TBM9: The Difference Between Intuition & "Psychic Powers"
Photo (c) WordPerfect
Although the goal of the Spiral Path is for you to gradually feel confident about your soul identity and reclaim your own inner courage, devotion, gratitude, and ability to trust and forgive, you need more than just a goal in order to get you there. You need tools — the tools available to you in your spiritual kitchen.
One of the most potent tools available to human beings is their intuition. So today I’m going to talk about the differences between your own intuition — a natural human faculty that comes pre-wired in your human DNA — compared to the “psychic powers” and “secret laws of attraction” being recommended so widely these days.
In your spiritual kitchen, intuition is like the ability to read the cookbooks on the shelf. It’s no good having lots of cookbooks on the shelf if you can’t read the recipes. Maybe you can look at the pictures, but if you can’t read the words or understand the numbers, then you’re going to have a heck of a time making that scrumptious-looking triple layer chocolate cake on page 42. You’re also probably going to end up feeling very frustrated and ashamed of yourself. Frustration and self-blame make it harder for people to follow the Spiral Path, so you probably don’t want to encourage such feelings.
A lot of people would be tempted to compare intuition to the cookbooks themselves — to the wisdom recorded by other authors in the pages of the books. According to this ancient theory, there’s a special kind of divine key that can unlock the human mind. Once the special key has been found, a hidden door suddenly opens inside the mind. All at once the inner mind can “tap into” vast stores of hidden wisdom, hidden knowledge, all of which can be seen at a glance. It’s like a scene from a fantasy-adventure film — a huge treasury filled with books of knowledge. There are even names for this treasury. Some of the better-known names are Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious,” Edgar Cayce’s “Akashic Records,” and the Bible.
The general idea among teachers who call themselves “psychic” is the idea that anybody — anybody at all — can access these divine books of wisdom with (1) the proper training and (2) the proper attunement to divine energies. If you aren’t already familiar with these ideas, you won’t have any trouble finding them in the nearest bookstore. Even popular alternative therapeutic methods such as Reiki rely on the idea that you can easily “tap into divine wisdom” if you go for a few weekend workshops and learn how to properly access the never-ending tap of divine energy. Oprah is very keen on these ideas.
What makes me uncomfortable about these teachings on “psychic abilities” and “energy healing abilities” is the way they treat God. All these methods start with the assumption that God is more like a vast energy field than two loving divine parents with distinct personalities and distinct thoughts and feelings. Sure, say these spiritual teachers, there’s a Divine Oneness that all beings belong to, but there’s not any difference, really, between you and God, so it’s okay for you to feel free to help yourself at any time to that never-ending tap of divine energy. Go ahead!, they say. Feel free to use it! It’s yours to use in any way you wish as long as you’ve aligned yourself with the universal energies.
This is the prevailing thought in New Age circles. But every time I hear it, I hear the metacommunication behind the words. It goes like this: “Please feel free to mooch off your divine parents. Please feel free to take them for granted. Please feel free to ask for things you can’t do and don’t understand and don’t even want to understand. Please feel free to try to escape all the hard work that comes with the Spiral Path. Please feel free to squeeze the complexity of divine relationships into a Twitter message.”
And nobody takes a bigger hit in most New Age teachings than God’s loving angels do.
In the excerpt for John Edward’s new book Infinite Quest, he talks about the “team” that each person has “at his disposal.” While I agree with the idea that each person has an angelic “team,” I object with all my heart and soul to the idea that any angel anywhere is at anybody’s disposal.
Angels — persons-of-soul — aren’t at anyone’s beck and call. So part of the challenge for people setting out on the spiritual journey of the Spiral Path is for them to process inside their own hearts and minds the nature of their relationship with their own guardian angels.
Yes, Virginia, there is a guardian angel watching over you.
Some of the cookbooks on the shelves of your spiritual kitchen were written by your own team of guardian angels because the angels watching over you are a lot smarter than you are. (That’s one of the realities you’ll have to struggle with). They’re very experienced, very knowledgeable, and very compassionate. That’s why they’re in a position to teach you — to write down the valuable recipes in some of the cookbooks you’ll be using. Their job is to teach and guide — not to obey your desires, wishes, and whims. Your job is to try as hard as you can to learn to read their cookbooks.
In other words, your job is to develop your human faculty of intuition — your ability to understand the “reading, writing, and arithmetic” of your own guardian angels.
And when I say reading, writing, and arithmetic, I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean that literally.
The cookbooks on the shelves of your spiritual kitchen have been carefully chosen by your guardian angel team to suit your unique needs and attributes. The books on your shelves aren’t the same books that appear on your neighbour’s shelves. Even more importantly, you don’t get to pick the books. You don’t get to go into the Akashic Records and pull out volumes on “The Great Pyramid” or other ancient mysteries. You get the books your own guardian angels think are best suited to you.
Your angels are trying with all their might to help you understand who you are as a unique soul — as a unique child of God — so naturally this is the focus of their efforts. They know you better than you know yourself. And they want you to know yourself the way they already know you! (That’s a good thing, by the way.)
On my blog Jesus Redux, Jesus gives a good example of a person who thinks she knows herself, but doesn’t. You can check it out at “Why You Need to Know Yourself: Mystical Commentary on Saying 67 of Thomas”.
The main difference between “human intuition” (a verifiable scientific reality) and “psychic powers” (not a verfiable scientific reality) is the dependence of intuition on the everyday choices you make. Intuition only functions properly if your human brain wiring functions properly. God has wired the human brain in such a way that when your brain wiring becomes seriously messed up because of the harmful choices you’ve been making, your intuition shuts down. It’s a logical, loving choice on God’s part to design your brain in this way. Why would a loving God allow you to have full access to the cookbooks in your spiritual kitchen during a time when you’re choosing to be intentionally destructive? You might get hold of the kitchen knives and use them to hurt somebody! So God gives people “time-outs” when they’re choosing to hurt themselves and/or hurt other people. During a divine “time-out,” not only can you not access the books in the Akashic Records (though this is the time you’re most likely to think you can), but you can’t even access the books in your own spiritual kitchen.
Fortunately, God also designed the human brain in such a way that if you put in the effort, and if you make new daily choices, and if you get the help of friends, family, and trained professionals, your human faculty of intuition can gradually come back on line. Your capacity for intuition can be healed.
This is the neuroscientific principle of neuroplasticity. The newly understood and verifiable reality of neuroplasticity states, in a nutshell, that old dogs can learn new tricks.*
On the Spiral Path, you’ll be taking full advantage of the principle of neuroplasticity. That’s not taking advantage of God, though. That’s honouring and being grateful for God’s wisdom in designing the human brain the way they did. That’s accepting God’s wisdom. That’s accepting your angels’ guidance and knowledge.
Why do God and God’s angels insist you do so much of the work yourself instead of handing it to you on a platter?
Because they believe in you.
* An excellent and highly readable book about neuroplasticity is Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (New York: Penguin, 2007).
