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Instinct, intuition, inspiration, synchronicity,

cosmic conincidence, miracles, grace

 

“My” superpowers

😉

 

 

 

 

I love the swing of it! 😉 

 

 

 

The spectrum of the superpowers

that I consider my modus operandi / mode of operation.

 

 

For me, those awesome phenomena are specific functions of consciousness that are at work in our personal lives all the time. We may notice them or we may not. They happen anyway.

In this article I wish to bring a bit more awareness to them, because living consciously with them brings magic into our lives. 

 

Miracles and wonders.

 

With this silly little animation I have been trying to mix them up a bit, because they don’t represent an orderly sequence – from the lowest to the highest. Not in my experience.   

With our logical mind, we tend to arrange these things hierarchically – as though instinct is what animals have, intuition is what sensitive humans develop, inspiration is what artists are occasionally blessed with, and grace is the culmination of it all, reserved for saints only. 

But these are not rungs, this is no ladder.

 

They are frequency bands of the same underlaying reality – consciousness.

For me, these terms represent different bandwidths through which universal intelligence arrives in our personal lives.

 

The intelligence that moves through instinct and the intelligence that moves through grace are not different intelligences. They are the same river at different altitudes.

And if we want to be bold, we could also say that those are the mysterious ways in which God works in the world of human beings. 

 

As my grandmother used to say:

“Der Mensch denkt und Gott lenkt.”

Which literally translates to “Man thinks, and God guides.”

(By the way, my granny was not a very religious person 😅.)

 

 

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Instinct is a complex, behavior that occurs automatically in response to specific stimuli. Unlike learned behaviors, which are acquired through experience and practice, instincts are “hard-wired” into an organism’s biological makeup from birth.

Animals have it in abundance. I suspect that they live in the realm of instinct.
Untouched by rational mind they feel, they just know certain things before they happen.

On the day before the big Tsunami struck in 2001 animals in the costal areas of Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka started to behave very strange and frightened. And that shortly before the first wave hit the beach hordes of bats, flocks of flamingos and other birds, dogs, buffalos and elephants rushed em masse away from the beaches and up the hills.

Animals seem have a sixth sense for looming danger.

Same can be said for “uncivilized’ tribes on the Andaman and Nicobar islands. Those “stone age tribes” acted the same way as the animals and survived the Tsunami by and large although they live on islands close to the epicenter of the earthquake that triggered the tsunami.

We civilized, rational-oriented, modern people have more or less lost this ability, the instinct to sense danger coming.

Not all of us, I guess. Women have the “sixth sense” more often than men. My mother always had hunches, a very bad gut feeling and foreboding that anticipated something bad is going to happen. She did not know what it will be, that was very painful for her.
Very often she was right. Not always ; )

Anthropologist who lived with bushmen in the Kalahari desert, Yanomami Indians of the Amazon and Aborigines in the Australian outback tell many tales how those so called “uncivilized” people have a direct connection to the land and the animal kingdom and can find food, water and their ways in those endless and dangerous environments by instinct.

For me, this kind of instinct is not behavior pre-programmed by evolution, but appears spontaneously because of a direct and alive connection/oneness with the astral realm of nature through the lower three chakras, that is not distorted by the rational mind or cultural conditioning.

Instinct may be a very low octave extra-sensory perception, a perception working thru “the belly”, the feet, the connection with the Earth.

Mostly the first chakra.

~

Whereas intuition may work thru the higher chakras, prominently the sixth Chakra, commonly called Ajna or Third Eye.

 

 

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Intuition operates for me at the level of what I would call: my soul’s peripheral vision.

I cannot look at it directly. I cannot think or will my way to an intuition – I can only create the conditions in which it can arise.

 

Silence. Receptivity. A willingness to let go and not-know.

 

This is why meditation practice is a training in intuition, because it trains me to be present before an intuitive insight, rather than immediately wanting to “do” something with it.

Intuition arrives to me as a “felt sense of the whole thing, the Gestalt of something.”

I know something about a situation, a person, a creative direction, a health choice – I know the “shape” of it – before I have any rational analysis to support that knowing.

And the most significant decisions of my life have been made from exactly this place. Not impulsively. Not from mood. From something that feels more like “landing on a decision” than “deciding”.

~

Over the years I have learned a lot about my inherent ability to know things intuitively:

– Intuition is a innate ability of any human being to know things that she/he actually, logically can not know.

– Intuition is practical and appears in a certain context.

– Intuition can appear in the form of a picture, of a “movie” in the mind, a voice or a feeling.

