Wisdom and love can bring us profound revelations about ourselves, our world, the nature of reality, and the meaning of life. But a special kind of fear—sometimes conscious, but mostly operating unconsciously—can keep those revelations at bay.

Do we put up scarecrows to keep away reality, intimacy, and wonder—perhaps even magic?

In this contemplation we inquire into this spiritual or existential fear and the challenges it presents. It's active in our lives and in our world, right here and right now. Facing it can empower and liberate us and our world at the same time. Time to take down the scarecrows, embrace the mystery, and let the magic start to work.

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

Apocalyptic LoveWisdom

Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a podcast for the soul and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, joining you in this moment so we can remember together that Real wisdom is dangerous, but it’s the direct, unconventional path to success and the good life. Dangerous wisdom can heal us and the world at the same time.

Today we consider Apocalyptic LoveWisdom.

This is our inaugural contemplation as the Dangerous Wisdom podcast. We used to contemplate the same dangerous wisdom in the Wisdom, Love, and Beauty podcast. We’ll re-release some of those contemplations here, but we have a lot of new material to release first, including today’s contemplation and some interviews that have waited patiently to commune with you.

What is apocalyptic LoveWisdom?

Apocalypse has two meanings. The Greek roots mean an uncovering or a revelation. But we have come to associate the word with some kind of destruction or the end of the World, because of Saint John, who received a vision on the Greek Island of Patmos.

We have a lot of post-apocalyptic movies, shows, and books, because we all feel a fascination with eschatology. Eschatology refers to the ultimate ends of things, including the end of our life and the end of the World. Will the World end in a zombie apocalypse? That’s one way we use the word apocalypse, in an eschatological sense.

If we think about these things, they indicate that movies showing us the end of the World always involve apocalypse in both senses. We see the end of the World as in its final destruction, and we also get a revelation. When we finally see how we destroy the World, it will come as a definitive revelation of what we have been doing with ourselves. The meaning of our actions and the actions of humanity as a whole will become revealed to us in a great and potentially tragic cataclysm.

The apocalypse means that the end of the world is revealed, as is the full extent of our ignorance.

The movie Don’t Look Up does a marvelous job at this double meaning of apocalypse, especially with the final line of the film, apparently improvised by Leonardo DiCaprio. Spoiler alert, in the final scene, Di Caprio’s character says, “We really did have everything, didn’t we? I mean, when you think about it,”— and then he speaks no more.

The character seems to have had some insight.

We might suggest that we can measure the significance of spiritual insights in terms of how profoundly they end our world. Spiritual insights come as a revelation that changes everything for us.

Apocalyptic LoveWisdom means LoveWisdom that ends our world. By that we mean the fabricated world the ego clings to. What the ego clings to is not the World. The ego clings to its projections onto the World. That fabricated world has to end, and that involves an apocalypse of thought, an apocalypse in the soul.

The fabricated world of the ego relates to everything associated with I, Me, and Mine. Until a significant enough spiritual experience comes our way, we can’t really imagine the limits of the ego’s world. Even after a fairly big spiritual experience, and even after many such experiences, we still can’t fully understand the limits of the ego’s view. Nevertheless, many things we take as real turn out to have an illusory aspect to them once we experience a transformative or apocalyptic insight.

Because the ego clings, we can find in ourselves a fear of visionary LoveWisdom, which amounts to a fear of ourselves, a fear of the superness of Nature, and a fear of our own power, our own true nature, and the nature of reality.

We’re talking about the ego’s fear of its relative smallness in comparison to the vastness of what we really are.

We have to taste that vastness in order to know ourselves, because we are more truly that vastness than we are the ideas about ourselves the ego clings to.

We have to taste our true nature in order to heal ourselves and our world altogether. But we will never fully experience our vastness and our true nature if we don’t face the fear we have of doing that.

We will meet many people who say they want to have a big visionary experience. They may fly all the way to Peru, hike into the forest, and take big quantities of holotropic medicine, and endure a tremendous ordeal and a significant life adventure. With all that effort, surely they want to have a big insight, right? Surely they want to see some hidden truth, to receive some apocalyptic LoveWisdom.

