Being A Closet-Intuitive
by Sarvananda Bluestone, Ph.D.
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the
source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his
eyes are closed.
 When
my daughter, Hira, was seven months old, my wife and I rented a house in
Arlington, Vermont, for the summer. I was still on my first sabbatical leave
from teaching. It had begun three weeks after Hira was born. It was a period
that consisted largely of the care and nurturing of an infant, something with
which few fathers are blessed.
The day after our arrival in Arlington we went to see an old friend of mine,
his wife, and two apple-cheeked children. They lived in a house with a white
picket fence and the whole scene seemed to have been plucked from a Norman
Rockwell painting. Everything was wholesome. The family smiled to greet us. We
were all set for a peaceful and relaxing day with friends. But it was not to be
so.
I carried Hira through the front door. As soon as we entered the house, she
began to scream. Her mom and I were quite surprised. She was a good-tempered
baby and rarely screamed. And this time she would not stop. Rocking, cooing,
coaxing -- no method was effective. Finally, in desperation. I fled outside with
Hira.
As soon as we stepped out of the house. Hira stopped crying. I then turned
around and went back in with her. Once again, she began to scream. I took her
outside again. She stopped crying. I did this four or five times until it became
quite clear that we would have to leave. We did.
The next day I phoned my friend to check in. After all, I had only had about
three minutes of conversation with him the day before. It was during that phone
call that the reason for Hira's screaming became apparent. On the day of our
visit my friend and his wife had decided to get a divorce. Their marriage was on
the rocks. Rather than postpone our social visit, my friend and his wife had
decided to put on a happy face and entertain us. This fooled me. This fooled my
wife. But it did not fool Hira. There was pain in that house. There was agony.
It filled up the house, it overflowed from the bedroom. It crawled along the
floor. It shivered along the windowpanes. And only Hira felt it.
All seven-month-old babies feel. All seven-month-old babies are endowed with
the ability to communicate their pain. It's very simple: When something hurts,
they cry. When it stops hurting, they stop crying. There was enough pain in that
household in Arlington, Vermont, to make my baby daughter scream. She knew
nothing of marriage or divorce, of body language or innuendo, of hypocrisy. She
only knew that it hurt in there. She was in tune with her surroundings.
Babies see things that we no longer allow ourselves to see. Babies feel
things that we don't allow ourselves to feel. Clearly we can not always stay in
the level of sensitivity of a seven-month-old baby. If we did, the pain of the
world would soon overwhelm us. So we learn to protect ourselves. We learn to
insulate ourselves. This is natural, even necessary.
Perhaps we owe our survival as a species to the existence of this sixth
sense. When it comes to sight, the hawk is much better equipped than a human.
The bat hears infinitely more acutely. The common grub has a more developed
sense of touch. The dog has a better sense of smell. The cheetah is faster, the
elephant stronger, and the cockroach more physically adaptable. And any number
of animals have a more acute sense of taste.
On the whole, the human race would be a very vulnerable one if it had to rely
solely on physical attributes. It was the development of the intellect that
allowed humans to see beyond the present moment. Intellect gave us human
creatures something that no other animals had: a plan. We are the only species
that plans ahead -- and intuition gave us insight into the moment.
This sixth sense is our birthright. Today we have come a long distance from
standing in the jungle and tuning in to the presence of a saber-toothed tiger.
Yet even in our modern, technological world, we still tune in to our
surroundings. Our psychic ability is as much a part of us as our intellect.
There are countless instances of mysterious spontaneous insight that we can
experience in our daily lives. For example, just about everybody has had the
experience of thinking of someone just as she telephoned. Or we'll dream of
somebody and then receive a letter from her the next day. How do such events
occur? How can I be thinking of someone on the other side of the country a split
second before she phones? There really is no explanation for such concurrence.
There is no explanation, but the reality persists.
We are all psychic. And even if we have suppressed that quality in our
conscious lives, it emerges night after night in our dreams. For our dreams
appear despite us. They are our nightly window into our own psychic awareness.
There is widespread distrust and fear of our intuitive powers. For one thing,
we are taught to be wary of our "fortune-tellers." However, true
psychic or intuitive sensitivity is the exact opposite of
"fortune-telling." It is our intellect, not our intuitive ability,
that looks toward the future. It is the intellect that is directed toward the
plan, the goal, and the ultimate end. Our intuitive sense, on the other hand, is
most profoundly directed into the moment -- into the here and now.
One does not work to achieve a Ph.D. in psychic awareness any more than one
studies to breathe. It comes naturally and with ease. And the younger we are,
the more naturally we breathe. All we need to do is watch an infant sleep, watch
the deep and relaxed breaths, to see how natural it is.
