The Art of Intuition

YEARS AGO, when I was a young woman working as a contributing editor at Town & Country, the magazine sent me on assignment to Costa Rica. The first night there, I attended a barbecue hosted by the organization I was writing about, and I remember standing under the tall, dark trees with a sweet, balmy wind ruffling my hair, just looking about, content to watch the crowd. The yellow glow of torches and the red fire from the huge hot barbecue cast black shadows across the scene, so that people seemed to rise from the night and fall back like specters. The night air was soft and dark as dreams.

“No, no. It’s true,” he said, and now I could hear the Scottish accent. “My grandmother was a seer, and I’ve inherited the gift from her. Every Sunday there’d be a line out the door of people waiting for the free readings that she gave after church on Sundays. I thought everyone’s grandmother gave readings, was a seer.”

His name was Ian McPhail, and he introduced me to two friends of his, Bill Jordan, an Irish vet who later created a wildlife organization, Care for the Wild, and Felipe Benavides, a Peruvian aristocrat who was deeply involved with the preservation of the Paracus Peninsula and the vicuña in the high Andes. We spent the next three days together.

I was enthralled. Never before had I heard grown men talk openly of God or loving kindness, or express their concern for plants and animals and the habitats in which they lived. Today, thirty years later, these are common themes, defending wildlife, saving the environment, but at the time this was way-out stuff. I’d never heard a macho American accept as natural and normal the underbelly of scientific lore—those inexplicable moments of intuition, insight, and telepathy that accompany the mystical journey into the Divine. We told stories late into the night.

Ian told me about an Australian friend of his who owned a sheep station so large that he’d named the outlying areas London, Edinburgh, and Plymouth. An aborigine brilliant with animals worked for him. Whatever the aborigine asked, the horse or ewe or dog would do. He seemed to know their very thoughts. The man was invaluable. The only thing is, he refused to work the whole year. One day, he would come to the boss and say, “It’s time to go.”

The rancher knew better than to argue. The next morning they would get in the jeep and drive for hours into the trackless bush, his workman pointing the way. Then, in the middle of nowhere, he’d say, “Stop.” He’d get out of the car, take off his shirt, pants, shoes, socks, underwear—fold them neatly, and place them on the seat of the jeep.

They had a profound effect on me, these three men. They opened me to an inner world that I’d tried hard to ignore, and when I went home to my husband and children, I felt confused and torn by conflicting loyalties. All my life I’d struggled to use principally the gifts of Reason, which, since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, have marked our culture as “civilized.” All my life I’d tried to tamp down the irrational, dark, dangerous, uncontrollable eruptions of intuition.

Intuition. Insight. Precognition. Clairvoyance. Today I’ve come to accept these qualities the way I accept that the sun, that rolling, roiling ball of fire, will come up tomorrow: not because I understand the motions of the earth and sun as we spin through vast cosmic systems, moving a million miles a day along the edges of the Milky Way (100 billion stars that form a galaxy 100,000 light-years wide), but because of its simple dailyness. It feels so ordinary that I use the word “understand,” when what I mean is, “am familiar with.” The same is true of instantaneous, unreflective apprehension.

What is intuition? A hunch, a gut feeling, an inspiration, or a premonition, precognition, clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, prescience, second sight—the shiver of “knowing” that pierces the veil of time and peers briefly into the future or at least into what’s not happened yet. It’s a decision made so fast you don’t know how you reached it: “It came to me,” you say. The root of intuition is related to the word tuition, from the Latin tueri, meaning “to guard, to protect.” For no rational reason we suddenly know: “Go here, not there!” Or sometimes: “Stop!” If we’re alert, we respond instantly, because intuition is always right.

The CEO who suddenly sells a stock “on a hunch” never pauses perhaps to wonder how he knew. He boasts of his smarts, attributing the sale to experience, intellect. On the other hand, the woman who shies in revulsion from a man in the doorway isn’t aware that she is reading a host of microsignals, including the energy field that surrounds him, his aura, or that in that first flash of intuition she “knows” him. Later, when he approaches her, all charm and smiles, asking her to dance, when he arouses her pity with his sad life story and sweeps her off her feet with flowers and chocolates ... her rational mind has already clouded her original knowledge. And only as she ends the abusive and violent marriage does she remember that she knew everything about him on first sight, that reason overrode her instinct.

