INTUITIVE KNOWING OF
THE NON-PHYSICAL WORLD
You are the single, most important thing in the whole universe and you are of no consequence whatsoever. Somewhere in between the two is the truth. We give meaning to life and giving spirituality to our life is another way to give our existence meaning. The truth is that our existence might mean nothing, but it might mean everything. Belief that it means nothing comes from the same level of ego as belief that it means everything. Somewhere in the middle is the balance – the breath between the words. The breath may be an in-breath or an out-breath; it is unimportant. What is important is that there is a space before the action of breathing takes place.
If nothing is important then why do we need to bother being spiritual at all? Spirituality is about something that goes beyond life; it’s about giving a purpose to your existence as a spirit.
Most people don’t remember being in the womb, their birth or being very small. This is mainly because we didn’t have the language to give our experiences meaning. If I step into another part of my recall mind I can remember the sensations of being in the womb, but it was without conscious thought. When our thoughts become conscious we have reached a certain point in our development. We are no longer just a sponge for information; we give that information meaning. Only then do things start to make sense and the ego mind starts to figure things out. It is possible that we lived in a different form before we were even conceived, but with our current mind we wouldn’t remember, as this mind demands the memory to have a meaning.
The things that people generally remember the most clearly are the things that have meaning to them. Of course memory can’t be trusted, as we often give meaning to events upon reflection. It is the ego that makes meaning out of life. It is therefore possible that life goes on after death and life went on before you were even a sperm and an egg. Of course the ego hates the very idea of its death and might just be making all this stuff up, but there is another knowing. It is an inner knowing, which knows that we survive the death of the physical body. This inner knowing also directs us to lead a good life. Otherwise, what would be the point of leading a life where at times we painfully take the right road for the greater good of all?
Because we ‘know’ that we are a part of something much bigger than ourselves. It is not a belief in a judgmental God who is going to cast us out if we don’t do as he says. It’s a knowing that if there is, in fact, a fight between good and evil then that fight is going on inside of us. Every time we choose love in our lifetime it is one small victory for our collective higher consciousness.
Each one of us is really two selves, locked into a perpetual arm-wrestling contest. Both sides keep lifting their elbows off the table, and accusing the other side of cheating.
Life is about removing the blocks we have created with the ego mind to stop us connecting with the truth of who we are, which is love. Once we remove those blocks we get to go home. I don’t believe it is possible to truly grasp what home is, but deep inside we know it. Deep inside we have always felt lonely because of our sense of disconnect. Leading a spiritual life is about being able to connect with a universal picture.
Taking a path of spirit is about making a commitment to loving. If we live on beyond death we have a reason to be good people. There are some people in life that we ‘vibe’ with; they seem to be on the same level of life path as ourselves. Imagine if you were able to blend energy fully with those people, to be able to merge with them; this is what spirit can do. It’s not like losing yourself; it’s like becoming part of everything you were already. You might recognize this freeing if you have ever been in love or in fascination with someone. You feel as if you want to consume them, absorb them through your skin. I believe that this is some kind of memory of this blending. Were we once all one being that came apart? My inner knowing feels that to be true, but when I think about it, it seems implausible. Intuition is the key to feeling what the truth of our existence really is – what it is for you. It truly is unknowable because you can only know it as a concept through the workings of the ego, which can only perceive things in terms of ‘have’ and ‘have not.’ As you now know, becoming one with everything is a horrific thought to the ego, as it will then have everything and give everything away at the same time.
It really does blow your mind. Have you ever gone too far down the thinking rabbit hole and been told ‘best not to think about it,’ or ‘you think too much.’ This is likely to be true. The only thing that can give you an insight into the meaning of life, life after death, or any such matters is to expand your loving consciousness so that you feel it. You might never be able to put those feelings into words, but in that moment of connection, it feels tangible. It seems impossible that this energy has an end, like the boundless universe – you change, but you exist beyond the body.
