Vibes and Intuition
Intuition comes very close to clairvoyance; it appears to be the extrasensory perception of reality
Alexis Carrel
The only real valuable thing is intuition
Albert Einstein
Mind can clearly operate in a separate Reality from the physical body in dreams, and can also directly affect the physical body via hypnosis. We know that to be true, despite Materialist Science trying to ignore the fact. But what else might Mind be doing that we haven’t been paying close enough attention to?
One most powerful mental component is Intuition. Yet it is mainly ignored by science as it occurs anecdotally, and not to order in a measuring laboratory. And if something is hard to measure, science tends to ignore it, and as with hypnosis, if something gets ignored for long enough, thoughts of its very validity or even reality slowly evaporate.
§ NB: Lack of measurability does not mean unimportance or non-existence. ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’ (An observation associated with Einstein.)
§ In case you think I’m exaggerating: ‘We are nothing but a pack of neurons.’…’Our brains create an objective science.’ VS Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego.
I could fill five pages with similar quotations from senior figures in Science, such as Mr R. They really do believe this. The illogic of such statements seems to elude them.
A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.’ Niels Bohr, nuclear physicist.
‘We are all just nuclear waste.’ Jim Al Khalili, nuclear physicist.
Snappy phrases, but actually meaningless once you try to make real sense of them. Can nuclear waste write poetry, for example? However, because they have been said by famous men who are cleverer than we are, we tend to just shrug and accept them as being True. We should not. Instead, we should take these claims at face value and trust our own judgements and agree that they are so lacking in logic as to be laughable. Bizarrely, they are still acceptable as rational and meaningful by Materialists, however.
Science’s popularisers keep up the drip feed: this from a BBC programme Inside the Human Body (May 2011): ‘Bit by bit her brain is creating her mind…’ Michael Mosley.
Nonetheless, Intuition occurs. For simplicity’s sake I’m going to split its occurrence into five areas: Vibes; Hunches; Normal mental processes; Genius; and last but certainly not least, Precognitive.
Vibes
I guess everyone has experienced the vibe effect: the creepy room in a strange house; the pub which feels instantly welcoming (or repellent); or the ancient church which invites introspection and calm. Of course, a Skeptic will say that these effects are all generated by things like dampness in the room, a jolly log fire (or dead horse) in the pub, or the silence of a country church. Of course these effects matter, but they are not enough, as everyone who has had the shivers in a particular location knows. They also don’t explain why normally genial dogs refuse to go into certain rooms or why cats hiss at empty chairs; or why perfectly normal and rational people sometimes feel the need to call in exorcists or ‘rescue mediums’.
It seemed to me that as I must now accept Mind as having some sort of direct creative power, I might also consider that Mind (‘thought’ and/or ’emotion’) could leave traces of some sort, in or around certain physical objects and places (via ‘vibes’?). This might explain all the effects above, and even some of the more bizarre reports I’d come across of people feeling ‘an electric shock’ off certain standing stones, or of feeling they were being watched in allegedly haunted houses. It would also explain the medieval fascination with holy relics alleged to contain the still-powerful ‘vibes’ of their previous owners.. The relics trade was encouraged by The Church to increase cash flow at monasteries, but that does not in itself prove that the original notion was fraudulent. Religion is constantly manipulated and exploited; so is science. This does not automatically make the core activity wrong.
§ Famous frauds: Henry V brought back to England Jesus’ foreskin, plundered from a church near Agincourt. There were a dozen others scattered across Christendom: little holy foreskins were venerated in Germany, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, and Rome itself. And St Apollonia must have had a mouth like a hippo to hold all those teeth.
By the bye… Jesus is not noted as saying ‘Thou shalt preserve and venerate my foreskin(s)’. Relics have nothing to do with Christianity and what Jesus stood for.
