Intuition: Language of the Soul :)

Hey, ever wonder why spirit speaks so clearly to you in the shower??? (wink, wink)~~Big JOYFUL HUGSSSS!! ~~Remember Jesus was Baptized by John in water....

Intuition: Language of the Soul

Hyatt Carter

Ernest Holmes says that intuition is "a direct perception of truth without processes of reasoning,"1 and Sharon Franquemont, waxing more poetic, says that intuition is "the language of the soul."2 Though some gifted few such as Shakespeare and Mozart seem to be born with a knowledge of this soul language, most will find that they are not, and, like any other language, it must be slowly learned, and fluency requires much cultivation and much practice. We are assured that it is well worth the effort.

Rather than "hitting the books" when faced with questions or uncertainty, intuition may be thought of as dwelling in silence and listening to the One Source for answers. Holmes again:

"Everyone in this field should reserve portions of his time for deep spiritual meditation. The upper part of his mind must be kept in a listening attitude toward the Infinite that he may become a transmitter of peace from the eternal reservoir of Life to external things and events and to those whom he seeks to help. He must ever seek to be spiritually alert, always keeping some part of himself in a listening attitude toward Life that his consciousness may become a transmitter of that which is beyond human thought."3

In light of all this, and if Charles Hartshorne is correct in claiming that "Intuition or feeling is richer than thought,"4 then the importance that intuition plays in virtually all aspects of the life of a practitioner can hardly be overstated.

What are some of the uses of intuition? Examples come to mind:

1) spiritual insights and revelations
2) increasingly effective prayer: finding the right words . . . at the right time . . . with the right feelings to energize the words
3) deeper and more powerful meditations
4) utilizing the power and creativity of the Theta brain-wave state

And for the practitioner:
5) to know what a client may be really saying, to read the implications of body language, tone of voice, what is "not said," etc.
6) establishing rapport with the client and being a better listener
7) feeling the way into "flow" with a client so that there is mutual entrainment, one resonating with the other
8) to induce in the client a state of intuitive receptivity

We learn of the importance of the conscious and frequent use of our intuitive powers when Franquemont tells us that "as with any other skill, intuition is strengthened by use, stays dormant with disuse, and varies with expertise."5 Many excellent ways to improve intuition may be found in her book, You Already Know What To Do. Designed around ten basic "invitations of the soul"— Just Say "Yes," Open Your Senses, Cultivate Silence, Nurture Joy, Set Time Free, Shift Space, Discover Your Purpose, Mate With Soul, Partner Exponentially, and Connect The Dots—the practice of these invitations promises to raise what she calls your "InQ" (Intuition Quotient.). Franquemont also offers four models for understanding intuition:

1. The Science Centered Model: The Left/Right Brain Theory
2. The Psychologically Centered Model: Carl Jung’s Four Functions
3. The Religious Centered Model: The Chakra System
4. The Earth-centered Model: The Wisdom of Indigenous People

She emphasizes the power of silence: "Because I believe that silence equals power, I’ve used the phrase ‘the power of silence’ throughout this chapter. Sige [the Roman goddess of silence], a powerful teacher of mysterious silence, gives birth to wisdom. The intuition which fosters powerful human encounters with creativity, peak performance, telepathic connections, and profound insights is recognized by experts to arise out of silence. In silence, you hear intuition’s voice."6

Intuition and Theta

Creative intuitions often come not as words or voice, but as imagery.

It was an image, an image of the uroborus, the snake swallowing its own tail, presented to him while he was in a light doze, that gave Friedrich Kekulé the key to the hitherto elusive structure of the benzene molecule. Einstein, who said, "I very rarely think in words at all," apparently intuited in the same manner via imagery emerging up from the creative unconscious. Archimedes had his famous "Eureka" experience while soaking in a tub of hot water. Almost twenty-five centuries ago Democritus flashed on the atomic structure of matter upon smelling the aroma of freshly baked bread.

Not verbal thought but an image from a nightmare gave Elias Howe the insight that enabled him to invent the sewing machine. It was not while racking his brain in the lab, but as he was walking down a spiral staircase at Oxford that James Watson intuitively glimpsed the spiral shape of DNA. In his book The Quark and the Jaguar (262-63), Murray Gell-Mann, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, describes how through a slip of the tongue he "immediately stopped dead" and had a sudden intuitive understanding of how "strange" particles differ from the more familiar ones such as protons and neutrons, an understanding to which he had formerly been blind because of intellectual baggage that, in the twinkling of an eye, he now saw to be mere superstition.