– Intuition usually appears on the periphery of my awareness in an unobtrusive, quiet way. It is not trying to grab my attention or make me do something.

– Intuitive “messages” often come to my attention when I am in a focussed mode – like driving fast or programming – or in a very relaxed mode – like the mode we may be in when we are under the shower or before falling asleep.

– For the untrained person intuition is often hard to distinguish from the usual chatter of the mind, from personal biases or fears.

– Intuition often runs counter to our known behavior patterns, the usual ways of our personality, our habits. Our ego’s preferences. That may be the reason we often doubt the validity of such messages and don’t follow those subtle hints.

– Fears and specific expectations can camouflage as intuition.

 

Generally speaking, we don’t know much – actually almost nothing at all – what Intuition actually is and where such messages are coming from and why.

 

~

 

The word “intuition” stems from: the Latin root intueri, which means “to look at, consider,” and has been used since the 15.Century in Latin as intuicioun, “insight, direct or immediate cognition, spiritual perception”

Websters Universal Dictionary defines Intuition as:

– The immediate knowing or learning of something without the conscious use of reasoning and active thinking processes.
– Instantaneous apprehension and insight
– Direct perception of truth, independent of any reasoning process
– Pure, untaught, none-inferential knowing
– Some definitions also interpret Intuition also in the context of instinct, automatic reaction, association, sixth sense, psi, extra-sensory awareness, clairvoyance, unmediated perception, divination, dowsing, inspiration …

 

~

 

C.G. Jung found four psychological functions that we humans all have:

 

Thinking    –    Feeling    –    Sensing.   –    Intuition

 

As Jung saw it, Intuition is one of the basic function of or psyche, the ability to instantaneously perceive all the possibilities inherent in a situation.
But he also found – that intuition is mostly unconscious and undeveloped, unappreciated in most western “civilized” people, especially so in males.

His four psychic functions correspond to specific regions of the brain:

the reptilian brain – sensing
the Limbic System – feeling
the Left Neo-Cortex – thinking
the Right-Neo-Cortex – intuition

Which is really interesting to know if we wish to consciously develop and use intuition in practical ways in our life.

 

~

 

What really interested me is the question:

 

Where is the intuitive information, intuitive knowing coming from, those messages and insights?

How can i know something that i actually have no way of knowing?

 

The answers are becoming much more clear the more i understand about consciousness.

Consciousness, both in Western philosophy and psychology as well as in Eastern Wisdom teachings is a Unity, a – somewhat mysterious and still unexplained – continuum of the same “substance” that underlays all phenomena. In quantum physics it is called Quantum Vacuum

Although it is considered a Unity, generally speaking it is thought of having four or five distinct different “realms”:

– the Ground of Being (the absolute substance of everything in Existence)

– the Unconscious (the collective consciousness, including human, animal, plant, and raw matter kingdoms, the whole evolutionary chain from the Big Bang till now)

– the Subconscious (the personal unconscious in humans)

– the Conscious Realm (the normal state of fragmented consciousness in humans, our daily state of awareness and what results from it in ways of Culture and Society)

– the Superconscious (the higher, more and more subtle dimensions of consciousness, the “Higher Self”, the Soul, Atman, the “Heavenly Realms,” “the Divine”, Brahman, God …

 

~

 

I admit that i don’t totally know what i am talking about here. This is my – rather intuitive – grasp of such big transcendental realities : )

But what it means to me is, that everything that is to know about anything in existence is already there, somewhere on this spectrum of consciousness. Ready to be picked up intuitively/directly and translated thru our mind into concepts that we can understand and language we can communicate with.

And – for reasons that are still hard for me to understand – we as human beings have the potential and inborn capacity to do that.
To “surf” the spectrum of consciousness up and down and “read” the universal data banks (called Akasha in Sanskrit).

Rare individuals throughout the ages have been able to do that, from the Rishis of the Vedic times in India to some Lamas and yogis of Tibet to a few high level Trance mediums of our times.

Obviously inner development, spiritual maturity and specific methods were/are necessary for such things to happen.
A development and fine-tuning of abilities that are given to us as a birthright but lay dormant in every one of us, waiting to be activated.
The potential is still there for anyone who feels a longing to raise above the usual jumble and malaise that is going on inside out heads every day.
I am talking about our “normal” state of mind, our fragmented awareness and the resulting brainwave pattern.

