This is the concluding part of a recent paper in which I explore what fully embodied sensing is and then deliver some scientific understanding of how it is even possible. What is the nature of a reality that would enable such a capability to exist? Recognising that reality, how would we develop and make use of this capacity?
Read Part 1 here.
The stated intention of this paper is to understand the nature of a reality in which non-ordinary phenomena exist, and while the title refers to intuitive “sensing”, it is by now apparent that something larger and more fundamental surrounds this territory.
We have looked at the physics of quantum entanglement and the demonstration that particles in the universe “know” about each other. We have looked at the emerging science of quantum biology and seen the complex relationship between information and human energy systems, including cells which seemingly “choose” their response to a stimulus. And we have briefly looked at the indications that something underneath all of this holds not only current information, but memories. More than that, for precognition to be possible, our communication with the matrix of memory operates beyond our normal concepts of linear time. The universe in which all this takes place is conceptually different from the one that we have generally believed in.
At this point, we need to turn the conventional view upside down, or perhaps inside out. That view offers us a concept of consciousness that it is created by the human mind. Whatever you experience, however you experience it, is a product of activity in your brain, something that starts with a physiological process of receiving data (light, sound chemical, etc.) from your surroundings and is then assembled into patterns in your neurons. That data is incomplete, though. You cannot see infrared or hear the high frequencies that a bat can. The pheromones that cause moths to fly long distances to find a mate are imperceptible to you. In turn, pattern creation may or may not be reliable — first, at the simple level of optical illusions; second, in our meaning-making; and then, in our evident ability to invent and imagine scenarios beyond what is there. That capacity to re-imagine is as powerful a shaper of human development as our opposable thumbs have been. The person who invented the wheel saw it first in their mind’s eye.
All of the above is true, but it is also limited. It does not allow humans to sense what the Dracaena could sense and it does not explain what the Dracaena was sensing. What does nature know and what does the universe itself know that is not explained by a mind-located model of consciousness? This is where the model turns inside out, and to grasp how that works we must revisit the relationship between energy and matter to ask the very simple question of what governs the process by which energy becomes matter?
The Nature of Creation
The conventional description is that from the moment when there was only energy, prior to the “Big Bang”, the universe as we know it erupted into existence, creating particles that coalesced into matter, randomly collecting into the forms that we know. Again, this image way well be true but, as before, it is limited. The phenomenon of quantum entanglement indicates what is missing; it introduces the element of information, a capacity for the universe to know itself.
What follows can only be a speculative narrative, but it provides an explanation for what we know now.
As I said, it is simple. I would like to take you on a short imaginary journey.
Imagine that there was once nothing but energy, a whole universe of it. If you like the Big Bang story, think of it like that, but that’s just an option. Think of it as if the energy were just there, vibrating with potential, but no structure, no meaning, no significance, no form.
Imagine that all that vibrating energy kept making shapes and patterns. These were mathematical patterns, and sometimes the patterns were not stable, so they came and went in the way that ripples on a pond do.
At some point, the mathematics worked in a way that created patterns where something came but did not go. Something was formed that was the first matter, the smallest particle that was possible. Picture it this way: the energy had a memory and made a note of what it had done, so it could do it some more.
Now step forward and scale up that activity. Imagine that many different forms of stable matter came into being, the ones that we now call electrons, neutrons and protons. Imagine that the energy-memory made a note of them all, and did more of that too.
Sooner or later, the particles bumped into each other and formed larger patterns. We call these atoms, such as hydrogen, oxygen and uranium. The atoms also bumped into each other and formed molecules. As before, some patterns did not last and were not remembered. The ones that were remembered became the building blocks of the universe.
The rest of the story, in conventional terms, takes about 14 billion years. Gravity packed matter together and it fused into stars, spinning galaxies full of them and also spewing off planets and rocks.
On one of those cooled-down planets, there was a very special stable molecule called water that covered a lot of it. In the water, molecules joined up to make amino acids. Amino acids created patterns that could reproduce. Part of the Universe’s memory was now chemical, like what we call DNA. This organic chemistry became living cells, probably starting with algae. Early bacteria were the prokaryotic components that merged to form more complex eukaryotic cells. All of the knowledge of how that worked was retained in the information bank of energy-memory. It was retained for every particle and every larger structure. The Universe does not lose track of anything. It does not know how. Everything that it is, is patterns in its memory.
