We have the same spiritual senses as we have physical ones. We have physical eyes and spiritual eyes. We have physical ears and also spiritual ones. We have physical smell and taste and also spiritual smell and taste. Besides our physical touch we can touch and feel spiritually.
These are the two times five senses which are connected to the physical body and the spiritual body.
These senses’ characteristic is that they are directed outward. The 10 senses are directed to sense what is going on outside of the body.
Also the mind has a kind of sense. The physical mind senses on the level of physical mind and the spiritual mind on the level of spiritual mind. These senses are called physical awareness and spiritual awareness (in German language this would be called Bewustsein.)
Finally, there are the senses of the heart (physical body's center of love, not the organ 'heart.' The physical heart’s sense is called physical intuition and the spiritual heart’s sense spiritual intuition.
We have now 14 senses which are directed outward, 10 senses of the body, two senses of the mind and two of the heart. Of these senses, half is physical and half is spiritual. Seven of these senses therefore are spiritual senses and about these this chapter is explaining. (Note that what often is called “sixth sense” actually is the collection of all seven spiritual senses.)
There also are senses directed inward. These senses are basically of the same kind as the senses directed outward. For example, the body senses what happens outside of the body with 10 senses, but the body also senses the working of the own mind in the body. A thought or emotion of the mind causes a sensation in the body, and this sensation is felt with the senses of the body, but now the senses are directed inward. Some of the physical senses are limited in this respect, for example the physical eyes cannot look into the physical body but only at it, but the spiritual eyes can look into the spirit body.
The mind senses what is in the mind and which came from the heart with what is called conscience (in German language Gewissen). Conscience is the same as awareness but now the awareness is directed inward. Conscience could also be called self-awareness (self-consciousness or, in German language Selbstbewustsein). Also the conscience has two components, the spiritual conscience and the physical conscience.
The heart senses what is in God. It is through this sense that man can receive revelations directly from God and that man can feel God’s pain or happiness in certain situations. For this no word been used in the past. We shall call this man’s divinity. Also divinity of man has a physical and a spiritual aspect.
Summarizing: There are five senses of the body, there is a sense of the mind and there is a sense of the heart. These are altogether seven senses that each have a very different character. Each of these seven senses can be directed inward (into the person’s self) our outward (outside of the person’s self). That makes altogether 14 senses. As long as man lives in the physical world, these 14 senses have both a spiritual aspect and a physical aspect. This gives altogether 28 senses.
But when we disregard whether the senses are spiritual or physical and whether they are directed inward or outward, we distinguish seven senses of man with each a very different character:
1. Seeing
2. Hearing
3. Tasting
4. Smelling
5. Touching
6. Awareness
7. Intuition
How many spiritual senses do we have now?
1. Spiritual eyes outward
2. Spiritual eyes inward
3. Spiritual ears outward
4. Spiritual ears inward
5. Spiritual taste outward
6. Spiritual taste inward
7. Spiritual touch outward
8. Spiritual touch inward
9. Spiritual smell outward
10. Spiritual smell inward
11. Spiritual awareness (outward)
12. Spiritual conscience (inward)
13. Spiritual intuition (outward)
14. Spiritual divinity (inward)
In the remaining part of this chapter we shall come to understand more about these 14 spiritual senses and learn exercises for the development of our spiritual senses.
1. SPIRITUAL EYES OUTWARD
With my physical eyes i see the world around me. Later, when my physical body has died, i live in the spiritual world and then with my spiritual eyes i will be able to see around me just as well as i now do with my physical eyes in the physical world.
But as long as i live in the physical world it takes time and effort to learn to use my spiritual eyes.
The physical world is a world of condensed and visible energy, while the spiritual world is energy in an uncondensed form and it therefore is less visible.
Moreover, the more that my physical desires dominate my spiritual ones, the more that my desire pushes me to only see in the physical world.
When i cannot yet see with my spiritual eyes, there are two problems to be solved. The first problem is when your physical desires dominate your spiritual ones.
When person A drives around in a car, A might only see trucks all the time. This is because A likes trucks and therefore only sees trucks. Person B sees birds. B doesn’t care about trucks, but loves birds. Person C sees houses everywhere, because C is an architect and is interested in how all these houses were designed and built.
Your desire determines what you see. If your desire is for the physical only, you will only be able to see the physical.
EXERCISE 1. If you do not make your spiritual desires to be dominant over your physical ones, then you will never be able to develop your spiritual senses. This exercise is to help you to develop your desire for spiritual life.
