You can count on Rob Brezsny to cook up a feast of dissident enlightenment, joyous upheaval, orgiastic compassion, insurrectionary beauty, and divine subversion. Here’s a taste.
Knowing the difference between your fearful fantasies and your authentic
intuitions is one of the greatest spiritual powers you can possible have. So
let’s explore what it means: knowing the difference between the
frightening, alienating pictures that sometimes pop into your imagination,
as opposed the simple, warm, clear direction that is always available from
the deepest source within you.
Strangely enough, many people get these two things confused. They are
especially prone to believing that the frightening, disempowering images
that erupt in their mind’s eye are coming from their intuition.
For many people, if they get an image of a scary future possibility
popping into their imagination, they worry that it’s a prediction of some
event that will actually occur in their lives.
For instance, they may have a fantasy of themselves getting into an
accident, or maybe they dream of losing a loved one, or maybe they
internalize the toxic vision of some talking head on TV who slaps them
upside the head with a prediction of imminent doom. When these people
get images like these stuck in their imagination, they may begin to obsess
on the fear that these things are literally going to happen.
Almost every time, scary fantasies like this are not true intuition. Our true
intuition is just not very likely to be fueled by fear, and it rarely if ever
motivates us to act by making us feel afraid.
No. Our true intuition emerges from the wise, loving core of our being. It
blooms in us like a slow-motion fountain of warmth. It reveals the
objective truth about a person or situation with lucid compassion. It
shows us the big picture.
Fearful fantasies, on the other hand, burn and itch and make us feel like
we’re coming apart. They drain our energy and cloud our judgment. They
fill us with obsessive urges to run and hide or do something desperate
and melodramatic.
I don’t want to say that true intuition is always calm and emotionally
neutral. It isn’t, necessarily. But I will say this: The emotions that
accompany true intuition are never alienating. They don’t make us feel
superior to other people or fill us with hatred and terror. They don’t
disempower us or make us feel helpless.
True intuition may rouse our anger, but if so, it is the kind of invigorating
anger that leads to clarity and constructive action, and thus it is an anger
that ultimately relaxes us.
True intuition may show us a difficult truth, but it always does so with a
suggestion of how to deal gracefully and courageously with that difficult
truth. True intuition may reveal imminent changes that could compel us
to adjust our behavior, but it always does so in a way that empowers us.
Let me emphasize this point: True intuition may not always reveal that
everything will be fine, or that we will be able to continue to live in the
ways be have been living — true intuition is certainly not falsely optimistic
— but if it does alert us to circumstances that are in flux, and how we will
have to transform ourselves, it does so with love and poise and clarity,
not with fear.
Here’s one more thing. Just as our true intuition never works by scaring
the hell out of us, neither does it flatter us with grandiose suggestions
about how superior we are. In fact, it may often gently inform us of some
correction that should be made in our attitude. It may tactfully but firmly
lead us to the understanding that we have been suffering from some form
of ignorance and that we need to wake up and get smarter.
True intuition reveals the story of our lives from our soul’s point of view,
not our ego’s. In my understanding, true intuition is the voice of our own
personal inner teacher, which just happens to be the divine part of us.
The certainty that true intuition provides us is therefore not loud and
puffed up, but rather humble and graceful.
I invite you to think on these things, and add some insights of your own.
It’s an excellent time to flush away the fearful fantasies that may have
seeped into your imagination — and thereby make it possible for you to
hear your true intuition better.
One way to facilitate this process, by the way, is to cut back on the
amount of terrifying and disorienting images you allow to flow into your
imagination from the TV, Internet, newspapers, movies, and other mass
media. In fact, I invite you to consider the possibility of going on a media
fast for a while and spending more time in nature than you usually do.
In conclusion, my beloved companions on this beautiful, interesting
planet, please get to work on seeing your fearful fantasies for what they
are and enhancing your connection to your true intuition.
