Did you ever wonder why it is that Jesus could perform miracles and you can’t, even though he specifically told his disciples that they (and presumably others) would do greater things than he had done? Why are you unable to performing miracles? Or – are you?
This is a chapter from an unpublished manuscript of mine on health and healing.
Chapter 5. Intuitive knowing
Everything we need to know to heal ourselves or to help others to heal themselves is to be found in the world’s scriptures. That’s why they were put there. This shouldn’t be a surprise. What should be a surprise is how little we use what we have been given.
An old joke says that the churches are filled with Christians who want to go to heaven, but don’t want to die to get there. What if they are misunderstanding what Jesus meant? Jesus said that “the kingdom of God is within you.” That doesn’t sound much like “wait till you’re dead and hope you get to heaven.” Similarly, Jesus said, “I have come that you may have life and have it more abundantly.” I think he meant “life more abundantly” not merely after we die, but now.
“Life more abundantly” means more than good health, but if you think that good health is not part of “life more abundantly,” I can only congratulate you on having escaped (or risen above) chronic illness, substantial disability, or serious injury. You will notice that Jesus is not on record as ever having refused to heal anyone willing to be healed. Neither do I recall him casting stones and saying that someone “deserved” to suffer.
Now, I know that it’s jarring to see casual references to Jesus and scriptures in a book on health and healing yourself. But I can’t honestly discuss health and healing without acknowledging how much is to be learned from scriptures. It is true that knowledge is gained from direct experience. But in order to get that experience, sometimes we need guideposts, and in this case scriptures provide them. Jesus is the perfect model for us of bringing forth the higher self while still in the body – or, to put it into conventional religious terms, living by conforming our will to God’s.
All the world’s scriptures have equivalent passages – because they are each trying to tell us what we need to know to live our lives. Regardless what religious tradition you come from, I suggest to you that if you will read your scriptures as instructions aimed at educating, rather than as legal manuals aimed at enforcing compliance, you will be surprised how differently they read.
(When we come to the day that people use scriptures as guidebooks to fuller life, rather than as texts to be memorized against an afterlife final exam, we will see religion transformed into something much closer to what it should be, and, for that matter, what science should be, too. A religion that respects and investigates and teaches spiritual facts! A science that is rooted in spiritual values! This will be the basis for a whole new civilization, and it cannot come too soon.)
Jesus said that the entire law and the prophets were contained in the command to do two things:
1) Love God with your whole being, and
2) Love your fellows as yourself.
Well, if you want health, if you want to help others heal, you need do two things.
1) You must learn to trust the knowledge that “comes to you,” and
2) You must come from your heart.
To my mind, that’s just what Jesus said. You must develop and use your intuition, and you must be love.
Trusting your knowledge
The greatest help I received in connecting with my healing abilities came when a friend told me to stop apologizing.
I had been learning to work with people for about a decade, feeling my way, working totally intuitively, usually not knowing what I was going to do or why I did it. Out on a limb? I had a whole tree house!
What I had learned about healing came from techniques picked up at The Monroe Institute, and two weekend courses, Reiki I and II. (I well remember feeling, when the Reiki I course culminated in an attunement, that for the first time in my life I had truly received a sacrament.) But although Reiki I taught techniques to hands-on healing, and Reiki II taught distant healing, I didn’t use either set of techniques very long. Both seemed unnecessarily complicated compared to what I knew from Monroe Institute techniques – and from what I knew from – somewhere. Some other part of me knew things that “conscious-I” did not.
This is when I began to learn about the issue of trust. My friend Bruce Moen says “trust is always the issue” when exploring new abilities, and I believe him. Trust keeps the information flowing from Upstairs (higher self) to Downstairs (conscious self). Distrust, by contrast, is the equivalent of stepping on the garden hose and expecting water to flow nonetheless because you believe that water should flow. But how do you learn to trust before experience gives you reason to trust?
There I was, opening up to internal guidance as best I could, and trusting it to steer me right. That wasn’t particularly hard for me. I tend to rush in where angels fear to tread. But when it came to working on others, it was a different story. Learning to bring in healing knowledge amounted to letting my hands do what they wanted to do, and seeing what happened. This was tightrope-walking without a net, in a big way, and you can believe that it made me nervous! In the interest of full disclosure, I would tell people as I was working on them, “I don’t know why I’m doing this, but my hands seem to want to.”
Finally one day my friend Rita told me not to apologize. So I stopped, and immediately my abilities began to ratchet upward. Eventually, I realized why: Trust is everything.
Before you know, you believe, and belief is trust. But before you know, you also doubt, and doubt is distrust. Thus the state between knowledge and ignorance may be described as a state of belief/doubt. Belief and doubt, far from being opposites, are more or less the same thing, with a slightly different emphasis. Operating from a state of belief, rather than from knowledge, is in effect operating from a state of mingled trust and distrust. Is it any wonder that such efforts get mixed, uncertain results? Yet until we know, belief may be the best we can do. So where’s the way out? How do we move from belief/doubt (which inhibits our efforts) to knowledge (which can only come from the experience that belief/doubt is preventing us from achieving)?
Here, my friends, we can only step out into uncharted waters. “Believe, so that you may understand,” one of the early fathers of the Christian church said. Perhaps in this context that admonition begins to make sense to us as it did to his contemporaries. Even though belief implies doubt, in the absence of knowledge belief may be the best we can do. If so, cling to the “belief” end of belief/doubt. Be willing to be fooled. If you cannot commit yourself to what you do not yet know, you cannot ever leave sight of land, and cannot ever find new lands. That’s what this whole book is about; nothing more, nothing less.