Half a step from relics we come to more personal things, like the Victorian penchant for keeping locks of a loved one’s hair in a locket. Just a memento, or something a little more? Suddenly one can see creepy things like voodoo gri-gris and pincushion-dolls looming, and even those laughable tribal types who don’t want their photographs taken in case it ‘steals their souls’.
Amulets, talismans, charms, blessings, spells, curses, taboos (and initiations?) all cover the same territory as ‘vibes’, in that they involve the application of mental and emotional force to physical things and they are found throughout history and in every society in the world. I find it an arrogance to write off all these peoples as irrational savages just because they are not irrational Materialists.
§ The Europeans who ‘discovered’, studied, and labelled exotic cultures did so largely in the heyday of Empire, when Materialism was newly triumphant. Thus the explorers and their ethnographical associates would have had very firm views about ‘magic’ and ‘primitive beliefs’. They would have seen themselves as men of science pushing forward the boundaries of knowledge, and would have no time for ‘mumbo-jumbo’: a word originally associated with a certain deity or supernormal force.
The Church also worked with these cultures, and had a similar view on ‘superstition’, here meaning ‘not believing the same transcendental stories as I do’.**
Why would someone spend £200,000 on John Lennon’s old guitar when they could buy a brand new one for £200? And queue up to stride across the zebra crossing on Abbey Road? Or dig out the cat’s eyes that border it? Why do historians get a buzz from handling original documents rather than photocopies?
§ I remember feeling this same buzz looking at an original Magna Carta in Salisbury cathedral. A photocopy would not have had the same impact. Why not? It’s the contents that matters, after all… isn’t it?
Why do historical memorabilia sell so well, especially autographs of the famous? And why did two tv Scientists get as excitable as a couple of teenage girls when confronted by a chunk of Einstein’s brain in a pickle jar? A quasi-religious awe? Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey said ‘It really is weird being so close to the grey matter that came up with relativity.’ But that grey matter is just chemicals, isn’t it?
§ The most popular exhibit at the Oxford Museum of Science is a blackboard Einstein once wrote on, with traces of his writing still visible.
I once passed over a personal item to a psychometrist. She didn’t look at me, but said ‘Abroad. Do you live abroad?’ Fishing perhaps, but a bit of a long shot. Yes, my family address was abroad at that time. The item in question was not from ‘abroad’, and I was wearing nothing foreign. She ‘scored’ with other people at the demonstration too. Were there ‘vibes’ of some sort associated with the objects we passed her? And did these vibes contain or evoke information about the owner? Unlikely, surely? But so is the universe. Ask any physicist. So, in the spirit of SPIT: put it on hold. Interestingly, I have read that some people get definite sense impressions of previous owners and eras when wearing old jewellery. Then there are cellular memory cases, as reported by recipients of organ transplants.** In one study, Professor Bruce Hood of Bristol found that even Materialist-atheists baulked at accepting an organ transplant from a murderer.
A Torah scroll for ceremonial use must be hand copied. The copyist prays that the holy work about to be undertaken will be imbued with the reverence in his heart. He then concentrates on the sanctity of every one of the 300,000+ letters, each of which must be said aloud before copying. It takes a year or more to complete a Torah. In other words, he has to soak the document with suitable vibes. Meanwhile, I wondered, might ‘vibes’ help to explain the mystery of love at first sight? And the odd business of ‘lucky’ and ‘unlucky’ cars and ships?
And how might ‘vibes’ relate to Professor Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of ‘morphic fields’? See his famous book A New Science of Life.
§ One of the most notorious ‘unlucky’ machines is/was actor James Dean’s Porsche (nicknamed The Little Bastard) which killed him, and bits of which subsequently killed two or three other people as well as injuring many others… so they say.
I could now see how a vibe and a ghost might be related. If ’emotional vibes’ can indeed ‘permeate’ material objects as a sort of recording, then maybe ghosts are re-runs of this recording. Certainly, many ghosts give the impression of being impersonal and repetitious recordings. The black lady of the pub in Shropshire was like that. But other ghosts do give the impression of being inhabited, so to speak; and some seem to be positively demanding or aggressive. What about them? Is there more than one sort of ghost?
