Date: Sat,  17 Dec 94 22:31 +0200
From: cbwillis@netcom.com (C. B. Willis)
To: Forum for discussing the role of intelligence in world transformation -
Subject: Intuition Training

NOTES ON INTUITION TRAINING

As an intuition trainer for many years I'll offer a few ideas on the
subject (perhaps more later when I get a 2 hour lecture transcribed, may
upload it):

One thing an intuition student must get past is the fear that they won't be
able to perceive enough information. Intuitive data is viewed as precious
and scarce, something they're not used to, and they are afraid they won't
get enough of it.

Actually their problem is the reverse: to screen out masses of irrelevant
data that can start to flood in if the person's orientation is not simple
and correct.

Right orientation is to set the attention to (in this order):

- To know the mind and heart of God.
- To know the Truth, and how it applies to any situation.
- To know the Good.
- To know Beauty.
- To love one's fellow man / spirits and to have goodwill and the
  will-to-Good.
- What does the person/group need to know right now to clear up a
  confusion and get them back on a clear path and flourishing?

That's about it; anything else is fluff, will distract and lead down dead
ends.

Follow your own spiritual path, and keep it affirmative. Seek to know God
and the Heart of all things.

Purify and eliminate the non-essential on all levels. Work to clear
personal trauma, false personality, and social conditioning/programming as
these, if present, can act as filters, distorting the impressions you
receive. Clearing/therapy allows spirit to flow freely and demonstrate in
the world, which includes your intuitive impressions and expression of
same.

How to talk about one's intuitive impressions?

Use "I..." statements, as you're talking about your impressions, even
though what you say may also have objective validity. Let others make their
own connections there.

It's also useful to study the effect of semantic constructions, the
structure of sentences and their meaning or impact, on the reactive mind,
so that you don't inadvertently (or Heaven forbid, deliberately) program a
person with limitation or negativity, thereby eliciting fear or self-doubt
and suppressing their spirit. Avoid "You...." statements, unless the rare
genuine compliment, as they are very programmatic. Avoid endwords or
actually any words in a sentence that are negative or fearsome. Make all
things as neutral as possible, inviting the person to perceive them
neutrally.

One more caveat: sometimes intuition studies make a person overly passive,
they are perceiving an inflow of data. Remember to balance this with the
active creativity of spirit, create it that goodness prevail in any
situation. "And so it is."

- CBW
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I believe, that Spirit, or God, is all there is. Spirit is the first cause
of all there ever was, or will be, and that it was an act of Spirit upon
itself that resulted in our manifest universe and all that it is made up of
or contains. I also believe that Spirit could not make anything that does
not contain all of it's qualities for that would be to limit itself in it's
most fundamental act, that of creation. Therefore there can be no such
thing as living Spirit and dead matter. Everything is living Spirit despite
its physical appearance. Thomas Troward states there is nothing wrong "in
the evidence conveyed to a healthy mind by a healthy body," the errors come
from the conclusions drawn from what our senses tell us. Yet what of
optical illusions or other such phenomena? Also if we do believe that there
is no such thing as dead matter then what of the things that appear to be
dead?

I think we need to go further than our physical senses and rely upon
something that is within us. This is usually called intuition and to those
of us that are not used to working with it (and to some who are) it is not
infallible and therefore it is difficult to rely upon. We do know however
that most of what our senses tell us appears to be correct, so we either
tend to ignore, or brush aside the seemingly minor number of things that
don't fit such as optical illusions, or instances where seemingly
unbreakable physical laws are ignored on a grand scale. For example a
mirage flies in the face of the physical laws that we know. So we try to
find a "physical" answer. Someday we might find that answer and it will
like all the others that have been found lead to more questions than we had
before. Look at all the great scientists of all time the more and more they
probe to find answers the more questions they come up with. There seems to
come a point when the scientist turns to Spirit for answers rather than the
material.

Have you ever been in an impassioned discussion with someone where they
were trying to impart something to you for which they did not have the
words? They spend a lot of time trying to explain what it is they feel to
you and something of this is received, and you tell them that you think you
understand, yet when you try to reflect it back to them in words you fail
as well. Yet, you know that you have, at some deep level understood (if not
all then some of it), and there is a greater bond between the two of you.
Then on occasion in the future you encounter that of which you were
discussing and there is that instant bond of understanding at some deeper
level.