But—more often than we care to acknowledge—the louder the ego proclaims its readiness for big insights, the more we should suspect the ego still feels in control. Enlightenment amounts to a great disappointment for the ego, and some aspects of reality terrify the ego. So the ego does what it can to keep us away from reality, including the ultimate trick of blinking out of existence in a way that leaves us without any great insight.

The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset touches on this aspect of our ego in a wonderful passage from his book Revolt of the Masses. There he writes the following:

“Take stock of those around you and you will see them wandering about lost through life, like sleep-walkers in the midst of their good or evil fortune, without the slightest suspicion of what is happening to them. You will hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to their having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of [their] own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but [they are] frightened at finding [themselves] face to face with this terrible reality, and [they try] to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry [them] that [their] “ideas” are not true, [they use] them as trenches for the defense of [their] existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.” Jose Ortega y Gasset

This passage has stuck with me since college. I dated a young woman from Puerto Rico, and her father recommended that book, and when I got a copy that metaphor felt so powerful: Our ideas are scarecrows we use to frighten away reality.

In giving us this diagnosis, Ortega y Gasset carries the Socratic insight forward to our time.

Socrates went around trying to show people this very fact, that they might speak as if they knew a thing or two, but really he saw them as sleepwalkers. He tried to dismantle some of their ideas, but that would mean reality might step in. Their ideas, opinions, beliefs, and supposed knowledge all functioned to keep reality away. Socrates threatened them with reality, and so they killed him.

In the dialogues Plato wrote we see Socrates steering people to the place where the scarecrows start to come down, and for a moment the field is empty. But before the ravens of reality can arrive, people squirm, and they tell Socrates that they have somewhere else to get to, and they don’t have time for reality.

Ortega continues this line of thought as follows:

“The [person] with the clear head is the [one] who frees [themselves] from those fantastic ‘ideas’ and looks life in the face, realizes that everything in it is problematic, and feels [themselves] lost. As this is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost—[the one] who accepts it has already begun to find [themselves], to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, [they] will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of [their] salvation, will cause [them] to bring order into the chaos of [their] life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. Those who [don’t] really feel [themselves] lost, [are] lost without remission; that is to say, they never [find themselves], never [come] up against [their] own reality. This is true in every order, even in science, in spite of science being of its nature an escape from life. (The majority of [scientists] have given themselves to it through fear of facing life. They are not clear heads; hence their notorious ineptitude in the presence of any concrete situation.) Our scientific ideas are of value to the degree in which we have felt ourselves lost before a question; have seen its problematic nature, and have realized that we cannot find support in received notions, in prescriptions, proverbs, mere words. The [one] who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything [they] had learnt, and [they arrive] at the new truth with hands bloodstained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.”

Ortega y Gasset’s criticism seems to have a lot of resonance with our social and political situation, but these particular lines have a resonance with our existential situation as well.

On an intellectual level, so many of us might reject this suggestion quite strongly. Some of us have had spiritual experiences we think of as big, profound, and so on. We may think we have gone to great lengths to have these spiritual experiences, or that they came to us because of special gurus we studied with.

But somewhere beneath the surface, the unconscious dimensions of our ignorance swim in the deep waters of the psyche, in ways that drive our conscious experience of life, such that we remain ignorant of more than we can fathom. That should seem unsurprising. What we don’t know seems to dramatically eclipse what we do know or think we know.

Let’s try to consider this situation. If we can admit to ourselves that, not only do we suffer from a perhaps significant level of ignorance, but that something in us fears what we might see if we cut through our ignorance, then maybe we could have more compassion for ourselves and each other, and maybe we could find new ways not only to help each other to dissolve our ignorance, but perhaps we can make totally new efforts, so that we can dispel the pattern of insanity that threatens the conditions of life.