Take some time daily to pray, meditate and think about the purpose of life. Specifically ask yourself about the purpose of physical and material life. Make yourself aware of who and what you are. Is it worthwhile to live like an animal or do you want to reach higher goals in life? The purpose of the exercise is to make yourself aware of the value of spiritual life. Try at least daily to come to some kind of insight in this respect.
This exercise alone can never make you a spiritually-oriented person. Only living a good life centered on God can really make you understand the value of spiritual life.
The second main problem is that you have a physical body with physical senses, and these physical senses tend to dominate your spiritual senses just by the fact of the character and the strength of these physical senses. When you try to look with your spiritual eyes, you cannot help that you also still see with your physical eyes. Your physical eyes receive an image of the physical situation, while your spiritual eyes simultaneously receive a picture of the spiritual situation. You actually get two pictures to see at once. The physical picture is strong and clear and is what you are used to, while the spiritual picture is weak and unclear and seems to be unrealistic.
Let me try to make clear with an example what this problem means. Suppose someone draws for you a picture of a person on piece of paper. You can clearly see this picture. Suppose that now another, clear picture of a landscape is drawn over the picture of the person. That landscape is drawn with strong and thick lines. Now all of a sudden you can clearly see the landscape but you find it hard to still discover the picture of the person.
Another example. Suppose there is lit one candle in a dark room. You can very well see the light of the candle. Now someone switches on the electrical light. Suddenly the whole room becomes clearly visible while the candle is just a small detail in the room.
Note that these are only examples to show you a little of the nature of the problem that the spiritual world is difficult to perceive as long as you are also using your physical body’s senses. For the rest, the two examples do not tell us anything meaningful about spirit world.
EXERCISE 2. We must get used to see the spiritual reality on top of the physical reality. Whatever we see in the physical world, there always is also something to be seen in the spiritual world. When you see a house in the physical world then there also is a house in the spiritual world. When you see a physical dog, there also is the spiritual dog. And so on.
We begin our practice with trying to see the spiritual atmosphere in a room. The spiritual atmosphere in a room is something which cannot only be seen, but it often is more felt or smelled. But here we focus on seeing the spiritual atmosphere.
First you must find a room of which you know that there is a good atmosphere. If you cannot find such a room, then you can also go to a beautiful place in nature, where it is clean, and which is not much cultivated by man. You also should find a room of which you know that there is a bad atmosphere.
The exercise is that you frequently visit these two places of which you know that the one has a relatively good atmosphere and the other a relatively low atmosphere. Maybe you could find such places on your daily trip to your work. Each time that you visit these places, you try to look through the physical visible place into the spiritual room. You must look at the room without consciously looking at what happens there physically. You look into the distance, beyond the physical images, and you ask yourself: What do i see more than with my physical eyes?
When you do this often you will begin to see a difference between the dark place and the good place. Now focus on this difference and ask yourself what exactly is the difference between what you see in those two places. Once you notice a difference, you have already seen something with your spiritual eyes, but you might not be so aware of that. Important is that you make yourself aware of the fact that you dó see with your spiritual eyes, you only didn’t realize it so well. Every person sees with spiritual eyes, but most people haven’t been trained to know that they do this. You do have spiritual eyes and with these spiritual eyes you do see. You only are not yet aware of this, and therefore you think you didn’t see spiritually.
Continue to do this exercise daily and focus on the difference. Make yourself clear what exactly is the difference between these two spaces. You focus on seeing the atmosphere, and you see something then. What you see is already a spiritual phenomenon. Bit by bit you will see that in the good place there is a light atmosphere which looks bright and clear. In the dark place it is literally dark and smoggy.
EXERCISE 3. The next exercise is that you expand your efforts to seeing the spirit of people. Usually you know people who often are in a good mood, and you also know people who give you a bad feeling when you meet them. Although it is hard to know always when a person is in good spirit or not when you didn’t ask God or when you yourself are in bad spirit, but still, deep in your heart you know when someone is more okay or less okay.
Based on other spiritual senses you know if a person is in relatively good spirit or in relatively bad spirit. You must now look at the spirit of these people. Again, while you look, you must not clearly look at their physical appearance. Try to look through the person, as if you look far in the distance. At the moment that you do not anymore see the physical appearance clearly, you will still see something. What you then see is the beginning of spiritual seeing.
