Some eccentricities are not dysfunctional but rather are based on past life habits. This is what makes older souls so eccentric. They are drawing from more past lives than other people and have many strong memories of habits from the past. For example, a second level old American scholar insisted on eating with her hands as a child. Her parents could not teach her to eat with silverware. Of course this proved awkward when going out to eat at restaurants or at friend's houses. Eventually it was revealed that her most recent lifetime was in Bangladesh where she ate with her hands all her life. Eventually as she grew to adolescence she chose to eat with utensils but at home she preferred to pick at food with her hands. Here there is absolutely no motivation for her behavior coming from fear or dragon influence.

A first level old warrior in the caution mode insisted on sitting with his back to the wall in public places so that he could see who was coming. He would apologetically announce to people that he had this preference and make them change his seat. To a professional psychologist this might appear to be dysfunctional behavior worthy of deep analysis or perhaps some treatment method to change the phobia. For this old warrior who had been ambushed and stabbed in the back on a number of occasions, including his most recent lifetime, this behavior made absolute sense. Occasional past life regression might be useful to help the person make a change in their current behavior but some of these patterns are so strong that no interventions will make much difference. If the behavior is not seriously interfering with daily life, it may be best to accept the behavior as eccentric and leave it alone.

Eccentric behavior that is dysfunctional is often based on the influence of the dragons or chief features and can be worked with to erase them. For example, a shoplifting habit is almost always related to the dragon of greed, the fear that there is not enough to go around. It is not unusual to find very wealthy people engaging in shoplifting so it is not necessarily a product of being very poor when it is more understandable behavior. This kind of dysfunction may also have a past life component in addition to situations in this life that cause the dysfunction. For example the wealthy shoplifter may have been neglected in childhood by jet setting parents and also have been extremely poor in their last lifetime when they were forced to steal to stay alive. These types of dysfunctional behavior can be complex and can be resolved by acknowledging all the past sources whether in this life or an earlier one.

A late level mature sage was an internationally recognized authority in her field of psychopharmacology but was unable to have a bowel movement anywhere but in her own home. Therefore her frequent trips to present papers were highly uncomfortable and had to be quite brief (under three days). Her childhood was extremely chaotic with frequent moves and no stability whatsoever and this contributed to her developing the dragon of severe stubbornness, a fear of change and letting go. In addition, in her most recent past life she died of dysentery while on a military campaign in a remote location away from her home. You can then see how the events of childhood chaos leading to stubbornness and the past life death by dysentery combined to create this dysfunction within her. With these realizations and some behavior change work she managed to break out of this stuck pattern.

Sanity is being able to function well in the time and space you are now occupying. That means you know where you are and what is expected in the current lifetime to get along with most people without getting into conflict with them. Sanity is being able to cooperate to a sufficient degree with the agreed upon reality of the times. You can be as eccentric as you want as long as you meet the above criteria. Some highly eccentric people become famous and are paid highly because they have the ability to do this.

Truly beyond this there is no useful definition of sanity or even normality. Ask a hundred average young, mature or older souls sitting in a seminar or a lecture if they feel they are absolutely normal or if they come from a normal family and almost no one will raise their hands. Toddler souls would be the exception of course. Sanity is a relative term. Normality is an even more relative term. Truly almost everyone is hiding the fact that they feel outside the norm in some way. The amount of energy expended on shame and hiding is truly enormous and contributes greatly to the twin dragons of arrogance and self-deprecation. Eventually, as more and more toddler souls evolve into young souls and there are greater numbers of older souls on the planet, this state of affairs will change dramatically. What you can do to contribute to the shift toward greater self-acceptance and tolerance of unusualness, is to begin by accepting your own eccentricity and even sharing it more openly with people you trust. The second thing you can do is to go out of your way to accept or not judge people who have small eccentricities that do not harm anyone. This would be especially beneficial to children. The third thing you can do is to fight circumstances in society where you observe people being judged, criticized and punished for their uniqueness when it is harmless to themselves or others. Should each person follow these three suggestions, world society would transform itself rather quickly. In the United States, a country with a history of promoting freedoms, this has already become a major theme that will grow in strength in the coming generations. Evidence to the contrary is misleading because of the highly vocal style of younger souls desperately trying to turn back the clock and hang on to control. Their day of control over others is fast diminishing.