We’re going to consider a few examples of people who encountered something that went beyond their paradigm, and how that primal experience evoked fear in them. We want to just get a sense of how natural this fear is in us, even if it might be entirely unconscious for some of us. This has to do with recognizing that our ego fabricates an identity and a sense of reality, and when the fabrication gets shaken, the ego naturally reacts with fear. Once we prepare ourselves for that, we can do the work we need to do to help dissolve that fear, and thus gain a much greater intimacy with reality.

In a previous contemplation, we considered the work of Dr. Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer. Mayer was a successful and respected psychologist. She was a clinician and also a scientist doing research in her field. She was well-regarded. She had been trained in the Western Scientific tradition. She got her PhD at Stanford University and she was on staff at Berkeley in addition to having a private practice.

Mayer details a wide range of anomalous data in her book, Extraordinary Knowing. In our previous contemplation we considered how the existence of extraordinary knowing changed the course of her life.

She not only experienced the extraordinary knowing of others, but she herself experienced extraordinary knowing on at least two occasions—as “the knower”.

In one case, she felt herself being moved to a lost object which she should not have been able to locate, as if a power she might pretend to understand had worked through her. Here’s her description from the book: She writes,

My youngest sister was living with my husband and me, finishing her last year of high school. My husband’s aunt had given him an extremely showy gold watch, one he’d never wear. In a burst of generosity, he’d given it to my sister.

My sister wore it every day. But she was seventeen and careless. She’d leave it lying around in the kitchen, in the car, in the laundry room. One afternoon I was working in my bedroom when she burst in: “I can’t find that watch!” We retraced where she’d been and when she’d last had it. No luck. My husband was due home in two hours. My sister was panicked; she was sure he’d be quick to notice that she wasn’t wearing the watch and ask where it was. We circled back over all the places we’d already looked. We were about to give up.

And at that point something happened that was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I was standing in our upstairs hall, near the door of my husband’s study. I walked into his study: deliberately, intentionally, but with no awareness of volition on my part. It was as though I was watching myself in a slow-motion film. I walked straight to a closet in the far corner of the room, a closet I’d entered maybe twice—if that— over the course of our entire marriage. As I walked, I wasn’t aware of thinking, of deciding, of choosing to do any of the things I was doing or about to do. I was just doing them. I bent down—again, it felt absolutely deliberate—and reached deep into the closet, behind a row of shoes, then behind some boxes behind the shoes. My hand went directly to a small leather case in the very back corner. I lifted out the case, stood up, and opened it. Inside was the watch.

Weirdly, I felt neither surprise nor excitement; I simply expected it. I walked out of my husband’s study, called for my sister, and showed her the watch. “Where was it?” she demanded.

I tried to tell my sister what happened, but it was hard to find the words. She looked disbelieving. I hazarded a guess as to how the watch got into my husband’s closet. Perhaps, annoyed at rescuing the watch from my careless sister one too many times, he’d taken it and hidden it away. My sister was skeptical, but couldn’t come up with a more compelling suggestion.

I decided I’d save face for everyone. I put the watch back in the closet, and when my husband got home, I told him what a panic my sister had been in and how she’d spent all afternoon looking for it.

My husband was calm and casual in his reply. “I was wondering when she’d miss it,” he said. “She left it in the bathroom after you’d gone to work this morning. You weren’t here, so I thought I’d try teaching her a lesson. I put it away in my closet.”

He went and got it, then handed it over to me. “Tell her to be more careful with it from now on.” (58-9)

Somehow, Mayer had no conscious difficulty processing this experience—even though deep reflection into such an experience might lead us to question such intimate issues such as agency or free will, subjectivity or consciousness, the nature of ethics, and the nature of knowing.

An experience like this, of feeling guided and being able to find something we should be able to find, that could strike us rather powerfully. In this case, it didn’t seem to have a profound effect.

However, in the course of writing her book, Dr. Mayer had another experience that did provoke more of this sort of reflection, because it somehow touched a deeper layer of ego, or at least shook the ego loose enough that she could consciously register the shock.

