Stepping Stones To Personal Empowerment

There is within all of us a genius waiting to be discovered, says Albert Einstein. In his words, “Every child is born a genius.” The genius in most of us, however, is lying dormant. It is a genius that cannot to be found in logical thinking, but rather in intuitive awakenings.

Intuition is a part of our psyche, our mental capacity. It is a part of our mental make up that for most of us is rarely tapped into. It is that part of us that comes from the right hemisphere of the brain, where appreciation for beauty and art comes from. It is that part of the brain that reveals to us that which the left hemisphere logical brain cannot. Intuition is instinctive knowledge. It is the knowing of things without evidence or logical reasoning, a knowing that is immediately sensed.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson was a big proponent of the science of intuition. To him intuition was a much under rated source of knowledge. It is that part of us that discovers the cure for polio, discovers the laws of nature that harness electricity, the part that realizes the potential of the computer. The logical brain implements the ideas but it is intuition that discovers the idea in the first place. Intuition is that part of us that goes unnoticed but makes the biggest impact to our lives. It is that part of our brain where unexpected thoughts are discovered. It is where knowing is certain. “Discovery consists in seeing what everybody else has seen,” says Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, “ and thinking what nobody else has thought.” That is intuition.

Intuition is the part of our brain, the part of our thought process, that we must learn to trust. It is the one that comes to us in feelings. “I had a feeling that would happen,” someone says or, “I just followed my hunch,” says another. What they are talking about is intuition. Intuition is something that has to be paid attention to. There have been so many times in my life when I had a hunch about something and ignored it only to find out later that if I had paid attention to it I would have saved myself a lot of grief. When we pay attention to those quiet hunches we can more fully employ our intuition. It is a source of information for us that we can tap into with practice, but first we must learn to trust it. When I sit in my garden and meditate it is intuition that comes and sits on my shoulder, like a graceful butterfly. When I pay attention to it I am greatly rewarded.

57. Realize that synchronicity is actively playing a part in your life.

What is synchronicity? The pioneering psychologist Carl Jung was the first to use the term. He wrote about it extensively. It is a series of events that appear unrelated but that have a relationship which is not obviously seen. Only rarely do we recognize synchronicity in our lives. Sometimes, however, it is so obvious that the relationship between events cannot be avoided. The dictionary defines it as “coincidental events that happen that seem to not be obviously caused by the other.” I have heard it put in another way far more simply. “There are no accidents.”

It seems that the more spiritual a person is in their thinking the more they see synchronicity at work in their lives. A lot of people brush off synchronistic events as coincidence. Perhaps they are, but when they happen often enough one has to wonder. I personally have seen too many things happen that could be coincidence that I feel at the very depth of me were not.

Sometimes the synchronistic events that happen to us are minor events that appear to be just enough to get our attention. One such event happened to me when I was working at the boarding school. The girls were preparing to have a bon fire one evening and as a precaution needed a garden hose attached to a water source. I found a hose and stretched it to the bonfire site. In walking back to the buildings I had a thought that it would be nice to have a nozzle on the hose in case the girls needed to extinguish the fire. While I was walking up the hill two seconds after having that thought I looked down at my feet. There, half buried in the dirt was the nozzle, the very same one I had pictured in my mind only seconds before.