Teaching access to guidance

Last weekend, I conducted a little experiment. I made a little bet with myself that in a three-hour period, I could help a small roomful of people to come into contact with their internal guidance. For some, it would be contact for the first time. For others, it would be a stronger, more definite connection. I hoped and expected that in this — as in so many similar areas involving access to nonphysical parts of ourselves – it would prove to be easier done than said.

In order to demonstrate my confidence, and to relieve any possible anxiety on the part of the participants, I said right at the beginning that if anyone felt that the experiment had been unsuccessful, or if they thought it wasn’t worth while, I would give them their money back. This involved only $25 a head, but the principle was the same as if we had been talking about real money.

I could make that offer with some confidence, because of the experience I have had over the past 20 years. I know that guidance is available. I know that psychic abilities are innate human abilities. I know we use them all the time, usually not noticing. And in my experience, the biggest obstacle to peoples doing these things is that they think, or fear, that they can’t be done. Often, they are willing to believe that they can be done, but only by others, not by themselves. So I set out deliberately to undermine that undermining belief, or fear, or lack of belief. Everything I did and said was designed to show them that working with guidance, either alone or with another, is a natural human ability that can be learned. In fact, these abilities are a part of what it is to be human. Only our society’s materialist biases have persuaded us otherwise, in the teeth of all our experience.

So, I devoted the first half hour to clearing away mental obstacles. I described the ways that I have experienced communication — sometimes as words that flowed through me requiring only that I not edit them in passage, sometimes as visuals, or ideas, or knowings which I had to interpret. Information often comes in forms that are cloudy, susceptible to misinterpretation. What we get often doesn’t immediately “makes sense.” It can’t always be immediately understood or interpreted. It’s important to perceive first and interpret only later.

I pointed out that guidance is not always experienced as internal communication. It may be experienced as hunches, coincidences, and things that other people say or do that strike us. We all experience these things every day, regardless whether we realize it. And this is nothing more nor less than communicating with other parts of life in non-sensory ways.

As an example that would ground the idea in history, I read them an excerpt from Charles Lindbergh’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book describing his long solo flight from New York to Paris in 1927. The Spirit of St. Louis was published not when Lindbergh was still young, but in 1954, when he was world famous. In the book, Lindbergh described being alone over the North Atlantic, half out of his mind from lack of sleep, conversing with disembodied spirits who not only talked to him for several hours, but assisted him in guiding the airplane.

This was guidance.

Spirits talked to him, he listened to them, and their guidance was good. When he came to the coast of Ireland, after a night of dead reckoning using primitive instruments, with an unsuspected tailwind, he found himself within three miles of his intended course. (Although the book was published more than half a century ago, the incident is still little known, because it is the kind of testimony our society systematically suppresses.) I cited his example because my theme was that these abilities are normal and widespread.

You don’t need to include a great deal of theory when you attempt to do something practical, but I did give them a simple workable model of how I think things are. The model: We in bodies extend beyond time and space. The nonphysical part of ourselves interconnects with all other beings outside of time and space, and so when we come into closer contact with our nonphysical component, we open the possibility of intimate contact with anyone else, in body or out. 

That’s why contacting guidance is not only possible but easy. Having provided this simple model, I listed potential obstacles. Among these: 

* The idea that non-sensory communication between people involved reading or overhearing something in another person’s mind. The process of accessing guidance on behalf of another person is not a matter of thinking or analysis, but more like active empathy. Think, for example, of the close wordless communication between mothers and newborns, or between closely attuned colleagues or teammates. 

* Ego, either too large or too small. I told them, this process is no big deal either way. If you succeed at it, well, someone just taught you. If you don’t succeed at first, well, that’s why you’re taking the workshop, to learn how. It is not true that success shows that you are something special, or that you will not succeed until you become something special. It’s a human ability that can be learned, nothing more, nothing less. 

* Keeping score. Edison, you know, invented many things by the trial-and-error method. Every time a new experiment failed, he reportedly consider it a success in that he had thereby found another thing that didn’t work. By implication that brought him that much closer to success. in developing psychic abilities, as in so much of life, it doesn’t necessarily matter when you get it. There are no prizes for finishing first. 

* Illusion of elsewhere. This is a big one. But there are no other worlds, no “other side,” even though we use such terms for convenience. I am convinced that the nonphysical world coexists with the physical world but is mostly unseen because it exists at a different frequency. You can see that if someone thinks they are attempting to go  elsewhere, it implies a certain effort that is not necessary if there is no elsewhere. It’s all right here, on different frequencies. 

* Illusion of distance. Similarly, if there is no distance to overcome the job is easier then we might initially think. And, since we are referring to an internal “journey,” that is non-physical, distance does not enter into it. 

* Illusion of separation between us. Separation between individuals would mean we have to overcome some obstacle, climb some wall. But we are all one, connected non-physically. There is no separation. 

* False certainty either way. On the one hand there is what I call Psychic’s Disease, which might be paraphrased as “I feel it strongly, so it must be true.” On the other hand there is rationalism, which says “I don’t have a logical reason for feeling this, so it must be false.” 

Then I described what worked. This could be described as alternately using the mental functions that my friend Bruce Moen has called the perceiver and the interpreter. First receive the data without judging it, and only afterwards evaluate it. Premature judgment cuts off the flow of intuitive material. One thing at a time. 

I also pointed out two common worries that are totally useless. “Is it true?” and “Who or what is the source?” The questions cannot be answered. In the psychic matters as in the rest of life, material either resonates or it doesn’t, and the data either supports it or it doesn’t. And as to the source, what is the source of your dreams? Your intuitions? Your inexplicable certainties? What is the source of your thoughts or ideas? We don’t know and don’t need to know. Our choice is to use them or not. 

So that was enough of explanations. It was time to get to work. 

I had them pair up with someone they did not know. As I put it, we were going to pretend everyone else there was psychic. One of the pair would ask a question and the other would try to answer it intuitively, bearing in mind my advice about what attitudes would be helpful or obstructive. The question was to be one that the questioner really would like the answer to, provided it was not about health and was not a test, and was not asking the other to predict the future. (this restriction was merely to reduce potential anxiety on the part of the perceiver.) The answer, I reminded them, could come in any form — an image, idea, word, lyric, association, memory – and from any source, provided it was not merely guesswork or logic. 

I gave them some other pointers and set them to it. Within a couple of minutes, watching the pairs intently interacting, I knew the experiment was going to work. My job was reduced mostly to telling them when it was time to change roles. Afterwards we debriefed as a group, so that they could learn from each other’s experience. Then we went right into another exercise in which they did the same thing, but alone. That is, they posed a question, then went into receptive mode and jotted down whatever came to them. This too was followed by a short debrief session. I was pleased to see that nobody volunteered anything about the content (as opposed to the process) of their individual session. That meant that they were asking real questions. 

After a break, we did it all again. Another paired questioning, with different partners this time, just to show that the previous success wasn’t a fluke, and to show how the flavor of such sessions varies with the other individuals involved. Another single session, to see if they could detect differences in their receptivity after having had the further experience of another paired session. 

And that was it. Three hours and four exercises, and nobody took me up on the money-back offer. Everyone had connected. 

It’s sooooooooo difficult, contacting guidance. 🙂