This naturalness does not last. From the time we enter school we are taught
to deny a basic part of ourselves. While science now recognizes that there are
two sides of the brain, we are taught to accept only one. We are essentially
taught to deny half of our intelligence. We learn to distrust our own sight and
hearing at a very early age. Imagination is the intellectual tool of the child,
yet it has little place in the educational system and becomes more and more of a
liability to the student as he or she progresses through the system.
It is imagination that is the mainstay of the psychic. Joan of Arc claimed to
have heard the voice of God speaking to her. During her trial as a witch her
accusers stated that she didn't hear God, she just had a very active
imagination. Her response was simple: "God speaks with us through our
imagination."
The right side of the brain governs imagination, emotions, and intuition.
Physiologically, it crosses over and controls the left side of the body. On the
other hand, the left side of the brain, controlling the right side of the body,
is the practical and problem-solving side. Clearly we need both sides to be
whole. However, it is the problem-solving, logical, and rational side that has
been encouraged in people. But right-brain (left-handed) folks have suffered
through the centuries from a fear of the physiology of intuition. Even the
derivation of the word left reflects this. The Latin term for left is sinistra
from which we get the word "sinister." Thus, the intuitive and
creative side is considered dangerous and evil in the lexicon of our mother
tongue.
Intuition is natural. It is human. How can it be scary? People have come up
to me time and again with stories of their own psychic experiences. Almost
without exception these stories are terrifying. One person dreamed that his
grand mother was deathly ill. And she was. Somebody else had an eerie feeling
that her son was in a car crash. And he was. Another person looked at a man she
was meeting for the first time and knew that he had some dreaded disease. And he
did.
I could never understand these stories. This was not my experience of the
psychic world. Yet I couldn't deny that people were telling the truth. Finally
it hit me. Imagine that we grew up fearing our sense of hearing. Imagine that we
were convinced that if we listened and heard, we would hear things that we
didn't want to hear. So we walked around with our fingers in our ears so we
wouldn't hear scary things: explosions, screams of terror and agony. However,
the life of hearing includes other, softer sounds: the gurgle and chirp of a
happy baby, the whispers of lovers in each other's arms, the rustle of the wind
through the leaves of autumn. Such sounds are lost to us when we have our
fingers in our ears. Because of our fears, we risk losing the sounds of
softness.
So it is with our psychic sense. We are told how frightening it is. We do not
use it. We deny its existence and hope it disappears. But the more we use our
intuitive sense, the less scary it becomes.
This is not to deny that there are things in life that are scary. However, we
mortals constantly face two choices: security or adventure. To opt for security
means going for the sure thing. Adventure means pressing through boundaries and
opening up to the possibilities beyond our frontiers. The Chinese word for
crisis is wei-chi. Wei means "danger." Chi means
"opportunity." Opportunities lie even within the fearsome dangers and
crises.
The intuitive sense allows us to go beyond the normal mind. It is both the
child and mother of imagination. It provides us with vision beyond our ordinary
sight -- beyond that which we already know. And it is such vision that has
propelled us from four-legged creatures with our face to the ground into
two-legged beings with our eyes to the stars.
It is the intuitive sense that allows us to see the world with new eyes. We
would be in limbo without it. After all, our ancestors had seen and feared fire
for thousands of years until one person had the vision to transform it from an
enemy into an ally. This person had seen the flames in a new way. The divine had
spoken through fire much as it did to Moses many thousands of years later.
Likewise, our followers had lived with trees and round stones for millennia
until one saw a wheel hiding in the form of the rock or the log and changed the
world forever.
The intuitive is our heritage. It is our doorway to new sight -- to new
vision. It, as much as the intellect, defines us as human. Within each of us
there is the visionary. Within each of us there is the seer who can leap beyond
our normal sight. Each of us has the power, privilege, and the right to see the
divine in a candle or burning bush.
The intuitive has nothing to do with belief, which is the acceptance of
someone else's experience. It has to do with one's own experience. It about
knowing. People often ask, "Do you believe in this stuff?" I tell them
that I try not to believe in anything. I do not believe in the reality of the
world of divination. I know it. There is a vast difference.
This
article is excerpted from:
 How to Read Signs and Omens in Everyday Life by Donald Bluestone Ph.D.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
Destiny Books. ©2002. www.InnerTraditions.com
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About the Author
Sarvananda
Bluestone received his doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin. He
taught at Roosevelt University in Chicago and the State University of New York
College of Old Westbury. After twenty years of college teaching, Bluestone and
his six-year-old daughter, Hira, left for India to be near the ashram of Bhagwan
Shree Rajneesh. They remained there for six months and then followed Rajneesh
back to America. For four years they lived in a spiritual community in Oregon.
Since 1986, between various trips to India, Sarvananda Bluestone has been doing
psychic readings for private clients at various Catskill hotels in New York.
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