Chapter 5 – Nature’s Way: Intuition

To follow the principles of nature means to align with nature’s way of knowing, which is instinctive or intuitive. Flowers just know when to open, birds know where to migrate, coal knows how become a diamond, earth knows how to create community. Without thinking, nature just knows and so do we know by trusting our intuition.

Intuition has a built-in logic, an organic way of genius, even to the extent of being mathematically exact. The eons-old mollusk, without a single course in algebra, designs its shell according to the equation of r=ae, which the great mathematician, Rene Descartes, discovered a mere 355 years ago. In essence, to apply nature’s principles to our life, live intuitively.

The beauty of intuitive knowing is that it contains all the principles of natural and successful sustainability. Like nature, intuition does not rely on fixed answers. It’s essence is change-able, current, and evolving. Intuition is the source of continuous creativity and renewal. It is the life force of growth, the energy of pure consciousness that evolves our awareness. Intuition is open like the wilderness, and with it, we are free to roam and grow.

Green Wisdom Cards are designed to activate the natural genius of your intuition. Like an oracle, the Cards reveal their truth by symbolic images. You the querent must tap your own intuitive inner wisdom for answers to their meanings. Nature’s principles are represented in the Cards as picture collages, and through your intuition you must personalize their eternal truths. Definitions of the Cards are sometimes presented in a poetic way, so that each word sparks intuitive associations and meanings.

Intuition, which means “tuition or education from within,” is direct knowing without rational processes. It comes as an idea, a feeling, a sensation or an insight that comes out of the blue sky. From the unknown, it just pops up. You “just know.” And your intuition is yours alone, right for yourself, and maybe for no one else.

Our whole triune brain that includes the ancient reptilian, mammalian, and the human neo-cortex contains and catalyzes eons of experience into intuitive knowing. Many of us are prisoners of logic, when in fact, logic is simply a tool for the intuition to explain or rationalize itself.

How to be intuitive? Just let it happen. If you had all sorts of techniques, that would be defeating the purpose. Creative intuition thrives on no rules, no shoulds, on an empty mind. It is such a simple, easy and quick process that we tend to discount it. In modern-day societies, unless something is difficult, time consuming, costly or from an authority, it’s often not respected. Value and honor what comes up swiftly and easily for you. Intuition is your most sacred friend and ally because it comes from the depths and heights of your true being.

Over the years of working with intuitive activators, I have found that visual images are the easiest, swiftest and most powerful cues. Albert Einstein suggested, images and “imagination is more important than knowledge.” From a picture of a man riding a wave of light, Einstein intuited the theory of relativity which ushered in a whole new world.

Selecting a Green Wisdom Card of natural imagery with the intention of intuitive realization naturally excites the intuition. This process I call “picture thinking,” free associating by means of the image to get an aha! Indeed, “The soul never thinks without a picture,” according to Aristotle. Human genius has the unique faculty to get the truth from the picture.

Picture thinking is the act of symbolizing – giving meaning to a visual object, imagined or tangible. The symbolic process leads to intuiting, to getting the picture to get the idea that has felt meaningfulness. Simply let the pictures in the Cards speak to you.

Natural phenomena, such as a stone or stork, which have existed for millennia, often take on universal meanings over time. They have become “archetypes,” symbols that are deeply imbedded in our collective consciousness. Images from ancient nature are thus able to arouse primordial knowing that goes far beyond the thinking, logical mind. As Sigmund Freud wrote, “Our mind is like an iceberg, seven eighths of it is below the surface.”

Archetypal symbols from nature hold a treasure vault brimming with untold wisdom. Our natural intuitive genius often arises through these universal symbols, whether they come in dreams, fantasies, musings and imagery. The breakthrough for the coil-like chemical structure of benzine came in a dream from the age-old symbol picture of a snake biting its own tail.

When we juxtapose ancient collective wisdom into contemporary, temporal personal situations, we experience creative combustion with a spark, a flash, an intuitive impulse that heralds the future!

Designed from collaged imagery, the Green Wisdom Cards are fragmented photomontages that catalyze the dreamlike quality of the intuitive. Looking at the imagery, full of unfulfilled pictures, engages our imagination to make them complete. The Cards, like our dreams, jog our curiosity and the subconscious, wherein lies altered perception and non-ordinary thinking, which are sources of intuitive creativity.

Images from nature are represented on Cards so that you can play with them. Intuition flourishes in a state of playfulness. When we return to a childlike state of being receptive, excited, joyful, innocent and spontaneous, there exists the prime condition for optimum insight, learning and creativity. Play is the way.

As they say, “Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.” Kid around and don’t cut your wings of intuition with judgment, censorship and doubt. Intuitions are angels, here to guard and guide renewal.

As in playing most card games, we select the Cards face down. It’s making an intuitive choice. This selection procedure imitates nature at work/play. If you watch a humming bird, it flies from here to there, with no logical progression, and it invariably finds the nectar. Intuition is like that in that we fly this way and that, sensing the way for no reason, trusting the impulse, and finding the magic in the mystery.

