by Rob & Trish MacGregor

An empath is a person who has an ability to tune into another person’s emotions, and sometimes literally assume those feelings. “They feel everything, sometimes to an extreme, and are less apt to intellectualize feelings. Intuition is the filter through which they experience the world,” writes Dr. Judith Orloff in The Power of Surrender: Let Go and Energize Your Relationships, Success, and Well-Being. A planetary empath, on the other hand, is someone whose whole being reacts to major events that are about to unfold and affect the planet and large numbers of people.

These individuals are so attuned to the planet that they experience physical, emotional and psychic symptoms hours and sometimes days before a natural or man-made disaster. They come from different countries, from different cultural, ethnic, and spiritual backgrounds, and most seem to be women. The intensity of their symptoms appear to be connected to the severity of the disasters and often subside once the disaster has occurred.

“Even though I was born intuitive and empathic, nothing prepared me for how those qualities would progress through life,” said Debra Page, a paranormal researcher in southern California. In the early 1990s, she began to notice that her intuitive flashes were expanding to include world events. The curious thing was how these flashes translated into physical symptoms. Days before a world event, she would feel a profound grief and heartache that nearly crippled her. “Then I started noticing a pattern. The grief episodes would precede an event—either a natural or man-made disaster—and disappear when the event happened: Princess Diana’s death, the beginning of the Gulf War, the shootings at Columbine, at Virginia Tech, the 2008 financial debacle.”

Debra and her husband were out running errands on December 23, 2004 when suddenly her left ear had a long, sustained ringing and she experienced simultaneous visions of destruction and flooding. “I knew many would die. I was so disoriented my husband had to hold me up until it was over. I told him what I was witnessing. I was horrified. I knew it would happen in three days, but didn’t know where it would happen.”

On December 26, a 9.1 to 9.3 mega-thrust earthquake jolted Sumatra, Indonesia, setting off a series of deadly tsunamis that inundated coastal communities with waves up to 100 feet. At least 230,000 people were killed in fourteen countries including India, Sri Lanka and Thailand, making it the one of the deadliest natural disasters in history.

Fukushima

On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m. Tokyo time, a 9.0 earthquake shook northern Japan for six minutes, moved the main island of Japan eight feet, and shifted the planet’s axis by four inches. The quake unleashed a tsunami that raced across the Pacific, triggering tsunami warnings and alerts for 50 countries and territories. Waves over a hundred feet high slammed into Honshu’s shoreline, and swept six miles inland, destroying everything in their path. Nearly sixteen thousand people died. The tsunami struck the Fukushima nuclear plant and created the largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in April 1986.

The triple disaster caught the Japanese government, the Tokyo Electric Power Company and other authorities by surprise. But none of it surprised Debra, who began experiencing debilitating physical symptoms up to a week before the quake. Debra’s ears rang constantly, she suffered from extreme vertigo, and excruciating migraines. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t function, and ended up in the emergency room several times. A sense of profound sadness left her paralyzed.

“I had severe ringing in my left ear, always a precursor to a quake or volcanic eruption.” Four days before the quake, other symptoms surfaced: severe vertigo, nausea, a crippling fatigue, inexplicable nosebleeds. Debra knew that the impending quake, wherever it would occur, would be bad.

Shortly before the Japanese disaster, Connie J. Cannon, a retired R.N., was in a grocery store one afternoon in northern Florida where she lives. Suddenly, the ground shifted abruptly beneath her and she grabbed onto a shelf to keep her balance. Her head hammered, her vision blurred, nausea gripped her. She barely made it out of the store to her car. Her husband and the other people around her didn’t experience anything at all.

“Prior to higher magnitude earthquakes, no matter where they are going to occur on the earth, I begin to experience a sense of impending doom,” Connie says. “This is quickly followed by an ‘edginess,’ and then the physical symptoms kick in. My ears will click and ring and sometimes thump; walking becomes a real issue, as if I’m trying to walk on a rocking, undulating boat in water although my floors are perfectly level, and I must hold onto the walls to keep my balance. The nausea is a sea-sickness type of nausea. Although I do have Parkinson’s, there’s a distinct difference between those symptoms and the planetary event warnings.”

