The Art of Intuition

IN 1846, JEAN-EUGÈNE ROBERT-HOUDIN, the most renowned magician of his time (the man from whom Harry Houdini would later take his name), asked for leave to investigate the claims of the amazing French clairvoyant Alexis Didier, who was astonishing all of Europe with his gifts. With bandaged eyes Didier could beat his opponent at a game of cards, knowing all the cards dealt, not only those in his own hand but also those in the hand of his antagonist. He claimed it was merely intuition. Or second sight. With his eyes closed, he could read pages selected at random in a book. He could describe a villa hundreds of miles away, down to the paintings on the wall.

It is widely accepted that it takes a fraud to uncover one. Robert-Houdin, knowing the magic tricks of conjuring and sleight-of-hand, asked to investigate the impostor. With his own hands he bandaged Didier’s eyes, and when they were well encased in wadding and bandages, he took out two new decks of cards, still in their government-stamped wrappers, opened them, shuffled, asked Alexis to cut, and proceeded to play écarté against the blindfolded intuitive.

Baffled, Robert-Houdin moved on to another test. He removed Didier’s useless bandages, pulled a book from his pocket, and, indicating a particular starting place, asked him to read at a point that was eight pages farther on. Alexis pricked the page two-thirds down with a pin, returned the book to Houdin, and spoke: “Après cette triste cérémonie. ...”

If Contemplation which introduces us to the very heart of creation does not inflame us with such love that it gives us, together with deep joy, the understanding of the infinite misery of the world, it is a vain kind of contemplation; it is the contemplation of a false God. The sign of true contemplation is charity. By the capacity for forgiveness shall I recognize your God and also your opening to creation.

MARIUS GROUT, French Quaker

I’m fascinated by what happens to us when we die. I’m not afraid of dying (though terrified of the pain that may accompany it; horrified also at the prospect of becoming a burden to my children, an Alzheimer’s vegetable “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” including continence and, most important, consciousness, by which I mean awareness of what is happening around me, of the glass of water at my hand, the light in the soap bubbles in the kitchen sink, the faces of my beloved children and their kids). I accept without question the reality of intuition, telepathy, premonitions, presentiment, and psychic or paranormal experiences. I accept also the concept of spirits and invisible guardians watching over us, of angels and a spiritual medium in which we live like fish in water, and later in this book I will speak about sensitives and psychics and the difference between them and the mediums who see spirits and ghosts. Meanwhile, I keep tight hold for the moment on this topic of intuition in its narrowest sense. What’s interesting about precognition and intuition and other forms of psi is the number of people who believe they’ve had at least one experience. Present understanding of our brains leaves no room for these phenomena.

SOMETIMES AS I’M GOING to bed at night, I ask for the solution to a problem that’s been puzzling me, for I have learned the ancient folk wisdom of “Sleep on it. You’ll know the answer in the morning.” Like many people, I keep a pad of paper by the bed and a pen or pencil in order to write down dreams and nighttime insights.

I saw the inside of my brain, and lights, which I knew were thoughts, sweeping like tidal waters washing through a sponge—pouring in and out, over and through the cells of my brain, and not just lighting up one segment of my brain (as I’d imagined) but all the areas except one. In my dream I tried to express what I was seeing, to describe it, but the language center (which, in my dream was at the left side of my temple—the left parietal) was mute; and in the dream I understood that if language were activated, the wash of intuition (at least in my dream) could not be discerned.

These intuitions could be expressed later, but the bolt from the blue comes, like mystical union, empty of words. Lights flare up throughout the brain, flashing here and there, but the “knowing” arrives visually, as in a painting or else accompanied by physical sensations such as goose bumps, chills, hairs rising on your scalp or neck, a wrenching in the gut, or your feet racing out of danger. But for that instant, language, cognition, is deliberately cut off. Why? In my dream I knew the reason was to force me to listen! and respond without “thinking” through the facts.

Was my dream a true depiction of intuition and heightened and psychic abilities at work? I don’t know. When monks, nuns, and experienced meditators are hooked up to brain scan machines during intense prayer and meditation, it is the prefrontal cortex that lights up, while the parietal area goes dark, as the meditators tap into the transcendent, speechless silence of unity with the Divine. The prefrontal cortex is known as the seat of cognition, intellect, reasoning. The left parietal controls language (just as I saw!); the right parietal is concerned with nonverbal memory.

Still she sat. “I think I’ll stay,” she thought, not knowing why, and curiously the cars on her left also didn’t move. Suddenly a car raced into the intersection, plunged through the red light, and tore around the corner. Had she moved when the light turned green, that car would have killed her daughter in the passenger seat.