To learn to recognize what going on “up there”, develop ways to shift from the Beta Brainwaves of everyday reactive mind activity into Alpha, Delta and Theta and Gamma Brainwaves at will … this will give us the key to the door of different levels of consciousness, direct access to knowing and probably abilities of the brain/mind/soul/spirit that we only can dream of now.

Does not matter how much i consciously know about brainwave states, it is clear from experience that intuition as well as any other “higher” form of perception is most possible when i am in a calm, wakeful, openly receptive state with very little mental noise going on in my mind/brain to interfere with the intuitive “input” ; )

~

In eastern symbolic & poetic language this state has always been compared with a perfectly peaceful pond under the full moon, no ripples or waves breaking the surface.
Like a mirror it perfectly reflects the full moon above.

 

 

In scientific language, this state is associated with brainwave coherence, which means the synchronization of brainwaves across different regions of the brain. Regions that I have mentioned before:

The reptilian brain – Sensing, the Limbic System – Feeling, the Left Neo-Cortex – Thinking, the Right-Neo-Cortex – Intuition

Coherence is also associated with moments of high creativity, so called “Flow States” of the brain, mental flexibility, openness and presence in the Here&Now.

Also there is an experience of Transcendence, like we would quietly allowed to peek over the edge of our personal existence into the bigger world beyond our confines – transpersonal experiences.

For me, this means that a healthy and coherent nervous system (mind-body/psycho-physical) can process higher-level knowledge in an orderly fashion and naturally lead my attention to the needed information at the right time without my personal effort involved.

 

This is exactly how i experience those moments of intuitive knowing, that give me the goosebumps.

 

It is also my experience that the depth and clarity of my intuitive perception and insight can be increased by my own spiritual practice, whatever this may be.

In my case it is meditation, for other people it may be Tai Chi or a deep artistic process that creates a Flow state of mind, where time and space and identity is somehow transcended.
Meditation has been the traditional way in the East, the most deeply explored and developed path to understand and utilize our inner potential, the abilities of our mind and what lays beyond.

 

 

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When the muse is kissing you, better don’t resist.
Go for the ride, enjoy the flow and the exhilaration, the joy of creating.

Inspiration is a seed idea, a creative impulse and the irresistible drive to bring the idea to it’s fruition, to bring it into being.

 

~

 

Most of the articles in this blog started as such seed ideas that appeared in my sleepy mind in the wee hours of the day, the liminal in-between time when I am not asleep anymore and not awake either. Or they literally dropped into my head fully formed under the shower or while brushing my teeth.

No thinking needed, no formulating or editing. Just scribble it down quickly, those precious ideas are fleeting like the smoke from a cigarette.

 

inspiration

my spirit takes flight
sometimes
and takes my mind on its wings

i have to scribble it all down
quickly
thats my job
so that nothing gets lost

 

I love the metaphor of the seed, inspiration as a seed. Because the seed already has the whole tree inside of it … potentially.

The whole Gestalt and also the whole process necessary for it’s gestation. It is so tiny, and it is so potent at the same time.

The seed just needs to drop into a fertile environment and some time to do it’s thing. And then there is no stopping it.

 

Where does inspiration come from?

Where do great ideas originate?

 

In general everyday use, the word inspiration would be used most often in the context of art, in connection with the work of composers and poets or inspired novelists of world literature who wrote about big things.

Dostoyevsky maybe, Tolstoy or Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Ralph Waldo Emerson or Walt Whitman. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for sure.
But also great scientists and inventors like Einstein, Nikolas Tesla and Niels Bohr, who had breakthrough ideas “in a flash”.

Artists in the past have often associated with a muse or more muses – usually beautiful looking females – for inspiration.

 

“Kissed by the muse,” as the saying goes.

 

The word muse(s) has its roots in Greek Mythology.

 

 

The “Nine Muses” were “the goddesses of literature, the sciences and the arts”, they were thought to be the daughters of Zeus, the king of all the gods and of Mnemosyne, the goddess of Memory!

Those muses – in metaphorical and maybe also real ways – have been the source of inspiration “from above” for extraordinary things throughout the ages, ever since.

 

~

For me it is obvious that inspiration comes from a similar transpersonal sphere as intuition, this level of our consciousness that usually is beyond our rational thinking and control, beyond the deductive abilities and conclusions of our mind.

 

Inspiration works in mysterious ways very similar to receiving an intuitive insight, just often in a much more broader, impersonal, almost epic kind of delivery.

Maybe it is not a question where the ideas come from, but what they inspire us mortals to create and manifest.