Some cell patterns survived and some didn’t. Over time, successful cell patterns clumped together and made multi-celled creatures. Everything was remembered and became part of the cosmic pattern. Species were formed, and they came and went too, like the dinosaurs, one of the most successful patterns that lived on Earth for a hundred million years — much longer than we humans have done yet.
Eventually mammals, and this one mammal called Homo sapiens showed up, the one that we think is rather special. And in a way it is. Most of the coming story is about what it means to be our kind of being.
You don’t need to remember any of the detail of what you have just read — not that there was much detail there. All that you need to know about the picture we have just painted is that the Universe is a kind of living experiment, with a memory. That memory contains information about everything that it has ever done or created. This means it holds the formulae for all that exists right now.
Physically, the Universe has memory of all of the patterns for making particles, atoms, molecules, galaxies, organic chemistry and people. It also has the memory of where every one of them is, because it doesn’t have a way to forget. The memory is built in to the fabric of everything that is. You might even say that it IS the fabric of all that is, since it is before matter, and shapes everything that is energy INTO matter. Form is the shape of consciousness.1
It also has all the other patterns for all the unseen beings, the ones which are only patterns of energy information, the nature spirits and the non-incarnated beings (whatever you might conceive those to be), like “entities” and the person who used to be Great-Aunt Agatha.
What you need to take first from this picture is that the field of information is everywhere, in everything, and has no boundaries. It is in you and around you, between you and your family, you and your pets, between you and everything that you think of as “not you”. And if you have ever played that consciousness game where you expand YOU way out, beyond the limits of your body and any geographical limits, that is the reality that you are engaging with. In case you thought that it was imaginary, it isn’t.
This the Field we have been putting forward since the start of this paper. More than being the invisible shaper of an arrangement of iron filings, it is first a memory store of everything that the universe has come to know about itself, but secondly and much more, an active space of continuing creation. There is a process that evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris calls “autopoiesis”, or self-creating,2 according to which we can view life as endlessly self-organising. Within it, dynamic balances are maintained between what benefits individuals and what benefits collectives. Similarly, ecosystems evolve from the blend of competition for resources to enable survival of one species with the collaboration that maximises the energy flow through the system as a whole and increases both richness and stability. While that dance as referenced in the title for Sahtouris’s book Earthdance is beyond our scope here, it provides the picture of how the field is built and what we find there.
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela prefigured this biological perspective in the realm of knowledge itself, going beyond the history in which philosophy has argued its various points of view based largely on pure reasoning and analysis. In their beautifully argued book The Tree of Knowledge,3 they extend the story as told here, reaching the conclusion that cognition is a “bringing forth of the world through the process of living itself”. In common with Elisabet Sahtouris, they use the term “autopoietic” which Maturana had previously conceptualised in 1980 in Autopoiesis and Cognition. They provide thorough evidence and analysis that human reality is not “out there”, and neither is it simply an internal construct that individuals develop. Rather it is a world in which they suggest that any individual who understands what they have said …
“… will be impelled to look at everything he does — smelling, seeing, building, preferring, rejecting, conversing — as a world brought forth in co-existence with other people.”
In consequence, reality has no independent point of reference. There is no external certainty available to validate our descriptions and assertions. The reality that humans live in is something we have constructed together and there is no absolute Truth. It is the biological basis of social life, a biological dynamic with deep roots leading to operational coherence in the social realm.
This is key to the realm of the embodied sensing experience. As humans we are engaging with the field of information that the universe has constructed into its living systems materiality/physicality. At the same time, we are exploring the field of what is collectively believed. We are bumping into what Mummy, Daddy or Great-Aunt Agatha believed and into the entire collectivised constructs of Islam, Catholicism, Trumpism or Socialism. Everything is equally real and nothing at all is real, including you. This is not the territory of Descartes’ “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am”. Who you are is an informationally constructed entity in a realm of other such entities, but also an entity seemingly individualised as a physical body, with the appearance of separateness.