All these examples, I believe, show aspects of the subtle power of the intuitive mode for creative breakthrough. Note that many of these examples occurred when the person was probably in the brain-wave state known as Theta.

Until the age of around six, children spend most of their time in Theta. It is mere coincidence that, during this time, they demonstrate their remarkable ability to so easily learn a language? And does not this Theta state, so natural to a child, shed new light on Jesus’ saying that we should become as little children?

Consider the internationally acclaimed healer and medicine woman, Rosalyn Bruyere, who has been called "a healer’s healer." In the July 1999 issue of Intuition magazine, Diane Goldner writes, "Stories of Bruyere’s healing prowess are legion. I myself have seen her separate the fused spinal vertebrae of a young minister when doctors urged surgery . . ."

Is it not interesting that, when Bruyere is working with a patient, her brain wave state is typically Theta? This strongly suggests that Theta could prove to be a very important resource in our healing efforts in Religious Science.

Intuition and Reason

But intuitions do not usually stand just as they arise; they must first be verified and then formulated into verbal expression. This is the function of reason.

Ernest Holmes evidently appreciated the need for verification:

"Now, if you have read Cosmic Consciousness by Bucke . . . you will find that this is what a man did, who had a very deep knowledge of the difference between spiritual illumination and psychic hallucination. He cites about sixty cases, as I remember, of those who undoubtedly have had illumination or been cosmically illumined; they had a deeper perspective, understanding, appreciation of, feeling toward, and knowledge of, the spiritual nature of man and of reality. He shows, by an analysis, certain fundamental things that they all believed in, and that they were justified in accepting."7

And Franquemont offers this: "One simple criterion for distinguishing authentic intuition from ego projections or wishful thinking is that the real stuff is delivered as invitations, not demands. The words ‘You should do . . .’ or ‘You must do . . .’ are not part of intuition. Rather, intuition is your soul saying, ‘Please consider . . .’ or ‘Will you . . . ?’"8

Also, even though some formulations may reflect intuitions of eternally valid truths, such formulations can always be improved, made clearer, more elegant, of a higher degree of generality so as to apply to a broader range of phenomena.

Another function of reason is to abandon those formulations when they become obsolete or antiquated, and come up with what Whitehead calls "transitions to new fruitfulness of understanding . . . by recurrence to the utmost depths of intuition for the refreshment of imagination."9 This is surely where new thinking comes into play: not only to update (thereby keeping New Thought really new), but also to see to it that doctrine does not ossify into dogma. Holmes called this being "open at the top."

In the adventure of ideas, reason and intuition, like yin and yang, mutually inform and augment one another in the creative advance into novelty. Think of the evolution of science and mathematics—Leibniz, for example, had to first intuit and then invent the calculus to further advance his understanding, and it was through the modality of the calculus that he advanced his understanding, his vision.

We evolve our intellectual tools for exploration, and thus the transition of worldviews: Ptolemaic, Copernican, Newtonian, Relativity, Quantum Theory, Superstring (?) . . . each subsequent revolution in thought rendering the former somewhat "quaint" and primitive. When will the thought of our day seem quaint—in the year 2050 . . . 3000 . . . 4000? What about the year 50,000 c.e.? We are so young as a species. That is probably why one of the most gifted minds of this century,10 Alfred North Whitehead, could speak about "the dim recesses of [our] ape-like consciousness."11

Intuition and Water

It’s intriguing to learn that Buckminster Fuller had two of his major intuitions while gazing at water. One example:

"In 1917, while Ezra Pound in London was extracting virtù from The Seafarer to make what would be Canto I, a seafarer ten years his junior, great-nephew of Emerson’s collaborator Margaret Fuller, was watching the bubbles boiled up in the wake of a Navy ship, and concluding from those millions of changing spheres that nature did not use pi. For pi will only describe a sphere once formed, and a sphere moreover idealized because static. But the generation of forms is described by vectors ("Vectors represent energy events, and they are discrete"), and Buckminster Fuller proposed to make it his business to find nature’s energetic geometry. Just 50 years later the bubble behind the ship had become in Montreal a geodesic skybreak bubble 20 stories high, enclosing 7 million cubic feet of air, as free as a water bubble of internal supports, and weighing a hundredth of what former technology dictated that such a structure should weigh. The load on its foundations was less than the weight of its materials, and had it been a mile wide it would have floated away. Outlining the first principles of the universe whose differentiation by mind can yield such a marvel, its designer spoke of knots."12