Living an intuitive life has a divine meaning, but it doesn’t make you smarter than anyone else or any less likely to experience painful moments in life. To be curious is the only thing that opens the consciousness enough to take the heart with it. Through this gateway we connect intuitively with all that there is, and we find that all that there is, in truth, is love. Living an intuitive life does not get you more sexual partners, next week’s Lotto numbers, or international fame; sorry to have not mentioned this sooner in the book, but it does make life easier.
Often people compliment me by saying ‘Where do you get all your energy?’ ‘How do you find the time?’ and ‘You look like Bridget Jones’ (even though I’d rather ‘you look like Renée Zellweger’ but who cares). Anyway, what’s the secret of having time and energy? First, the less time and energy you spend on working out if a decision is right the more quickly you move though life. Also I don’t have a TV, TVs suck your time and also give you things to think about that are often irrelevant. I do watch the UK TV show Doctor Who and I’m a big sci-fi fan; it opens my mind to time travel and intergalactic possibilities. The clearer your head the more you can hear your intuition (and mute your ego), the easier decisions become, the faster you move the more you get done. My motto is ‘Know that you know, know you’re right, and move on!’ Life is short and living this way feels like living at a divine altitude.
Each lifetime you have lived throughout your existence, you have been given a choice: to choose love or to choose fear. A simple way to explain it is that it is as if you either live your life closed down or full of love, gratitude, and generosity. Fear has many levels and represents itself with many different faces and circumstances. Jealousy, manipulation, cruelty, anger, and vengeance are all aspects of fear. Fear is the underlying cause of everything that doesn’t resonate with love. You might not see that it is fear that drives someone to beat someone else up or kill them. The need to destroy an adversary always comes from fear. Bullies at school or in the workplace are scared of the victim and also scared of becoming a victim themselves.
Every fear that you overcome in a lifetime never comes back, as it is part of your ego and no longer has a hold on you. Like peeling the layers of an onion, you move closer to love and remove the blocks to finding the love that has always been within you. Gradually, the real you is revealed. Each lifetime we live, we are only reborn to carry on the task of letting go of the ego (fear). Over and over again we come back and are challenged with a life of metaphors for love and fear. We are faced with things that could trigger us to be the worst of ourselves; we are thrown into testing situations and continually asked, ‘Do you choose to respond with love or with fear?’
Choosing love isn’t a wishy-washy, limp handshake choice. It is often the hardest choice of all: it’s the grown-up, mature choice; it’s the choice for the greater good. Sometimes it is the road less traveled, the one where the grass is not worn down by many previous travelers. The road of fear has many passengers going round and round the mountain, while the road of love often shows us that we need to climb the mountain. People call the mountain-climbers crazy. They cannot explain why they need to climb. Life is like being a mountaineer; you feel the passion and the longing for invigoration, which moves you past the fear to being born.
Before you were born, I imagine you and I were hanging out in the spirit world. Bobbing around on a cloud, you know the scene! Then the darn nymph with the clipboard came over, looking for the people who had to go back to the physical world to dance again with fear. You jumped up and said ‘Me! Me!’ Why? You know it sucks to be human; you know the pain of living in ego. As ever, you wanted one more try, so that in one lifetime you could choose love over fear. You react in love not ego. This is enlightenment; when the vibrational frequency that is you is the closest to light, it is also the closest to love. Then and only then can you get back to your real home, a place where all energy is reunited as one. So, one by one we jumped up and said, ‘Me! Me! I want a chance to go home.’ We knew the pain, but we also knew the exhilaration of that ride was worth it.
