Not having read this thread (
), I'd have to agree with the part I skimmed on the first page by Brilliand about health... Except for the exaggerated part (only YOU can keep the poor intuitive types from killing themselves! Lol). I just wanted it clear that I realize that's exaggerated so people won't mistake my meaning.
has something to do with being able to rather correctly interpret signals in ones own subjective physical experience, or experience of their body, or what not. Or simply to be confident in ones ability to interpret that. And that would be a *very* handy ability.
I find that I'm happy as long as I am healthy because then I can conveniently ignore most
stuff... I don't have to worry about interpreting it correctly because there's no way there could be a problem. That was how I used to be anyway. I never really thought about it. Also I have a remarkably good immune system (inherited from my dad I think) and so I rarely get sick. But sometimes when I have gotten sick it's kind of scared me a bit, as in sometimes I wonder if I'm going to die. And over the past few years, strange hypochondriac tendencies have begun to emerge... and my health in actuality hasn't been very good... this leads to a place of fear and confusion about if something doesn't seem right because I don't know how to interpret it and I don't know if it means something is wrong or what that will mean (if anything) later. I seem to need others to tell me I'm okay. And I really don't like that. I feel like I (my mind) is attached to this reality through the conduit of my body... and if that conduit is severed, then I'm gone. This is scary and paranoid.
The other thing I've noticed since thinking about
more is that often times physical sensations emerge as images in my mind, before I actually feel them. Like I was falling asleep and my knuckles were pressed into the wall and I hadn't noticed. As I was falling asleep I started seeing myself in this weird dusty town (I was falling into a dream) and I raised my hand and noticed my middle knuckle was gleaming... light was shining off of it, like how the light hits glass at certain angles... it was really bright/blinding. Then I was thinking in my half asleep way that something about this was bothering me... something felt eerie about how it was shining... and then it began to dawn on me: my middle knuckle hurts... because it's pressed too hard into the wall.
This sort of thing happens to me when I'm awake as well. I'll be sitting in an odd position in my chair and I'll start to realize that my thoughts are starting to take on an unpleasant feeling, like something is interrupting the flow of my mind... this becomes apparent to me in vague images and colors that feel "off" or wrong... and then I'll start to realize it's that my ankle hurts because I've been sitting on it funny for who knows how long... this realization dawns on me when the pain of it starts to become intense enough that it can't be pushed out of my mind anymore. Before this point, it will vaguely dawn on me a few times that my ankle hurts, but it doesn't hurt enough for me to think to actually change positions. But these sorts of things are always creeping up on me, under my awareness, gradually coming to the surface... and so my entire day is often spent in varying degrees of physical discomfort.
Anyway, if I imagine myself as being different... as attending to these sorts of things and knowing how to attend to them when they arise... that would be a whole different kind of way of experiencing reality. I don't know that I would want to experience reality that way... but I can definitely see how good
would be advantageous. So in that way I think that
is worthy of appreciation. But this of course is silly, because well, if missing any 1 of the 8 IM elements, something in reality would be lacking.