The Art of Intuition

Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be. We cannot be created for this sort of suffering.

JOHN KEATS, in a letter

MANY YEARS AGO, Annabel Stehli, a friend of mine, phoned to say she had a tape she wanted me to listen to.

We were living in Brooklyn Heights at the time, and Annabel, a single woman with two little girls, lived a few streets over. Dotsie developed leukemia at age four, and Georgiana, the younger child, was autistic. The father had run out. (Of course! I thought indignantly on behalf of my lovely friend. Just like a man!) They lived in a small upstairs apartment overlooking a noisy street, and Annabel was in danger of unraveling. Two babies, both with disabilities, and sweet though they were, it was hard for her to make it through a day. Dotsie’s hair had fallen out from the chemotherapy, and her joints and face were swollen. She was young and innocent, and she was sick, poor little thing. She hurt, and the fact that her younger sister could not speak, could not look you in the face, could not play with other children, including mine, when we came over for a playdate or to help out Annabel—all combined to make it hard for Annabel.

At age eight, Dotsie died. A year or more passed, and one day Annabel phoned me. She had just returned from England, she said, where she’d seen the famous medium Ena Twigg.

“What’s a medium?” I asked in my simplicity.

“I have a tape.” She was bursting with excitement. “Will you listen to it? I want you to tell me what you think.”

She came over to my apartment. We put the tape into the recorder, and soon the voice of the medium with her English accent filled the room. A moment later her voice changed, and a chill ran down me. It was Dotsie! I knew that voice. I knew that child! There was no doubt in my mind. Moreover, as if to dispel any questions her mother might have had, the voice of Dotsie told how one day after she had died she had watched her mother weeping while folding up her little clothes. Then she described a moment, a single act that no one but her mother could have known.

“It’s true!” said Annabel, her face alight. “It’s true!”⁴

That was the first time I heard about mediumship. Never did I imagine that I would acquire intuitive gifts myself (though nothing approaching the level of the magnificent Ena Twigg) and never did I realize that we all have it within our power to cross these boundaries. Some people are more naturally gifted than others, but I’m convinced we all can do it!

But before I was able to understand these things, years of learning lay ahead of me. First I had to accept the possibility that there was indeed a spiritual dimension (or more than one), that the soul lives on after death, that angels and spirits may be more than metaphor, and that we are all subject to moments of grace, inexplicably enfolding us in love. And this, despite the fact (am I particularly dense?) that I had been reared in the Episcopal Church, after all, which taught belief in God and the afterlife, in the love and forgiveness of a Holy Spirit. Somehow I needed proof before I could accept the teachings as true. Yet evidence abounded. It was all around me. As long ago as 1758, the mystic Swedenborg had visited Queen Louisa Ulrika of Sweden, who asked him to tell her something about her deceased brother Augustus William. The next day, Swedenborg whispered something in her ear. Turning pale, she explained that what she’d heard was something only she and her brother could know. Another time a woman who had lost an important document came to the famous clairvoyant, asking if a recently deceased person could tell him where it was, and this information, too, he passed along.

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I was afraid of the dark. We lived in the Maryland countryside. Today the landscape is covered by developments, but in those days when no one lived nearby, the tall oaks towered over the roof, swaying gently like sea kelp and casting a greenish light over us, as if we lived underwater. But at night the darkness was immense. We never went outside at night.

In summer, of course, the long, slow, pearl dusk lit by fireflies kept the night at bay until we children were well in bed. But in winter the family crouched in the small study, our parents and we three kids, until our mother would nod to me.

“Time for bed. Give a kiss good night.”

I dreaded bedtime. My parents didn’t think to walk me upstairs, and I knew better than to invite their ridicule, ask for coddling.

“She’s afraid of the dark!” They would have laughed and then, impatient: “Now, go on. There’s nothing there.”

From the small study I had to cross the pitch-black downstairs hall. It took all my courage to leap into the pit toward the light switch on the far wall, right next (oh, horror!) to the yawning black doorway of the formal living room. Once there, safe for a moment in a yellow pool of the light, I stood helpless, staring into the black hole up the stairs.