Coming from the heart
When I first became half-convinced that psychic abilities actually existed, I thought I would find them via the head. I didn’t. Psychic ability – life – is found not via the head, but via the heart. Loving is the key to life. I know this from experience, and I know that merely by talking about it won’t convince you. Spiritual truths are proved by experience. Still, talking a little bit about it may make it seem respectable enough that you give it a try, so here goes.
I was 46 years old when I remembered what it was like to love. Before then, I thought I was loving enough. I fell in love, married, and had children. I loved my brothers and sisters and various relatives from the state of being in which I lived. But lower states of being cannot comprehend higher states. When we reach higher states, we look back at lower ones with compassion and pity. Now I see those years as largely wasted. So many opportunities to love; so little loving done. Instead, worries, ambitions, jealousies, anger, insecurities….
It has been said that the ultimate polarity is between love and fear. This polarity could equally well be expressed as between hope (love) and despair (lack of love). We live between these extremes, and we choose, day by day, which pole we move toward. If we are to live in health, if we are to help others heal, we must live in love as best we can from day to day.
The key to healing is to remove the illusion of separation, and the way to remove the illusion of separation is to love. There will come a day when we will live our lives knowing, not believing, that we’re all connected, knowing that we are individuals and that we are not individuals. It is the perception of separation that creates the perception of lack of control, which creates fear. Eliminate the perception of separation and fear goes out the window. This is what love does.
“Love” in this context is not about warm fuzzy feelings, or sentiment, or romance. We’re talking about the binding energy, rather like gravity, that not only “makes the world go ‘round,” but makes the world. Love is the interpenetration of being, the fundamental oneness of everything. It is to life what flesh is to bodies. No love, no life.
Children in their natural state freely express love. (“Unless you become as little children,” Jesus said, “you can’t enter the kingdom.”) As we age, we can become relatively dead to love, as we can be relatively dead to life itself, and for the same reason. Fortunately, once we know what’s wrong, we can work to set it right. No matter where you are right now on the ability-to-love scale, you can teach yourself to love more deeply, more easily.
Here’s a simple daily exercise to help you to practice love, extend your consciousness and your openness, and grow. It’s not complicated or difficult. It just requires doing.
Find some object to love, whether it’s a pet or a flower or an abstraction or a car, though it would be better if it were a person. Do it! If you have difficulty doing it, go back in your mind to some time when you loved or felt loved.[1] Experience that feeling again; call it up, and express it toward whatever recipient you have chosen.
As you practice this, day by day, raise the bar by successively practicing loving something that’s less lovable. Anyone can love a dog, because the dog thinks you’re wonderful. It takes a little more to love a cat, because the cat thinks it’s wonderful. It takes more to love a woodchuck, because a woodchuck doesn’t care one way or the other. It takes more to love a rattlesnake, because it’s harder to relate to – especially if you’re afraid of it. So you could easily raise the bar a little bit every day, just by aiming to love something that is continually a little bit less loveable. Even if it didn’t do a thing for your healing abilities, it will do wonders for your life.
Three potential dangers
It would be irresponsible to leave this subject without calling your attention to three dangers attendant to relying on intuition: psychic’s disease, psychic inflation, and psychic self-delusion.
* Psychic’s Disease is what I call it when you confuse strength of feelings with accuracy of feelings. Just because you feel something strongly doesn’t mean you’re right. Just because you live relying on intuition doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be checking that intuition against logic, common sense and other people’s judgment. Sometimes, intuition is right when logic, common sense and other people’s judgment are all wrong. Sometimes. Not always. Oliver Cromwell of all people was quoted as saying to those who were interpreting scripture, “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, consider that you may be wrong.” People with Psychic’s Disease – and any of us may be afflicted with it, unpredictably, at any moment – never consider that they may be wrong. In my experience, those who think they are always right occasionally go disastrously wrong. It’s only to be expected; they are trying to keep their balance without a gyroscope.
* Psychic inflation, a well known psychological phenomenon, can happen to people when they contact parts of reality that are larger than ordinary life. Some who begin to manifest psychic gifts have their lives enhanced. Others, in contact with the same manifestations, come to serious harm. The difference is in whether they preserve their perspective and their humility. A divine part of ourselves lives outside of time and space: This does not mean that we, in our ordinary Downstairs personality, should consider ourselves godly rather than mortal. We inside time and space need to remember that we are fallible; we are a part and not the whole. Inflation – identification with the divine without remembering one’s mortality – leads not to further growth but to madness. It is, perhaps, the difference between Nietzsche and Carl Jung. The psychologist delved at least as deep as the philosopher, but Nietzsche seems to have fallen victim to inflation, and died mad, while Jung retained his dual perspective, and became ever wiser.
* Psychic self-delusion, the third pitfall on the path of living in tune with intuition, is closely linked to psychic’s disease. Just as those with psychic’s disease over-value opinion, and consider certainty a guarantee of accuracy, so those with psychic self-delusion over-value experience, and consider certainty a guarantee of reality. Yes, so you had a given experience. Was it real? Was it necessarily what you took it to be? In any case, what does it mean? Don’t be in too great a hurry to decide any of these questions. Second thoughts are cheap insurance against going too far off course.
Having said all that, it may be worth repeating: The way to obtain healing ability lies through trusting your internal knowledge, and working from an open heart. Although this course has its pitfalls, all courses have pitfalls. If we were to try to stay where we are until we find paths without perils, we would never move. The trick is to keep our eyes open as we move.