Hunches
We all have hunches, usually of a minor sort. ‘I won’t throw that away. It’ll come in handy.’ And it does a week later (perhaps!) A variation is at work when doing a crossword. I remember a clue wanting ‘A large Australian fish’. ‘Shark’ didn’t fit, so I left the space blank. The next day the word ‘barramundi’ came to mind. I recognised the word but didn’t know what it meant so I checked it in a dictionary: ‘A large Australian fish’. Yes, it was a memory, but a memory is just a data-complex. What was it that selected that particular data-complex from among the millions of other scraps of nonsense that I have stored somewhere, and delivered it to my conscious mind for me, even though it was something I didn’t consciously know the meaning of? Intuition, I reckon, as it turned up in my head in precisely the same way as a ‘hunch’. Some people have more impressive hunches, which lead them to rewarding connections.
Helen Keller went deaf and blind aged 19 months. She was completely isolated from any meaning in the world, and became a ‘wild child’, until a teacher taught her some ‘fingerspelling’ sign lettering. This meant little to Helen until the teacher one day held their hands under a gushing pump and repeatedly spelled out w-a-t-e-r on Helen’s hand. After a while, Helen’s face ‘lit up’, as the connection was made and ‘meaning’ entered her life. She learned 30 words that day and went on to become a graduate, and to then tour the world lecturing on behalf of the blind. What connected the symbolic physical tapping of w-a-t-e-r with real water? A sort of hunch: insight: inner tuition: Intuition.
§ Do dowsers operate on hunch? After all, some use wire rods, some use hazel twigs and some use their bare hands. And despite Science’s contempt, hard-nosed folks like farmers regularly use them, and oil companies pay good geological dowsers a fortune.
Normal mental processes
Hold tight… this next bit might be a shock…
It came as a great surprise to me to realise that Intuition works within each one of us every moment of every day, in making routine connections for us. In fact it is the very medium by which we operate at all.
Remember the problem of adding up long numbers when tired? And how there comes a point when you know you’ve got it right? What is the nature of this knowing? I suggest it’s Intuition, making the connection for us between ‘Have I got this sum right?’ and ‘The current answer is correct’. Intuition is the synthesiser in the background that computes the various inputs from our senses and our memory and then adds whatever is necessary to integrate and make sense of it all. More than that, it makes judgements for us too, by confirming that we’ve got our arithmetic right.
Another example: do you remember how difficult it was to define a simple word like ‘window’, never mind a tricky one like ‘beauty’? And yet we somehow manage to understand thousands of original sentences spoken to us every day. None of the words has a precise definition. Bang one word after another and all you have is a string of badly defined concepts, arranged in a curious order. Other languages would put similarly badly defined concepts in quite a different order. And yet, we somehow manage to understand each other, often even across a badly garbled language barrier. The term psychologists use for this is ‘gestalt’: the facility whereby we somehow squeeze meaning out of gappy strings of data. It seems clear to me that the force behind the gestalt is Intuition. In other words, the power that makes new connections for us (as for Helen Keller) makes our essential everyday associations too; and it is this linking-associative-synthesising process that generates, or delivers, meaning for us. And of course, we should not forget that spoken words are just sounds, which have no inherent meaning at all. Yet we infer meaning from them. How? ‘Intuition’, I think. Let us not forget that what actually reaches your brain isn’t even sound. The eardrum transposes vibrations (that word again) into electrical impulses, which are then somehow decoded by the brain into hundreds of thousands of different meaningful ‘sounds’. A totally extraordinary process. I’ve yet to come across any explanation for how chemical brain jelly can convert electrical impulses into meaningful ‘sound’ while containing no detectable amplifier or speakers.
