Wednesday, December 28, 2022

Hopeful Thinking, Saturday, June 4, 2022 - Our Intuition


My grandmother Madelon was a truly lovely woman. Elegant. Dressed very well but never to the point of drawing attention. She’d sing “I love you, a bushel and a peck…” from Guys & Dolls and never kiss us just once when five or six pecks in a row were possible. We all adored her. 

Gram always taught us to follow our intuition. She never made a big deal about it, but whenever the opportunity presented itself to reinforce the idea, she never failed to do so.


From an early age this always made me wonder about the power, purpose, and, of course, even the existence of, our human intuition. But if Gram said it existed, then it existed. She did not exaggerate, gossip, or overdramatize. So, with the exception of her occasional superstitious beliefs such as hiding your mother’s dish towel to get rid of a wart, we generally took her words at face value.


I believe we all possess a skill we might refer to as intuition. But I won’t claim to determine the source of it. Some may deem it to be God/Holy Spirit speaking to them, or through them. Some believe that intuition and other forms of more demonstrable psychic phenomena are a mental handhold with the “other side” creating a conduit of information. Or perhaps it’s something else entirely.


It could be all of the above.


For the sake of things not becoming too complicated or specific in my mind about the origin of the information I receive through the process of my own intuition, I choose to see it as my higher self tapping me on the shoulder. A part of me that has a slightly better connection with All That Is giving me hints and signals about what to do next, like an inner compass.


But since intuition is quite fallible, and vulnerable to our own emotional disturbances, influences, and interpretations, it’s generally easier to see in hindsight something our intuition was trying to tell us than it was predictable before the fact. 


I’ve thought the same about really good tarot card readings. They tell us things like a tall, dark stranger is coming your way only to find out you’re being asked to housesit a friend’s enormous black Great Dane named Pipsqueak. There was something to the original intuited thought, but too vague to have acted upon, ending up only as a curiosity tale. Or tail, as the case may be.


This leads us to things like prophecy, both ancient, such as the Book of Revelations in the Bible, and what have ended up to be modern prophecies, like Jules Verne’s predictions of modern technology in his 19th-century science fiction books. Included with these are also some conspiracy theories, like the Simulation Hypothesis, which is a belief that all of “reality” is actually a simulation, and not real, popularized by movies like The Matrix trilogy and other forms of science fiction. 


I wonder where our intuition configures into ideas such as these? Because, if Revelations, for instance, is a prophecy of some kind, the imagery presented could mean any number of things other than the literal destruction of humanity. It could very well mean the death of the old corrupt way of doing things, for all we know. I bet that would feel very much like an annihilation for those who live corruptly.


And since we know virtually nothing about the “hereafter,” but enough about physics to know that parallel dimensions of reality co-exist alongside ours, is our intuition picking up on the notion that this experience of life we’re having is somehow entangled across dimensions and mirroring another, and subsequently identifying it as a simulation? Or as Heaven?


How much information about the Ultimate Reality do we really receive through our intuition? While it’s impossible to answer, spiritual teachings across cultures do advocate for stillness of the mind and body, and peace of the heart to get the most from what naturally comes to us. 


The bottom line? I believe that the Universe speaks to us all the time. It's easy to make mistakes about it. Make sure your antennae are at ease to get the best reception possible.


No comments:

Post a Comment