Sometimes a definition is easier to mark by what it is not. Joanne, a brilliant journalist, offered her own experience to prove that intuition can’t be trusted. One day while waiting at the doctor’s office, she saw that the only other waiting patient was an unkempt, disreputable-looking woman, the more off-putting for having the shadow of a dark moustache. Joanne shuddered at the idea of talking to her! But as time passed and the boredom increased, they gradually fell into conversation, where to Joanne’s surprise the woman turned out to be a nuclear physicist, and captivating.

But that wasn’t intuition. Joanne had made her judgment based on intellect, not intuition. Intuition creeps in shyly to the noisy barn dance on ballet slippers so soft that you hardly hear them whisper against the floor. We recognize it most often in times of crisis and danger, those moments, rare and dramatic, when it saves your life or offers prescience you cannot understand. By definition intuition involves information unavailable to the intellect, and it is always to be trusted.

The one problem with intuition is that while it gives you a nudge or hesitation or signals to go here or there, it cannot tell you WHY! Intuition warns you that something in the future is “wrong” for you, but it cannot tell you what! Perhaps you’ve been invited on a wonderful adventure with friends. You want to go, yet you hesitate, drag your heels, can’t bring yourself to commit! Your conscious mind wants to join them; your intuition whispers no.

I have a friend whose mother was engaged to a young man who loved cinder-path motorcycle racing, a dangerous sport. She signed up to go on a cruise with her family, while her fiancé entered his last big race. Then intuition intervened. Anxiety. She canceled the cruise and insisted that her fiancé forgo his cinder-path race. He loaned his motorcycle to a friend to take his place. The cruise ship sank. The friend was killed in the race.

Carl Jung spoke of the collective unconscious. Rupert Sheldrake suggests we operate in “morphic fields,” and Max Planck, the physicist, spoke of the matrix behind all matter. In his entertaining book Blink, the Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell proposes that intuition is the result of the “adaptive unconscious,” which is that part of the brain that leaps to instant and brilliant conclusions. (Don’t you love the way scientists make up new terms for perfectly adequate ones?) Gladwell is interested in those decisions made in the blink of an eye. He tells how the Getty Museum in Los Angeles was about to spend $10 million for a magnificent kouros, a beautiful Greek statue of a standing boy, fists clasped at his thighs. A battery of scientific tests had already validated its absolute authenticity, but when Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, saw it, the first words that popped into his mind were fresh and wrong. Federico Zeri and Evelyn Harrison, two authorities, agreed. Georgios Dontas, head of the Archaeological Society in Athens, went cold when he saw the work. “I felt as though there was a glass between me and the work.” Another felt a shudder of intuitive repulsion. These authorities could not really explain how they knew it was a fake. They simply had an “educated eye.”

Gladwell calls such snap decisions the “thin slicing” of information by the brain, and he describes test after test, illustrating the swiftness of such pattern recognition. Observers following a married couple’s conversation on any neutral subject for one hour can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether the marriage will last for fifteen years. Only fifteen minutes of observation yields a reading that’s 90 percent accurate. Students watching a videotape of a teacher speaking nothing but garbled nonsense syllables can predict within two seconds with 90 percent accuracy whether the teacher is good or not.

The rest of Gladwell’s book suggests that instantaneous decidement is simply the educated brain whipping through reams of information like a giant computer and coming up with judgments so fast they seem to have been made in a flash. It’s a survival skill. In times of danger, he says, you don’t want to have to stop and reflect: You jump! He points out that first impressions are not always right (this is not my experience, by the way), that unconscious bias comes into play, especially concerning the opposite sex or color or race or cultural distinctions. We override our instincts by what psychologist Jonathan Schooler calls verbal overshadowing.

One of Gladwell’s most interesting observations concerns damage to the ventromedial prefrontal area of the brain, behind the nose. This is the decision-making center, and damage to this area causes “a disconnect between what you know and what you do.” You can’t make a decision; you have neither intuition nor reflection, or else you pore over the material endlessly, knowing what to do but never arriving at the impulse to act.