The natural way of intuition is seemingly at random, but actually follows a higher organic logic. In free circulating with intuitions, we circle and spiral in the way that energy moves in the universe. In so doing, we are in the “flow” as we move with the natural “chi” of life.

When faced with the unknown, you can rely on and trust the intuitive flow. Let your intuition guide you in choosing the Card when it just feels right. Your intuitive selection is not a random choice. Physicists have statistically proven this through thousands of intuitive selections of tarot cards. There is an unseen logic. I have done this many thousands and thousands of times, and it works. But it’s best for you intention to be there by having a conscious purpose for choosing a Card. We accept synchronicity, that there is a meaningful relationship between ourselves and whatever happens to us at any given time. Everything is synchronized.

Tapping intuitive genius is so entirely natural through natural imagery that it’s simple, quick and immediate. “Easy does it” is the intuitive’s motto, for the harder you try, the harder it gets, until you are rock hard – closed, uptight, dense, slow, resistant – hardly the condition for intuitive flow.

Intuition is the one mode of cognizing that comprehends the whole at once. Like nature, it naturally integrates wide-ranging diversity, whereas logic can only fill in small bits and pieces fro point A to point B. As a wholistic way of knowing, intuition comes from the whole self that includes the thinking mind, feeling heart, and sensate body.

Intuition is not only thoughts in the mind, but an affair of the heart. Intuitive impulses carry strong feelings because they emanate from the heart center of emotions. This is why they have such power, for they spring from the same source as love and passion. Intuitions are marked by an emotional charge, an electric impulse. They relay a sense of excitement, a heart stirring, not just brain storming. This kind of knowing is emotionally revitalizing and regenerative throughout the self. In the act of intuiting, we feel alive and we are enlivened.

Intuition is also a body knowledge, using all the phsycial senses synergistically to create a “sixth sense.” Whole brain thinking is, in fact, “whole body knowing.” Intuitions triggered by nature cue our visual, auditory, olfactory senses of knowing.

Yet, intuition remains a mystery. Life the invisible life force spirit, it is impossible to accurately define and measure it. We can only trust it in ourselves as intuition does represent the closest we have to who we are authentically. Intuition seems to be “inspirited,” or inspired, and it inspires us to act. Intuition is like the life force itself.

The power of intuition to direct and move our lives is by virtue of its wholeness, as it manifests throughout all our faculties. When our feeling heart, our intelligent body, our mental acuity and the mystery of inspiration are in agreement, then we are synergized and as optimally effective as we can be.

Each Green Wisdom Card is food for all the sense. Let it evoke visions, smells, textures, places, temperature, sounds. Allow it to elicit feelings of all kinds ­ ­– pleasure, joys, fear and pain – which tell us how we are and what to do. Let the imagery take your imagination away to the universe of all possibilities. In touching the senses and the heart and spirit of the matter, we move ourselves beyond the fences of belief and habitual patterns into inspired knowing and living.

Once you have internally experienced the nature of your Card, ground yourself. Plant your feelings, senses, ideas and visions into action you will take. The natural way of living calls upon taking tangible steps. The proof is in the pudding.

Let the Card you select call you to action. Nature is all about doing, not just resting and certainly not thinking and worrying and obsessing. We have 50,000 ideas a day. We don’t need more. We just need a few that inspire us to act.

And intuition is like thinking on your feet; it flourishes in activity. In the doing comes the answer. Note that we get twenty percent more oxygen to the brain when we are standing, and we make decisions twenty percent faster on our feet. Intuition is for doers, those who are on their toes. It is a quickened state of alertness for a swiftly moving, changing world.

In our time-compressed world of today, it’s survival of the quickest and survival of the fittest – those who feel it and do it! Now we know that those who are aerobically the fittest are not only capable of sustaining physically and emotionally, but have the capacity to regenerate brain cells and grow younger mentally.

Intuition is energy! It motivates and moves us. The more we trust and follow it, the more we can do, the more effortless life becomes, and the more authentic, whole and resourceful we be.

Intuition is an inner feeling unique to each person. By listening to our inner counsel, we are true to ourselves and know ourselves. Look at nature and see how a bird knows how to go about its business. It does not try to be something it is not. It has no confusion as to which berry to seek. All elements and creatures of nature know themselves and are themselves. No doubts, no hesitance, no failures. Intuition is our human way of having self-authenticity and self-confidence.

How do we know our way in life? Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek, once wrote, “As I watched the seagulls, I thought, ‘that’s the road to take; find the absolute rhythm and follow it with absolute trust.’” What is our absolute rhythm? The intuitive flow that naturally moves within us at all times.

Only through our intuition do we get the freedom to be ourselves and be true to ourselves. Our own intuition is the only reliable authority to ever follow, let alone in a time of changing beliefs, values, systems, institutions, technologies, folkways and mores.