 

 

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Let’s say, I had a dream last night, a rather emotionally loaded dream about a friend that I have not seen for a very long time. And in the dream it has been a very joyful reunion.
And then, this morning I receive a email from exactly that friend, asking me how I had been lately …

 

Similar things happen to me quite often, and I always get goosebumps when they occur.
I love that!

Synchronicity is one of those terms that entered popular culture already a while ago – before it was fully understood. Today it is often used casually to mean “a strange coincidence,” “a sign from the universe,” or “something that was meant to happen.”
But in its original definition, synchronicity is more precise and more interesting:

 

Synchronicity names an event in which an inner psychological state and an outer occurrence correspond in a way that feels deeply meaningful, while no ordinary causal connection can be shown.

 

The concept was developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, founder of depth psychology – Tiefenpsychologie – who researched this phenomena for many years.

Jung described synchronicity as an “acausal connecting principle”:

a form of connection not based on physical cause and effect, but on meaning. In the Jungian framing, a synchronistic event is not merely unlikely. It is symbolically charged.
Something in the outer world appears to mirror, answer, intensify, or illuminate something happening inwardly.

 

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Jung’s synchronicity theory emerged from his clinical psychotherapy work, his study of dreams and symbols, and his lifelong interest in mythology, alchemy, religion, and the I Ching.

He noticed that therapy patients often reported coincidences that arrived at psychologically decisive breakthrough moments. These events seemed to function like living symbols, acting as catalysts for insight.

 

Synchronicity requires three elements: an inner state, an outer event, and a meaningful correspondence between the two.

The meaning arises spontaneously from the emotional, symbolic, or existential situation of the person experiencing it.

I think the important question is not: “Why does this even occur,” or “How can this be happening?”
Synchronicity asks a different question: “What does this mean to me?”

 

What happens in human life when such so called coincidences are experienced as meaningful?
Sometimes it means quite a lot. A synchronistic event can reorganize attention in our psyche. It can bring unconscious material into consciousness. It can strengthen a sense of being addressed by life. It can also help a person find meaning during disorientation.

 

Synchronicity and Spiritual Traditions

 

Although Jung established the modern psychological term – synchronicity – the underlying concept is an ancient one. Many spiritual traditions assume that inner and outer worlds are not separate.

Indigenous cosmologies, Taoist thought, Hindu and Buddhist metaphysics, mystical Christianity, Sufism, Kabbalah, and esoteric traditions often describe reality as patterned, relational, symbolic, and responsive.

In such worldviews, events are not isolated objects floating in unrelated space. They belong to a living web. A bird, a dream, an illness, a chance meeting, or a repeated symbol may be read as part of a larger conversation between the person and the cosmos.

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Jung was drawn to the I Ching partly because it does not operate by linear prediction in the modern mechanical sense. It treats the moment itself as meaningful.

The throw of coins or stalks is random from one point of view, but from another it participates in the pattern-quality of the moment.

 

Jung saw this as close to the logic of synchronicity: not cause producing effect, but meaning creates a constellation in time.

~

I would say that one shall be a little careful here. “Ancient traditions believed this” does not automatically make the claim true. Not everybody should immediately go buy the I Ching and toss the coins 😇 The shadow side of synchronicity is spiritual narcissism, over-interpretation. The line between meaningful coincidence and make-believe projection is a fine line!

Discernment and contemplative self-reflection is recommended.

 

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Coincidence, Cosmic Coincidence, Synchronicity

They are often confused. Whats the difference?

 

Coincidence – Albert Einstein said when asked – is:

 

“God’s way of remaining anonymous.”

Good old uncle Einstein loved to give quizzical riddles to profound questions.

 

Maybe it is important to distinguish between coincidence and synchronicity – or maybe not. 🐸
They are often used interchangeably but have different meanings. ‘

While both involve seemingly unrelated events occurring simultaneously, synchronicity is charged with a deeper meaning, insight, revelation or connection.

Coincidences are seemingly random occurrences that happen by chance, with no felt underlying significance. They are simply a result of probability and statistical likelihood.

When I have been traveling in foreign countries, walking around in a large city, it happened sometimes that I have been running into a old friend unexpectedly. Big surprise!!! Big joy!

Distinguishing between coincidence and synchronicity requires paying attention to the context and meaning of the events. It involves reflecting on the significance of the events in relation to my own life and journey, and considering whether there is a deeper message or lesson that can be learned.

 

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Cosmic Coincidence

 

At the heart of C.G. Jung’s synchronicity is the concept of oneness and universal interconnectedness. It suggests that everything in the universe is connected in some way, and that these connections can manifest in our lives through synchronistic events.

