The importance of self-protection

I have recently been reminded of minor incidents in my life that are ideal for further illustration of a very important point: people who can sense unseen influences need to take good care of themselves and avoid getting overloaded.

The good inner state

I was on a bus one morning. As it drew near to my stop, I got up and started to walk down the narrow aisle. A young man who immediately made me feel uncomfortable suddenly put a bag down in front of me, blocking my path. I sensed that a few people had moved in behind me, guessed why, and immediately moved my backpack round to the front so that no one could take anything.

The man smiled ruefully and moved his bag out of my way. I turned round; I did not like the look of the people standing very close to me. The area is not good; there are services that attract many people who are best avoided.

I was pleased with myself for immediately seeing the risk and taking appropriate action. I realised that the outcome could have been very different if my inner state had not been so good at the time.

I had had a good night’s sleep and a good breakfast. I was looking forward to doing some interesting work on a database: I enjoy bringing order out of chaos. I was looking forward to seeing a very good film on TV that evening.

I was living quite comfortably in the real world that day, and had some spare capacity for dealing with the unexpected.

The bad inner state

On another occasion, I had a successful shopping trip in an area I like very much. There is an open-air market and other attractions, and I got a lot of stuff. I should have quit the game while I was ahead and gone home, but I decided on impulse to take a long, scenic bus ride into Kent. This 'good idea' turned out to be a very big mistake; it resulted in a small-scale nightmare scenario.

Do inner demons sabotage our lives?

It is important to take responsibility - where appropriate – when we do stupid things, make mistakes, and experience setbacks, accidents and misfortunes. 

I know very well that becoming tired, stressed and overloaded is asking for trouble, so I do what I can to avoid getting into those states.

I do sometimes wonder though whether hostile unseen influences are also at work, subtly taking advantage when people are distracted or not functioning well.  They do whatever they can to cause trouble, damage their victims’ environments and sabotage lives.

I have noticed that ideas that lead to trouble or even disaster sometimes slip into people’s minds. The man who had the ‘good idea’ of moving his daughters into the basement because bad weather was expected only for them to be drowned by flood water during the night, is an example of a very bad case.

Some much less serious examples from my own life come to mind. While I definitely need to take responsibility for getting so absorbed in reading or preoccupied with research that the real world disappears, so when forced to do something I deal with it with the back of my mind, other factors might be at work too..

On one occasion, I was immersed in a book; I became aware very slowly and dimly that something wasn’t quite right. There was a faint smell that I automatically and mistakenly assumed to be medicinal; an inner voice told me that it was just the vapour balm that I had been using for a cough. 

Eventually, I came down to earth and realised what was happening: I had not replaced the lid of a bottle of nail varnish remover properly, the bottle had tilted on its side and the liquid was ebbing away. I was too late to save most of it. It was definitely my fault for not putting the top on properly and for not immediately investigating the source of the smell, but I was misled by that small voice.