The vast majority of human beings—perhaps with the exception of young children—don’t have what I’ll call “the natural mind.” We’re blinkered out of it by education, by materialistic and scientistic thought patterns, and maybe by technology.

The natural mind cannot adequately be described—it can only be experienced—but I’ll try to describe some things about it in order to “point to” it.

The natural mind is downright magical compared to the regular mind. It’s a constantly “exciting” or “lively” experience, for lack of better words.

Creativity is easy and abundant. Self-expression is uninhibited.

Perception is heightened, to say the least. In fact, things that seem “logically” separate or incidental are effortlessly, reflexively connected in the natural mind.

For example, two or three days ago I was at a service plaza, and I saw a girl who was kind of cute—not the cutest, but the cutest girl.I’d seen at the service plaza. And anyway, at the same second I saw her walking in my direction, I had a moment of bitter taste in my mouth (I was eating something at the time), and I realized that if I’d had the natural mind, I would have known—not as speculation or deduction, but as immediate perception—that that meant she was a bitter person, or that she causes bitterness in others who interact with her, or that she would cause bitterness in me if I had a relationship with her. (As a natural mind, I don’t think the association would have presented itself as three possibilities as I described; I think it would have been one or another, or perhaps an abstract “superposition” of two or more of them.)

As another example, when one of my sisters was young (maybe 6-8 years old), we were watching a cartoon in which a person tried to display something from an old-style film projector when it suddenly burst into flames. It was something important he wanted to see or find out, but I don”t renember what. As soon as the projector caught on fire, my little sister said, “I guess he didn’t really want to find out,” or whatever it was he was trying to do that I don’t remember. A few months later we were watching the same episode, and she said the exact same thing at the same point in the episode. Most adults probably wouldn’t make such a connection, thinking it’s logically something we don’t have any psychic control of. They’d be wrong.

As an example of my sister’s heightened, magical perception when she was little, once our noisy bathroom air mover thingy was on, and we were in the dining room which wasn’t too far away from it. She came up to me and put her head sideways against my chest and said, “I wanted to see if you could hear the bathroom from here.” I found that amazing, and it reminded me of everything I’m missing.

In another example of her heightened/magical perception, she once said to me, “I see two of you. One’s happy, and one’s sad.” This was accurate because I’ve always been very unhappy deep down, but I had always tried my damnedest to be cheerful and optimistic. Another time, she drew a half angel, half  demon on my wrist, which seemed pretty apt to me.

Another time, when she was a bit older (maybe around 13), she was standing next to me in the kitchen, we weren’t saying anything, and I suddenly decided to envision myself as a kind of real-life Sonic the Hedgehog-type figure, as a temporary form of self-identification. At that moment, she said, “I just saw you.”

There have been other examples of her extraordinary perception, but I’ll just stop there. I’ll say one more example that happened to me, though. One day the other month, my mind was very unusually full of light, and while I was in a doĺlar store, somebody did or said something, I don’t remember what, and I wanted that trait for myself, so I naturally envisioned it physically moving from that person to me, for me to store it and maybe use it later. There may or may not have been a shopping cart or something/someone taking the same path at that instant, I’m not sure.

Oh, and another example. Once my friend Rey and his girlfriend were over, and at that time he was a truly magical being, a constant or at least frequent vessel of the unseen. He/they had an effect on me kind of analogous to a “contact high,” and I became more magical myself. His girlfriend had deep-seated self-esteem issues from childhood, and at one point while they were in my room and she was lying face-up on my bed, he said something to her like a compliment or something else healing, and I could in some sense actually see the thought fly through the air in an arc and then land in his girlfriend’s heart.

Later on that night, I decided to test that ability. He was lying on the hood of a car on his stomach looking at me, and I decided to allow a negative thought come directly out of my subconscious (so that it would be deeper and more powerful) and send it directly toeard him, to see if he’d react. The instant I “saw” it reach him, he violently shook his head up and down and made a silly vocalization as if shaking out the thought, or perhaps being “electrocuted” by it or something.

Another time I was in a more heightened/awakened state of mind, my other sister was standing at my doorway talking loudly as she does, and I actually felt her voice against my skin. I then instictively held my hand up with my palm facing her to physically block the sound and said, “stop talking so loud!” She laughed.

Not too long after or before that, I was on the phone with someone, and I could actually hear the sound bouncing around inside the phone (this was a landline phone). And then my niece started talking to me at the same time the girl on the phone was talking, so in order to track what both of them were saying, I mentally arranged the two voices/strings of words in two different directions in space, so that I could pay attention to one and then the other. It wotked.

So, that’s enough examples.

Another characteristic of the natural mind is that it feels full of light (as I mentioned in the dollar store example), maybe in the way a bright Enya song is full of light. The inside of one’s mind seems simple and dynamic, and one can actually perceive the workings of it much like one can perceive the workings if what’s going on outside the mind. In fact, the lines between “inside” and outside aren’t as distinct.

I feel like I’ve always had this natural mind in some layer of my being only waiting to be expressed, or at least it’s something I used to have, perhaps in another life, and the rift between my regular thinking and this natural  superstratum is an ever-present, if vague, source of emotional pain.

Our goal as humanity needs to be to get back to  this natural mind…