I am intuitively resonating with the non-dualistic view of existence, the age-old understanding that micro- and macro level, inside and outside, spirit and matter are not separate but are intrinsically and mysteriously One Existence.

We could call it God, Consciousness, The Mother or by any of the many other names The Undefinable has been named throughout the ages. Let’s try to not name it for now!

 

The DAO that can be expressed
is not the eternal DAO.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal name.

Tao Te Ching / 1st stanza – Lao Tze

 

~

 

What intrigues me here is the interconnectedness and inter-relatedness of everything in life / in the inner and outer universe.

Why everything is as it is.
Why I have married this woman and not her best friend.
Why I grew up in a sleepy Austrian village in 1953 and not in Vietnam.
How my past lifetimes in India resulted in a specific spiritual lifestyle that I chose early on in this life.
How come an amazing Cosmic Coincidence makes Total Solar Eclipses possible.

 

Many such personal and trans-personal co-incedences / co-occurences can be rationally explained for sure.
But for me, I’d love to see the bigger picture.

The “invisible hand behind the veil.”
I can feel it, but I cant explain it.

 

There are obviously many cosmic-scale – non-religious – hints, from the most cutting edge quantum theories to the earliest Vedic scriptures and some Buddhist metaphysical teachings.

Quantum entanglement  and “Indra’s Jewels” and Huayan Buddhism. 
Its too complex for me to go into all of the details here, I wound not even try! 😎

At the end of the day, Oneness on a cosmic scale is not understandable on a rational level, no matter how big those concepts may be.

I can simply feel it, or intuit the existence of a web of life that I am one with, an individual waterdrop maybe in Indra’s web but not separate at all.

 

 

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Miracles are a delicate subject indeed!

Believe it or not!

Up to you 😉

 

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Oral history and all the scriptures are full of miracles, stories passed on thru the generations. 

 

A miracle is an event that cannot be explained by natural or scientific laws and accordingly gets attributed to some supernatural or preternatural cause. Various religions often attribute a phenomenon characterized as miraculous to the actions of a supernatural being, god, a deity, a miracle worker, a saint, or a religious leader.

 

I am sure there has been plenty such events, just i have not been graced to witness one – i am still hoping.

For me, i rather focus on the everyday miracles, the small overlooked ones. The ones taken for granted

Life as a miracle

Honestly, I don’t want to say very much about such a heavenly topic, I rather let others do the talking.

 

Poetry is the best way to feel into it.

The miracles and the wonders.

 

~

 

World of Miracles

This is a world of miracles and wonder!

Where in the face of death, exhaustion, sorrow,
Every day someone chooses love
Serves the poor, gives a shirt to the naked, water to the thirsty,
Shelter to the homeless, food to the hungry.

Where in spite of the vast ugliness,
And amid the ruins and the ashes, someone plants a garden,
Makes a small poem of beauty that few will ever see,

And like artists everywhere, works without acclaim.

I don’t want to hear about miracles-as-magic-tricks,
Changing water into wine, stones into loaves of bread.
Tell me about miracles of goodness, kindness, beauty, caring, sharing,
Undeserved love.

Those are the miracles I want to hear about!

By Anonymous

 

 

 

 

Logos

Why worry about the loaves and fishes?
If you say the right words, the wine expands.
If you say them with love
and the felt ferocity of that love
and the felt necessity of that love,
the fish explode into many.
Imagine him, speaking,
and don’t worry about what is reality,
or what is plain, or what is mysterious.
If you were there, it was all those things.
If you can imagine it, it is all those things.
Eat, drink, be happy.
Accept the miracle.
Accept, too, each spoken word
spoken with love.

by Mary Oliver

 

 

 

 

Mysteries, Yes!

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

by Mary Oliver

 

 

 

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What is Grace

 

‘What is grace’ I asked God.

And He said,

‘All that happens.’

Then He added, when I looked perplexed,

‘Could not lovers
say that every moment in their Beloved’s arms
was grace?

Existence is my arms,
though I well understand how one can turn
away from
me

until the heart has
wisdom.’

Anonymous

 

 

 

The wine of divine grace is limitless;
All limits come only from the cracks of the cup.

Moonlight floods the whole sky from horizon to horizon;
How much it can fill your room depends on its windows.

Rumi

 

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Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Rumi

 

 

 

El Cant dels Ocells / Song of the Birds
Pablo Casals / Yo Yo Ma Cello

 

 

 

 

 

 

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