavioural evolution, we have come to know the well-rehearsed ropes in such circumstances and stick to what feels appropriate to share, as a boundary-setting exercise; in ways that most people are possibly still too novice to realise they should when it comes to the video-conferencing format . When a person is sat in their lounge hosting a call that goes out to high numbers of people, who they can’t see and can hardly visualise, they are likely to be off their guard to the point of being completely relaxed yet, really, they are making connection with all these individuals, “in real-time”, intimately opening-up to them all at once, which has to be impactful.

Another consideration is, perhaps like performing on a stage, some people actually get energised by this; it fuels them to be on a screen, connecting with all these people across the airwaves. There’s a whole generation of vloggers, virtual coaches and internet personalities etc. who sustain  themselves with a daily diet of this kind of energy, without ever having to leave home or, necessarily, meet that many people in person. We make our friends that way too, in many cases; equating “likes” and other forms of “feedback” as displays of friendship (almost as thought the computer itself, as it delivers these measures of self-worth, is the real friend). Is it healthy or sustainable? We don’t know yet…

Again, I suspect those of us that don’t enjoy this vibe are the sensitives, also the introverts, those who prefer minimal audience and one-to-one conversations “in the flesh”. We are those who tend to feel deeply into life more so than engaging with material cues as to “what’s happening”;  we start by reading the energetic signal and then we make more solid deductions from those. In all our encounters with other people, we send out those antennae-like sensors of ours to check out who we are dealing with, and we bring that energetic profile back home to our nervous system, which is very-often wired quite unlike that of a less sensitive type (for more on that, I refer you to Elaine Aron’s website and books, amongst others).

For those of us that are electro-sensitive, as I’ve touched upon before, perhaps we don’t even need the formality of making “a call” to experience this effect. We can simply be in an environment where lots of people gather and where wi-fi and cellular signals are strong, to feel drawn into that energetic soup and come out with very hot ears, faces, maybe even the whole length of our vagus nerve (the longest in the body) and thus all the many the areas of the body impacted by all these disparate frequencies we seem to “suck in” from our environment. We are, in effect, forced to take part in all these multi-conversations as they, quite literally, pass through our bodies as frequency. For me, good reason to avoid public spaces and wi-fi dense environments, at least most of the time; an arrangement that means I can put up with the trains and the theatres when I have to, or really want to, having not crashed my system with a daily overload. In other words, I use spadeloads of discernment around technology; keeping it on my terms.

Because of this discernment, I am doing pretty well, actually, as an electro-sensitive living in this techno-obsessed world of ours. What I do notice, still, is that in the hours or even days following a video call, my ears can be red-hot and over-sensitive, even painful. So why still do it? Well, for one, my daughter pretty-much insists on it, being of a generation that feed off the visual so, to them, old-fashioned phone conversations are just not stimulating enough. This is even though she pays me very little attention in return for my hot ears and burning body; her eyes and attention wandering everywhere as we chat but its an occassional price I pay to enjoy her company, long distance (something my mother and I didn’t have). Yes, technology has its perks.

Where does this acute sensitivity (when others seem unaffected) come from? In my case, I have only become more sensitive the more I have “woken up”  in spiritual terms. It’s almost the sting in the tail of this awakening process that you, effectively, notice and feel more. Or, rather, I have noticed, it can be a particular problem in what I refer to as the indigo phase as we tend to become very addicted to high frequencies and photonic light during this stage; like a heat-seeking missile seeking it out and gobbling it up in the form of whatever facsimiles of these happen to come our way…including sources of EMF.  In other words, we become confused and beguiled by the sheer array of higher frequencies that suddenly open up to our awareness and, at least some of the time, we are attracted to the least-ideal sources of it. When we start to crystallise in our energy structure, we notice how we suddenly start to become much more discerning about sources of high frequency “light”…and, ultimately, we come to realise that what we are looking for on the outside is, really an inside job…we ARE the light.

So, am I still sensitive to EMFs, now that I feel myself making that transition? Well, yes, I still feel how much they affect my body and thus it makes sense to mitigate my exposure as a priority, given that I  currently reside in this body and respect its needs more than ever. This continued sensitivity is partly because the body is such an habitual creature; its responses take a little while to be unlearned, and I am working on that; but to imply the body is lagging behind or demonstrating an inappropriate response is far too simplistic and, frankly, condescending.

Especially in the light of the other reason I am still aware (and indeed, I intuit, my higher consciousness wants me to still be aware) of how much manmade EMFs impact my human body, which is because what we are being exposed to, right now, does feel like too much, too soon…and we still have a lot to learn. In years to come, I feel confident we will regard some of the uses we are currently making of technology to be foolhardy and far too abrasive with respect to the human energy field (both individual and collective); which we need, more than ever, to keep intact for our ongoing evolution. Those of us that have different, less material, priorities to the mainstream, would do well to remember that the technologies we are currently being subjected to are in their very infancy in terms of anyone understanding their longterm effects on health. At the very least, they seem to scramble and work-against our innate frequency enough for it to be uphill work rebalancing ourselves constantly, if we expose ourselves too much. Again, as in all things, it’s a matter of discernment.

Is technology my friend? I’d be a hypocrite to say it’s not as, having made the switch to digital art over painting over the last year, I now rely on it more than ever and, yes, in that sense, I truly love what it can help me do, be and express. I’m really excited about some of what technology is allowing us to play with today while being quite wary of some of its applications. I even feel, at some level, as though I have seen it all before and can see some of the pitfalls up ahead that others seem so blindly oblivious to. I scrutinise everything before I jump on board; which is no bad thing. The crucial distinction that I make, which many others seem to forget, is that it is an instrument that I use, not an extension of who I am. Boundary setting is so important in this regard, as with all things. It’s also a case of getting the balance right – I use it, but I don’t seek to merge with, or become, it; worse, for it to become me. Knowing the difference maintains my humanity which, just for the moment, I kind-of rely on as I came here for that very experience. It’s a fascinating topic; one I intend to allow to open up more without forcing it along with too much intellectual speculation. There are no answers or accusations here; just some ideas to be playful with.