I could turn on the light from downstairs and climb the lit stairwell, but even so, once upstairs I had to flick off the light at the far wall and dash through darkness—five steps—to my room! (No one thought of leaving lights on, and the possibility never entered my head, so trained were we to save electricity.)

Why was I so afraid? The grown-ups walked through the black rooms without a thought, familiar as they were with the numb stability of chairs and tables. But to me the dark was filled with subtle movement, a shifting of air, a kind of silent breathing, and a sense of being watched.

Things . . . watching.

Later, when I was grown and living in other rooms in other houses, I’d sometimes catch the flicker of a shadow at the corner of my eye and turn to see . . . nothing there. Sometimes I’d shudder at the uncomfortable sensation that someone was in the room with me. I’d swivel around, only to find the room empty. Was it my imagination? The play of light? My eyesight was excellent; these instincts weren’t the consequence of impaired vision. Yet this—what do I call it?—enhanced acuity of the senses carried over into adulthood.

Spirits are usually seen with peripheral vision, out of the corner of your eyes. A flash and they are gone. They are sensed with the “spiritual eye.”

I didn’t believe in ghosts or spirits. For that matter I didn’t even believe in God (at least not as the white-bearded, erratic, male, Old Testament deity I’d read about, and I wasn’t so sure of the Father that Jesus offered either, no one having told me that our images of God might grow and change as we mature). Yet I believed in Something that I didn’t understand. I’d stand speechless sometimes at the beauty of a tree, a pond, the bravery of a squirrel. And sometimes shiver as if touched by the trailing of a will-o’-the-wisp.

I’m telling you all this as an introduction to my fear of dying. (This was before I met my first ghost or had my life saved by an angel or experienced most of the events that awakened my consciousness.)

I was twenty-four or -five. It had only recently dawned on me that I could be extinguished utterly, and at night I lay in bed beside my husband, rigid with terror, my thoughts flying and fleeing this apprehension of reality, scrabbling for escape. Of course, I’d known about death since the age of two: The cat had died. So, too, the chickens, mice, goldfish, dogs. But they weren’t me, and I suppose you have to reach a certain level of maturity before you can grasp that egocentric fact. In teen age, you’re impregnable, immortal, immutable, a god.

So there I was at twenty-five, lying in the dark in bed, thinking about being dead, and, worse, seeing no way out and knowing that my own death was coming closer with every passing day (time hauling me handcuffed toward the Infinite Dark). Finally I decided that contemplating my extinction, as I was doing, was driving me insane. Was I clinging to an egoistic, isolated notion of a self? One night, defeated, I gave up, decided to think about it no more, excepting the desperate, inarticulate, and silent prayer “Save me, God!” (At the time I had no concept of the Buddhist doctrine of anatman, the theory of “no-self” or “no-soul,” just as I knew nothing of the Buddhist “emptiness” of all phenomena or understood the Wisdom Books of Ecclesiastes, bemoaning that all is emptiness, all vanity.)

There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death.
After that, everything is possible. . . . Believing in God
amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have
accepted death, the problem of God will be solved—and
not the reverse.

ALBERT CAMUS

Years passed. I had children. Gradually, caught in the busyness of living, I forgot about dying.

And then my mother died. We’d had a stormy relationship, as I struggled for independence and she to impress on me some semblance of respectability. She was an intuitive herself, prescient, emotional. I see her still, the way she dragged the little tractor around the patchy two-acre lawn. She would stop to rest and look out over the valley to the line of trees that marked a stream below. She drew energy from the earth, the view, the towering trees. My mother “knew” things.

Once she dreamed of shipwrecked people on a raft, rising and gliding down the slopes of high waves. In the dream she saw the coordinates for the raft. The next morning she heard on the radio that a plane had crashed in the Pacific. She was aghast, but what could she do? Whom could she telephone to tell of such a dream, and who would believe her if she tried?