Beneath that appearance are unceasing exchanges in the realm of matter, electrons, photons and other particles that flow between your body and its environment. Several thousand million of your skin cells will have replaced themselves during the time it takes to read this paper. The you that you think is you has changed in the time taken to read this sentence, perhaps even as a result of reading this sentence.
There are numerous mystical, spiritual or religious perspectives regarding the notion of one-ness, from Buddhism through St. Theresa of Avila to more modern presentations with New Age or quantum consciousness frames. They have in common the perception that humans can experience their sense of self-vanishing so that they perceive themselves as embedded in or at one with all that is. Some call it nondual reality. Some frame it as the only reality, saying that our experience of the dual is an illusion.
Buckminster Fuller takes the definition of “universe” in its literal sense, as with union or unity, as being a single entity, but points out that within it we immediately have the possibility of division into the “I” and the “Not-I”. This is the human reality that we operate from whenever we cross the street. A nondual experience with traffic returns us rapidly to the realm of the disincarnate. It is also the human reality that we function from when we engage with intuitive inquiry. The “I” seeks information from the “Not-I” that it is embedded in. And then Fuller has a further definition, that “Universe is the aggregate of all humanity’s consciously apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences”.4 [My emphasis in italics.]
It is not possible in a paper such as this to disconnect science from its philosophical or metaphysical context. There are epistemological and existential questions — what can we know and who are we? — that humans have asked themselves for as long as writing has existed. In framing the above I felt it necessary to deal explicitly with such questions, albeit principally in order to set them to one side and focus on the application of this view of reality to our living experience.
Never before has the world been so aware of its interconnected wholeness in the material realm, and never more aware of systemic turbulence, sometimes encapsulated as VUCA conditions.5 For these conditions, our previous ways of thinking regularly show themselves as inadequate with their linear cause-and-effect logic, binary right-wrong polarities and deliberate subdivision into fragments rather than understanding of systemic wholes. More intuitive ways of decision-making are becoming an essential survival tool. I note in passing that while Artificial Intelligence can do a great deal more than human brains to find larger systemic relationships, since AI does not have access to the information field itself, we should not assume that we can rely on its conclusions. Besides which, as several scary movies have portrayed, an AI system might rapidly conclude that the problem the planet is dealing with arises from the excessive numbers of human beings.
The purpose of this paper is therefore to encourage us to make use of our embodied sensing connection, and to bring these applications alongside of our rational, cognitive, intellectual brilliance in order to add both to the quantity of data available and to our ability to include it in our choice-forming processes. The thinking which generated our belief that we would reduce risks by establishing completely objective and reliable ways of knowing — i.e., scientific materialism — is the level of thinking which got us into this mess. That recognition should lead us now to Einstein’s famous conclusion that solving such problems demands a new level of thinking. The problem-solving methods which have emerged from the intuitive worldview meet with distrust from those who demand objective proof. By definition they are not part of the solution. Inevitably, mechanists who deny the existence of consciousness are unable to make use of its tools.
As the satirical documentary presenter Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan) might put it, humanity stands at a fork in its crossroads. Whatever you make of that image, we do not have the option of living in both worlds and a choice of reality is being forced on us. We already know that there is no “new normal”; we are dealing collectively with the stress of that shift and with its consequences for us as individuals. In reviewing the nature of reality, we are also obliged to reconsider what all of this means for our view of ourselves.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle prompted many questions about the nature of observation and the effect on what is observed. The territory being explored here straddles the boundary between human awareness and the remainder of reality — between the I and the Not-I. We need to take our existential and metaphysical questions a little further.
Who Are You?
Consider for a moment these questions:
Are you a human being having a consciousness (spiritual) experience?
or
Are you a (spiritual) being of consciousness having a human experience?
I suggest that when the question is asked in that fashion, it is difficult to be both. Have you made your choice? Seeing yourself as a human may make it more difficult for you to regard yourself as fully embedded in the Field. It leads to potentially greater separation from the flow. If you see yourself as a conscious being functioning as a human, it is easier to view yourself as a part of the All. However, it also may set up some challenges to your material conception of the world, to any pre-existing views you have about God (or whatever term you prefer for a “Higher Power”) and to some of the more tricky parts of alternative reality such as ghosts and mediums. The choice has consequences, some of which might take further time and effort to resolve.
