To live with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS/ME) is to live in a state of hyper-exposure. Long before the term “Long COVID” brought post-viral illness into the global lexicon, millions of people were battling a condition defined not just by profound, bone-deep exhaustion, but by a radical, almost unbearable amplification of the senses.
For those with CFS/ME, the world is rarely muted. Fluorescent lights feel like needles behind the eyes; a slammed door reverberates through the nervous system like a physical blow; the hum of a refrigerator can be a source of psychological torture. Skin sensitivity makes clothing feel like sandpaper, while chemical sensitivities—to perfumes, cleaning products, and plastics—turn everyday environments into minefields. The body has lost its filter. Every boundary between the self and the environment has worn thin, leaving the individual porous to the outside world.
In esoteric circles, there is another group of people known precisely for this lack of a filter: the psychics.
Often referred to simply as “sensitives,” individuals with psychic or intuitive gifts operate on a wider bandwidth than the average person. Their energetic and neurological architecture allows them to perceive frequencies, emotions, and presences that remain entirely indiscernible to the neurotypical or non-intuitive populace. Where a normal filter blocks out the background noise of the universe, the sensitive takes it all in.
Usually, we view physical illness and psychic giftedness as occupying entirely different realms—one belonging to the cold, sterile domain of medicine, the other to the mystical domain of the esoteric. But what if they are two sides of the same coin?
Consider the peculiar symptom documented by Erica F. Verrillo in her exhaustive and seminal work, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Treatment Guide. Among the labyrinth of physical ailments, immune dysfunctions, and cognitive crashes, Verrillo notes an unusual and startlingly specific psychological/neurological symptom experienced by some CFS/ME patients: hearing one’s name called by an undefined entity.
To modern psychiatry, this might be hastily categorised as an auditory hallucination, a glitch in a misfiring brain. But to anthropologists, historians of religion, and practitioners of the occult, this exact phenomenon is profoundly familiar. It is, in fact, the classic signature of the “Call.”
Throughout human history, prophets, saints, and shamans have begun their spiritual journeys not through gentle self-realisation, but through an abrupt, often terrifying disruption of their reality. Across cultures and centuries, one of the most prominent markers of latent, undeveloped psychic ability—frequently taught and recognised in modern psychic development circles—is the experience of hearing one’s name called by an unseen spirit being.
In shamanism, this is known as “shamanic sickness.” Before an individual can step into the role of a healer or medium, they must often undergo a period of intense physical breakdown, isolation, and sensory overload. The spirit world, attempting to break through the dense material concerns of daily life, turns up the volume. The body breaks down because it is being forced to vibrate at a higher, more demanding frequency. The threshold between worlds thins until the individual can no longer ignore the unseen.
The Old Testament provides one of the most enduring archetypes of this phenomenon in the story of Samuel the prophet. As a young boy sleeping in the temple, Samuel hears a voice calling his name in the dark. Mistaking it for the voice of the priest Eli, Samuel runs to him, only to be told he wasn’t called. This happens three times until Eli realises the boy is being addressed by the divine. Eli instructs Samuel on how to respond to the voice, marking the exact moment Samuel is initiated into his prophetic vocation.
Samuel was called by name, in the quiet, and he was told to answer.
When we place this ancient narrative alongside the pages of modern medical guides like Verrillo’s, a provocative and haunting question arises: Does spiritual sensitivity predispose individuals to physical sensitivities, including CFS/ME?
Could it be that the hypersensitivity defining CFS/ME—the agonising intolerance to light, sound, chemicals, and physical pressure—is not merely only a malfunction of the mitochondria or a broken immune response, but also the physiological toll of an overburdened spiritual antenna?
Modern medicine looks at the nervous system of a CFS/ME patient and sees a system stuck in a permanent, destructive “fight or flight” loop. But esoteric traditions might look at that same nervous system and see an unshielded conduit. If a human being is fundamentally a spiritual receiver, what happens when that receiver is tuned to pick up everything, all the time, without the capacity to turn the dial down? The hardware overheats. The battery drains. The system crashes.
This perspective does not invalidate the physical agony of CFS/ME; rather, it sacralizes it. It shifts the narrative from one of pure deficit to one of profound, albeit painful, transformation. It suggests that the exhaustion of the chronically ill might stem, in part, from wrestling with unseen weights, processing a hyper-saturated reality that others are blissfully spared from perceiving.
We live in a culture that pathologizes sensitivity. We medicate it, dim it down, and tell people to toughen up. But if prophets and shamans teach us anything, it is that those who stand at the threshold—those who hear the voice calling their name in the dark—are often carrying a message for the rest of us. Perhaps it is time to listen differently to those with CFS/ME: not just as patients to be cured, but as modern sensitives weathering a storm at the very edge of human perception.
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Recommended reading: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Treatment Guide, by Erica F. Verrillo.