You will find a difference between the sight of the low-spirited person and that of the high-spirited person. You should focus on that difference. Think and meditate about that difference. Make yourself very clear what differences you have seen, and that those differences are differences in what you spiritually saw and not just contrasts in the physical appearances.
EXERCISE 4. Condition yourself to see the spiritual appearance behind each physical person, animal, plant or object. To develop your spiritual senses you must make effort over a long time, and it also needs high concentration each time that you want to see spiritually. It does never go without making effort over time and each time and again.
When you go through a street, try to see the spirit of the homes. You must always do this in prayer centered on God, because your spiritual senses only open in a good way if God allows it. So if your attitude is against God, God will not open your spiritual senses.
When you receive a letter, then look at the letter before opening the envelope and try to see spiritually if the content of the letter is good or evil.
The exercises are near endless, and in order to develop your spiritual eyes you must practice always and ever, day in day out.
EXERCISE 5. Until now you have practiced to use your spiritual eyes to see the spiritual aspects of physical beings and objects. It is more difficult to see spiritual beings and realities that are not expressed in a physical body.
We can see spirits and angels and sometimes also spiritual realities beyond the physical earth. But you cannot see a spirit if that spirit is not there with you or near you. You cannot see what is not there. So, depending on whether you can see a spirit is whether that spirit is near to you.
Furthermore, there are many spirits who are almost invisible even in spirit world. Such spirits lived such a low life that their spirits are practically non-existing. Such spirits you can almost not see, even if your spiritual eyes are developed to the highest degree.
Even a higher spirit is only visible if that spirit expresses him- or herself. When spirits are emotional or highly motivated to express themselves in a situation, they become visible to our spiritual eyes.
To learn to see spirits, you should develop your relation to God. When God tells you that a certain spirit is there, you can make effort to see that spirit. The spirit appears to your eyes like the spiritual aspects of physical beings and objects did.
2. SPIRITUAL EYES INWARD
As you can look with your spiritual eyes to see spiritual beings and objects and phenomena, you also can look with your spiritual eyes into your own body. This is a special ability which one can develop for example in order to discover diseases or disorders in the own body.
For now this ability is not of so much significance, so no exercises are given for this.
3. SPIRITUAL EARS OUTWARD
Just like for any visible entity in the physical world there is a spiritual aspect which can be seen, so for any physically audible entity one could hear a spiritual component.
In the sounds of all which we hear around us there is audible with our spiritual ears what kind of spirit is connected to the sound.
For example, when someone is angry, that anger shows a certain quality of the spirit self. When an angry person speaks, his or her speaking will be expressing that anger not only in a physically audible medium but also through a spiritually audible expression.
Of course, the physical components of sounds can never be seen apart from the spiritual ones.
Computer-made sounds can be made to sound like real, human-operated instruments, but a computer cannot put a spiritual component into that sound, other than the spirit expressions that come from the energy of the computer itself. Therefore, computer sounds usually cannot move our hearts. These sounds lack the spiritual aspect through which love and emotion can be expressed much more fully than is possible with just physical sound.
Physical sounds have impact on the physical world. Loud physical sounds can make buildings vibrate or deafen our physical ears.
Spiritual sounds have impact on the spiritual world. Spiritual sounds do not have direct effect on the physical world.
Spiritual sounds have direct effects only on the spiritual world.
EXERCISE 6. Concentrate on hearing the spiritual component of each sound that you hear. For instance, when you hear sounds made by a person, try to feel in those sounds in what kind of mood the person is. If someone angrily slams a door, the physical sound already tells you much, although it also could be that a draught slammed that door.
But in the sounds made by a person we can hear in what kind of spirit that person is. It is just a matter of making effort to discover more and more about people in that way. Make yourself aware that what you hear is spiritual and that now you are using your spiritual ears.
Train yourself to listen to music and to find out about the spiritual atmosphere in which the concert was given by focusing on the spiritual component of that music.
Listen to the sounds of nature and that of the weather. Even the winds have a certain spirit of which you can become aware by listening to it.
There also sound in the regions of spirit world that are not connected to a physical aspect. These solely spiritual sounds can be made by spirits. When you have become aware of the presence of a spirit, you can open your spiritual ears to hear what the spirit tells. You can ask that spirit a question and sometimes the spirit answers you. The more energy the spirit person puts into what he or she says, the better you can hear it. Be aware that commonly spirits are not better or worse than physical people. They are just people and they often may know less than you do. Never fall on your knees because you hear spirits speaking, because after that you will arrogantly and mistakenly put yourself high above the people around you.
