Intuitive Awakening

Some people experience a spiritual awaking that hits them like a bolt of lightning. Awakening is when you have a strong realisation that causes you to see your life, your actions or your thoughts differently. An awakening can lead the person to great insight about our nature as humans or even the nature of the universe and consciousness itself. It is an awaking that shifts consciousness that I would like to focus on in this anthology.

This kind of awaking can come from a great trauma, an accident or a suicidal tendency.   Mine has been subtle awakening. Personal awakening doesn’t have to be something that happens from one single moment of enlightenment. For me that one moment would have had little impact without all the other somewhat minor events that happen within a life time. We grasp aspects of many works of knowledge to find out truth. Our awareness of ourselves is in the books other people write, the conversations, the relationships, the magnificent views or our simply being profoundly messed up or lonely. Every aspect of life holds the key to becoming enlightened.

In my past position as a radio presenter, I took the opportunity to interview many of the spiritual teachers who had inspired me through their books. A shocking reality for me was that many of them simply don’t walk their talk. At first I was horribly disappointed and even angry at some of them. I had taken great hope in the idea that there was a right way to live a life, a spiritual way that would mean you were happy all the time in a blissful constantly forgiving bubble of consciousness.

As a radio presenter, author, spiritual teacher and intuitive personality in Great Britain, I felt the pressure of keeping up the persona of happy spiritual perfection. In truth it is simply a marketing strategy to sell a concept of a loving spiritual community. On the back of the concept of happy spiritual perfection for most spiritual teachers, books, talks and workshops are sold. The result is a lack of authenticity which creates more of the separation spiritual community is trying to desolve. I set out to devote my life to following something which isn’t possible 24 hours a day. I would then beat myself up about having negative feelings of failing to keep my ego negative thoughts under control.

My own expectations of myself were reflected back to me from my students, followers and friends. I found it exhausting to keep up the pretence of being fine and happy when inside I was battling a profound loneliness. Every conversation people wanted to have with me was on the subject of my work. I lost my sense of identity and  interest in areas outside my work. I found it hard to meet with friends and catch up with them about their lives because the volume of clients was extreme. If listening were a muscle then mine was so exhausted I couldn’t lift another word.

From a state of emptiness I had to seek that which would make me fulfilled. The thing that gives me the feeling of fulfilment is empowering people through spirituality. I questioned how the very cause of my emptiness and isolation could be the route to fulfilment? A few days later I was due to give a talk at a Mind Body Soul festival. My subject was spirit guides. I duly arrived with a wheelie case of my books to sell and the letter telling me what time my talk was - I always arrive at the room I am giving the talk in about 15mins early, this gives me time to set up and prepare myself.  On the way, I bumped into a student of mine, we got talking as I got a coffee and when I arrived at the room, I looked in and saw that people were standing at the back as the room was so full there weren’t any seats left. I couldn’t see the speaker at the front, so I checked to see who was on before me, as I looked at the list of speakers, I realised that it was me that was due to talk right now! The time had been changed, I wasn’t late, but I had to start now.

My body started to shake as I walked down the centre aisle to the front. I stood for a moment, waiting for persona ‘Show Biz’ to kick in but nothing came, no time to set up. I turned to the audience and just started to talk as myself without the ‘spiritual teacher font of all knowledge persona’. I have given this talk so many times, but this time I felt connected to every word as I talked about the shift in consciousness the world is currently going through. As I talked I could intuitively feel the unexplored potential in the room; it was as if every person had a visible spark of God consciousness coming from the back of their head. I could feel everyone in the room as one energetic potential of loving creativity.

Everything I have read has expanded into a much larger possibility and potential to bring us all into a shift in consciousness. Not by reaching for perfection, but by fully accepting who we really are.

By loving every aspect of ourselves (authentic and un- authentic) we would also love others as we wouldn’t project onto them our own judgements caused by the fear of our own failings. If we all could intuitively feel this connection to each other we would never feel alone or separate again. It is an intuitive connection to a collective consciousness. Due to the law of resonance if 51% of the population could connect like this, everyone would follow as it would create an energetic tipping point. This would then result in the shift of consciousness, a true understanding of non-duality. I became incredibly excited, this really felt like another way to bring about the change the world desperately needs. Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist, once said

“The problems that face us cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them.  What we need is a shift in consciousness”.

