Sensitive Soul

Subtitled 'the unseen role of emotion in extraordinary states', this fascinating book is an exploration of the fields through a new lens based on the observation that emotion 'exists within and between people, underpins personality, spirituality and a range of extraordinary perceptions, conditions and experiences.' We exist in a flowing, interconnected 'empathosphere', and some of us have thinner boundaries than others, which can also come about as a result of trauma, psychic and mystical experiences, as many near death experiencers have reported. Thick-boundary (skinned) people are 'rigid, calm, deliberate, well organised and persevering', while thin-boundary people are 'open, vulnerable, reactive, flexible and agitated' – in other words more sensitive. The book considers a range of phenomena at the intersection between mind, body and emotion, beginning with PTSD and moving on to mirror senses and various forms of extraordinary perception. The author argues that five types of people – 'individuals with autism, synaesthesia, savantism, child prodigies and children who remember the previous lives are linked through the biology of emotion' associated with a hidden emotional intensity and also electrical sensitivity, citing many fascinating case histories.

One should note that the very etymology of telepathy means to feel at a distance, with its bodily equivalent of telesomatic, where closely-bonded people are able to feel the bodily sensations of their loved ones at a distance (p. 153), which is what I call empathetic resonance, also manifest in psychometry. Some cases are even more extraordinary, where verbal abuse can be translated into bruises integrated from prior physical abuse (p. 51). The author argues that 'highly attuned sensing' is in fact our default setting that is subsequently overlaid by cultural factors and overall development. Those who retain this faculty are most likely to experience anomalous perceptions, which will in turn influence our sense of self. Sometimes these extraordinary capacities appear after a brain injury, providing further backup for a filter theory of mind and the existence of a Universal Mind postulated by early researchers such as Thomas Jay Hudson and leading New Thought thinkers from the late 19^th century. Personally, I find this line of thought more coherent than the more fashionably genetic memory as an explanatory hypothesis. This same logic applies to other forms of prodigy and extraordinary knowing. The author also weaves in bodily factors on the basis of other scientific research.

Interestingly, he argued in a previous book that thin-boundary people 'are more likely to report anomalous perceptions whereas thick-boundary people are more likely to engender anomalies.' This put me in mind of the famous incident with Freud and Jung where the latter announced that a loud report would emanate from a bookcase just before it happened, which it then did (twice). This distinction between thin and thick also seems to correspond to the tender and tough-minded classification of William James, where the latter is correlated with 'hard' (for which read masculine) science. This difference of temperament could ago some way towards explaining the debate about the status of psi. The theory also sheds light on why particular children remember previous lives when one notes that a higher proportion than normal of the lives remembered entailed violent deaths. The author connects the endurance of emotion with birthmarks and 'remembered' lives as well as heart transplants, though he does not refer to the possible attachment role of discarnate intelligence or some kind of Akashic memory field. Overall, this pioneering book makes a strong case for emotion as fundamental to sentient life – including animals and plants - and helps expand the discussion of the nature of consciousness beyond cognition and in the direction of panpsychism.