At about dusk one night not long ago, I was closing the gate at my office and had a hallucination that took over my consciousness completely – if only for a moment. It was of my wife at home in the kitchen.
She was wrestling a rarely used vessel and an associated implement from the dusty far reaches of a deep cupboard. It had been a wedding present and I don’t think it’d seen the light of day since the birth of our first child nearly thirty years ago. It soon dissolved, I secured the gate, and drove home.
Just inside the back door of our house, I gasped when I saw that wife was using the vessel from my vision and had to have gone through those exact motions at the moment I saw them. I asked what in the world had induced her to procure that setup to which she responded that she had been looking for something else, came upon it, and decided to use it instead.
Holy dogs, it wasn’t like I’d flashed a winning lottery number or been visited by divine guidance (or retribution for that matter) but, whatever, it was beyond coincidence. Tha occurrence and others similar came to mind when reading the “Best Ideas of the Year” bit in the last issue of the New York Times Magazine that year. It was about a forthcoming book entitled Extraordinary Knowing by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer.
Ms. Mayer was a psychologist and professor at UC Berkley. Her eleven year old daughter’s harp had been stolen and they were desperate for its return. Weeks went by with no leads when a friend suggested they avail themselves of the services of a dowser.
Skeptical, but, “well why not?”, she contacted the American Society of Dowsers who referred her to one in Arkansas. She called and after a pause the gentlemen told her that the harp was still in the area and asked her to send him a map of it. The map was soon returned with a location marked upon it. “Not good enough for a search warrant” said the police so Ms. Mayer decided to post photos of the harp on telephone poles around that neighborhood.
Days later a phone call led to the return of the instrument and a changed Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer. She began an exploration of the “inexplicable powers of the human mind” and first found, to her amazement, that several eminent colleagues at Berkeley had had related experiences, but were loathe to discuss for fear of possible harm to their professional reputations.
Her investigation is filled with fascinating anecdotes, history, psychology, neuroscience, and quantum physics. She suggests that extraordinary intuition is “quintessentially characterized by its random non repeatable quality and its absolute dependence on its highly idiosyncratic deeply personal capacities and dispositions of the knower…”.
An adept told her that: “Our minds resist intuitive knowing. Once you learn to relax that resistance, you can start to reclaim intuition from its suppression by the rational mind. The more you work with it, the more remarkable your knowing becomes. You free the receptive state from it armoring by the ego. You learn to live closer to receptivity.”
If there was ever a reason to clear up neuroses, this had got to be it. Could maybe tune into something really cool.
The Subtle Landscape 
March 5, 2010 at 11:21 pm |
Dad! That is crazy! I can’t believe that!