Cassandra, daughter of Priam in the Iliad, had visions, foresight, dreams. She prophesied the fall of Troy and to her horror foresaw the city set aflame, herself enslaved and carried to a foreign land. She was made mad by the slaughter, rape, and butchery she forecast; made mad by virtue of her intuition, her gifts of precognition and prophecy, that showed what anguish lay in store: mad with horror, mad with grief, mad with the loneliness and isolation of farsighted intuition. She could not tell, and others could not hear.

It is no accident that the Greek seer Tiresias was blind—the perfect metaphor for insight. Or that the prophecies of the Delphic Oracle came from the dark cavern in the rocks from whence arose the smoky steaming breath of the earth and gods.

One-half of all spontaneous psi experiences occur in dreams. Many involve the death of a family member or loved one.

INTUITION THAT COMES in the form of a dream is as old as folklore itself. Plutarch reports how Calpurnia, wife of Julius Caesar, dreamed of the danger to her husband on March 15, the ides of March. She begged him to stay home that fateful morning and not walk down to the Roman Forum to attend the Senate. He refused her admonitions and premonitions and thus was stabbed by the Roman senators, who feared he’d end the Republic by naming himself dictator.

For naught. His nephew Augustus grabbed power during the ensuing civil war, crowned himself emperor, and finished off the Republic anyway.

There are some who say that our dreams are given us by angels, spirit guides. And others that our subconscious mind, unable to make itself heard above the clatter of the conscious mind, forces its intuitions on us as imagery in the form of dreams.

Word associations immediately after awakening from a dream are 29 percent more likely to be unusual than those later in the day.

BACK TO MY MOTHER. One day she died. And my own views of the afterlife changed.

After her death, she made her presence known insistently, and usually with her own quirky sense of humor. The first instance, perhaps a few days after the funeral, occurred when my sister and brother and I were looking for a particular document. We couldn’t find it anywhere. Finally, we stood in the pantry looking at one another helplessly.

“Where could it possibly be?”

“I know!” my brother cried, and he dashed down the basement steps.

A moment later he returned with the legal document in his hand. “It was in a file cabinet at the back of the cellar.”

“How in the world did you know where to look?”

He looked at us in bafflement. “I didn’t even know there was a file cabinet there.”

Intuition? Clairvoyance? We laughed. We knew our mother’s work: thoughts inserted in his head.

The second one took place months later. After my mother died I used to drive to Baltimore from Washington once or twice a week to see my father, who had suffered a stroke. He was fortunate to have nurses caring for him. He didn’t have to go into assisted living. But his life was sad and lonely without his wife of fifty years. The house felt quiet now without her busy footsteps clattering across the wooden floors. Yet oddly, I never opened the front door without feeling the welcome of her presence, as if she were still hanging around. Waiting for Daddy. “My imagination,” I thought, and reproved myself for wishful thinking.

Sometimes I brought along my daughter, then twelve, and because I wanted her to have fond memories of these visits to her grandfather, I found some horses nearby for us to ride. We would visit Daddy, go off to ride for an hour, come back to have tea and talk with him. I would do the talking, holding his limp hand, telling him the news and loving him while he listened, eyes shining or sometimes dulled with the exhausted despair of those imprisoned by a stroke. I had the helpless feeling that these visits were never enough. I couldn’t help him.

One day we came in the house, sat with my father for a while, and then left for our ride. When we returned, Bernice, the nurse, announced, “There’s no water in the house.”

“What do you mean?”

“It happened right after you left. We had water then. Remember, you had a cup of tea? When you left, I went to the kitchen to make lunch, and all of a sudden the spigots spit out air. The toilets don’t flush. It happened right after you two left.”

“We need a plumber.”

But first I went down to the gloomy basement to investigate. There, in a cavern off to one side, a pump sucked up well water with heaving gasps that used to thrill and terrify us as children. The pump room was the heartbeat of the house, and only my mother knew how it worked. I took a flashlight and clumped down the narrow basement steps and back to the dank Etruscan cave, sweeping the light around the dark cinder-block walls, unsure of what I’d be looking for anyway. To my surprise, the floor was ankle-deep in water.

