Intuition and the Unseen Realm

In Dr. James Houston's book (1989) "The Transforming Friendship" there are number of insights linking one's spirituality and psychology with daily life. First is the importance of intuition expressed here,  "Our materialistic and rationalistic society is afraid of intuition, because it awakens us out of the sleep of a false world with shallow values.  The devil is afraid of it, because it activates an awareness of the spiritual, inward life" (p. 132). Second, the idea that prayer links the events and people of one's days to what is opening or closing in the unseen realm, provides a metaphysical sense of existence in relationship to God, self and others. For example, the mere greeting, "hello," carries with it an etymology that is quite breath-taking.  It is from the Old English, "to hallow,"  which means to make great, and it begins the Lord's Prayer where we pray, "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name..."  When we greet a person with awareness of the full meaning of this word, we are proclaiming that the image of God in him or her would shine forth.   Third, the function of one's dreams in refurbishing emotional processes, connects one with realities in both the seen and unseen realms. The sense and intuition needed to live in both these realms is within our human capability, but prevalent in individuals more gifted in this area.  This is the world where dreams can speak healing or meaning into our lives, and one's vision can become clearer after it has been veiled.  Often people from Middle Eastern cultures understand and give more significance to their dreams than in the Christian or secular West.  This left-right brain split between science and religion has us tied in knots, except for a fringe of New Age mystics, spiritists, and charismatic Christians. Post-modernism has been the severe remedy for this, but has thrown the baby of structure and coherence out with the bath water of emotional and visionary stultification.

When the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is referenced to the insights above, the splits between thinking and feeling, sensing and intuiting, judging and perceiving and introversion and extroversion, illustrate how the mind can be blocked from a full spectrum of possibilities.  If one looks at psychology or the mind and soul from an integrated perspective (www.mentalsymmetry.com), the first split, thinking and feeling, can be integrated by helping a person see that when bad things happen to a person, it is not necessarily a personal attack, even though it may feel that way.  The ability to separate thinking in general to feeling specifically is a necessary ingredient for intellectual and emotional well-being and development.  In other words, can the structure of your think tank contain the emotional pressure in the tank? The sensing and intuiting continuum is particularly left-brained. Sensing functions concretely in present reality, finding practical solutions such as what you will make for dinner on a given night, whereas intuiting thinks in generalities and theories such as an idea for solving world hunger. The intuitive area is emotional and abstract in its ordered complexity, and awakens a person to the realm of the unheard, unspoken and unseen.  Some may call it energy, spirituality or enlightenment.  This is difficult to integrate in a secular, empirical society, as explained above, so it often gets repressed as children grow older, and people revisit this area of their minds in fantasy escape in one form or another.

For now I must get some rest, for dreams may come as my sleep architecture has gotten more robust in the last year.  Take heed to ask for dreams.  Sleep tight!