4. SPIRITUAL EARS INWARD
Just like you can see things inside of your own spirit body, you also can listen to what happens in your own spirit body. Also this ability is not something which we practice here.
5. SPIRITUAL TASTE OUTWARD
Each of the senses of the body has its own special use and purpose. With our eyes we look around and all of us are very dependent of our sight. But there exist people who are very focused on their hearing, sometimes because they are blind or because they are just very much centered on that. A painter will have trained his ability to see while a musician trained the ability to hear.
The taste is mostly connected to food.
When we make food, it is extremely important how this food is prepared spiritually. I myself have often experienced to get dead-sick from eating a little food which was prepared with a bad spirit. The sickness then is sickness of the spirit body.
I could write a whole book about the topic of how to spiritually prepare good food, beginning with cultivating the food in a garden to harvesting to preparing it in the kitchen. It is a big and important topic.
With our spiritual eyes we can see if food has a good spirit or a bad one. But this demands much experience added to much concentration at the moment of looking.
The spiritual sense of taste is necessary for us to guarantee that we only eat good food. Food that was prepared with a good heart will have a good effect on our spiritual condition and health. Food that was prepared with a bad heart will have a bad effect on our spiritual condition and health.
The higher is your standard for spiritual life, the more you will be affected by the spiritual component of food. When your standard in spiritual life is very low then it doesn’t matter very much what kind of food you eat, as long as that food is in order physically.
To simplify it: food can be prepared having good spiritual value or bad spiritual value or no spiritual value. Food with good spiritual value can only be prepared by people having a high spiritual standard using food components that also have been cultivated and treated well. Food with bad spiritual value can be prepared by someone in an evil spirit, or there have been used ingredients with low spiritual value. There also is much food that has almost no spiritual value. It is spiritually empty food. When you eat it, it only fills your physical stomach while your spiritual body still is hungry after eating. Such kind of food without having spiritual value is usually made in factories where machines do much of the work or it is prepared by people who have a very businesslike attitude. Most quick-food restaurants serve such kind of food. Yet, such food is still to be preferred above food with a bad spiritual value.
EXERCISE 7. You should become critical about the food you eat. Of course, your physical food should be of good quality, but as you improve the quality of your own spiritual life, you also should learn to eat food with good spiritual quality.
Whenever you eat, always make effort to discover what spiritual value that food has. If you are sure that the food has a bad spiritual value, don’t eat it.
Try to taste the spiritual emptiness of food from fast-food restaurants.
Prepare a piece of bread, put it in a plastic bag and then for one hour on a street. Physically the food has not changed, but now taste how that food tastes spiritually! If you are not too far down as a spiritual person, you only need to do this exercise once in your life…
6. SPIRITUAL TASTE INWARD
With your spiritual taste directed inward you can taste in your mouth in what spiritual condition your own body is. You can also taste the effect of certain thoughts on your body. Good thoughts give a good taste but bad thoughts and feelings give you a bad taste in your mouth.
7. SPIRITUAL TOUCH OUTWARD
With your physical touch you feel the wind and the shining of the sun. You feel warmth and coldness.
Your spiritual touch does the same but it feels only spiritual contact.
When someone touches you, you can sense what is behind that touch. The physical contact tells you something about the one who touches you. If someone gives you a soft hand, it could tell you about a weak character, but it could also be that the person has an illness in the muscles of the hand. The spiritual contact tells you clearly about the spiritual reality of the person who shakes hands with you.
Maybe you have the experience that when you met a person you suddenly felt cold. Did you realize that this feeling of coldness is a spiritual experience?
When you come into a room or house with a low spirit, or you touch things used by someone with a low spirit, you will feel like getting dirty. Take such experiences very seriously, because your spiritual skin warns you that spiritual dirt is all around you. That spiritual dirt first touches your skin, but if you are not careful, it will enter your spirit body and make you ill.
EXERCISE 8. It is difficult to give exercises to develop your spiritual senses as living with spiritual awareness is something that must be learned in lifelong daily and even hourly experiences. To develop your spiritual sense of touch you basically must do the same as what you did to practice the other senses. Find situations in which you know that there is a bad spiritual atmosphere. Train yourself to experience how that feels on your spiritual skin. Find situations in which there is a good spiritual atmosphere. Train yourself to experience how that feels. Then make yourself aware of the differences between contacts that made you feel good and contacts that made you feel bad.
