00:00:13
Quite no, we see the future like a distant hologram. Here's how it works, if you want a little scientific explanation. My favorite theoretical approach is, if we think of the universe itself as being a giant hologram, a hologram is a three-dimensional image. And if you know how holography works, if you take a hologram and cut it in half or cut it in quarters, every little piece represents the whole. So you can see the entire image by shining a laser on just a piece of the holographic film. However, the smaller the piece, the more vagueness, the less distinct it is. And I think that's a very good metaphor. We ourselves are pieces of the whole. We are pieces of the entire universe. But because we are tiny pieces, we see things indistinctly.

00:01:21
There's a certain uncertainty, a certain fuzziness in our picture. And that happens when we look at the future. In that famous encounter of Moses with God, when Moses asked God about his identity and the Hebrew words that came that came back was 'I will be what I will be'. Totally different than our Hellenistic thought 'I am that I am', God says 'I will be what I will be.' So even in the divine there is this evolutionary aspect which has some unpredictable nature to it. And now there's another deeper question as well, because when we talk about intuition, people often, because I'm in parapsychology, and frankly it's my interest as well, there's the question, well, can we use this to make money?

00:02:22
Like, if I can look into the future, I could predict what the stock market's going to do next week. I could predict football games. I could predict election results. And simply by placing some strategic bets, I could accumulate a lot of money. And the answer is, yes, you can. However, there's another function that intuition has. That's not the function of intuition because all of those things can serve to reinforce your sense of separateness. I'm going to do all of these things to build up myself, me, as opposed to everybody else. And naturally, of course, we do want to act in a way that enhances our lives. I'm not saying that that's wrong, but what I am saying is that the function, of intuition runs deeper than that.

00:03:21
Gary Zukoff, whom I've interviewed, the author of The Seat of the Soul, says, you can use your intuition for practical purposes, for seeing into the future, but be aware that whenever you attempt to use your intuition, it will work fundamentally to give you the information and the direction that your soul most needs. And your soul may most need to let go of money or to let go of something to which you are very attached, something to which you are trying to acquire or trying to cling to by looking into the future. The soul may give you just the opposite of what you think you're going to do. You see, it may very well be in your soul's interest for you to have a divorce or a bankruptcy or something that you're not anticipating here.

00:04:15
And that's why I think when we work in this realm of intuition, it's very good to ask the deeper question, what is my purpose? And let your actions flow out of that. What is my highest purpose for being here right now on this planet? How can I best fulfill that purpose? And when you use your intuition in the service of your highest purpose, your destiny, As a human being on this planet, you're less likely to run into the kind of trouble that I have seen people run into when they use their intuition in ways that really enhance their sense of self-importance. Yes? I understood what you said about the uncertainty relating to the future. Intuitively, I tend to think The uncertainty should also apply to the past, or what we call the past. But that doesn't jive with my analytical mind. We have this notion in our culture that the arrow of time. People say time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like bananas.

00:05:42
Shifting ground here. There is another view. There is the Einstein view in which we think of space and time as a four-dimensional matrix. And it's true, in that sense. That if we look into the past, it's uncertain, just as we look into the future. We're not sure about the origins of the universe entirely. We're not sure about evolution and the history of our species on this planet. Why, we don't even know who killed Nicole. And not only that, there are physicists who suggest that we can change the past. Just the way we can change the future because we're living in parallel worlds. There are many pasts and there are many futures and we can jump from one to another. So I think these questions are in both a philosophical and a scientific sense.

00:06:49
They're open. In fact, there was an article in Scientific American not too long ago that said it would be possible to build a time machine to go back and to change the past. As long as whenever that happened, then we jump into a different parallel universe where that was the past. So you could even avoid the problem of killing your own grandfather and then never being born. There are paradoxes like this. There are very strange realms of thought that are becoming are speakable now. I mean, serious people in scientific journals are speaking of them because, let me just expand on that a little bit more. It's 1995 and many of us, I can see we've been around, we've been watching these changes accelerate for the last 10, 20, 30 years.

00:07:46
How many of you have personal computers right now? Okay, how many of you 20 years ago would never have imagined that you would own a personal computer. Right? And the speed of transportation is increasing. The speed of information is increasing. New technologies are coming down the tubes quickly. Nanotechnology, little machines that will be as small as molecules, like tiny little vacuum cleaners that will go into your bloodstream and clean out the cholesterol, are going to be invented. Genetic engineering, virtual reality is around the corner. And these things are going to change our civilization probably as much in the next 20 years as we have seen in the last 2,000. Right on the cusp of all of that.

00:08:37
And it's a time in which we are You know, in addition to all the other reasons that we've been talking about for going within, for getting in touch with your intuition, for getting in touch with your true nature, these changes are going to demand it of us even more strongly. Because with these new technologies comes awesome responsibility. We become almost like gods. And if we're going to have the power of gods, and we do, we have the power to annihilate the whole planet in many different ways now, we have to grow and have the maturity and the responsibility of gods. And that means going deep, deep, deep into the inner worlds, opening up not only to the oneness, but to the many stages of archetypal reality.

