A personal example of numina… Gaia controls ecological balance, and is rather moderate and tolerant of erratic behavior from the organisms in any specific section of it’s being, but it does exert subtle influences for what would seem to human minds an almost purposeful reason.

Like a dog scratching at fleas? Yes, but with much more finesse and subtlety. Science is now discovering that a great many species have a rather sophisticated electromagnetic sensitivity, bugs, fish and birds mostly, but I feel in time they will find it includes all life on the planet.

They have invented a device they call the god helmet. It uses transcranial magnetic stimulation to create weird perceptual influences in people. The device doesn’t do any actual harm. People just find it spooky, mostly. It gives you the impression you are being stared at, things like that. Well, the atmosphere acts like a huge god helmet. Even subtle shifts in your brain activity… I don’t mean chemical shifts. I mean electrical or mechanical though the two go hand in hand… But even a subtle shift in your brains activity can create a substantial influence on your behavior, create a mild sense of nausea say, or an inexplicable anxiety.

The magnetic poles on earth are said to flip periodically, perhaps a reboot going on. Some think the earth will end when the poles flip, but it’s really nothing we would really notice? Exactly. As a matter of fact, the idea that it will end is rather absurd as it had its poles flip before and the planet is still here.

I guess we aren’t as frightened as we once were about what the brain can handle. Well, to further explain, a simple wave of even mild anxiety can discourage activity in a whole group of people. People who might otherwise have gone out and walked right into a situation that would cost them all their lives.

At first I was thinking numina was like mind control. Humans exert a numina also, but it’s no more a form of mind control than giving someone a hand shake is hand control.

Anxiety is contagious, so is laughter. Is that numina? It is one form of numina, yes, but back to the Gaia example…

This wave of anxiety that changed this group of people’s behavior will likely not be recognized as a coherent influence. No one will trace it all back together and ascribe any form of intelligence to it. They will just dismiss it as coincidence. The wave of anxiety in this example was generated by Gaia, but the individuals influenced just ascribe it to random personal mood swings or make up a reason they might have felt anxious. Neuroscience calls this confabulation. It’s what your left hemisphere does when it needs to make a behavior fit into your world view and doesn’t have sufficient information to do so correctly.

To use a non-Greek word to describe this concept, numina could be compared to the news, the events themselves, and the people involved might have seemed to have only an obvious impact. But when this information gets communicated around, it transforms into something that you wouldn’t reconnect back to the original event. Sort of like reality playing a big game of telephone through all the minds involved. The price of tea in China fluctuating can in the long run lead to you arguing over whether or not your spouse will wear K-mart socks, because it’s not the actual data that matters, it’s the impulse of potential that is transferred with the data.

Numina is the chain of events? It’s the trigger of the chain, the driving energy behind it.

The butterfly effect is numina? Yes, but it isn’t so nebulous as a tempest in a teacup. It does have an order and form to it, and organization, like the world itself was a big story book or computer program.

The sport doesn’t make you a star. The practice and skill does. Yes, though the world might be a big dictionary of all the possible events or ideas, exactly what words get strung together to make a sentence is unrelated to the word as they stand by themselves.

And can go together is many ways. Yes. It’s like the world and all the spirits in it are playing the word association game with you, and all of them are hiding behind masks that look like a Rorschach inkblot test as well.

This is why weather prediction is so impossible to do well? The weather can change its mind.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~