Do also train yourself to detect spiritual touching on your skin from the presence of a spirit who comes near to you.
These are the two times five senses which are connected to the physical body and the spiritual body.
These senses’ characteristic is that they are directed outward. The 10 senses are directed to sense what is going on outside of the body.
Also the mind has a kind of sense. The physical mind senses on the level of physical mind and the spiritual mind on the level of spiritual mind. These senses are called physical awareness and spiritual awareness (in German language this would be called Bewustsein.)
Finally, there are the senses of the heart (physical body's center of love, not the organ 'heart.' The physical heart’s sense is called physical intuition and the spiritual heart’s sense spiritual intuition.
We have now 14 senses which are directed outward, 10 senses of the body, two senses of the mind and two of the heart. Of these senses, half is physical and half is spiritual. Seven of these senses therefore are spiritual senses and about these this chapter is explaining. (Note that what often is called “sixth sense” actually is the collection of all seven spiritual senses.)
There also are senses directed inward. These senses are basically of the same kind as the senses directed outward. For example, the body senses what happens outside of the body with 10 senses, but the body also senses the working of the own mind in the body. A thought or emotion of the mind causes a sensation in the body, and this sensation is felt with the senses of the body, but now the senses are directed inward. Some of the physical senses are limited in this respect, for example the physical eyes cannot look into the physical body but only at it, but the spiritual eyes can look into the spirit body.
The mind senses what is in the mind and which came from the heart with what is called conscience (in German language Gewissen). Conscience is the same as awareness but now the awareness is directed inward. Conscience could also be called self-awareness (self-consciousness or, in German language Selbstbewustsein). Also the conscience has two components, the spiritual conscience and the physical conscience.
The heart senses what is in God. It is through this sense that man can receive revelations directly from God and that man can feel God’s pain or happiness in certain situations. For this no word been used in the past. We shall call this man’s divinity. Also divinity of man has a physical and a spiritual aspect.
Summarizing: There are five senses of the body, there is a sense of the mind and there is a sense of the heart. These are altogether seven senses that each have a very different character. Each of these seven senses can be directed inward (into the person’s self) our outward (outside of the person’s self). That makes altogether 14 senses. As long as man lives in the physical world, these 14 senses have both a spiritual aspect and a physical aspect. This gives altogether 28 senses.
But when we disregard whether the senses are spiritual or physical and whether they are directed inward or outward, we distinguish seven senses of man with each a very different character:
1. Seeing
2. Hearing
3. Tasting
4. Smelling
5. Touching
6. Awareness
7. Intuition
How many spiritual senses do we have now?
1. Spiritual eyes outward
2. Spiritual eyes inward
3. Spiritual ears outward
4. Spiritual ears inward
5. Spiritual taste outward
6. Spiritual taste inward
7. Spiritual touch outward
8. Spiritual touch inward
9. Spiritual smell outward
10. Spiritual smell inward
11. Spiritual awareness (outward)
12. Spiritual conscience (inward)
13. Spiritual intuition (outward)
14. Spiritual divinity (inward)
In the remaining part of this chapter we shall come to understand more about these 14 spiritual senses and learn exercises for the development of our spiritual senses.
1. SPIRITUAL EYES OUTWARD
With my physical eyes i see the world around me. Later, when my physical body has died, i live in the spiritual world and then with my spiritual eyes i will be able to see around me just as well as i now do with my physical eyes in the physical world.
But as long as i live in the physical world it takes time and effort to learn to use my spiritual eyes.
The physical world is a world of condensed and visible energy, while the spiritual world is energy in an uncondensed form and it therefore is less visible.
Moreover, the more that my physical desires dominate my spiritual ones, the more that my desire pushes me to only see in the physical world.
When i cannot yet see with my spiritual eyes, there are two problems to be solved. The first problem is when your physical desires dominate your spiritual ones.
When person A drives around in a car, A might only see trucks all the time. This is because A likes trucks and therefore only sees trucks. Person B sees birds. B doesn’t care about trucks, but loves birds. Person C sees houses everywhere, because C is an architect and is interested in how all these houses were designed and built.
Your desire determines what you see. If your desire is for the physical only, you will only be able to see the physical.
EXERCISE 1. If you do not make your spiritual desires to be dominant over your physical ones, then you will never be able to develop your spiritual senses. This exercise is to help you to develop your desire for spiritual life.
