With perception abilities, like empathy (perceiving emotions), telepathy (perceiving thoughts), communicating with your subconscious (perceiving internal messages), or remote viewing (perceiving foreign locations) - the question almost always arises: How do you know what you’re perceiving is real?

How do you know you’re perceiving someone’s emotions correctly and not just making it up?  Their thoughts?  How do you know that when you communicate with your subconscious, that you’re actually accomplishing something?  How do you know you’re actually perceiving something accurately?

For certain situations, it’s pretty easy to test.  If you’re remote viewing a location, and you want to know how well you did, then go to the location and check it out.  Or if your friend is trying to telepathically send you an image, then look at the image afterwards and see how close you got.  Easy :-).

However, with a lot of “real world” applications, it becomes a lot harder.  If I read someone’s emotions, how can I tell that I’m really doing it?  If I’m reading a complete stranger, then it’s not like I’m going to ask them afterwards how close I got.  Or even reading friends - it can be pretty awkward to approach them and ask, “are you feeling confusion over whether you should continue your relationship, or call it quits?”  So how do I know that I’m reading someone accurately?

Or if I’m communicating with my subconscious… how can I honestly tell that what I’m receiving is accurate?  How can I tell it isn’t just my imagination?  I mean - it IS all in my head - by definition!  A challenging situation.

The answer is: I don’t know, especially at first.

As a follow up question: if I don’t know whether I’m doing it correctly, how do I even know if I’m doing anything at all?  Maybe I’m just psychotic?  I mean… if I can’t know whether what I’m doing is real, then it’s pointless.

My response is: Well, that’s fair… at first.  Keep your skepticism on high when you first start - I completely agree.

However :-).  We can be smart about things.  We can stay flexible, be skeptical, but still play along and see what happens.  And that’s the attitude I encourage.  Be skeptical - but don’t let that skepticism turn into cynicism.  Keep trying new things, keep experimenting and having fun, keep doubting and questioning.

If you maintain this attitude of having an open, playful, and skeptical mind, then you will succeed.  If you turn off your skepticism, then it’s possible that you will delude yourself at some point.  So skepticism serves us well.  If you turn off your open mindedness, then the skepticism will overtake you and you’ll develop cynicism.  With this attitude, it’s very possible you’ll do something amazing, but completely ignore it.  So open mindedness is very important too.  Therefore, the goal is to maintain a healthy balance between the two extremes.  The middle path.

Let me relate to you what has happened to me over the years.  I first started getting into empathy and communicating with my subconscious back when I was 17 years old (I’m now 24).  I can remember feeling unsure of whether it was working at all.  I can remember specific situations where my subconscious told me something that wasn’t true, and I questioned if I was wasting my time completely.  Did my subconscious actually not know?  Or was it my fault - and I was bad at communicating?  Or was I just crazy?  I really didn’t know the answer.

I would go a few weeks, attempting to communicate, and eventually getting pissed and giving up for another few weeks.  Then a day would come by where I would think out of the blue, “Man, I haven’t really tried talking to my subconscious in a while… I should really start doing that again.”  So I would give it another shot.  Over time, I gradually became more and more confident, and the messages started getting more and more clear.  I’m at the point right now where I can clearly distinguish between my own thoughts, and the messages from my subconscious mind.  I can easy dictate a conversation, with close to zero effort.

At this point, how do I know that it’s real?  I just know.  I’ve developed a feel for it.  It’s sort of like asking a baseball player: how do you know when to swing the bat?  Well… they just know.  They don’t have a formula in their head… it’s a feeling they’ve developed over time.  They know.  The same is true for me at this point.

With the subconscious, my confidence slowly grew over time.  However, with empathy, my confidence was pretty high at the beginning.

I believe that everyone is naturally empathetic, and it’s inside all of us… it’s just a matter of tapping into the right feeling, and then developing it to be more accurate and specific.  Sort of like hearing.  We all hear.  But musicians will develop their hearing to the point of picking out certain notes and frequencies, different layers and instruments.  We all have a natural empathetic sense - and if we exercise it, we can become much more accurate with it, extracting emotions and watching them interact with each other.

I’ve always been confident of my empathic ability, because I can just see it.  I honestly can’t think of a time when I read a situation incorrectly.  Like I said - with empathy, it’s something we all have.  Even when I was bad at empathy, I still read things correctly - I just read them with less detail, and couldn’t piece it together as well.

How do I know when I read something if I’m correct?  Well, I make predictions based on what I read.  For example, if I read that a girl is starting to think sweet thoughts about me, then I will predict that she will attempt to ask me out on a date in the near future.  However, if I read that she isn’t the sort of girl to ask a guy out on a date, then I will predict that she will have her friends ask me about her, so she can get a feel of the situation.  And if I know that I’ll reject the idea of a date, then I can see how she’ll emotionally respond to this, and what her reaction will be.  I can see that she will reason that we just need to spend some time together in social situations… so I can see that she will attempt to set up social situations where we hang out.  And I can keep going further into the future, predicting my emotions, and sensing how she will react to them.  I can make an entire timeline for the next couple months.

Now - I see all of this about a week before it even begins.  How do I know how accurate my empathy is?  I watch and see how accurate my predictions become.  And if I have 100% accuracy, then I can be confident that my empathetic perception is real and accurate.

If I test my empathy with predictions every now and then, I can get a sense for how accurate it is.  Then when I read a situation that I can’t test, I can still be confident that my empathetic perception is correct.  I might not be able to test that specific situation, but why doubt it?  I’ve proven myself credible.  So I trust in my ability.

Overall, it can be a little hard to trust in these strange abilities at first.  So don’t.  Keep that skepticism high, but also keep an open mind.  Over time, things will start to add up, and you’ll develop the confidence through seeing the results.  It might not be 100% accurate, but if it’s accurate sometimes, and the accuracy keeps improving, and you can FEEL the improvement, then you’re on your way.  Eventually you’ll reach a point where you can be confident in your abilities, because you’ve proven them to yourself.  Until that time comes, have fun, and do your best :-).

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 12:28 pm and is filed under How-To, ESP, Subconscious. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.