Even if we are nailed to a cross, sit under a tree our whole life, or are exiled from Tibet, we keep saying ‘yes’ to love. Living in a universe that works on polarities, I have often been asked if the worse a lifetime is, the more it takes you closer to your enlightenment. It depends largely on what you choose. You can have the worst things happen to you and make them mean the best things; in other words, you keep finding love in the face of adversity. You can also have the best things happen and they never are enough. I believe each lifetime has a grand purpose or a grand lesson that takes you closer to love. I believe you know it at the time of your death and when you review your life after death. Your enlightenment for this lifetime could be to fall in love, or to be in service to others. Imagine the nymph that came to Princess Diana, when she was just a mere spark of the light of possibility, and said, ‘Okay, got a great one for you – you get to live a wonderful and privileged life, but your heart gets broken… a lot. You will die young, leaving two great boys, but you heal the people of a small island called Great Britain and in so doing open its heart chakra, which has been closed since World War II – you know those Brits and their ‘stiff upper lip.’ This level of sacrifice also means you won’t have to be reborn as many times.’
What would you have said to the nymph? What did you agree to do in this lifetime, for your personal growth, the growth of your family, or community? It doesn’t have to be bad things; it could be winning gold at the Olympics, writing a life-changing book, bringing a child into the world. We don’t know what the large events of our time mean. We don’t know if they tip us so far in polarity and take us so close to fear that we then swing harder into love. We don’t know the bigger meaning of the disasters and the triumphs of our lives. Even if everything I am saying here is wrong and choosing love makes no difference at all, it still feels better! Freewill is the greatest gift we have ever been given. It is our freewill to continue to destroy the planet and our human existence or to stop and try a different approach. This is the tipping point in our evolution. As individuals, from one lifetime to the next, we get to choose love or fear.
Right now, at this tipping point, our choices as individuals have got to tip the choices of the whole of humanity. It is going to take all of us to think in the same way to change where we are heading. It’s not just one of us – it’s all of us. Yet each country has a different need from the planet. It is those countries that are in an abundant and privileged position that are going to have to choose love first. Love is the only salvation to the world’s problems. All of our lifetimes have taken us up to this point. Of course, many of us are at different stages of enlightenment. And of course, enlightenment isn’t a thought, it’s a vibration; it’s a knowing without words. It is not something you can go out and get, or even look within and find; it’s a wordless realization that you are at one with love and always have been.
You might not have a conscious recollection as to why you are here right now, who you were in your past lives, and what level of enlightenment you are currently working toward. And, even if you don’t buy into the idea of reincarnation and the nymph with her infernal clipboard, you’ll probably still want to know why you’re here – what’s your bigger purpose. But your inner knowing knows. The thing is, it knows without words. It might know in images, feeling, or bits and pieces of ideas. The reason for this is so that the ego mind doesn’t get hold of the information and use it against you. You can access this knowing in an unconscious way. You might like to do that through imagery, like a form of dreaming. The best way to do it is simply to pose the question. Many people wonder about these things, but never feel it is possible simply to ask. All the answers are inside of you and they have a wonderful way of coming out through the multiple ways of intuitive knowing. Start with becoming curious, which means you’re not creating a question that will engage your left hemisphere, but sending out the emotion of curiosity about your past lives or your greater purpose. Try it and see what downloads.
Through the collective consciousness we are all connected. It is therefore possible to connect with the residual energy of your old past life selves. People sometimes feel that this is a place they have never been before. Much of this is unimportant as facts; what is important is that it can give you a sense of connection to everything. You don’t see yourself as being part of a time, but timeless. You don’t see yourself as being fixed to the roots of your culture, but connected to all cultures and yet knowing your current vibration. You see yourself moving forward into the unknown future with a sense of wonder not fear. You become an all-inclusive energy that embodies the whole world with a consciousness that is tapped into the expanse of the universe. Then you wonder what you want for dinner and you’re back in your kitchen.
Being connected won’t stop you being an individual while you have an ego at play. It will, however, give you moments when you feel that sense of divinity and bliss, and then you can come back to being you.