Take some time daily to pray, meditate and think about the purpose of life. Specifically ask yourself about the purpose of physical and material life. Make yourself aware of who and what you are. Is it worthwhile to live like an animal or do you want to reach higher goals in life? The purpose of the exercise is to make yourself aware of the value of spiritual life. Try at least daily to come to some kind of insight in this respect.
This exercise alone can never make you a spiritually-oriented person. Only living a good life centered on God can really make you understand the value of spiritual life.
The second main problem is that you have a physical body with physical senses, and these physical senses tend to dominate your spiritual senses just by the fact of the character and the strength of these physical senses. When you try to look with your spiritual eyes, you cannot help that you also still see with your physical eyes. Your physical eyes receive an image of the physical situation, while your spiritual eyes simultaneously receive a picture of the spiritual situation. You actually get two pictures to see at once. The physical picture is strong and clear and is what you are used to, while the spiritual picture is weak and unclear and seems to be unrealistic.
Let me try to make clear with an example what this problem means. Suppose someone draws for you a picture of a person on piece of paper. You can clearly see this picture. Suppose that now another, clear picture of a landscape is drawn over the picture of the person. That landscape is drawn with strong and thick lines. Now all of a sudden you can clearly see the landscape but you find it hard to still discover the picture of the person.
Another example. Suppose there is lit one candle in a dark room. You can very well see the light of the candle. Now someone switches on the electrical light. Suddenly the whole room becomes clearly visible while the candle is just a small detail in the room.
Note that these are only examples to show you a little of the nature of the problem that the spiritual world is difficult to perceive as long as you are also using your physical body’s senses. For the rest, the two examples do not tell us anything meaningful about spirit world.
EXERCISE 2. We must get used to see the spiritual reality on top of the physical reality. Whatever we see in the physical world, there always is also something to be seen in the spiritual world. When you see a house in the physical world then there also is a house in the spiritual world. When you see a physical dog, there also is the spiritual dog. And so on.
We begin our practice with trying to see the spiritual atmosphere in a room. The spiritual atmosphere in a room is something which cannot only be seen, but it often is more felt or smelled. But here we focus on seeing the spiritual atmosphere.
First you must find a room of which you know that there is a good atmosphere. If you cannot find such a room, then you can also go to a beautiful place in nature, where it is clean, and which is not much cultivated by man. You also should find a room of which you know that there is a bad atmosphere.
The exercise is that you frequently visit these two places of which you know that the one has a relatively good atmosphere and the other a relatively low atmosphere. Maybe you could find such places on your daily trip to your work. Each time that you visit these places, you try to look through the physical visible place into the spiritual room. You must look at the room without consciously looking at what happens there physically. You look into the distance, beyond the physical images, and you ask yourself: What do i see more than with my physical eyes?
When you do this often you will begin to see a difference between the dark place and the good place. Now focus on this difference and ask yourself what exactly is the difference between what you see in those two places. Once you notice a difference, you have already seen something with your spiritual eyes, but you might not be so aware of that. Important is that you make yourself aware of the fact that you dó see with your spiritual eyes, you only didn’t realize it so well. Every person sees with spiritual eyes, but most people haven’t been trained to know that they do this. You do have spiritual eyes and with these spiritual eyes you do see. You only are not yet aware of this, and therefore you think you didn’t see spiritually.
Continue to do this exercise daily and focus on the difference. Make yourself clear what exactly is the difference between these two spaces. You focus on seeing the atmosphere, and you see something then. What you see is already a spiritual phenomenon. Bit by bit you will see that in the good place there is a light atmosphere which looks bright and clear. In the dark place it is literally dark and smoggy.
EXERCISE 3. The next exercise is that you expand your efforts to seeing the spirit of people. Usually you know people who often are in a good mood, and you also know people who give you a bad feeling when you meet them. Although it is hard to know always when a person is in good spirit or not when you didn’t ask God or when you yourself are in bad spirit, but still, deep in your heart you know when someone is more okay or less okay.
Based on other spiritual senses you know if a person is in relatively good spirit or in relatively bad spirit. You must now look at the spirit of these people. Again, while you look, you must not clearly look at their physical appearance. Try to look through the person, as if you look far in the distance. At the moment that you do not anymore see the physical appearance clearly, you will still see something. What you then see is the beginning of spiritual seeing.
You will find a difference between the sight of the low-spirited person and that of the high-spirited person. You should focus on that difference. Think and meditate about that difference. Make yourself very clear what differences you have seen, and that those differences are differences in what you spiritually saw and not just contrasts in the physical appearances.