On Wednesday, November 11, 2015, we received the following email from Connie:

Am wondering if any of the other planetary empaths are reporting in? About forty minutes ago, I began to have really awful symptoms. I feel very “sick” (stomach), feel as if I have a fever…I don’t. Temp is actually low: 97.2 degrees. Also am crying for no reason…feel an intense overwhelming sense of great sadness enveloping me that has no basis in my life. I can’t be still. Am walking, pacing the floor, want to wring my hands (wringing hands is totally foreign to me)…extreme nervous energy, and I am the least “nervous energy” person I’ve ever known.

I’ve checked the usual worldwide geographical sites for any kinds of earth events. So far, whatever it is has apparently not yet happened. Based on the strength of these symptoms, whatever is imminent is huge and probably will be accompanied by untenable grief and/or loss. It may not be a “planetary event.” It may be some type of human-action…massive school shooting or something on that order. I hope not!! But I do sense many people involved. I hate this. Absolutely hate it. When it manifests, the symptoms will dissipate.

Two days later, November 13, terrorists attacked Paris in multiple locations killing 137 people, including seven terrorists. By Saturday afternoon, Connie said her planetary empathy symptoms were fading away.

Before the 6.3 quake in New Zealand on February 21, 2011, Natalie Thomas, a medium and mother of five in Australia, began to experience a great sense of agitation that came out of nowhere and “dreadful sadness akin to grief or a broken heart.” Most of the time when these feelings begin to surface, it’s as if a switch has been flicked on that allows her to feel the energy of events. The only thing she can equate it to is a sense of ”being broken open.”

On May 1, 2015, two days before the 7.8 quake in Nepal, Jane Clifford of Wales was in her garden when she experienced such violent shaking she had to stretch out against the ground. The next day, she told a friend that a massive earthquake was coming with huge loss of life. Her friend’s response was that quakes were going on all the time, but Jane insisted that her premonitions are about the ones that hit the global news. When she woke up on the day of the quake, she felt shock, grief, terror, loss, and knew the quake had happened. “I struggled to clear those emotions for hours, then heard on the radio about Nepal and knew there was more to come.”

We started gathering information about planetary empaths five years ago, in January 2010, when we began receiving emails from visitors to our synchronicity blog, who described a spectrum of physical symptoms that they believed portended an impending natural disaster. Some of these people said the symptoms were similar to what they had experienced before other disasters – 9/11, the Indonesian quake and tsunami in 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Hurricane Andrew in 1992. In other words, for some of these individuals, the symptoms had been consistent throughout their adult lives. They had a means of comparison.

It didn’t take long before disaster struck. On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 quake struck 15 miles southwest of Port au Prince, Haiti, at a depth of just 8.1 miles beneath the surface. According to Disasters Emergency Committee, an organization in the U.K., three and a half million were impacted by the quake. The death toll was enormous – more than 220,000 with another 300,000 injured – and the destruction was massive.

DEC estimated that after the quake, there were 19 million cubic meters of rubble and debris in Port au Prince – “enough to fill a line of shopping containers stretching end to end from London to Beirut.” At one point, a million and a half people were living in camps. In October, there was an outbreak of cholera that killed nearly six thousand and left more than 200,000 infected.

After the initial quake had occurred, the planetary empaths, who had contacted us, reported that their symptoms had subsided, but that they were still experiencing severe discomfort, indicating that the event wasn’t over yet. Sure enough, within the first nine hours after the quake, the United States Geological Survey recorded 32 aftershocks of 4.2 or greater, and on January 24—twelve days after the quake—there were 52 aftershocks measuring 4.5 or greater. Only then did the empaths report that they were free of their symptoms.

Mass Events & The Global Mind

The earthquake in Haiti classifies as a mass event – one in which media coverage is so extensive that you would have to be living under a rock not to know about it. Mass events seize us emotionally, collectively, and that reality ripples outward through time. And it’s measurable.

The Global Consciousness Project, based at Princeton University and cosponsored by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, monitors what author and researcher Dean Radin calls the “global mind.” It was started by Princeton’s Dr. Roger Nelson, who defines the global mind as the combined consciousness of everyone on the planet.