It is my belief, although I have never heard this anywhere else, that there are certain historical figures whose entire lives are a metaphor for human learning. It is a ‘knowing’ I’ve had for some time. There was a deeper meaning when Jesus said, ‘I died for your sins.’ It doesn’t fit into my understanding of God because I don’t recognize a judgmental God. Yet, when I think of the life of Jesus as a metaphor for us to learn from, it makes sense to me. I believe there are other public figures who seem to have had such extraordinary lives, and it seems odd that only one person would benefit from those experiences. I don’t feel time is linear so, in some circumstances, we get to see into someone else’s lifetime. If you think about some of the iconic individuals, what would it be like to be able to understand the reasoning behind their decisions? Wouldn’t it bring you closer to understanding yourself?
This idea was explored in the movie Being John Malkovich when an office worker finds a portal into the subconscious of the actor John Malkovich and witnesses life though his eyes. Imagine being able to step into the shoes of Hitler, Elvis, Eva Perón, Pol Pot, Gandhi, Mother Theresa or anyone whose life has been extraordinary, whether that life was for the betterment of humanity or not.
Being a witness through an iconic life doesn’t mean that we can change history, but it does give us a better understanding of humanity. If you had had this experience in a lifetime, you might feel a resonance with someone from history – maybe a famous actor or political figure. It doesn’t mean that you were them, just that you might have been almost a walk-in for their life experience. It might have been a whole lifetime or just at a critical moment in time.
Consciousness is our inner landscape and has many levels: subconscious, conscious, collective consciousness, and super (God) consciousness are some that we have identified and named. Consciousness is part of what it is to be human – to have an internal and natural drive to reach altered states of consciousness. This is because, through the expansion of consciousness, we get to understand the world and ourselves more profoundly. The pull to experience altered states of consciousness is the same as a plant moving toward the sunlight. We are naturally drawn toward what will heal and expand us.
We are also pulled at particular ages in our lives to expand our consciousness: to understand all aspects of who we are, light and shadow. The drive for altered states of consciousness comes when we are teenagers. This is partly why teenagers are so prone to becoming involved in drug and alcohol abuse. I’m not saying that those things heal, but a teenager starts to look for definition of the self.
The drive can also come at midlife when an ordinary person who has lived an ordinary life suddenly needs to experience their shadow self and has what we call a ‘midlife crisis,’ which might also be called a midlife awakening. A person in midlife might feel the desire for deepened sexual or emotional experiences. They might also seek out meditation or other ways to shift their awareness.
In everyday life we enter in and out of altered states of consciousness. We sleep, stare out of a window in a trance-like state, dance, and lose ourselves in music. Then there is also making love, being in nature, getting angry in a car, etc. – there are so many ways in which we ‘lose ourselves.’ Being in a state of altered consciousness can feel wonderful, but it can also bring up aspects of ourselves that we don’t like to see. This is the shadow (ego) side of human nature. Many seekers of enlightenment don’t want to look at the shadow and often want to reach the spiritual, blissful euphoria of enlightenment by bypassing the emotions. Sadly, that isn’t sustainable and at some point the shadow will bring you down from your spiritual high as you verbally snap the head off another person for moving your meditation cushion! The shadow coming up is always good news; it just never feels like it, so we shun it. Being in an altered state of consciousness, through meditation, dance, or even certain drugs, amplifies the inner healing, when mixed with authentic living and critical self-inquiry.
It is what you do with your life in between the spiritual experiences that is really what gives the spiritual experiences the most meaning. All humans naturally gravitate toward wholeness; how they try and find it is an individual experience, but even those who try and find it through wealth will still be taken to a crisis point. We all must face the ‘disowned’ parts of ourselves, the parts of being human that we deny in ourselves, and judge other people for showing. Facing the disowned parts of ourselves is what it takes to become one and whole. Being naturally pulled toward what will heal us might mean we are pulled toward bad or difficult situations because we will come through the situation with more ‘knowing,’ which in turn will heal our situation on a deeper perhaps unconscious level. For example, I find that when I go traveling alone, I meet more people. Those people often have something to offer me that I don’t have for myself. If I travel with a friend, I don’t meet as many people. Whatever we personally need to feed our growth always shows up.