EXERCISE 4. Condition yourself to see the spiritual appearance behind each physical person, animal, plant or object. To develop your spiritual senses you must make effort over a long time, and it also needs high concentration each time that you want to see spiritually. It does never go without making effort over time and each time and again.
When you go through a street, try to see the spirit of the homes. You must always do this in prayer centered on God, because your spiritual senses only open in a good way if God allows it. So if your attitude is against God, God will not open your spiritual senses.
When you receive a letter, then look at the letter before opening the envelope and try to see spiritually if the content of the letter is good or evil.
The exercises are near endless, and in order to develop your spiritual eyes you must practice always and ever, day in day out.
EXERCISE 5. Until now you have practiced to use your spiritual eyes to see the spiritual aspects of physical beings and objects. It is more difficult to see spiritual beings and realities that are not expressed in a physical body.
We can see spirits and angels and sometimes also spiritual realities beyond the physical earth. But you cannot see a spirit if that spirit is not there with you or near you. You cannot see what is not there. So, depending on whether you can see a spirit is whether that spirit is near to you.
Furthermore, there are many spirits who are almost invisible even in spirit world. Such spirits lived such a low life that their spirits are practically non-existing. Such spirits you can almost not see, even if your spiritual eyes are developed to the highest degree.
Even a higher spirit is only visible if that spirit expresses him- or herself. When spirits are emotional or highly motivated to express themselves in a situation, they become visible to our spiritual eyes.
To learn to see spirits, you should develop your relation to God. When God tells you that a certain spirit is there, you can make effort to see that spirit. The spirit appears to your eyes like the spiritual aspects of physical beings and objects did.
2. SPIRITUAL EYES INWARD
As you can look with your spiritual eyes to see spiritual beings and objects and phenomena, you also can look with your spiritual eyes into your own body. This is a special ability which one can develop for example in order to discover diseases or disorders in the own body.
For now this ability is not of so much significance, so no exercises are given for this.
3. SPIRITUAL EARS OUTWARD
Just like for any visible entity in the physical world there is a spiritual aspect which can be seen, so for any physically audible entity one could hear a spiritual component.
In the sounds of all which we hear around us there is audible with our spiritual ears what kind of spirit is connected to the sound.
For example, when someone is angry, that anger shows a certain quality of the spirit self. When an angry person speaks, his or her speaking will be expressing that anger not only in a physically audible medium but also through a spiritually audible expression.
Of course, the physical components of sounds can never be seen apart from the spiritual ones.
Computer-made sounds can be made to sound like real, human-operated instruments, but a computer cannot put a spiritual component into that sound, other than the spirit expressions that come from the energy of the computer itself. Therefore, computer sounds usually cannot move our hearts. These sounds lack the spiritual aspect through which love and emotion can be expressed much more fully than is possible with just physical sound.
Physical sounds have impact on the physical world. Loud physical sounds can make buildings vibrate or deafen our physical ears.
Spiritual sounds have impact on the spiritual world. Spiritual sounds do not have direct effect on the physical world.
Spiritual sounds have direct effects only on the spiritual world.
EXERCISE 6. Concentrate on hearing the spiritual component of each sound that you hear. For instance, when you hear sounds made by a person, try to feel in those sounds in what kind of mood the person is. If someone angrily slams a door, the physical sound already tells you much, although it also could be that a draught slammed that door.
But in the sounds made by a person we can hear in what kind of spirit that person is. It is just a matter of making effort to discover more and more about people in that way. Make yourself aware that what you hear is spiritual and that now you are using your spiritual ears.
Train yourself to listen to music and to find out about the spiritual atmosphere in which the concert was given by focusing on the spiritual component of that music.
Listen to the sounds of nature and that of the weather. Even the winds have a certain spirit of which you can become aware by listening to it.
There also sound in the regions of spirit world that are not connected to a physical aspect. These solely spiritual sounds can be made by spirits. When you have become aware of the presence of a spirit, you can open your spiritual ears to hear what the spirit tells. You can ask that spirit a question and sometimes the spirit answers you. The more energy the spirit person puts into what he or she says, the better you can hear it. Be aware that commonly spirits are not better or worse than physical people. They are just people and they often may know less than you do. Never fall on your knees because you hear spirits speaking, because after that you will arrogantly and mistakenly put yourself high above the people around you.