I agree with this statement wholeheartedly and I believe we are on the way to that shift in consciousness, but we must see it and choose it for ourselves.

In my own life, my shift of consciousness has lead me to sell my house and give away all my belongings. It was clear to me that my need to appear like I was living a perfect life was actually getting in the way of the spiritual life. Not that I believe we need to be rid of all possessions. Just the mindset that believes they define who you are. Instead of hanging on to a successful career, I let it go to move to San Francisco and become a student. It is my conclusion from following my intuition that life starts in the mind and imagination and then plays itself out in what we believe is reality. My belief is that reality is a none dualistic consciousness.

In this anthology I would like to bring to you some of the spiritual thinkers that have lead me to my conclusions set out in a step-by-step process. In my own life the information did come in a neat step-by-step package, but self-realisation rarely does.

First step - Intuition.

I have worked as a professional intuitive for many years, teaching the subject at the College of Psychic studies and writing the book ‘Advanced Psychic Development’. I was very curious as to why other people didn’t use their intuition in the same way I did. I found that not only do many people believe that they are not intuitive, but some people are even sceptical in the belief that intuition exists at all. People have looked to science to prove the existence of Psy energy which is the root energetic component to intuition, psychic ability, inner knowing or the sixth sense. However there have been two very important missing elements to most tests.

The first is that intuition is something we receive into our awareness and mind. It isn’t possible to go and get intuitive information. For example if someone was to ask you to use remote viewing (being able to see a place you have never been to clairvoyantly)  to describe their home, it is likely the left hemisphere of the brain would try and guess what the house looks like based on the knowledge you have of that person. It would seek to work out the answer to the question. The right hemisphere is a receiver of information and if it is given the time to be open to information before the left brain starts to try and grasp information it is likely pictures will form of what the home looks like. This is very true in my own case of clairvoyance. I put this down to being dyslexic. My right hemisphere is stronger than my left hemisphere. Which leads me to believe in the same instance as someone who has lost one of their five senses, another sense will become stronger to compensate. I am more able to receive intuitive visions, information and emotions because my left hemisphere is lacking on the fields of English, Maths and science.

Dr. Laurie Nadel has been conducting research into psychic phenomena since the mid-1970s. She is the author of Dr. Laurie Nadel's Sixth Sense: Unlocking Your Ultimate Mind Power. In Dr. Laurie Nadel's Sixth Sense she describes the human brain and its functions in this way:

“The left neocortex, which we call ‘the brain you took to school’ can only perform certain functions having to do exclusively with external reality. Although the left neocortex is the centre of language, the other brain systems are nonverbal and cannot measure time and space. The right neocortex is continually absorbing information from both the external and the internal worlds. It translates its perceptions into visions, glimpses, innovations and intuition. The left neocortex then processes these perceptions as language so that we can speak about them and makes them concrete. We tend to denigrate information that we sense, feel, or intuit because the process by which we obtain it cannot be reduced to a step-by-step procedure. But intuition is nonetheless an intellectual skill, one that cannot be systematically measured or graded.”

In order for anything to be proven by science any experiment needs to be repeatable for a large percentage of the tests. However Dr Caroline Watt at Koestler Parapsychology Unit in the Department of Psychology at University of Edinburgh has been conducting experiment with what I believe has included the most important missing element of any test on Psy energy, Love and purpose.

