About a year ago I taught a university Introduction to Psychology course and we were using a newer psychology text. I was shocked to read that this text taught the students to mistrust their intuition. “In sifting reality from illusion, won’t intuition and plain common sense suffice for everyday life? Some say psychology merely documents what people already know and dresses it in jargon…. Others scorn a scientific approach because of their faith in human intuition. Advocates of ‘intuitive management’ urge us to distrust statistical predictors and tune into our hunches when hiring, firing, and investing. Like Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker, should we trust the force within? Actually our intuition can lead us astray.” (p. 17-18, Psychology, Seventh Edition in Modules, David G. Meyers, 2004). My role as professor was to teach these students not to trust themselves. (Postscript – I taught the course my way and stopped teaching at this university!)

I once saw a bumper sticker that stated, “The Goddess is coming, and she is pissed.” Well she must have read that psych text! Our intuition is a feminine energy aspect. Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her wonderful book Women Who Run With The Wolves, tells a tale about Baba Yaga which beautifully illustrates that the power of intuition is handed from mother to child. Estes says that “Over generations, these intuitive powers became as buried as streams within women, buried by disuse and unfounded charges of disrepute. However Jung once wrote that nothing was ever lost in the psyche.” Thus, there is the need in us all, both women and men, to reawaken our connection to our deepest knowing and to believe in this knowing despite the chorus of voices telling us otherwise.

“Gut feeling” is an emotional connection and having a beyond-logic sense about something is indeed a deep connection with our broader knowing. In her book Sacred Contracts, Caroline Myss tells us that, “Intuition is our primal sense. Long before we are introduced to rational thinking, we sense life. As babies, we absorb the energy climate of the world we live in including the emotions of our parents and the atmosphere of our home. As we grow older, the rational abilities of the mind develop, and the intuitive experiences that many children describe, such as seeing angels, are dismissed as imagination. These psychic forces then go underground, although usually they do not go completely silent. I am convinced that the polarity between our rational and intuitive selves creates an inner atmosphere that sets the stage for intense suffering and depression. To sense energy information but then repress that information for lack of rational support is to court madness.” (p. 236)

Many thousands of years ago the story of human development became his-story. I would highly recommend the work of Marija Gimbutas (Professor Emeritus & renown cultural anthropologist) who devoted her life to studying the Age of the Great Goddess. One amazing fact that stood out to me in her work is that of all the archeological digs of ancient matrilineal societies, no weapons were ever found. Not one. All matter of other artifacts were unearthed, except weaponry. This explains the takeover of these peaceful feminine cultures by the violent Indo-Europeans whose warring conquests shifted the tide of human history for thousands of years. Until now.

There is much speculation about the year 2012 which is to mark a seismic shift in human development representing the end of time as we know it. Many seekers and seers project that we are soon to experience a shifting of energies toward the feminine and hence a more balanced world. We already see much evidence of this prediction in a heightened consciousness about environmental issues, and a more commonly accepted embracing of broader perspective. Indeed, quantum physics has brought the connection between science and spirituality as close as we have ever seen them in our lifetime. However earlier science, that of alchemy and metaphysics, well knew of this sacred connection. Do you get a sense of the swinging of human development and understanding in and out of balancing the masculine and feminine?

The book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell examines how we think and states that, “there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.” (p.17) Current quantum physics has shown us that we literally change objects through the act of perceiving them. Masaru Emoto’s work on water molecules is perhaps the most stunning of this new scientific awareness. What impact does this have on our understanding of objectivity? Scientific proof? Truth? Validity? I would say that it turns most of modern science on its head (depending of course on who is doing the perceiving!)

And so I am waiting to see another version of that bumper sticker, one that says, “The Goddess is coming, and She is smiling!”