There are many theories about how humans think, and how we construct our world-view. Earlier I aligned with Maturana and Varela’s view that we develop it through the process of living itself. I would like to extend that perspective with the psychological theory that human beings construct their reality. “These authors believe that the [cognitive] core network may support self-projection: the ability to mentally project oneself from the present moment into a simulation of another time, place, or perspective.”6 Cutting a long story short, Raymond Mar concludes, “There is substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and those used to navigate interactions with others — in particular, interactions in which we’re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others.”
The bottom line is that humans tell stories. We tell them to ourselves. Our engagement with the world is all framed in terms of the stories that we have about it. We do this because to thrive psychologically as well as biologically, we have to reduce uncertainty. We do not function at the level of raw data, which would be self-evidently overwhelming. We make meaning of the world, weaving factual data into patterns, associating contexts and episodes. We create constructs — labels that we use in those narratives,7we make maps8 and we organise our reasons why, the priorities that drive our choices.9
So what is your story and in what way does it support or undermine a belief that intuition exists, that you personally can be intuitive and the ways in which you might be effective in using it?
I suggest that in addition to the two options offered above — that you might define yourself either in terms of your human form or in the frame of some belief that consciousness itself is primary — that you consider the possibility that you are neither of these. Who you are is the experience itself, the story-teller and the story. And as Maturana and Varela suggest,10 you create them by the process of living.
This paper is a story too, which you can believe or not believe. You are free to choose any of the options or reject all of them. The first purpose of the questions was to make you think. But what creates the greatest possibility? I offer the suggestion that you allow yourself to simply be the story. This is because I believe that it is easier to understand and engage with both the concept of intuition and with its practical use if you set yourself and your “I” as free as possible in your relationship with the “Not-I”. Doing so helps reduce the sense of having to be “right” or “accurate”. More important, it opens your inner space and all of the resonating detector processes — regardless of whether I have described these or not — to receive the flow of information without preconceptions, constraints and filters. It is a space of allowance and non-judgement. It allows what is to be what it is and it allows you to be who you are, free of any impulse to make the Universe or yourself wrong.
How Do You Use the Tools?
This question could be the subject of a later paper; here the goal is only to provide a high-level sense of what the tools are and how to engage with them.
Since providing the earlier two definitions of embodied sensing, the journey of this investigation has widened the territory to include some more forms of awareness. While they might seem to be something other than that sensing, their use of similar forms of connection prompts me to include them.
I also wish to make a distinction between two other ways of viewing embodied intuitive experience. It is common for the word “intuition” to be used in the same way as a “hunch” or something else which conveys a spontaneous and unlooked-for awareness that I will describe as passive. There are other ways of using embodied sensing that are active, involving an intentional inquiry or investigation or a deliberate choice to connect. My own first experience was an example of such active intention.
Here is an incomplete but indicative list, roughly increasing in active engagement. The first three may be more comfortable to people who view consciousness as being internal, but are willing to accept that their inner awareness, unconscious processes or “higher self” are capable of recognising things that their everyday cognitive mind would not, or may detect patterns in the data that would not show up analytically.
I am intentionally offering no judgement about any of these examples. All are consistent with the view of an information field as all such phenomena are possible and I know of no criteria by which to determine what is or is not real. They are included in order that you can consider what they mean to you, and which you experience as stretching your own constructs or taking them beyond their breaking point. You may also find one arena prompts particular curiosity.
1. Information that you notice
Sometimes ideas simply come into your mind which you might notice, or might not. Sometimes it will happen that a later event will trigger your awareness, perhaps in an “if only I had paid attention to that” way.
2. Noticing what you notice
Some individuals, and some quasi-shamanistic training processes, lead to an intentional choice to consistently scan one’s own field of awareness and notice what it is drawn to. This covers not only the stream of internal narrative, but observation of the things, messages or events that attract your attention. Perhaps you find yourself looking at a particular advertising hoarding, or a song lodges in your head, or you are unusually aware today of the colour orange. Someone might say something, or you might overhear a comment that sticks out, as if somehow highlighted. You might equally notice that there is an emotional undercurrent, have a sudden unexplained sense about a person, like something not being spoken or a lie being told. There could be a repeated “pop-up” feeling that is not part of your regular repertoire, maybe a simple sensation that something is “off”, without any apparent explanation. These may or may not be significant and the task is to develop the practice of noticing. Be aware too, of how many different ways there are for information to be revealed.