In July 2008 Caroline gave a brave talk at a meeting I attended for the Society for Psychical Research. The audience was mostly full of the sceptical society who were mostly unhappy about Caroline’s findings and discounted them as best as they could. In her talk she described a concentration test in which subjects were asked to concentrate on the flame of a candle. In another room a person was given times that they had to send help in the form of positive thoughts to the person trying to keep focused on the candle. It was found that when the person was sending energetic help, the person not knowing when this help was coming, was able to focus on the candle more when the help was sent. However when the test was repeated by non-believers it was discovered that the help didn’t work at all. I believe this is because and energetic bond wasn’t being formed for the purpose of the experiment and the non-believer simply didn’t create it. I recreated the experiment with my own students under less scientific means and discovered the same thing. When we love there is intuition, without love there is no intuition. I have found this with clients and have a rule to only work with clients that I like. I don’t feel intuitively linked to people all the time. Simply because I don’t care about people all of the time. However if I were to think of the wonder of creation and the beauty that can be found in all people, the love and therefore the intuition opens to receive information.

People don’t believe they are intuitive as most people simply can’t put it into words their inner knowing, when the left hemisphere of the brain is busy thinking about the past or planning the future. Our inner knowing has so much information to offer us about who we are and the world around us, but the left hemisphere is far too busy to allow it to come to our conscious attention. As we all have a right brain, it is possible for us to change our form of thinking and listening to our world to become more intuitive. We would need to move from the left hemisphere thinking ‘I’ ego voice to big picture inner knowing right hemisphere.

Step two - Collective consciousness.

We all as humans are interconnected more than we care to realise. The reason we don’t care to realise we are connected is because when a person acts from a damaged ego, we tend to de-humanise them, as if we and they are not of the same human make up. Within our ego self we believe we are separate. It makes it possible for us to put ourselves first in a Dog eat Dog world. This is what is happening in the conscious mind. In popular psychology it is said that there are four levels of consciousness: Sub – consciousness, consciousness, collective consciousness and Super / God consciousness. I became interested in how we can move from the sub-conscious and conscious mind and relate to each other in the form of collective consciousness.

Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth has been my biggest influence on my ideas of consciousness and the possible shift of consciousness over the past few years. In this section of A New Earth he describes awakening from the mind voice.

This mental construct is what you normally refer to when you say ‘I’. To be more precise: Most of the time it is not your who speaks when you say or think ‘I’ but some aspect of that mental construct, the egoic self. Once you awaken, you still use the word ‘I’ but it will come from a much deeper place within yourself.

Most people are still completely identified with the incessant stream of mind of compulsive thinking, most of it repetitive and pointless. There is no ‘I’ apart from their thought processes and emotions that go with them. This is the meaning of being spiritually unconscious. When told that there is a voice in their head that never stops speaking they say, ‘What voice?’ or angrily deny it, which of course is the voice, is the thinker, is the unobserved mind. It could be almost be looked upon as an entity that has taken possession of them.

Some people never forget the first time they disidentified from their thoughts and thus briefly experienced the shift in identity from being the content of their mind to being the awareness in the background. For others it happens in such a subtle way they hardly notice it, or they just notice an influx of joy or inner peace without knowing the reason.

This egoic voice which Eckhart is describing, is the voice that makes all our decisions. After reading  A New Earth I made a shift in how I listened to myself. I stopped paying attention to the voice and listened to my inner knowing and intuition. This lead to me understanding the actions of others on a much deeper level. I could see the root of other people’s actions were often reflect of my own.

I learned a better understanding of the dangers of heeding the voices in my head from an intensive training in course in psychosynthesis, a spiritual form of psychotherapy. During this course I learned about the many different voices in our heads created by the ego. These voices are known as sub-personalities. I felt it was vital to check all information no matter what its source through my own inner knowing. Most of my decision and thinking was based in some aspect of fear or perceptions based on past experience. I then realised that my inner knowing was really the most reliable decision maker I had. The inner knowing also doesn’t come with words, it comes from a wholeness that absorbs every aspect of who I am.