In religious imagery, water is often a symbol for Spirit. Think of "the face of the waters" in the creation story in "Genesis." In the Tao Te Ching, the Tao is described as "a river flowing home to the sea" and Meister Eckhart likened God to "a great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can stop."

Alan Watts, in his delightful and lucid book, The Way of Zen (p. 99), talks about yun shui (the Chinese characters meaning "cloud" & "water") "the common and revealingly picturesque term for the Zen student, who drifts like a cloud and flows like water."

It was a rainbow, that mystical mirage of sunlight and mist, that God chose as symbol to establish his covenant with humankind. Baptism, ablutions and rituals of pouring, sacred rivers such as the Ganges and the Jordan, rain dances, sweat lodges, water spirits in mythology such as nymphs and naiads, the still pool as metaphor for the enlightened mind, the living water that Jesus talks about in John’s Gospel that keeps you from ever thirsting again—Jesus, whose ministry began with his baptism in the river Jordan, whose first disciples were fishermen, whose first miracle was turning water to wine, Jesus, who calms the tempestuous sea and walks on water, who tells us we must be born again, of water and Spirit, who washes the disciples’ feet with water, and whose next to last utterance on the cross is, "I thirst."

Water, water, everywhere! . . . as Coleridge says in his poem, "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." "Life is an aquatic phenomenon," my old biology Prof told us again and again.

We humans are drawn to water for refreshment of body and spirit—just look at how people flock to lakes, rivers, waterfalls, geysers, beaches, the open sea. And the sound of water—how refreshing and soothing: the ocean surf, a babbling mountain stream, gentle rain, a quiet fountain in a peaceful garden . . . is this not music for the soul?

God’s Spirit gives life, and also sustains it, and how God’s Spirit refreshes and cleanses! But so does water! Life on this planet began in water, just as each one of us, with bodies over 70% water, began life in the amniotic fluids of our mother’s womb. Water symbolizes not only the presence of Spirit, but also the activity of Spirit, and, in its many splendid forms, what a beautiful, rich, and endlessly suggestive symbol it is. As Bucky Fuller’s example shows, the contemplation of water can cause revolutionary intuitive ideas to bubble up from our own watery depths.

Since water has the power of evoking the Presence, we would do well to often dwell in the evocative presence of water in all its myriad forms, water in stillness, water in flow, the "living water" shining through the real, sustaining, refreshing, cleansing: leading us by the still waters into the very water of Life itself.

References and Notes

1. Ernest Holmes, The Holmes Papers, Volume I, p. 115
2. Sharon Franquemont, You Already Know What To Do, p. 2, passim
3. Ernest Holmes, How To Use the Science of Mind, p. 133
4. Charles Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, p. 104
5. Franquemont, pp. 11-12
6. Franquemont, p. 125
7. Ernest Holmes, The Holmes Papers, Volume I, p. 159
8. Franquemont, p. 5
9. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 159
10. Process philosopher John B. Cobb says, "Whitehead is the one major thinker of the twentieth century who has really tried to put things together. To do that, one has to know mathematics, physics, biology, physiology, psychology, history, and religion. Whitehead was not an expert in all of these. But he had enough depth of knowledge at enough points that his was a serious undertaking to think more deeply in each area until he could find a point of unity. This involved a fundamentally different way of under-standing the nature of reality, one that makes it possible to build up a new coherent vision. One has to think past waves and particles to a different notion of what the physicist is dealing with and, at the same time, one has to think in a different way about human existence, to name only two examples. This takes radical reconceptualization, and no one else in the twentieth century, as far as I know, has done this in a sufficiently revolutionary and comprehensive way to be a serious alternative to Whitehead." From the chapter "Why Whitehead?" in Can Christ Become Good News Again, p. 27
11. Whitehead, p. 295
12. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, pp. 161-62