What you ask has a wide spread of answers and subsequent range of possibilities.
The thing that damages people is influence running through [and inside] their system when it is not in a controlled or managed state.
So this begs the question, what happens to someone when they are exposed to high intensity influence fields from the outside?
The best that I can tell from direct experience, you become psychic through concurrent "activations". What causes the activations? Generally passing influence through your system. But this begs the question:
Do people absorb high intensity influence? (the etheric tide as you called it)
As far as I can tell, yes, the interconnect and it's influence centers do absorb external influence. (psychic circulation)
But the big question I don't have an answer to is this:
Do people require external influence to do an activation? (I don't know)
Exactly what affects (beyond internal and external influence circulation) does external influence have on the interconnect and biological body? (Many mysteries)
Do people have a finite supply of "internal" influence? Or is the "external influence" somehow converted and becomes "internal influence"? Or does the interconnect receive it's supply of influence from the food we put into our bodies? Or are we born with a finite [internal] supply?
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I can speculate, but I don't know. If I don't know this tiny bit of info, then everything else is somewhat of a mystery. Different entities alluded to different answers. So there is some conflict or a lack of answers.
The Guardian (lower end Angel) said that I have a (large) but limited supply of influence.
The ET's generally avoided telling me where my influence "starts", so there must be a reason as to why they would skip such an important and critical piece of information. I suspect it was "skipped" because the info would have given me ample control over my own abilities OR there is some detail they wanted to hide because it would have affected me negatively...and therefore, probably knowing the truth, I would have not have participated in the experiments. [i.e. that there is a limited supply and I might be going through a lifetimes worth in a very short period of time?]
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The ET's strongly allude to the the interconnect centers having an ability to absorb and convert influence to your own personal living pattern. But they discouraged exercising that notion.
I can affirm this much must be true, as I have seen non-living types doing this all the time.
But that raises the question, is that where we get our main supply of internal influence? Are we all vampires on a spiritual level? If this is the case, then why would non-living entities focus on living entities as their supply line? Why not go out and take it directly from the environment?
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To answer the above, (because I realized this above point many years ago when I was in the thick of it), the non-living entities appear to "prefer" or cannot absorb influence directly from the environment.
I noticed that the living entities tend to take my IFM influence (internal) but not my EFM influence (external).
Why?
There are two possible reasons, either, my EFM structures have a psychic "affinity" that is so strong/great that they cannot effectively siphon or "pull" the influence into themselves.
Or
The EFM configuration is [somehow] not identical to my IFM influence. Which means there is some "specific notion" that I am not aware of that despite there being influence all over the place, for whatever reason, they cannot absorb it.
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If they [non-living entities] cannot (or choose not to) absorb specific types of influence from the environment itself...then why would we as living being absorb it?
My best speculation (on this line of thought) is that perhaps there are "nuanced components" to "living influence" and that it may not be "just patterns" in a specific configuration. Perhaps there are specific internal patterns that can only be ?generated? from inside of living tissue?