My first understanding of a collective consciousness came from my own communication with spirits. This started in my childhood and at the time I put it down to being a child and childhood imagination, which is a pretty amazing thing for a child to think. Over time evidence accrued that I really was gathering information from people who had died. I got the evidence from living people who knew the dead person and who could confirm what I was saying to be true. The information came in the form of pictures mostly relating to my own life and objects within my life such as an image of my grandmother’s carpet or a character from a TV show I had watched. I could also just ‘know’ information and feel sensations and pain in my own body that came from the person who had died. I would sometimes hear a voice inside my own head. But often not, it was just a knowing. There was one spirit I had felt the presence of all of my life. I later found out this is known as a spirit guide. I trained in mediumship at The college of psychic studies (where I later became a tutor) and Arthur Findlay college. At first thought it was a wonderful gift to be able to give messages from those who had died to the living. However I had an on off love affair with being a medium in my professional life. I found that working as a medium was making me dislike the living. This was in part because I became a public media psychic medium and so was under pressure from each client to produce results. I found no support from the community of mediums in the same position or in the spiritualist church. In fact other mediums were often more cruel to each other then the sceptics who host websites and call you a ‘Brazen cow’ in bestselling books. I decided to only work for the spirit world as a medium, this does mean not getting paid by the living and only using the skill when called upon by spirit. This shifted my ego on the subject and I stopped thinking about being ‘good’ at mediumship. At this point other realms of consciousness in my mediumship communication opened up. I found I was able to communicate with collective consciousness in the form of a group of beings. It started with a group of twelve who gave me a name (which is most unusual as why does a telepathic communication need to use names) Ishmael they are non-human and all communicated as one ‘knowing’. I enjoy exchanging knowledge, emotion and connection with many different vibrational beings, some have been human and some not. However I am still reluctant to express that I do this form of communication. In my writing the information I ‘know’ from them is expressed, but I am unwilling to put added importance into what is being communicated by declaring its source.  All channelled information in order to be put into words has to go through the mind and often the ego of the receiver of the information. It is important to me to use discernment of my own mind as well as other consciousness.

I started to research the way that the mind works in terms of being able to interpret and make sense of the information I was downloading which came in forms of emotion. I found a fantastic talk recorded for TED.com (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html), Jill Bolte Taylor a neuroscientist describes how she had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions -- motion, speech, self-awareness -- shut down one by one as the left hemisphere was effected by the brain bleed. In her speech she describes what she discovered:

“I am an energy being, connected to the energy all around me, though the consciousness of my right hemisphere, we are energy beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemisphere as one human family”.

This explanation was exactly how I felt, we are energy beings connected to one another as one human family. This to me is the connection of the collective consciousness. I don’t know if anyone can be an expert in consciousness as it is such a personal thing. I can only talk from my own experience. I have experienced a collective consciousness not inspired by my imagination. Most of the day I am happy to connect to the world from my own level of screwed up ego self. This is how the majority of us connect to the world. However when I connect to the collective consciousness, I can see and understand other people’s deep reasoning for screwed up behaviour. Although I don’t know all the details I can feel a sense of the route of the fear the person is playing out. I can also see how I hold the same fears in other ways. I then know I have a choice to act and react out of love and become a transformational catalyst or out of fear and buy into the belief this person is holding. This doesn’t mean putting up with an abusive person, but having a deeper understanding of where they are coming from, so I can with compassion and understanding tell them that they are out of order. From this level of understanding it becomes hard to wish harm on others as other represent an aspect of yourself.

Law of resonance.

At the start of every private consultation I will ask my client to give me an object that they have on their person. This is normally a watch or a ring. I then do Psychometry which means reading the energy of the person from the object. Having not been so academic at school my ex boyfriend  James gave me an explanation of how my Psychometry works in scientific terms. James explains:

Everything that exists is actually different forms of energy in vibration. This is what modern science tells us. In real terms, our bodies are composed of the same basic building blocks of matter as everything else. These chemicals have existed in their basic forms (most of them) since they were forged long ago in the bellies of stars. If we look closely at one of these chemical particles, as many of us did at school, we find that 99.9999% of an atom is nothing but empty space. Within this mostly empty space exist smaller “particles”; protons, neutrons and electrons. These particles are pure energy. Little particles or waves of energy in vibration, actually winking in and out of existence millions of times per second at speeds far beyond the ability of the human senses to be able to detect. Only the most complex scientific equipment can register it. At this subtle level, this quantum level of existence, everything consists of tiny packets of energy, and empty space; quantum is the Latin word meaning packet, and you can see how the word quantity came from this root.