4. SPIRITUAL EARS INWARD
Just like you can see things inside of your own spirit body, you also can listen to what happens in your own spirit body. Also this ability is not something which we practice here.
5. SPIRITUAL TASTE OUTWARD
Each of the senses of the body has its own special use and purpose. With our eyes we look around and all of us are very dependent of our sight. But there exist people who are very focused on their hearing, sometimes because they are blind or because they are just very much centered on that. A painter will have trained his ability to see while a musician trained the ability to hear.
The taste is mostly connected to food.
When we make food, it is extremely important how this food is prepared spiritually. I myself have often experienced to get dead-sick from eating a little food which was prepared with a bad spirit. The sickness then is sickness of the spirit body.
I could write a whole book about the topic of how to spiritually prepare good food, beginning with cultivating the food in a garden to harvesting to preparing it in the kitchen. It is a big and important topic.
With our spiritual eyes we can see if food has a good spirit or a bad one. But this demands much experience added to much concentration at the moment of looking.
The spiritual sense of taste is necessary for us to guarantee that we only eat good food. Food that was prepared with a good heart will have a good effect on our spiritual condition and health. Food that was prepared with a bad heart will have a bad effect on our spiritual condition and health.
The higher is your standard for spiritual life, the more you will be affected by the spiritual component of food. When your standard in spiritual life is very low then it doesn’t matter very much what kind of food you eat, as long as that food is in order physically.
To simplify it: food can be prepared having good spiritual value or bad spiritual value or no spiritual value. Food with good spiritual value can only be prepared by people having a high spiritual standard using food components that also have been cultivated and treated well. Food with bad spiritual value can be prepared by someone in an evil spirit, or there have been used ingredients with low spiritual value. There also is much food that has almost no spiritual value. It is spiritually empty food. When you eat it, it only fills your physical stomach while your spiritual body still is hungry after eating. Such kind of food without having spiritual value is usually made in factories where machines do much of the work or it is prepared by people who have a very businesslike attitude. Most quick-food restaurants serve such kind of food. Yet, such food is still to be preferred above food with a bad spiritual value.
EXERCISE 7. You should become critical about the food you eat. Of course, your physical food should be of good quality, but as you improve the quality of your own spiritual life, you also should learn to eat food with good spiritual quality.
Whenever you eat, always make effort to discover what spiritual value that food has. If you are sure that the food has a bad spiritual value, don’t eat it.
Try to taste the spiritual emptiness of food from fast-food restaurants.
Prepare a piece of bread, put it in a plastic bag and then for one hour on a street. Physically the food has not changed, but now taste how that food tastes spiritually! If you are not too far down as a spiritual person, you only need to do this exercise once in your life…
6. SPIRITUAL TASTE INWARD
With your spiritual taste directed inward you can taste in your mouth in what spiritual condition your own body is. You can also taste the effect of certain thoughts on your body. Good thoughts give a good taste but bad thoughts and feelings give you a bad taste in your mouth.
7. SPIRITUAL TOUCH OUTWARD
With your physical touch you feel the wind and the shining of the sun. You feel warmth and coldness.
Your spiritual touch does the same but it feels only spiritual contact.
When someone touches you, you can sense what is behind that touch. The physical contact tells you something about the one who touches you. If someone gives you a soft hand, it could tell you about a weak character, but it could also be that the person has an illness in the muscles of the hand. The spiritual contact tells you clearly about the spiritual reality of the person who shakes hands with you.
Maybe you have the experience that when you met a person you suddenly felt cold. Did you realize that this feeling of coldness is a spiritual experience?
When you come into a room or house with a low spirit, or you touch things used by someone with a low spirit, you will feel like getting dirty. Take such experiences very seriously, because your spiritual skin warns you that spiritual dirt is all around you. That spiritual dirt first touches your skin, but if you are not careful, it will enter your spirit body and make you ill.
EXERCISE 8. It is difficult to give exercises to develop your spiritual senses as living with spiritual awareness is something that must be learned in lifelong daily and even hourly experiences. To develop your spiritual sense of touch you basically must do the same as what you did to practice the other senses. Find situations in which you know that there is a bad spiritual atmosphere. Train yourself to experience how that feels on your spiritual skin. Find situations in which there is a good spiritual atmosphere. Train yourself to experience how that feels. Then make yourself aware of the differences between contacts that made you feel good and contacts that made you feel bad.
Do also train yourself to detect spiritual touching on your skin from the presence of a spirit who comes near to you.
