TBM31: Miracles: Big Love in Small Places
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A while back I talked about intuition and how it works during a crisis.* Today I’d like to try to describe what it feels like when you use intuition as a normal part of your everyday life.
I suspect that if you gathered a group of, say, 100 people and asked each one to speak in private about an experience of Divine presence during an emergency, you’d get about 20 who’ve had a deeply personal experience of a comforting presence, and another 25 who know they got out of a scrape but aren’t sure how, and slightly more than half who attribute their escape to their own personal brilliance.
Still, there are a lot of people out there who’ve gone through something very scary and have felt, without even asking, the presence of a wise and loving angel, if only for a few life-changing moments.
We’ve been conditioned in our culture to accept that maybe — just maybe — God and God’s angels will “be there” for us during an acute emergency. So we pay attention to news stories about people who’ve defied incredible odds and somehow managed to survive. These are the events we call “miracles.” If you’re a person with an open heart, you can feel the reality of the miracle even if you can’t understand it with your logical mind. You can feel the reality of the miracle even if the Church dismisses it because no saints were invoked. You can feel the miracle even if the atheists insist you’re a gullible, superstitious fool.
It’s not easy in this culture to believe in miracles or in God’s loving intervention when you’re being attacked from all sides (including attacks from conservative Christianity). So it’s understandable that a person of faith might be pretty nervous about widening the net of miracles to include everyday activities rather than just emergency situations.
This is why I think this post may be more difficult for many readers to process than anything I’ve written so far — because this post is about everyday miracles, the miracles nobody wants to talk about and nobody wants to acknowledge because the implications are so darned real.
Human beings have a knack for shifting their own thoughts and feelings to every place except the place where they’re standing right now. Psychotherapists have accurate labels for these destructive psychological habits. Among these habits are projection, denial, reaction formation, fantasy, displacement, suppression, intellectualization, and rationalization. These strategies are used by individuals to help them avoid being honest with themselves about their own thoughts, feelings, needs, and inner wisdom. In one way or another, each of these strategies is a form of lying — a form of lying to oneself.
On the surface, it seems a person who’s using projection or denial is lying to other people — and, of course, such a person is lying to other people. But before she can lie with malicious intent to other people, she has to be lying to herself with malicious intent. She has to be trying with all her might to ignore the inner wisdom of her own soul (which has no malicious intent).
Meanwhile, a person who’s trying to balance the complex needs of the 4D soul and the 3D body, who uses all parts of his or her brain instead of only some parts, who has a well-developed sense of intuition and timing, has no need to lie to him/herself. Why would he/she? The whole point of being a Whole Brain Thinker is that you can consistently weave the needs of heart, mind, body, and talent into a tapestry of courage, devotion, trust, and gratitude. Therefore there’s no need to engage in energy-wasting psychological defences such as projection, denial, etc. There’s no need to waste precious biological brain resources on building and maintaining a collection of lies. The brain therefore has more time and energy to spend on more important matters — matters such as improving your health by learning to pay attention to cues from your guardian angels.
I’ve had many years of practice in working with these cues. These cues don’t come into the brain and central nervous system the way you might imagine. The authors of many, many TV shows and films and books and religious myths have attempted to describe how these cues are experienced by “the chosen ones.” I’ve seen few authors who get it right, and those who do are usually writing about some other aspect of the human condition and stumble accidentally on the experience of intuition as it actually exists in us poor ol’ non-chosen slobs.
One of the few dramatic series to get it right is the recent 5-year story arc of Battlestar Galactica (the new one, not the old one). One of the few written pieces to get it right is the 1989 novella The Last of the Winnebagos by science fiction author Connie Willis. These stories pursue the very ordinariness of intuition, and the great transformative power of it, wrapped together within the borderlands of love that exist where two or more people open their hearts to each other.
It’s the ordinariness of intuition and the ordinariness of Divine intervention that most people just don’t want to hear about. They don’t want to hear about the “quantum Post-It notes” your guardian angels can attach to a bag of oranges at the grocery store so you pick up the bag that’s best suited to your own health needs. They don’t want to hear about angels helping you find a pair of shoes that fit. Or a shampoo that’s on sale. Or a newspaper that has an article you really need to read that day. But, in fact, this is the way intuition is supposed to work.
When I say, “quantum Post-It notes,” I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean that literally. I mean that when I pass my hand slowly over the pile of bagged oranges at the grocery store, I can feel the one my angels want me to pick up. I feel it as a faint “aha” feeling. More like a creative impulse than anything else — a sense of knowing something is right. That’s it.
It’s NOT (as you might suppose) an experience of hearing voices or “seeing things” or feeling detached or “floaty” or “blissed-out” or “connected to all Creation” (as so many authors have speculated). I mean, I’m at the grocery store, for heaven’s sake! It’s not like I’m ascending on clouds of ecstasy or anything. I’m just buying groceries!
At a neurophysiological level, I suspect the brief “aha” feeling would show up (if it could be studied in me or others) as spikes of gamma brainwave synchronization. But neurophysiology aside, these intuitive cues from my angels are also accompanied by feelings of calmness, compassion, and trust (so oxytocin is probably also involved in the “aha” experience).
Weird, eh?
Weird it may be, but I can’t imagine my life without these daily intuitive experiences. Those who are close to me are used to me and my weird way of doing things. They just kind of roll their eyes when I say my angels pointed out a gorgeous $495 Anne Klein size 6 summer weight wool blazer marked down to $5 that fits me perfectly. (Don’t worry — I kept the sale tags in case anybody wants me to prove it.) I feel fantastic when I wear this blazer, as my angels knew I would.
I wear a size 6, and sometimes a size 4, not because I starve myself (I’ve never dieted — never once in my life) but because I listen carefully to what my guardian angels suggest for me and my own body’s needs. My food regimen probably wouldn’t be the same as yours, because each person’s body is unique. But my food regimen works for me. So I put cream in my coffee. And I eat cheese and butter every day. And I bake (and eat) chocolate chip cookies. And I drink lots of fruit juice that contains Vitamin C, Vitamin D, and calcium. And I never count calories. The only thing I pay attention to is the quantum Post-It notes that appear on specific food items at each meal.
My approach to healthy eating isn’t something you’d want to rush out and try without first being sure your own intuitive circuitry is working properly. It’s a lot smarter to practice your intuitive skills on something with fewer possible health consequences — something like shampoo brands (because not every shampoo is right for every person).
Believe it or not, your guardian angel would be thrilled to help you find the right shampoo for you. No, I’m not kidding. Guardian angels don’t EVER want you to practise using your intuitive circuitry on “the big stuff.” It’s too risky for you and your loved ones. It’s too easy to “mix up your signals” and assume you’re getting an intuitive cue when you’re not. (God gets blamed all the time when religious folk try to overextend their intuitive circuitry and end up causing great harm because they don’t understand their own limits).
So start small. And be grateful for these ordinary, everyday miracles. These are the stuff of everyday relationship with God and God’s angels, unless you happen to be an astronaut on the International Space Station or a regular feature on the slopes of Mount Everest. Maybe you think it would be boring for your angels to help you find shampoos and oranges, but trust me — they never find it boring to help you be as healthy and as happy as it’s possible for you to be on Planet Earth.
Divine love is so big it fits in the smallest of places. That’s why it’s Divine love!
* Please see Guys, Intuition, and the Gut from April 2, 2011.