The ancient Hindus spoke of the Akashic River of Knowledge that sages dip into now and again. I remember reading years ago of Rupert Sheldrake’s “morphic fields,” an invisible medium in which all information floats. Sheldrake tells one story of how, after years of effort by scientists to create in the laboratory a totally new crystal, they finally succeeded ... after which the “artificial” crystal could easily be duplicated anywhere in the world, as if the first one served as a spiritual template for all others; and he recounted how, after one group of lab rats in London mastered a difficult maze, their offspring, the next generation, knew it automatically. But how? (I might add that Sheldrake created a storm of controversy, and charges in Nature that his thesis is pseudoscience.)

Also around this time the hundred-monkey syndrome started to make the rounds. The story began with an isolated island off the coast of Japan that served as a research station for monkeys. Because the island didn’t produce enough food, extra supplies were periodically dropped down to the monkeys by plane. One day, one genius young female monkey took a dropped yam down to the ocean and washed the sand off in the sea before eating it. Not only was her yam clean, but it also had a pleasant salty taste. No other monkeys washed their food, but this one female always did, and she taught her young to wash their food as well. Soon their playmates began to imitate the action, so that a whole generation of young monkeys washed its food.

At some point the yam-washing number reached a critical mass (call it ninety-nine monkeys washing their yams), while the rest of the population still held out. And then the hundredth monkey carried a yam down to the sea and washed it in the salty waves. The scale tipped. Suddenly every monkey on the island, young and old, began to wash its food. Today we call it the tipping point.

Is this what will happen with us, as more and more people become aware of our intuition, of prescient dreams and creative premonitions? For intuition can come in many forms. When the “knowing” relates to the present we call it intuition. When the insight concerns the future, we call it precognition, prescience, or presentiment. When it concerns thought transference, we name it mental telepathy. But aren’t they all aspects of the same ability, and does it matter if the information comes in a dream or during meditation, while showering or working quietly in the garden?

Elizabeth Whiteley is a Washington, D.C., painter and sculptor. She told me that artists sometimes paint the future, as she herself has done. On one occasion, after moving to a new apartment, she recognized the view from one of the windows as being the very image she had painted ten years earlier. On another occasion, she was nearly killed in a sailing accident when a motorboat rammed her vessel. Thrown into the water, near drowning, she was struck by the special green color of the water. Later, thinking she should paint away her trauma, she discovered she had already painted the scene, employing exactly that unusual green, a tone she had never used before.

In 1999, Michael Richards, an African-American sculptor, completed a bronze statue of a black Saint Sebastian pierced by flying airplanes. Two years later, while working in his studio on the ninety-second floor of South Tower of the World Trade Center, he was one of the thousands killed by terrorists in hijacked airplanes, and much of his work was destroyed. As for writers, we don’t have to look far to find prescient imagination. Back to the World Trade Center, it was in a Tom Clancy novel that planes first flew into the towers.

LARRY DOSSEY, in his book The Power of Premonitions, gives another explanation of intuition and precognition: The mind, he says, is “nonlocal,” and though lodged in the brain and locked inside the skull, it has the ability to sweep out beyond time and space to grasp at everything and everywhere. The term nonlocal comes from physics. According to the old world order, Time always and consistently moves forward, but Dossey notes that in theory Time can move in any direction—backward, forward, sideways—exposing all information to the infinite, unhindered power of the “nonlocal” mind.

Dossey’s book is filled with stories of ordinary people foreseeing catastrophic events, and this is so common both in folklore and in scientific studies that you’d think it would hardly rouse comment. The events of 9/11, for example, generated the largest out-pouring of disaster premonitions ever received at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, which has collected more than fourteen thousand cases of intuition and extrasensory perception since the 1920s. (The spike was followed, curiously, by a big drop-off in premonitions only hours before the event itself. Why? Is that because at a certain moment there’s no longer time to take advantage of the portent, change plans? Or because the event has become fixed somehow, memorable?)

Even more startling, however, is the fact that, apparently, based on their inexplicable cognitions, people changed their behavior. Dossey reports that 79 percent of the planes used as weapons of attack that fateful September day had not been full: a chance of one in a million. American Airlines Flight 11, the Boeing 767 that crashed into the North Tower, had room for 168 passengers, but only 92 people were aboard that day; United Flight 175, which hurtled into the South Tower, could likewise have carried 168 passengers but had only 65 people aboard—a 67 percent passenger vacancy rate; while the Boeing 757 that crashed in Pennsylvania was around 80 percent unoccupied, with only 37 of 182 passenger seats filled. When was the last time you or anyone you know flew in a plane with two-thirds of the seats unfilled? One of the people who changed her flight that day was Jean Houston, the renowned psychic.