The project collects data from a global network of physical random number generators located in up to 70 host sites around the world at any given time. According to their website, “The data are transmitted to a central archive which now contains more than 15 years of random data in parallel sequences of synchronized 200-bit trials generated every second. Our purpose is to examine subtle correlations that may reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world. We hypothesize that there will be structure in what should be random data, associated with major global events that engage our minds and hearts.”

This means that if you repeatedly flip a coin, it should result in an equal number of heads and tails. But with events of extreme global interest, the concentrated and emotional outpouring results in a noticeable difference in the percent of heads versus tails. When 9/11 occurred, it became a collective story of humanity—the most powerful country in the world had been attacked at its financial heart.

Radin noted that on 9/11, thirty-seven of the random number generators were active. The fluctuations in the bell curve analysis indicated that anomalies had begun two hours before the first plane hit the World Trade Center – odds of 20 to 1. “That means that on that fateful day, the CP’s ‘bells’ collectively rang out around the world with an unusually pure tone,” Radin said.

It also means that the fluctuations were precognitive, that the global mind’s awareness of an imminent mass disaster rippled out through time, into the future.

Are planetary empaths the human equivalents of random-number generators? Are they the twenty-first century shamans who can tap into the flow of human experience in a way that eludes the rest of us – but which might help us save lives? What can we learn from them? How can they learn to hone their abilities so they can pinpoint longitude and latitude, the exact place and the nature of the disaster?

In The Minority Report, the Steven Spielberg movie based on Philip K. Dick’s novel, a group of precogs are wired to devices that enable police to arrest people before crimes are committed. Are these empaths our planetary precogs?

Is a new paradigm under construction here or have planetary empaths been around in one form or another for millennia? From the oracle at Delphi to Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce, the world has always had prophets and seers. But planetary empaths may be the quintessential result of the 21st century and an increasingly chaotic world. They are radically different from other prophets in that their physical bodies and emotions are the conduits of precognitive information.

These planetary empaths don’t have the luxury that Nostradamus did, whose visions came to him while he stared into a brass bowl filled with water. They can’t distance themselves from the information as Edgar Cayce did when he entered a self-induced trance. They must deal with physical symptoms that are often so debilitating it’s difficult to function, to go about the business of their daily life.

The challenge for these individuals lies in defining the symptoms. Some know that a clicking or ringing in one ear or the other indicates an earthquake is imminent or that feeling hot and flushed indicates a volcanic eruption is about to occur. But location eludes them. Geographical coordinates don’t accompany the symptoms. Most of the time, they don’t even know on which continent the catastrophe will take place.

In late March and early April of 2013, we began receiving emails from several empaths about severe physical symptoms they were experiencing. We eventually realized these symptoms were connected to the bombing at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013.

On April 14, the day before the bombings, Jenean, a writer and poet, reported that she’d been having left ear vibrations, palpitations, a touch of dizziness. She was sitting outside on her daughter’s deck, moved her chair slightly, and suddenly “felt the earth tremble” and jerked her chair back.

Her daughter noticed and asked her what was wrong. Jenean replied, “Didn’t you feel that? The earth just trembled and I thought I was going to fall off the edge.”

Her daughter laughed and said it was all in her head. The next day, of course, Jenean realized she’d been experiencing symptoms related to the bombings.

Ridicule is one reason that planetary empaths are sometimes reluctant to talk about their experiences. It’s easy for other people to write off ringing in the ears or vertigo or a sense that the earth is rocking and rolling as being “in your head”—i.e., you’re imagining it. In Western society, we’re taught to distrust and dismiss our intuition and the validity of our own experiences. We’re taught that skepticism is the only course that is reasonable and logical. But isn’t it more productive to react with an open mind, with curiosity and a willingness to explore whatever might be happening?

Planetary empaths are keenly sensitive to planetary disruptions. In essence, they serve as receivers of the rhythms of the planet, and the beat of the human condition. As such, we have much to learn from them.

Excerpt from Beyond Strange: True Tales of Alien Encounters and Paranormal Mysteries