In many traditions, consciousness is understood to be the guiding force in that culture. For example many cultures have a rite of passage for teenagers, to allow them to adjust from the consciousness of child to adult. This creates a safe container in the community for the teenager to go through the transformation they are being pulled toward experiencing.
Believing you need to heal is to believe that there is something wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with you or the world. It would all work perfectly well if we left it alone. But, of course, the structure of humanity would fall apart. Going full circle can bring our needs back to the basic ones. It is the basic, emotional needs of humanity that are not being met: love, peace, and companionship. Yet also, for 80 percent of the world, physical needs are not being met either: food, clean water, shelter, and basic human rights. How can greed have let us get to the point where we allow a person (or millions) to starve right under our noses? The ego can justify anything, even the dire suffering of mankind or the planet. The ego is the insanity of the world’s situation, but the more you focus on it, the bigger it becomes. There is something deeper in all of us that is always trying to emerge.
The steps it will take to heal the world are the same steps it would take to heal your life. If people loved you and supported you unconditionally, could you be happy? If everyone had each other’s best interests at heart for the bigger picture, would we need capitalism? The ego tips our hand to put ourselves first and our excuse is that we have no other choice, as this is the way the world works. But the world isn’t working well. We really want to live in co-existence with the planet. We either choose this or die out – there is really no choice at all. How long it takes us to ‘get it’ and make the move toward love is as simple as the choices you make every day: whether it is what you buy, what you accept, how you act toward others, or what you think. The steps for global healing are the same as the steps to heal your own life:
Those are the only things that really matter. Intuition is how we feel safe and know that our unconditional love will not be used against us. Actually it’s impossible anyway, but we fear being hurt. Sharing with an open heart comes from knowing when it is right to give and to receive, with the intuition to know when you are coming from your center of balance.
When you have these moments of awakening you feel that normality is a waking sleep and these moments feel more real than what we know as reality. I have had these awakened moments throughout my life. This wasn’t the first one, but it’s one I remember the most. An awakened moment is simply a heightened state of consciousness. People use all kinds of methods to get to a place of expanded awareness and I am no exception: travel, sex, drugs, live music, lighting, dancing, daydreaming, meditation, sailing, walking, singing, dangerous sports, gazing endlessly at hot air balloons. All of these things work to some extent, but the sleep state of normality causes our eyes to dim and we lose our awakened state.
Many years ago I was working as a stage manager on a small show at Edinburgh Festival. I was driving the show’s transit van down Princess Street, when something remarkable happened. A bunch of kids were standing on a corner about to throw an egg at the van. The tall one with the egg caught my eye and I impulsively smiled and he smiled back. The whole scene must have taken a moment, but it seemed to last forever. I was in a state of total completeness. Everything seemed full and alive. The repercussions of the feeling lasted a few days, I felt utterly complete. Oh, and he never did throw that egg!
There are three stages of awakening. The first is what I experienced in Edinburgh, simply being engaged with the environment. Time seems to stop; you feel part of a flowing motion of life, simple and perfect happiness. The second is when the world becomes really sharp, colorful and vibrant. You are in the moment with a feeling of ‘being in love’ with everything. You feel as if you are at one with the world and everyone in it. Your mind stops thinking words and you feel a flow of loving energy coursing through your body. The final stage is when you lose track of yourself, you are at one with everything, but there is no ‘you.’ You have a sense of divine love within, connecting you to everything. You are universal energy and the universal energy is you. You have lost all sense of ego separation; you no longer exist as a separate entity.
Some people believe that these states of awakening are nothing more than the mind playing tricks. Yet when you are in one of these experiences they feel more real than what we commonly call reality. They feel so good that just knowing it is possible to feel like this makes life a remarkable experience.