00:09:30
The layers of consciousness that lead us into the oneness. Yes, sir? The question is, are happiness and sadness intuition? And the answer is yes and no. The yes is that when you're talking to the director of the intuition network, maybe I'm like a fish swimming in a fishbowl, but as far as I'm concerned, everything is intuition. And I mean that sincerely, and in a deep philosophical sense, intuition underlies all human experience. Before we even know that it's happy or sad, it emerges out of an intuitive level. You're being intuitive right now, just listening to the words that come out of my mouth, because I can speak so rapidly that I don't even pause between the words, and yet you know when one word ends and another word begins, and you know it without knowing how you know.

00:10:31
It's automatic. And with emotions, we respond. At an emotional level, our body is a great intuitive antenna, and when we're happy or sad, we have hormones coursing through our brain and our heart and our body, and those hormones are part of an instinctive, intuitive reaction to the situations around us and within us. So, even when we think we're being very logical, every logical thought, if you follow it to its root, is deeply intuitive. Yes, and then the reason that they are not is because they're emotions. And at another level of discourse, one would distinguish between emotions and intuition, just as one would distinguish between logic and intuition. But I prefer to look at the way intuition underlies everything. I think that's where we understand intuition not just as a concept, but it's meat that we can chew on.

00:11:34
How do you distinguish logic from intuition? The question this lady asks is how do I distinguish logic from intuition? Well, in a conventional sense, logic follows an algorithm. It's a set of rules that you apply to a premise. So I can take a premise, for example, If I take the premise that men typically wear suits, and I can go around the room and look at the people who have suits on and say, well, you're a man, and, oh, you're a man. It won't always apply, but that's a logical operation, applying a principle to a set of premises. But the premises themselves are not logically derived. Where do the premises come from? And every system of logic has to have a premise, and every premise is ultimately arrived at through intuition or experience or common sense, which all of those are different kinds of language for talking about pre-logical human processes that are related in different ways to intuition.

00:12:51
Well, that's what I'm saying. At this level of discourse, you can't separate them. There is a level of discourse which is very meaty, at which intuition underlies everything, virtually everything. But isn't it true, you know, logic follows a premise. And if that premise is incorrect, then the logic is incorrect. For example, you say A doesn't like B because because B cheated A in a transaction. That's a logical premise. But if you said A doesn't like B, and he doesn't know why, that's an intuition.

00:13:40
Lots of times, in daily parlance, we make these distinctions. But you see, Obadiah, what I'm liking to do is reach a little deeper. Let's say, okay, it's perfectly logical to say A doesn't like B because B cheated A. There's nothing intuitive about that. We all know, but if we look a little deeper and we say, what is cheating? What is our sense about cheating? There's a moral sense underneath that, and that's intuitive. In fact, the great philosopher Immanuel Kant, one of the greatest of Western philosophers, in his book, A Critique of Pure Reason, points out that there are logical categories that we can't derive from anything else. Space, time, energy, identity, purpose. And these are the most important things that motivate us, that color our life, our sense of good or bad, our sense of values.

00:14:41
They underlie everything else that we do, and they fundamentally grow out of our intuition. Or one might say, well, they grow out of the structure of our brain. There are many things that people will say they grow out of, but they come out of what one would think of as pre-logical. Yes? What is the difference between intuition and God? The question is, what is the difference between intuition and God? That's a very good question. And maybe it would be best to leave you with the thought that there isn't such a difference. That after all, God is undefinable, ultimately. You know, somebody once asked Einstein, did he believe in God? And he sat there for about a half hour. And then he said, you know, there are 30 definitions of God.

00:15:37
Which one do you mean? But Aristotle spoke of God in the sense of being the prime, the unmoved mover, which is the same as saying, you know, the original premise out of which everything else came. And that's the level that I'm thinking of when I talk about intuition here, that there is a sense of the origin, the beginning, the fundamental connection, the eternal, the divine. And one word for that is God, another word is spirit, another word is intuition. So when I use the word intuition, I am definitely pointing in that direction. Yeah. I mean, we could quibble about grammar and semantics and theology and so on, but I would choose to emphasize the similarity there rather than the distinction. Would I say intuition is a tool?

00:16:38
Yes, I could say that intuition is a tool, and I suppose I wouldn't say that God is a tool. I'd rather say that we are God's tool. And maybe the same is actually true of intuition, that it's much better to think of ourselves as the tool of intuition than to think of ourselves as the master of the tool of intuition. But, you know, we're talking about paradoxes within paradoxes within paradoxes. I wouldn't ever advise any one of us to become merely the tool of intuition. Intuition needs to be combined with reason. Actually, the quote that Obadiah opened our talk with points this out, that intuition without experience can lead one into just into the realms of fantasy that are ungrounded. It can take us in any direction. Experience without intuition lacks vision, lacks purpose.

00:17:36
They need to be combined. So maybe the better way to say it is that we are God's tool and God is our tool and the same with intuition. Well, it's just about 12:30. Let me conclude with one final note. If I may, somebody at one of my talks asked me in a deeply imploring way, she said, 'Well, but who am I? Who am I in all of this?' And it reminded me of a story of a great seeker who had climbed to the highest mountain And opened up his robes in ancient times and beat on his chest and looked up at the heavens and said, Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? And just then the clouds darkened and began rolling and there was lightning and a parting of the skies and a deep voice boomed out. Who wants to know? Thank you all. You've been a delightful audience.