I shone the flashlight around, and there in the far corner, behind the pump, I saw an open faucet, only inches from the ground, with water pouring out.

I took off my shoes and socks, waded through the pond, and turned the spigot off.

“It’s on!” came a cry from the kitchen overhead. “The water’s back on.”

“Oh, Mummy!” I burst out laughing! Only my mother knew there even was a faucet there, and my heart rejoiced as I put my shoes back on. She was still in the house, playing jokes on us. Telling us that she was still around.

But how could a spirit turn a spigot on? That takes physical force. Do we conclude either that the faucet turned itself on (this once, and never before or since) or that spirits can actually move a physical weight? I read somewhere that a spirit can move three pounds. When the son of a man I know died, the grieving father found his son’s baseball cap mysteriously shifting around the house—the top of the bookcase, his computer, the boy’s old room, his own.

I’m told that spirits have a special relationship to water. I had a great friend, Dorothy Clarke, then well into her nineties. Her daughter had tragically died by falling off a balcony, and soon after Jane’s death her mother found that each time she took her broom out of the closet, water poured out of the straw onto the floor. It’s important to note that Dorothy always set the broom upside down in the closet, handle to the floor, having learned as a child that this is the proper way to conserve the straw. Now, each time she pulled out the broom, a cup or two of water poured onto the kitchen floor. There was no leak in the closet, not even a water pipe nearby. One day she announced to me, “I keep thinking it must be Jane doing this. Do you think Jane could be sending me a message?”

After this, the broom stopped filling with water, which was as curious as the fact that it had overflowed so copiously during the previous weeks. Had Jane’s spirit wanted only to be acknowledged? Was she sending a message of the water of new life?

The Sunday after her father died, a friend, grieving, stayed home from Mass while her mother and sister attended. “I just have a feeling,” she said. “An intuition. I don’t know why, but I think I should stay home.” She didn’t believe in an afterlife; yet what she wanted more than anything was to know that her father was somehow all right.

When the two women returned from church, she met them, beaming. “You won’t guess what happened!” Their uncle had phoned from Hawaii to say that he’d had a curious dream the night before, in which his dead brother told him he had to phone home and tell his daughters that their father was all right, that everything was fine.

You hear story after story like this. You’d think this matter of angels and apparitions would be out of order in this work on intuition, but no. If consciousness continues after death, is it too difficult to believe that those who loved us on earth would not still be guiding, protecting, guarding us? And could they do so any better than by popping thoughts into our mind? Is it too far-fetched to think that intuition may be associated with attending spirits?

I used to wonder if all intuitions were not angels at work. I’ve come to believe, however, that we have these gifts within ourselves. We are souls incarnated into physical bodies, and we come trailing clouds of glory from the other world (or worlds). We come with all the manifestations and abilities of divinity. The trick is to hear with the heart, for intuitions come not from intellect but from an opening, a loosening of inhibitions, an awareness of our connection to one another and to all sentient life. It requires deep listening and a compassionate heart energy, if I may use so imprecise a term. It is our right as spiritual beings. The information is carried on spiritual energy waves and received at the core of our souls, and if angels are also involved, I say, well and good.

I’ve had many experiences with spirits now, and they are different from anything I might have imagined as a child, not the least of which is your curious lack of fear. It’s quite unlike the depictions in movies, where the spirits leap screaming from a closet and scare the bejesus out of you. Or like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who disappears at first cock’s crow. In real life (or afterlife) they hover around all day, and they seem not only kindly and helpful but terribly anxious to communicate. They are happy, young, in perfect health. They love us deeply, and they are fascinated by our world.