Lyn Buchanan, who worked for the U.S. military as a controlled remote viewer and who later founded a company that teaches pathways to inner intuition, was waiting in his car one evening to cross a busy two-lane highway when suddenly, as if with a mind of its own, his car leaped across the steady stream of commuter traffic, dodged between the oncoming cars, and landed safely on the far side just as a truck plowed into the post where seconds earlier he’d been waiting in his car. Intuition? Foresight? Second sight? Precognition?

To a degree it does not lend itself to scientific investigation. According to the Dalai Lama (and Buddhism has been investigating consciousness for millennia), the nature of consciousness or awareness, shepa in Tibetan, has no material form or shape at all. Instead of having some material nature, consciousness is “mere experience” or “awareness.”

But is that all? Some years ago neuroscientists thought the neurons in the brain couldn’t change or regenerate. Now we know that the brains of London cabbies grow huge simply by their having to learn every street and avenue and alleyway in that huge city. Birds learn to peck a hole in the paper top of milk bottles so they can drink the milk. People who meditate change the very structure of their brains, opening access to the deep gamma waves that are then paramount. By meditating they heal physiological breaches in the brain.

A case study reported in 1980 in Science concerned a hydro-cephalic student at Sheffield University, England, who had virtually no brain! Increased intracranial pressure had compressed his cerebral cortex against his skull to less than a millimeter in thickness. Nonetheless, he had an IQ of 126 and graduated with first-class honors in mathematics.

And we think we know anything about consciousness? We observe the physical world around us and name it “consciousness,” but without experience we’d forget the outer world we’re looking at. Memory plays its part in consciousness by enabling us to recall our own experiences or be aware of emotions surging through us; and all of this we think of as basic consciousness. Yet there’s still another, even higher aspect of consciousness: the “luminous quality of the mind” that shines on the external world and sees it not as separate from itself but integral. The idea of separation is itself a trick of consciousness. Indeed, how can the conscious mind look into or study itself?

The fact is, we’re hard put even to say when someone is conscious or not. Witness the controversy over Terri Schindler Schiavo, who was in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) for fifteen years, until she was allowed to die by court order in 2005. Was she “alive”? Did she know what was happening around her? Could she hear and think? Was she dead before they shut down the machines that kept her heart beating, her lungs taking in air?

At one time “locked-in” patients were thought to be unconscious. However, those who have brain function but cannot communicate because of brain injury may have a new way to make their needs known. Engineers at the University of Toronto have developed a system that measures blood flow to the parts of the brain that process preferences. If it works, it will allow patients to express a choice and have that decision understood.

In 2006 the Journal of Clinical Investigation published new research on the recovery of Terry Wallis, who lived nineteen years in a minimally conscious state (MCS). In 1984, as a nineteen-year-old, Terry survived a car crash that sheared the nerve connections in his brain, putting him in a minimally conscious state and rendering him quadriplegic. His parents visited regularly, talking to him all the time, until one day, nineteen years later, he spoke the word Mom, and so began his recovery.

Time after time, a patient dies on the operating table, brain waves flat, no pulse or vital signs, only to recover a few minutes (in at least one case hours!), later to report on what happened during the lapse: the surgeons’ conversations, the efforts to bring the patient back to life. Raymond Moody wrote of this phenomenon as long ago as 1975 in his book Life After Life, followed by further reports by Kenneth Ring, professor emeritus in psychology at the University of Connecticut, and by so many others that today the acronym NDE or “near-death experience” has become as commonly recognized as “out-of-body” experience. Betty Eadie wrote about what happened in her near-death experience in her book Embraced by the Light, and Dannion Brinkley claims to have been killed not once but thrice, revealing tales of a dark tunnel, a crystal city, a cathedral of knowledge, and angels offering revelations of the future. The 1982 near-death experience of Mellen-Thomas Benedict, who “died” of cancer, echoes the others, with the Light pulling him into one experience after another and shifting into images of Christ, the Buddha, mandalas, archetypical images, Lord Krishna, and his Higher Self. He drank of the River of Life. He visited pre-Creation before the Big Bang and stood in the mystic’s void of absolute, pure consciousness, in the energy and vibration of the space between atoms. And later, when he was brought back once more into “the vibratory realm,” as he called it, he tasted the gift of “being the human part of God.” He had been declared clinically dead and remained so, we’re told, for an hour and a half.

Later, when she came back in her body and was recovering from the surgery, she reported everything she had heard and seen—the brilliant colors, the lights, the words spoken, the actions taken, her own shaved hair, the wedding ring on her hand, and none of this would have been remarkable if you believe that consciousness continues after death, except that Vicky had been blind from birth.

The curious case of Pam Reynolds offers another view of how boundless is our consciousness. Her full story was written up in Michael Sabom’s book Light and Death, and retold by NPR reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty in her beautiful Fingerprints of God, but it doesn’t mean the events should not be retold here, so powerful are the implications of this oneiric quality of the human brain.