This is communication without words between two of Spirits creations. Why
must we limit ourselves(and hence Spirit) by assuming that it can only
happen at seeming levels of intelligence. If all of spirit is in all of
everything there can be no levels of intelligence no matter what our senses
tell us.

Any attempt to define intelligence is doomed to failure, in that it is like
trying to define God or Love. In short, you can't define it you can just
describe some aspects of it. Also these aspects are only ones that are
apparant to our senses, what about the ones that we suspect are there but
our senses aren't developed enough to recognise and greet?

Modern science is continually coming up with new evidence to suggest that
things that we thought had no intelligence, in fact, do have intelligence.
As an example it has been determined that plants will "scream" when cut.
This would indicate that they are capable of knowing that they are hurt.
More than that it would also indicate that they are capable of feeling.

What does this mean to us in our enquiries? I think it definitely proves
that there is more that we don't know than there is that we do know and
therefore we cannot grade the level of life or intelligence by what we
think we know. In fact, mankind has gotten things completely backwards more
than once, and I suspect it could also be happening to the author of this
article as well. In any event, if we accept the premise that there is more
that we don't know than there is that we do know we can free ourselves to
conduct a further exploration.

Using that as a base then what is it that we don't know, and how can we
find out more about it? Well, the thing we are trying to probe is
livingness and how can we get more of it, if it in fact exists. I think we
have to move beyond our five senses and get more into intuition or feeling.
If this livingness exists can we then communicate in some way with this
livingness? In other words can we learn to talk to trees? If so, why not
water, or air, rocks or cows????? This may sound outrageous at first but if
we follow careful reasoning we can see that the basic premise while seeming
preposterous is in fact, worthy of serious study.

One thing the reader will have gathered by now is that we are going to have
to really open our minds to greater possibilities than ever before. We are
also going to have to seriously question some long held beliefs that may
not have been based on fact, but rather, on what our senses seemed to relay
to us. So if we can't trust our senses what can we trust? We come straight
back to intuition, which may be the next great step for mankind. The
ability to rely upon something other than our senses to experience a
greater degree of livingness while we are in this existence. It would be
wise for the reader to realize that this will only be another step in the
evolution of mankind and there are probably an infinite number of steps to
follow.

At this point I think it would be wise to come up with a definition of
intuition that we can use for the purposes of this further exploration. I
am going to define intuition as that inner knowing, that may be beyond
words. It is that unknown impulsion that guides us to take certain actions
or make decisions that may go against all known facts, may be unpopular,
but later turn out to be correct. Sometimes most dramatically. This is
difficult to put into words as are most abstract discussions so perhaps and
example might help. Have you ever been on a journey of some kind and
perhaps for some unknown reason take a different route and then later find
out that there had been a serious accident on the route you were going to
take and it would have happened when you were there? Or have you ever done
something that seemed illogical at the time, and later found out that as a
result of having done it a serious problem or injury was averted? What
caused you to take these actions? What inner knowing was it that avoided
possible injury or tragedy? This is what I mean by intuition - that
something - whatever it was, that made you take or not take certain steps.
If we can find out more about this thing we call intuition, then perhaps we
can come to use it more and more and by using it satisfy ourselves that it
exists. Then perhaps this will take us one rung further up the ladder of
evolution and enable us to communicate with things that we seemingly cannot
right now.

You see I have talked to many people who have experienced what we have
defined as intuition and I think the reader has and has also experienced it
as well. I have also talked to many people who have told me that they have
somehow communicated with seemingly inanimate objects. This comminication
goes beyond words and when trying to describe it it best fits the
definition we have here of intuition. Are the two somehow related. I have
on a few occasions experienced what these people have told me and the
feeling is the same for me so I think that perhaps it is.

The difficulty with an exploration of this kind is that there is no "proof"
in the normally accepted term so the reader is going to have to rely upon
his/her intuition to know for themselves whether or not to rely upon what
is presented.