SPIRITS LIKE TECHNOLOGY. Again and again we hear of lights flickering, or the TV turning off and on. Or the record player going on all by itself, playing the favorite song of your brother, who just died. In one story, the grieving girlfriend alone in her apartment fell asleep listening to one record and woke up to her boyfriend’s favorite song, which was on the reverse of the record. (How could the record have turned itself over?) Sometimes others will “feel” the presence of the spirit when they meet you, confirming your own sense of him still hanging around, but eventually the spirit must leave. There’s work to be done; there’s some “place” or dimension it’s supposed to be.

Ted Greene, my anthropologist friend, says that when he was around forty, he renewed a friendship with his best friend from high school. He had not seen Wayne in years and found, as happens with some friendships, that they picked up with the same intimacy and delight they had shared years earlier.

And then Wayne got cancer. They talked about his dying. Ted asked Wayne to come after he died and tell him about it. Ted visited him in the hospital just before flying on a mission to Santo Domingo, and as he left his friend’s room, walking down the hospital corridor, he had a premonition that he would never see Wayne again. He broke into tears. A few days later, Wayne’s wife phoned him in Santo Domingo with the word that his friend had died.

That night as Ted lay reading in bed, Wayne suddenly materialized. Ted freaked. Immediately the image vanished. Ted groped his way to the kitchen for a glass of water and regained control.

“Why would I be afraid of Wayne?” he asked himself, and then forced himself to lie down again, relax, and see if his friend would return.

“Relax, relax,” he admonished himself. “I accept. I want him to come.”

At this point Wayne reappeared.

“I’m not supposed to be here.” He spoke telepathically. “I’m breaking a big rule. But we always made a point of breaking rules, didn’t we?” The spirit laughed. “I can’t stay. There’s someplace I’m supposed to be.” The important news for Ted, however, was that he was happy. Things were good. Death brings no extinguishment; we live on afterward.

Ted has no interest in developing his gift, if a gift it is, but as an anthropologist he’s aware that all the so-called primitive cultures lay claims to these mysterious powers. He believes they are our natural heritage, wiped out of Westerners by the speed and hurry of our technological lives.

In psychology, physiology and medicine, whenever a debate between the mystics and the scientists has been ... decided, it is the mystics who have usually proved to be right about the facts, while the scientists had the better of it in respect to theories.

WILLIAM JAMES

SPIRITS COME BACK in many forms, especially in dreams, but they seem to have a special affinity for birds or butterflies, winged elements. I heard of one woman who loved robins. Soon after her death, her daughter was in her kitchen, when suddenly a robin landed on the windowsill and began to peck at the glass. It wouldn’t stop! It pecked and pecked. The daughter approached the window, held up her hand, and still the bird did not fly off.

“Mother, is that you?” The robin stopped pecking, hopped on the sill, peered at her with one cocked black eye, pecked one last time, and flew away. She burst into tears.

A man driving down the road thinking of the father he had lost found his car suddenly surrounded by a swarm of yellow butterflies. “My dad,” he thought, for if there was anything his father had loved, it was butterflies.

I recently heard of a man whose black Lab was stricken with prostate cancer. One night he saw an owl perched in the branches of the tree outside his bedroom window—an owl he had never seen before and never saw again. A day or two later, the dog died, and he remembered the Native American belief that an owl will come to help a soul move to the Other Side.

How odd that these apparitions seem to come “suddenly.” They don’t last long—a greeting, an appearance in some physical form—and almost as swiftly they have gone.

Soon after my cousin died, his wife and daughter saw a magnificent antlered stag cross the lawn of their suburban Maryland home, stalk up to the picture window, and stare in at them, then turn to step majestically to the grieving widow’s favorite bush, drop his head, and snatch a bite. He gazed at them from huge dark eyes and moved serenely into the woods. The two women watched in astonishment, certain that this was no normal stag. And this is one of the marks of these engagements with animals, dreams, or intuitions: that the percipients can’t shake the idea that the events are beyond the ordinary.

Patricia Kratzer is an unwilling clairsentient who works as director of finance at Imagination Stage, the children’s theater, near Washington, D.C. She is English by birth, and most of her experiences have taken place in Europe.