One study from the 1950s found that trains involved in accidents carried fewer riders on the days of accidents than on other days. In 1912 when the Titanic made her maiden (and final) crossing of the Atlantic, many people had forebodings. It sailed unfilled. J. P. Morgan was one of those who canceled his Titanic passage on a hunch.

At this point I have to report that I was one of many people who changed a flight that was scheduled for the day of September 11, 2001. I was supposed to fly from New Mexico back to Washington, D.C., but a few weeks beforehand I began to experience such anxiety, such tooth-chattering, gut-churning, sickening nausea at the thought of flying on that day, that I finally paid a $100 fee to change my ticket and come home one day early, on September 10. The moment I rebooked the reservation, all fretting vanished. I was mystified. I had an uneventful flight, arriving home only to wake the next morning and watch in anguish with the rest of the world as the Twin Towers collapsed repeatedly on TV. Later I walked down the hill from my house to the Potomac River, where a pillar of smoke rose above the trees from the Pentagon. I had had a premonition—and acted on it—but I did not foresee the burning towers, the crash of planes, and I’m left wondering why? Why is one ordinary woman saved from the minor inconvenience of airport closings, an inability to get home? And what of the 2,973 people who died in the attacks? I’ve asked several psychics about 9/11, and none foresaw the tragedy. Dossey, however, reports at least two premonitions of destruction and smoke, though they came to no one who could avert the attacks.

INTUITION IS DIFFERENT FROM FEAR. Intuition comes to each of us in its own personal way. Perhaps it’s a nagging sense that something’s wrong, though you can’t put your finger on it: as when in a dream you’ve lost something and you’re searching for you-don’t-know-what. Sometimes it’s an odd lassitude or lethargy, a paralyzing inability to act, the hesitation being itself the warning that you’re about to take a false step. Sometimes it comes as a physical sensation, a gut-wrenching kick to the belly, the hair rising on your arms, goose bumps, a shudder, or the tingling of your scalp.

In recent years I’ve started playing again and I’ve found all the same symptoms, but far from being a hindrance I’ve recognize these physical manifestations as signals of intuition: I’m about to make a wrong move. Moreover, now that I’m listening, aware, the symptoms don’t manifest with such virulence. If my heart beats thump! I pause. I breathe. I reexamine the board. My Higher Self knows what my mind can’t yet see: I’m about to make a bad move; there’s another solution to the trap.

Once I agreed to voluntary surgery. This was in the early eighties, before the AIDS epidemic, before most people (including myself) had even heard the term. The doctor was ready to schedule the operation in two weeks, but I put him off. “No, if I’m going to do this, I need two pints of my own blood for a transfusion.”

Nonetheless, I had a bee in my bonnet. I went to the Red Cross and insisted on having a pint of blood drawn and put aside in my name. Six or eight weeks later they gathered the second pint. At the hospital, the night before surgery, I asked if the two pints of blood had been delivered. The nurse said no, but not to worry; I wouldn’t need it.

Later, one of the nurses asked me about it: “How did you know to do that?” she inquired. “What a good idea. I think everyone should do that before surgery.” A year later, and we were in a full-blown AIDS epidemic with everyone aware of the transmission of the disease through ordinary blood transfusion.

Jane Rottier, now eighty-three years old, says she used to have premonitory dreams and doesn’t anymore. She remembers one time when she was around twenty-five years old. She’d been writing letters. She lay down to nap and dreamed that her brother, who was in the military, would be home for Christmas. In her dream she saw him carrying three suitcases. He set them down on the front steps, calling, “Mama, Mama!”

When she woke up, she told her mother, “I think Bob’s coming home for Christmas.” That night at two in the morning, she was awoken by a rattling sound. Looking out the window, she saw her brother standing in the snow with three suitcases at his feet. He was throwing pebbles at her window. It annoyed him that his sister had spoiled his Christmas surprise.

“Don’t be silly, boy,” his mother would say. But moments later his father would be at the door. Animals have this gift as well, and we see it in our own pets: the dog who suddenly leaps up and starts pacing at the doorway while his master is getting off the bus three blocks away; the cat who curls discreetly in the front hall, too dignified to make the fuss of a dog—their intuitions carried on the seeds of love.