Energy itself, according to Albert Einstein in his formula E=MC², is mass (M) multiplied by the speed of light (C) squared. So mass, or matter, when multiplied by the speed of light times the speed of light equals energy.

Waves of energy in vibration must make some kind of sound, I am really excited by the idea that the whole universe is made of sound. This also means that our thoughts, emotions and consciousness must also make a sound.

Sound has an interesting quality, if you have a guitar on one side of the room and you strum it, a guitar on the other side of the room tuned differently will resonate to the same frequency as the first guitar. Due to the law of resonance, the dominate frequency will tune every other frequency around it and make it vibrate to its own resonance. I believe that this is also the case with people. We can be in a really good mood and be brought down just by sharing a room with someone in an unhappy mood and vis versa.

A story that really clinched this idea for me was called the 100^th Monkey:

The Japanese monkey, Macaca fuscata, had been observed in the wild for a period of over 30 years. In 1952, on the Island of Koshima, scientists were providing monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand. The monkeys liked the taste of the raw sweet potatoes, but found the dirt unpleasant. An 18 month old female named Imo found she could solve the problem by washing the potatoes in the salty ocean water, improving the taste of the potato. She taught this trick to her mother. Her playmates learned this trick and taught their mothers too. This cultural innovation was gradually picked up by numerous monkeys in the troop and observed by the scientists.

Between 1952 and 1958, all the young monkeys learned to wash the sandy sweet potatoes and make them more palatable. Only the adults who imitated their children learned this cultural improvement. Other adult monkeys kept eating the dirty sweet potatoes. In autumn of 1958, something startling took place. A certain number of Koshima monkeys were already washing their sweet potatoes, the exact number is not known. The hypothetical number given was 99. Then it happened. The hundredth monkey learned to wash the sweet potatoes. The added energy of that hundredth monkey somehow created an ideological breakthrough. Almost everyone in the tribe was washing their potatoes before eating them, but a surprising occurrence was observed by these scientists. The habit of washing the sweet potato had jumped overseas. Colonies of monkeys on other islands and the mainland troop at Takaskiyama began washing their sweet potatoes.

Although the exact number may vary, this Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon means that when only a limited number of individuals knows a 'new way', it remains the conscious property of those individuals. However, when one more individual manifests this new awareness, the field is strengthened, a critical mass is reached, and the awareness becomes the conscious property of all. This new awareness is communicated mind to mind.

From The Hundredth Monkey by Ken Keyes Jr.

I have often wondered if the missing link in bones between monkeys and humans was created by a shift in consciousness that got us to walk upright and change the way we think.

In conclusion.

I believe there is a tipping point for our shift in consciousness. In the same way the scientists saw a tipping point of monkeys washing fruit, we as humans can have a tipping point from the fear ego mind set to an all inclusive loving mind state. Intuition allows us to really see how much the same we all are and be aware when we are reacting to someone’s ego or coming from our own. It isn’t possible to judge someone else as being a separate entity from yourself when you can intuitively see how alike you are. This then dissolves the aspect of ego that causes us to self protect and become self interested. It makes us all inclusive of others as one.

From this level of intuitive awareness we open our consciousness to the collective conscious of all energetic life.

As a result we would find it incredibly hard to have a dog-eat-dog business mentality based in egoic greed. This mentality has resulted in many of us becoming separated from each other and the Earth that we must all co-exist in. 

What happens once we stop seeing each other as separate no one knows for certain. My thoughts lean to the idea of non-duality.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, says:

‘Nondualism may be viewed as the understanding or belief that dualism or dichotomy are illusory phenomena. Examples of dualisms include self/other, mind/body, male/female, good/evil, active/passive, dualism/nondualism and many others. It is accessible as a belief, theory, condition, as part of a tradition, as a practice, or as the quality of union with reality’

It’s a difficult concept to grasp and a possibility that we will never know unless we shift the consciousness that is causing the road to our own extinction. We cannot change the road we are heading down with the same thinking that got us onto that road. We can do it together as one awake intuitive collective consciousness.