Paying Attention

I thoroughly believe that when we are born, we know everything we need to know, in terms of the psychic tools we have and the spiritual connections we need to maintain. And we are born with an utter sense of self-worth and unshakeable faith. When a baby cries out, it expects to get its needs met. That’s how much faith and self-esteem we have at birth.

And what frequently happens is, over the next decade or so, we are taught to abandon our tools, and our sense of self-worth & acceptance. Sometimes this happens via well-meaning parents & authority figures (teachers, church leaders, government, doctors, etc). They nibble away at our psychic & spiritual awareness by telling us our intuition is just our imagination playing tricks on us. When the lights go out at bedtime and a child calls to mommy, saying there is “someone in the room,” well, maybe there IS someone in the room. Maybe the child is picking up on a spirit guide, or perhaps an ancestor passing through. So what if, instead of saying “Honey, that’s just your imagination,” we said to the kid “Really? Did you say hello? What did they look like? Did you ask why they were visiting? Did you tell them they have to play nice if they want to stay?” Imagine the possibilities!

There are miracles occurring all the time, right in front of us, and we have been trained to reject them as “just” coincidences. It always bothers me that the word coincidence seems to have lost its true meaning. It is often used in a dismissive manner, but an online dictionary defines it as “a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.” Right. Without ‘apparent’ casual relationship. That to me is almost the very definition of intuition.

To access intuition we have to pay attention. It is not a linear, causal, “1 + 1 + 1 = 3” kind of relationship. Intuition is free association & playful & irrational. What never ceases to amaze me is how, once I stop and listen carefully, once I truly take the time to pay actually attention, everything is so obvious. There are miracles occurring all the time, right in front of us.

Maybe one day, as you are walking a familiar route, you take a different street at random, for no ‘reason’ you believe, and there you bump into someone you haven’t seen in along time and the meeting turns out to be unexpectedly important. That was no accident, that was coincidence or as Jung defined it, synchronicity.

These types of things happen every day, perhaps dozens and dozens of times a day. You think of a friend, and a minute later the phone rings and there they are. And these things are often not provable. But they happen all the time, in small and large ways, and if you can shut off the logical side of your brain saying, “This cannot be, it is not logical,” you will eventually see the larger picture. Or even, after a friend or loved one passes away, and you are thinking of them, and one of their favorite songs starts to play on the radio? Not an accident.

But you do have to look for these things. You have to pay attention all the time. At first you will have to resist the training we all got as little children, telling us to dismiss these occurrences. This might sound like a lot of work, but it isn’t, really. Just gently remind yourself now and then during the day “I will notice and recognize any coincidences in life, and see them for what they really are.” At first you may only catch it now and then, but soon the universe will start to appear as it really is: far less random than you might have assumed, and far more connected than you might have expected.