It seems that the most intense awakenings happen in nature and it is easy to understand why. The natural world causes us to slow down and start observing, whereas it is impossible to take great notice of where you are simply from the volume of fast-moving bodies that surround us in the city. I believe that you have to be out in the trees, the mountains, and by water, to reconnect with yourself, life, and the universal energy. You just need to be able to really see the sky; the expanse of that, itself, can cause an awakening experience. By intuitively tuning in to nature you can create an awakening experience.
But wherever you are, all awakening experiences share one thing in common: you are experiencing the world through your intuitive senses with a lesser connection through ego. You might see intuition as the key to these awakening experiences, or that the awakening itself is your intuition functioning fully. The problem is you can only analyze the experience with hindsight because when you are in the awakening moment, you’re not connected enough to your ego to think about it.
When we become numb to life, intuition can wake us back up again. Awakening isn’t just about some spiritual enlightenment or a shift of consciousness, it’s about choosing life and being alive in that choice.
You can’t know about God, but you can ‘know’ God. It’s hard to come up with a better word than God, but it is linked with so many different ideas defining ‘God.’ I would like to use the term ‘the Knowing’ but it sounds like the title of a movie. So let’s just stick with God, with the understanding that it is the word used for the energy force of creation. Part of the problem with trying to find the right word for God is that there shouldn’t be a word. Words limit and contextualize something that you simply can’t understand with the mind. We can know God, but not in a way that can be discussed – only in a way that can be felt. To me, to know God is a form of intuitive knowing, almost like bringing yourself into a place of total stillness from which you are in connection with everything. In that place we no longer have the thoughts of ‘this is this and I am that.’ It is quite beautiful. Using inner knowing to find God is how we all connect fully.
For many people this connection happens when they are at their lowest ebb, when they are sending out a prayer for God’s help, and finally stop the noise in their head to listen for an answer. When the soul-searching moves inward it is because everything external hasn’t worked, when there really is nowhere else to turn but inward. Some people have found this moment when a loved one is missing or near death, when they feel that everything in life is lost, when the bills can’t be paid, or when they get sick.
The first time I heard God as a form of inner knowing, my mind turned the knowing into words. I was living in Bristol in the UK and involved with a serious drug addict. These scenes often involve a bathroom floor, and this story is no exception. Although God didn’t talk to me there, it was here that I decided I was done with life. I was crying and wanting to die. I really wanted to die, as if I could pull my insides out by wishing hard enough.
The next day I moved to London to go to drama school and escape that life but, as I was unpacking my things, I plugged in a desk lamp and experienced a direct current shock – which means you can’t let go of the object that is electrocuting you. My arms looked like Mr. Tickle as they went out in front of me. I realized someone would have to shut off the electricity; I looked at a girl standing in front of me and wondered why she wasn’t doing anything. I looked into her eyes and saw they were rolled back into her sockets. Then I realized it was me. In that moment I felt a knowing: if I wanted to go home, I could. It was a peaceful idea in a moment of madness. My body however replied ‘no’ and I made a very odd noise.
My roommate doesn’t know why he walked into the room or even if he heard the sound, but within seconds he had disconnected the plug. He himself should have received an electric shock, but somehow that wasn’t what happened. My life was saved and I guess, from that moment, I knew that there was something inside and outside of me. Everything that happened came from me; I believe my decision to die caused the circumstances of a possible death, but who provided the calm and safe feeling of death being home?
In the days that followed I was presented with many demons to battle. In my dreams, as well as waking hours, the choice was always the same. It wasn’t just a choice in that moment to choose life. It was more than a choice of life or death; it was a choice to live with the full understanding of what life is about. It was a fight of love over fear.
Every moment there are only two decisions to make. You can choose love or fear, love or ego. By choosing to live it was a case of fighting fear and to keep choosing love. And if I were to describe my work as an ‘intuitive therapist and catalyst’ simply, it is to be a guide to make choosing love easier.