3. Asking for something to “show up”
This can be a practice such as requesting a dream experience that will answer a question that you have, or holding a question when you go to sleep with the request that your first thought on waking will tell you something relevant that you need to know. This can be combined with number 2, asking to notice something that may offer a clue.
4. Meditative scan
This is like an extension of mindfulness techniques where you settle your inner mind and then “open up” to receive. I believe it can work for some people, but my view in general is that the Universe responds to questions.
5. Programmed guidance
There are many products and I don’t pretend to be familiar with them. Often they support a more focused form of number 4 — leading your enquiry with suggestions and questions. They may have a specific direction of focus, such as work on your own health issues, or relationships or financial challenges and they may extend more into “create your reality” concepts which I have not covered here. I have other materials on that topic. 11
6. Intentional Inquiry
My training colleague Maiken Piil uses this technique a lot, for example to tune in to a coaching client prior to a session and as a life guidance tool. It is perhaps the most widespread of active techniques because it can be oriented to just about any question, which makes it powerful and more or less unlimited in application. Embodied sensing is not a “gift”, as all humans have it, but it is possible to be gifted, like a Federer, a Ronaldo or a great musician. In either case, development to high levels takes time, practice, consistent intention and effort, but even novices can get results.12
7. Shamanism
As described briefly in the text above.
8. Energy healing, whether hands-on or remote
There are so many forms of this. The Silva Method was the first I learned and the source of a profound experience with the healing of a person with AIDS. I tell this in The Science of Possibility and in my short book Your Access to Possibility. However, perhaps the most widely known of these techniques is Reiki.
9. Gardening with the spirits of nature
Exemplified by the work at Findhorn and Perelandra as mentioned above.
10. Divination
The ability to tune in to an object and sense information about its history, where it has been, and who has been in contact with it.
11. Constellations work
Developed by Dr Bert Hellinger, a method of working with the ancestral influences in families13 and the contextual relationship shapers in organisations.14 Based on what he learned from 16 years as a missionary with the Zulu people in South Africa.
12. Entity work
Practitioners who work with the way in which non-incarnated information energy systems may affect individuals.
13. Space clearing
Working with residual information and flows in buildings.
14. Geopathic and land energy work
Specialising in the informational field content that governs the health of energy systems in the land.
15. Mediumship
Most people have heard of mediums — those who specialise in connecting with individuals who are no longer in their bodies and have “crossed over”.
16. Channeling
This is connection with an individual intelligence, or sometimes a collective, that are located somewhere in the field of consciousness and who seemingly choose to make themselves available to communicators on Earth. There have been some famous examples of such intelligences, such as Seth and Kryon, and whether you believe in them or not, they have some very interesting messages and perspectives. In this category, I include some of the more generic identities, such as the “Ascended Masters”.
17. Homeopathy
This is a field-based use of information signatures from substances as a basis for low-energy triggers to the body intelligence in awakening its own healing capabilities.15
18. Trauma-based therapy
Crossing the boundary between information in the field of families or societal systems and the individual internal beliefs and embodied flows affecting human addiction, anxiety, depression and relationships, among many other conditions, and the causation of physical illness.16
Note that the last two items in the list relate to the aspects of this science (as with Timmy’s story told in Part 1 of the paper) where the science of embodied sensing transitions into the areas directly affecting human physiology. At this point, the list could include hundreds of modalities both ancient and modern in the arena of complementary medicine and embodied psychotherapy. Since the information field itself has no boundaries and we are operating in the context of one-ness, this transition space should be recognised. In particular, many of the practitioners of these modalities use embodied or intuitive sensing as part of their toolset, hence their inclusion here.
