A lot of people keep asking me about my theories concerning the connection between disabilities and psychic abilities.  I have talked about it at length in different places but never in a concentrated place like my blog where I can direct people when they ask me about it.  So here I am to explain it!  I don’t think this blog will be very long because it’s pretty straightforward but here we go….

My beliefs on this matter are very simple.  I believe that there is a connection between displaying natural psychic abilities and having some kind of disability whether it is physical or developmental.  (As an aside, the proper terms are physical disability and developmental disability.  Saying crippled or retarded are not at all acceptable.)  I started noticing the connection when I was rather young in school.  When I realized what it meant to be someone with psychic/intuitive/mediumistic abilities, I was somewhere around middle school, I think, and I was automatically put into special ed classes for one period a day just by virtue of being in a wheelchair.  Mainstreaming people with disabilities in school permanently is a whole other issue that I will probably talk about it another blog at some point.  But anyway, some of the other kids in the special ed classes sometimes talked about sensing presences that they couldn’t see or hearing mysterious sounds or knowing information before it happened.  Basic intuitive abilities, really.  Outside of the special ed classes, the other kids almost never talk about those things.  In fact, outside of the special ed classes, talking openly about intuitive abilities was almost always met with ridicule and bullying.  I made the mistake when I was very young of telling a few friends about the things I saw or experienced and it resulted in bullying that made me silent about it until I was well into high school almost ready to graduate.

I never gave it much thought, the question of why people with disabilities of any type were more prone to having spiritual experiences than “normal” people.  I don’t like the term normal because it implies that people like me are abnormal and I don’t think that’s right but there is no other way to compare and contrast people with disabilities and not with disabilities right now.  My mother made a friend with a professional psychic when I was in my sophomore year of high school and that woman made the suggestion to me that people with disabilities are actually very advanced souls and it’s natural to make the connection that advanced souls would be more connected to the other side.  She used people with Down Syndrome as her example, specifically naming them as being very advanced souls.  She also indicated that such people are on their last lives and will not reincarnate anymore because they have finished everything they need to learn and they’ve used their last life to teach people around them.  That was my first exposure to a theory about why people with disabilities are naturally more connected to spirituality than others.  Specifically in the areas of developmental disabilities, I have noticed that people with various forms of autism tend to displaying natural mediumistic abilities.  Several friends of mine who have children with autism also report their children having significant and legitimate encounters with spirit entities and displaying precognitive knowledge.

In my case, I don’t have any developmental disabilities whatsoever but I am technically a quadriplegic so that makes me fall into the physical disability category.  That gets a little hairier as far as fitting into the theory of why disabilities and spiritual abilities seem to be so connected.  When I was writing my book about reincarnation, I really had to address that issue because I knew other people were going to ask me about it.  That meant I had to ask a lot of very difficult questions, which is what should happen when anyone is writing a book about spirituality in any form.  It actually occurred to me when I was watching that movie Ray about Ray Charles, who was blind.  I don’t remember the exact scene or anything but the the actor playing Ray referenced the fact that because he was blind, the rest of his senses were heightened.  He was talking to a woman and told her that there was a hummingbird outside or something of that nature and she looked and found the hummingbird even though she hadn’t noticed it.  He noticed it because he could hear it.  His other senses were extremely heightened because one of his senses didn’t work properly anymore.

Most people probably don’t even realize it when they look at people with physical disabilities but we are extremely confined and many of us have some senses denied that other people take for granted.  Some of us don’t have a sense of touch at all (I do have full sensation).  Some of us are very limited in our mobility, which means we can’t just get up and go into the next room when we hear people talking.  It doesn’t matter what sense is taken away.  The other senses are going to go into overdrive to make up for the loss.  It’s not anything that happens because we intended to – it’s just the body’s natural way of coping and surviving.  Since I was very limited in where I could go and what I could do when I was younger before I had a wheelchair, I got very good at listening to everything going on around me, even in other parts of the house.  I knew where everybody was in the house, and I knew what they were doing, and most of the time, I knew about every conversation that happened under my roof even if I didn’t witness it firsthand.  Being so limited and mobility forces a person to be still and quiet much more in their lives than the average person.  That’s usually the first lesson in developing psychic abilities – be still, listen, etc.  It’s the beginning of meditation.  So people like me who are not as physically active as everyone else naturally developed the beginning stages of meditation without realizing what it was.  And as the other senses became heightened, so did extrasensory perception.  It happened for me at an extremely young age.  I started having experiences with the other side and spirit entities when I was a toddler even though I didn’t understand the terms “afterlife” or “ghost”.

In the simplest terms possible, it just comes down to being denied one or more senses and the other senses jump into overdrive to make up for the loss.  People don’t typically think of psychic abilities as another sense.  The tend to put it on a pedestal like it’s special, so special that only a few people actually have it.  I kind of disagree with that.  I think it’s just something everybody has but most people ignore and never develop.  Extrasensory ability is no different than a sense of touch or sense of smell or sense of sight.

For those of you who regularly watched Paranormal State, they often did experiments with sensory deprivation in order to open themselves up to encounters with entities.  It’s basically the same principle.  If you deny yourself certain senses, the rest of them will try to make up for the loss, and that’s really what’s happening to people with disabilities.  It may be true that people with this abilities are more evolved spiritually than the average population but I truthfully don’t know for sure.  I believe it but I can’t prove it.  It’s much more accepted to believe that sensory deprivation in any form will lead to the remaining senses becoming heightened, including extrasensory ability.  So if you have people in your life who are disabled in any form, my advice is not to question them too much if they claim to have spiritual experiences.  They’re probably telling the truth.

What are your theories?