§ Because words lack precise meanings, misunderstandings are common. Perhaps even more common are misunderstandings which are thought to be lexical, but which are actually misreadings of intonation or body language. Sarcasm is an example of the power of intonation to distort meaning. There are dozens of other examples, as every actor knows. To the best of my knowledge these don’t have names, but we recognize them right away. A slight pause here… a tiny rise or fall of tone there…. a momentary glance away… A lot of the time we gestalt the true meaning behind the utterance, despite the words rather than because of them. Intuition at work again, I suggest.
Human beings do not live in a world of precise definitions, and in real life, have no use for them. When a Professor of Physics wants to cross the road, he does not think: ‘If I cross the road now, at 2.46mph, the approaching Ferrari Priapos 4.8 17-valve coupé, which I estimate to be travelling at 52.36 mph will strike me below the left capella in 4.1 seconds. Therefore I will not cross.’ No. He glances; he pauses; his Intuition does the rest in a moment.
Have you ever looked at a clock and realised that you can’t actually ‘read’ the time? You can see the hands, but nothing ‘clicks’. Then suddenly, it does click and you can ‘tell’ (ie, ‘understand’) the time. Or met someone in the street whom you know you know but ‘can’t place’. Intuition may eventually rescue you. There will be a definite moment when you know you know who they are. You can feel the moment when you know.
Every time we correlate impressions, memories, thoughts and feelings, it is our Intuition that is doing the work for us. Big Science is no help here, as it insists that Intuition, if it recognises it at all, ultimately arises from chemicals, a view that was now to me utterly foolish.
Intuition does not operate by calculation, which is what the Intellect is good at (as in experimental psychology, or science in general: but even then, Intellect needs Intuition to ‘glue’ data together meaningfully). Intuition supplies Direct Knowledge. You might even say that Intuition is Direct Knowledge, as that’s certainly its instant result in our minds. You can only know something when it is okayed by your Intuition.
§ It seems that Intuition is the territory of the right-brain. The right-brain was for long denigrated as the lesser brain by people whose work is predominantly left-brained (ie neuroscientists). The left-brain operates according to set formulae, rules and boxes.
‘Intuition’ is anathema to it. All science is predominantly a left-brain activity.
There’s more: in conversation, nobody carefully plans each word before speaking a sentence. We open our mouths and it is all there, ready for us, gestaltable meaning and all. Intuition does this for us as well, I suggest. It literally puts words into our mouth.
We may not be consciously aware of Intuition but our language betrays signs that our ancestors who created our language were well aware of it, as a mental input apparently coming from outside. Consider such phrases as:
- It suddenly struck him…
- Like a bolt from the blue…
- She gradually became aware that she hated her mother…
- The idea suddenly flashed into his mind…
- It came to me that…
- Such a thing had never entered his head before
- It dawned upon her that…
…and especially the everyday ‘realised‘. When we say ‘He realised that he was lost’, the word ‘realised’ means ‘made real’. However it is not used in the sense of ‘actively made real, by effort’, but as in ‘the reality of it became clearly known to him’ as a sudden and undeniable truth where none had been before. As in the examples above, there is a perceived element of ‘coming from outside/elsewhere’ here. This sounds to me precisely like Intuition, although the word itself refers to ‘inner tuition’. The confusion arises, I suggest, because we know so little about our own minds: what is outer and what is inner?
These phrases are so workaday that we never think about them and their implications. Maybe we should?
All of the above shows, I hope, how my rather sketchy analysis led me to the surprising conclusion that we are quintessentially Intuitive beings, even more than emotional; and certainly more than ‘rational’. And Intuition, above all things, makes a nonsense of the Materialist hypothesis that only Matter/Energy created everything out of itself alone. But it was not yet my White Crow.
Genius and other oddities…
All the things that truly matter: beauty, love, creativity, joy and inner peace, arise from beyond the mind.
Eckhart Tolle
Logic plus Occam’s razor had led me to the conclusion that Higher Mind must exist, and might/must? even be closely connected to our Intuition.
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