Children are highly attuned. I remember my mother taking my sister and me to the trotting races one summer evening. I don’t know how old I was, ten, perhaps? Eleven? We shared one program that gave the names of the horses, owners, jockeys, and colors. I remember that I chose the winner for every race except one, when my sister demanded the horse I’d chosen: “I was going to pick that one!” And my mother’s cajoling voice: “Let her have it; you’ve won every time.” Her horse won, and my second choice came in second. We didn’t bet, of course, but the party behind us leaned forward, you can be sure, to hear which horse the child picked, and I think they may have won some serious money that night.

I said earlier that you must always trust your intuition. This is true, unless you interrupt the perfect machinery of your mind. If you are taking drugs, if you are addicted to alcohol, if you are in emotional distress, angry, vengeful, or overwhelmed by grief—be cautious. Test your intuitions, for all of these (and especially the mind-altering substances) can intervene, and then you are baffled by things that you once knew intuitively how to handle.

IN BLINK, Malcolm Gladwell explains these inexplicable moments of sheer knowing (you can almost hear his sigh of relief) as no more than the swift workings of the “educated eye.” But his explanation falls far short. I mentioned the Irish vet Bill Jordan, who became famous for his work in saving wildlife and increasing public awareness of the cruelty inflicted in countless ways on mute and helpless animals. When he was a young medical student in Edinburgh, he went to his oral exams and to his surprise he couldn’t make a mistake. He knew it all! As if the responses were whispered by angels into his ear. He knew the questions the examiners were about to ask, as well as the best responses. He was in the flow. In the zone. Inspired. Perhaps you’ve had such moments while playing tennis or golf, or as an artist when, captured by the Muse, you feel yourself lifted to the heights of creative exaltation. Is that, too, a sample of “thin-slicing” by the “adaptive unconscious,” the work of the “educated eye”?

There is a word for these other psychic experiences: psi. The term, coined in 1942 by British psychologist Robert Thouless, describes abilities that have baffled scientists since the early 1800s. Psi (pronounced “sigh”) is related to the Greek word psyche, meaning “soul or spirit,” and it defines the four ways of receiving information or perceptions without the normal five senses plus two ways in which your thoughts influence events. These six qualities may be related to intuition, or perhaps they are different aspects of the single gift, but surely they belong in our discussion of the phenomenon.

There are two kinds of psi:

Perceptions include clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, telepathy, precognition, premonition, psychic readings, psychometry.

Projections involving mind over matter include psychic surgery, healing touch, levitation, materialization or dematerialization, and other matters not included in this book.

There are four ways of receiving: (1) With telepathy, or thought transference, information moves mentally from person to person across space; (2) with clairvoyance, you view or “see” a distant event; (3) with clairaudience you hear the information, sometimes even as an external voice murmuring in your ear; (4) with clairsentience you experience a physical sensation, that is, you feel what is going on in the body of your friend, or you reach a medical diagnosis by sensing the pain of another in your own body.

In addition to these four subtle ways of receiving information, another quality falls under the umbrella of psi. With your own focused intention, known as psychokinesis (PK), you are not receiving but projecting. You are able to: bend spoons, move cigarettes around a tabletop, walk on fire without being burned, sleep like an Indian fakir on a bed of nails, or pierce your cheeks with thorns, your belly with swords without bleeding or wounds or scars; or you “send” healing energy and prayer to a person who is ill or in pain. We think of Christ healing the lepers and the blind man or even the centurion’s daughter from afar, and we remember His injunction that “this and more shall you do in my name.” We all have this ability, if we have the capacity to love. In labs at the Princeton School of Engineering, literally millions of experiments have demonstrated that by thought alone anyone can influence highly calibrated, random-operating machines—nonsentient matter. Distance makes no difference. You can send an intention from Australia to one of the random-operating machines in Princeton, New Jersey, and at statistically significant levels you have influenced the results. Time makes no difference. You can send your intention ten days before the machine makes a “run,” and your intention will be recognized. More astonishing, you can send your intention after the machine has produced its results, and if the data have not yet been reviewed and recorded, your intention will be evidenced at statistically significant levels!

It should be noted that everyone has both perceptive and projective abilities. Mental telepathy, for example, requires two people using the two different skills: a sender and a receiver. The sender is using the projective ability, the receiver the perceptive one. The two skills are always discrete: You can send or receive, but never at the same time.