In all the above practices, the way that information comes to you will be specific to the individual. I don’t propose to cover this in detail, but please understand that there are conventional beliefs and assumptions that are not true. The common word “clairvoyance” implies a visual event and people who are learning to develop intuition may start looking for pictures when perhaps only a third of people function this way. There are just as many who are “clairaudient” — the information comes like an internal narrative. Another large group simply have ideas, concepts show up and others have some kind of bodily response — there is a reason why our language has the expression “gut-feel”. Please understand that any of ones senses, or all of them, in any combination may be involved.
Closing Summary
The intention of this paper was to present the science that would explain intuitive capability. It will have become obvious that embodied sensing is one thread in a tapestry with much wider implications. Nevertheless, I would like to end with a focus on the key elements of the scientific narrative.
There has been a polarisation between views of the Universe as a material/energetic entity and as a place of consciousness and spirit.
It is possible to bring these two aspects of reality together when information is seen as a determinant of the way that energy is shaped when it becomes matter.
This process of shaping has been active from the very beginning of the Universe’s formation
The process is autopoietic; that is, it is self-organising and emergent, building from its own resources.
The process can be tracked through the mathematics and physics of energy relationships in the formation of particles.
It can be seen in the way that, over extended periods of time, matter built larger and more complex inorganic structures (atoms and molecules) and subsequently organic ones (amino acids, proteins and nucleotide replication mechanisms) that were the basis for cellular life.
As cellular life developed, the self-organising processes embraced the dynamics of competition and collaboration to create increasingly complex ecosystems containing larger species of organism.
Larger organisms such as mammals are members of ecosystems; they also contain within them ecosystems of cells that function in a coordinated way as collections of organs. (Note that those ecosystems are supported by large numbers of cohabiting and collaborating cells such as probiotics).
There are several mechanisms that co-ordinate those trillions of cells which operate at a variety of cycle speeds (down to femto-second and quantum level) and are highly sensitive to very small changes, internally and externally.
The mechanisms involved are not closed but are continually exchanging particles, energy and information with the surroundings. They are sensitive to the field, able to “read” and potentially also “write”.
These mechanisms provide the aspects of human consciousness that enable intuitive, sensed communication and extend also into spiritual experience and to the many other ways in which humans can work with information-field based applications.
The Universe described here is one that fits the term “panentheistic”; its frame for the context of divinity is one in which the field itself holds omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence. It is entirely open regarding personal framing for anything that might be called “God”.
This cosmology also leaves the personal space open for how one might frame such aspects of existence as “soul” or “higher self”, and for any considerations of individual spirit regarding reincarnation, past lives, life-after-death or the many other possible ways that people describe and experience those possibilities.
Links to More Information and Resources
There is more information about The Science of Possibility here.
For more information about my Relational Being work, and embodied sensing within the infinite tapestry of reality creation, visit my website here.
Connect for conversations and more, including my embodied sensing training packages and reality-creation materials at the Access to Possibility Facebook page and by joining the Relational Being group.
With huge thanks to Petra Pieterse for her brilliant editorial support.
Acknowledgements to Juliet and Jiva Carter and The Template® for this phrase, which gets deeper the more you engage with it.
Elisabet Sahtouris, Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution.
Maturana and Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding.
From Synergetics [301.00–302.00]. Also Amy C. Edmondson, A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller, 301.10.
Elisabet Sahtouris. Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution.
R. Nathan Spreng, Raymond A. Mar, and Alice S. N. Kim , “The Common Neural Basis of Autobiographical Memory, Prospection, Navigation. Theory of Mind,
and the Default Mode: A Quantitative Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience Volume 21, Number 3.
George A Kelly, A Theory of Personality: The Psychology of Personal Constructs.
Marjolein Lips-Wiersma, Lani Morris, The Map of Meaning: A Guide to Sustaining our Humanity in the World of Work.
Don E. Beck, Christopher Cowan, Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values Leadership and Change.
Maturana and Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding.
See Maiken Piil’s work on reading the Field.
Bert Hellinger, Love’s Hidden Symmetry: What Makes Love Work in Relationships.
Hellinger work in organisations: Klaus P. Horn, Regine Brick.
Jon Freeman, “The Science of Homeopathy.”
For example, the work of Dr Gabor Maté as shown in the film The Wisdom of Trauma.