What would we call someone who has developed this faculty? Perhaps this is
what is meant by a "mystic". Ernest Holmes defined a mystic as "one who
sense the divine presence........who senses the thought of God" We have now
ventured into an interesting area as there is no way to seperate the true
from the false other than by using what we are trying to define and prove.
Also, there are many who would attempt to discredit this exploration or use
it for their own ends. Be that as it may, you should not be discouraged as
we somehow know (again through intuition) that it will be more than worth
the effort

We have all heard of many who have been called mystics and a lot of us
think of Gurus or other such individuals who live in caves and perform
seemingly impossible things such as not eating or drinking for years. Or
not moving for long periods of time or other such things. Then there are
the ones among us who seem to have lost their grip on "reality" they are
dreamers or some such. Then there are the artists and poets. musicians also
may fall nto this class. However not all who can write music, poetry or
paint are mystics. As Wagner said anyone can make a noise but not all noise
is music. Similarly poetry may be simply to entertain, it may not be
mystical. Therefore it would seem that one must have the gift of an
artistic nature of some kind before one could be a mystic. But having that
gift does not necessarily make one a mystic, it is the way in which one
uses the gift that counts.

Also if we look closely enough we will find that everyone has one or more
of these gifts, they may well be hidden from view and seldom if ever used
but they are there. So, it seems that perhaps there are levels of the use
of our mystical talents. If we examine the lives of some of the people that
we consider to be mystical we will find that they had a highly developed
intuition. We also find that they did not act in commonly accepted modes of
behaviour. What is behind their going against commonly held beliefs. We
know, through our intuition, that the mystics have found something we
aspire to. So how do we attain it surely not by rebelling against everyone
and everything. So do we rebel selectively? I suspect that what holds most
of us back is that we wish to be comfortable, whether it be in our minds or
physical circumstances. It is easier not to think or not to buck the flow.
It is not so much a matter of rebelling as starting to really think. Then
to think about what we think about. As the wonderful mystic Ouspensky said
there are two stages of sleep horizontal sleep with the eyes closed and
vertical sleep with the eyes open. The interesting thing about the latter
is that if you tell someone they are asleep they will wake up long enough
to say they are not asleep, and then they will go right back to sleep. This
concept requires contemplation, for once having accepted the same we
realize that we have been asleep most of the time and that there is the
possibility of waking up. It also implies that there are levels of sleep
and therefore there would also be levels of wakefulness. In other words
once we wake up there will be more waking up to do. In fact, once we wake
up it is extremely difficult to stay awake.

There are several obstacles to staying awake, the main one being the
beliefs that mankind has and does hold. To be in this world requires a
certain amount of being of it. This being of it is what holds us back from
our further growth.

This would again imply that we need to rebel against all and everything
that we know and accept. I think that rather than rebelling we need to
question all and everything. This means that there are no sacred cows.
Everything we believe about anything must be open to careful scrutiny and
potential change. The only measure that we have as to whether a held belief
is true or not is our intuition. We must, as part of this process, also be
ready to remove all of our self imposed limitations and realize that each
of us is unlimited potential.

Therefore we can conclude that nothing is what it seems, including
ourselves. So, where do we go from here? Do we forsake everything that we
hold dear in the name of our continuing growth? Do we become as some of the
eastern yogis we hear about that live in caves and go without food or drink
for extended periods of time? Do we retreat to a natural setting so that we
can be more at peace. I don't think so. I think that the most natural place
to be is with other people. The challenge is to stay awake in the midst of
the race consciousness. This is how change will be effected for if we can
stay awake then we can wake others up to their potential. So, as
individuals we need to be what the race might call selfish in order that we
can assist our fellow men and women to realize more and more of their
potential. As Jesus said if I be lifted up then those around me will be
lifted up. So we need to be selfish to the point where we are lifted up
with the goal always being to lift up those around us. I see many pitfalls
as it is seemingly so hard to stay awake it would be easy to lose sight of
the objective and thus be selfish for purely personal gain. What a
challenge!

I think there is a fairly simple solution (to state that is) and that is to
maintain the balance. If we can use our intellect to awaken our intuition
and then use our intuition to guide our intellect in a never ending
continuium we shall be the force for good that is our divine heritage. When
either one of these has more influence than the other then we are out of
balance and our results will be as well.