“It only happens with people whom I trust, in a healing class, for instance, when people are holding hands. Suddenly a spirit will appear.” Patricia doesn’t see people, but she hears and feels them. In these moments she can’t breathe. Often tears spring to her eyes. It’s easy, she says, to categorize these “comings” as products of her imagination. Her mother, however, can tell when a spirit has come to her, for Patricia’s clairsentience has gone on since childhood.

“Relax,” her mother will say. “Ask, ‘What do you want to tell me?’”

Patricia is not altogether comfortable with her gift. If she’s aware of a little elf running back and forth, she’s left wondering, What is it? What is real? At one time she thought to cut out: “It’s not something I want entering me.”

“Entering you?” I asked in our interview. Her choice of words intrigued me.

“I don’t see them. They’re inside me. I hear them talking. I can’t go past the Vietnam Memorial,” she continued. “I hear the screams.”

Once, while staying at an ancient inn in Cornwall with her diplomat husband (himself an atheist), “I saw horrible things. I woke up. There were people everywhere, some grabbing at me. Some wore the eighteenth-century costumes of highwaymen. Later I learned they used to hang the highwaymen right there at the site of the inn.”

Christy Vinson is another spirit magnet. Skinny and nervous, she talks fast and a lot. She has attracted spirits since early childhood, having acquired the gift through both her mother and grandmother, but only recently has it intruded into her life.

Seeing spirits hasn’t been easy for her.

“I wish I could say it’s been a fluffy, love-filled experience, that I’ve sailed along the last six years or so on calm waters of peace and grace, but it has not been smooth at all. I don’t talk about it around the PTA or our marketing business, or friends and neighbors. They know the ‘old me.’ I’m the same me, except now I see and feel beings from the Other Side.” She calls them passed ones.

The apparitions often appear in her bedroom as she is going to sleep, or they awaken her in the night—passed ones of all ages and appearances. She will get a “hit” of death by car accident, or by cancer, or by heart attack. At first she was afraid, not knowing what to do or how to help.

“You see, it’s not just that they show up and freak me out by looking creepy. It seems to be first a way of letting me know ‘how’ they passed and then an indication of their present ‘condition’: afraid or sad, or angry, lost, unhappy, whatever.”

One night a soldier appeared at the foot of her bed, glaring at her. He stayed ... and stayed.

“You have to go! This is my home! Go away! I need to sleep!”

For four hours she prayed for the soldier, convinced he needed to move on, get out, go to the Other Side. She asked Jesus (“since He was human and must understand us humans and our difficulties”) and also the soldier’s guardian angel to help.

“Suddenly, to my alarm and amazement, into the bedroom came a whirlpool of light about the size of a doorway, complete with sparkles and rainbow colors. It flew up to the ceiling, and I could see a woman reaching out her arms to him (perhaps a mom or grandma) along with several tall, angelic figures. He was almost sucked into the light and disappeared.”

Relieved, she fell asleep.

SOON AFTER THE SUDDEN DEATH of her husband of thirty-one years, JoAnne Zawitoski had a dream. She never saw her husband, but in her dream a voice asked if she would accept finding her husband’s missing class ring and his pocket PC as a sign that her husband was well and happy, still alive with consciousness. She said yes, for both items had been missing since his death.

That morning her son found the ring tucked deep into the seat of his father’s car (why would he have taken it off there?), and two days later her husband’s boss phoned to say the pocket PC had been found at his office—did she want it back?

Even though JoAnne had agreed in the dream that she would “believe” if the two items were found, she didn’t feel comforted. She wanted him back.

Of course, not everyone believes in a spirit world. One friend of mine was at my house for dinner soon after his mother died. Curious (and with my usual tactlessness), I asked, “Have you seen her since she died?”

“What do you mean?” He was taken aback.

“I mean, has she come back to tell you she’s all right?”

“Of course not.”

We were silent a moment. “Except last night,” he added, “I had the most vivid dream about her. It was so real. She was standing by the bed. She was happy. Is that what you mean? But nothing happened.”