When she was thirty-five Pam had a basilar artery aneurysm, with blood leaking into her brain. She flew to Arizona for “standstill” surgery. There the doctors taped her eyes shut, packed her body in ice to lower her temperature, and stopped her heart. When her temperature dropped to about 60 degrees, the doctors drained all the blood out of her body, so that the aneurism sac in her brain would collapse and could be clipped.

But from Pam’s point of view what happened was remarkable. As with many NDEs, she reported floating to the ceiling and looking around with intense awareness. It was wonderful! Colors were extravagant, sounds intensified, and all her senses sharper than in life. She watched the doctors working on her body—and didn’t care. She heard their words, examined with curiosity the surgeon’s drill, and at that moment saw a pinprick of light calling to her. She felt herself pulled toward the light, and there stood her grandmother and her musician uncle, David Saxton, who had died earlier of a heart attack. Behind them stood a sea of people, all shimmering with light and looking young and joyous and beautiful, and wearing “coats of light.”

Pam stood in the breath, yearning to dive deeper into the Light, when her uncle David informed her that she had to go back into her body. She didn’t even want to look at her body. She protested, refused, and then her uncle pushed her. “And I hit the body, and I heard the title track to the Eagles’ album Hotel California. When I hit the body the line was: ‘You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.’” After she recovered, she thought she’d been hallucinating, despite the fact that her deepest brain functions had been shut off. But a year later, when she described what she had seen and heard of the surgery in the operating room, her doctor confirmed it all. And what does this say about consciousness? Or death?

SOMETHING LIKE EIGHT MILLION PEOPLE have had a near-death experience (NDE). In other words they clinically died (evidencing no brain or heart activity) and mysteriously returned to life. (But they did not really die, did they? Or they’d not be back giving reports.) Some saw nothing: the River Lethe of forgetfulness. But many return with tales of encountering a great light or beautiful Beings of Light, often perceived as sheer Intelligence. Some were met by angels and sages, others by dead relatives welcoming them. One child who returned from this chthonic journey told his father he had met a “little brother,” at which the father burst into tears and confirmed that, yes, an older baby had died before this boy was born.

These blessed souls, returning, also uniformly report knowing that everything in the Universe operates perfectly, according to a perfect plan, even suffering, even famine, torture, war, abuse. Even our unanswered prayers. Often these individuals are transformed by their experience. They have had a spiritual awakening. They can no longer tolerate the physical world with its illusions, anger, materialism, its polarities of judging everything as good/bad, black/white, either/or, we/they. Nothing appears to them as before, and they are not quick to decide anymore what’s good for us or bad but only what is.

IT WAS WHILE THINKING about this book that I began to wonder how truly odd is consciousness. We think. We respond to neural stimuli (pokes, punches, pricks). We have sudden flashes of intuition—“Don’t move!”—that sometimes save our lives. And roughly every sixteen or seventeen hours, every adult, child, and doddering aged creature lies down and goes to sleep. Soldiers in opposing armies put down their weapons, turn out the lights, and fall asleep. Bankers, builders, beggars and brawlers, dictators and prisoners, pacifists and terrorists, mothers and babies—everyone gives pause to conscious cognition and drops into a state of otherness. We dream. We live alternative states in sleep and then wake up and wind up the mortal coil again.

Consciousness is marked by creativity, intuition, the play of imagination. We see its operation not only in the beating of a heart, the pulsing orange or green line of an electrical brain monitor, the rise and fall of breath, digestion and defecation, but also in eye movements and our cries of joy and pain. We see it in hearts broken by grief or in the entanglement of telepathy and precognition, in clairvoyance and remote or distant viewing.

I REMEMBER MY MOTHER telling me while riding in the car with her (I remember the very crossroad that we passed, such an impression did her words make on me as a child) that when you die “your life passes before your eyes.” Folktales are rich with such reports. People have been dying and returning, apparently, since the beginning of time.

You see your life like a movie flashing before your eyes, she told me, and events are shown dispassionately and without judgments of good or bad (no punishment). Rather, you see them from the point of view of everyone involved. I read of one child who decided to come back to life because during this review she understood that she was being shown only those moments when she “hadn’t loved enough.” She returned to life in order to love more deeply this time around. Is compassion another aspect of consciousness?

So it’s not goodbye when we die but sayonara, hasta la vista, see ya, I’ll meet you over there. Swedenborg has a lot to say about what happens when we die, and how those who have lived good lives go to a place of goodness, and those who have lived evil lives also go there but find themselves so uneasy in heaven that gladly they flee to the hell of their own making and comfort level.

Meanwhile, what can we do to increase our intuition, creativity, and heightened perceptions? Our consciousness? What can we do to awaken and enter the luminous mystery that so often we approach with dulled eyes and plodding footsteps? The answer lies in our brain waves, and this, too, as you see in the next chapter, is a skill that can be learned.