I don't think it has anything to do with whether one is gothic or not...quite the contrary...I was reading something upon that notion today...the reasonable aspects of differences in people's perceptions of the self or id...whether one considers themselves "otherkin" or "vampire" or anything other than "normal/mundane"...and I found it interesting...perhaps you will too...:)
This is quoted from The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion, How Feelings Link the Brain, the Body, and the Sixth Sense by: Michael A. Jawer with Marc S. Micozzi, M.D., Ph.D.
"Kreskin and Extremely Sensitive Perception" (pgs. 280-281)
"Reading Grandin, I was reminded of a quite different sort of person: the Amazing Kreskin. Billed as a mind reader, Kreskin himself claims nothing of the sort. What he does maintain is that he possesses ESP-defined by him as "extremely sensitive perception." He is convinced that the more that is learned about anomolous talents, the less anomolous they will turn out to be. This obiviously differs from the standard notion of ESP as "extra" sensory. Let us recall here that author Guy Murchie suggested that human beings might have as many as thirty-two senses, which he organized into five major groupings (the radiation senses, the feeling senses, the chemical senses, the mental senses, and the spiritual senses). So, what Kreskin taps into is probably not extrasensory in point of fact, but merely beyond what we take our presumptive five senses to encompass.
"In his act, Kreskin demonstrates a talent similiar to what is commonly referred to as telepathy or clairvoyance. Even offstage, he will sometimes guess something correctly out of the blue, not knowing himself how or why. These instances are often trivial, like stating what someone is going to say before he or she says it. On one memorable occasion, however, Kreskin stopped a performance short because he was convinced that a woman in the audience with whom he'd interacted during the show was planning to commit suicide. "I had sensed it," he relates, "almost the way one feels sick to one's stomach, an actual, physical sensation of queasiness that was immediately and consciously associated in my mind with death."
"Kreskin is interested in the paranoramal (as are many accomplished magicians). This interest has been lifelong because, from childhood, he clearly possessed certain remarkable abilities. In his twenties and thirties, he served as a medical intuitive to an established physician, and the anthropologist Margaret Mead later suggested that "sensitive" was an apt description of him. Thus, Kreskin always wondered how his particular aptitudes relate to standard notions of the psychic. He has become convinced that what he's honed to a fine art-and a handsome living-is the propensity to "recognize physical characteristics that telegraph the thought that produced them." But, he adds "there's a great deal more to extremely sensitive perception, although I don't know what, precisely."
"In this book, I am proposing that what still confounds Kreskin-indeed, what puzzles all true sensitives, the people close to them, and the people who study them-can best be explored through the lens of feeling. Inborn sensory differences (thin boundaries, sensory defensiveness, overexcitabilities, call them what you will) clearly begin to explain how some individuals perceive life so differently from those around them. Still other personality constructs (high transliminality, absorption, fantasy-proneness) apply as we seek to explain certain people's strong interest in, and pull toward, the anomolous. But I suspect the brain/body dynamics of feeling represent the missing piece in this puzzle.
"By directly quesitoning people who are highly sensitive, we have a down-to-earth way of beginning to fathom those lessons. In the process, we stand to learn much more about the nature of perception, the nature of cognition, and how we as human beings impinge on-and interact with - our environment. The emotional nature of our surroundings is an overlooked fundamental of our existence."
Essentially, the extensions of sensitive awareness through our individual perceptions can be inwardly linked through our emotional being...expanding our relationships beyond the mundane but even unto the Divine as each person may experience a heightening of one sensory form or another.
Emotional health in individuals varies...and highly dependent upon other aptitudes inherently applied to work through trauma or other life experiences. Emotion is related to the heart...the heart related to the brain and to the physical body.
Herein, I quote from another book of interest, Epilepsy: A New Approach by Adrienne Richard and Joel Reiter, M.D.
"There is considerable evidence that stress and its consequent physical and psychological tensions depress the immune system's functioning, making illness and disease more likely.
"Acknowledging that a person's mind-set affects illness or wellnes is difficult for biomedical practitioners to accept. Nonetheless, departments of behavioral medicine have sprung up in medical schools around the country, and doctors trained in family medicine try to take a broader, more biophsychosocial, approach. Puzzling over my symptoms one day, my primary physician said to me, "You aren't your lab tests. They only tell part of the story."
Each of us has a range of functioning from optimum to minimum with occasional peaks of experience exceeding our usual performance and occasional bursts of negativity or worse. We need to work toward keeping ourselves at the upward end of this mental and physical scale. As Dr. Sacks states in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, "A disease is never a mere loss or excess--there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and preserve (his or her) identity. We need to make sure that what we do in response to epilepsy is positive and ensures our wholeness in the best possible way."
What is it I am saying here then?...How or why do so many poseurs...or people rather...convince or try to convince others of their "supernatural" abilities?...as it is surely not being something other than human...but indicating that certainly there are those of us in the crowd here and elsewhere that have developed extremely sensitive perceptions. These perceptions are innate while others are handed down to us through literature, ancient writings, archeological and scientific studies...legends and mythos...they are a part of our social identity and in that concept, the individual realizes their own correlation to these variable aspects they find within the seat of their souls...knowing who and what they are deep within their hearts.
It is evident in the discovery of the human genome..that we are a species of greater diversity than what we see upon the surface. Our inner quality of being is multi-dimensional and beyond the physicality of the body, the soul, and the spirit...but capturing all at once every aspect of that divine quality of the cosmos within us all....but in seeking what is Divine, we forget that which makes us "whole"....the beating of the heart.