We can call this an ontological shock. That sounds fancy. It means we experience something that demolishes some aspect of our basic sense of reality. We experience something that indicates reality itself is not what we have assumed.

We can suggest that our basic image of reality—our basic feel for what the whole Cosmos is and what we are—usually remains highly resistant to fundamental challenges.

This creates a problem for all of us, because the basic image of reality implanted in us by the dominant culture doesn’t function very well. So we have to shift that image, but the experience of a better image can feel threatening to the ego.

A better way of knowing transcends the ego. All our insights arise in a way that transcends the ego. But the ego tries to maintain its basic image of reality, even if we sometimes acknowledge the presence of the mystery.

In other words, this all has an existential dimension. As egos, we get really excited to pronounce ourselves experts on the great mystery of life. We fancy ourselves sensitive, intelligent, and insightful. Some of us think we understand how everything is connected, and so on, but in fact we don’t know what’s out there—not all of it or even most of it.

And when the ego confronts the gap between its ideas and reality, when the scarecrows fail to frighten reality away, then reality may turn the tables on the ego and its scarecrows, and it may flood our carefully tilled fields with not only ravens, crows, wolves, and bears, but also rains and fires, earthquakes and lightning.

We can arrive at better ways of knowing by various means. Often, the knowing comes in spite of our ignorance. That means we can know in ways that tap into the mystery, even if we ourselves lack wisdom, compassion, and grace. Some of the hacks we use to know in a better way involve ways of distracting the ego.

For instance, if we use a dowsing rod, the ego can give up. The ego doesn’t know where the water is. We get the ego to focus on the dowsing rod or pendulum, and this gives the ego something to do while the real work of knowing gets done by sacred powers and inconceivable causes that always escape the ego’s grasp.

So, we can turn down the noise of the ego either by means of distracting it, pacifying it, or dimming it. Or, we can take a spiritual approach that expands us beyond the ego.

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer had the opportunity to try this by means of a ganzfeld experiment.

The word ganzfeld literally means “complete field”. We can think of it as a field that completely covers over our habitual field of perception, and sort of cancels it out.

We might refer to it as noise-cancelling headphones for the soul. The ganzfeld produces an experience that cancels the noise of the ego, so the soul can hear itself think.

The ganzfeld protocol can target both the visual and auditory field. Typically, the visual field is made monotone by covering the eyes with special goggles. You can replicate this at home by cutting a ping-pong ball in half or repurposing ski goggles or other goggles that can be painted white to make a monotone visual field. Depending on your facial contours, a ping-pong ball cut in half might feel uncomfortable, and repurposed goggles can feel better.

But the idea either way is that everywhere your eyes look, they see the same white field.

The auditory field gets covered by headphones that play a uniform sound or even white noise. You can’t hear anything but a single uniform tone, or just white noise, which is continuous random sound. It comes across as monotonous in part because we can’t make any sense of it.

So, philosophically speaking, we have nothing to look at or listen to outside of ourselves. The noise cancels out the habitual processes of perception. That can open up the possibility for non-habitual perception.

In a typical experiment of the kind we consider here together, a computer randomly assigns one of 6 images for a person to try and “send” to another person completely isolated and put in a ganzfeld experience.

So, if you are the sender, you go into an isolated room, and a computer randomly selects one of 6 images. You focus on that image and try to mentally send the image to another person isolated in another room.

You do this for half an hour, or maybe a bit less in some experiments.

The person in the ganzfeld just experiences the ganzfeld, which might include seeing imagery. When the mind no longer has habitual perception going on, it could start to perceive in a different way, or resonate more with subtle things now that all the grosser things have gotten blocked out.

After the sender finishes trying to send the image, an experimenter goes into the receiver’s room and brings them out of the ganzfeld experience. The experimenter gives the receiver the 6 possible images the computer might have chosen, and they ask the receiver to put the 6 images in order, with the first-ranked image the one they think most likely to have been the one the sender was attempting to send

Maybe we should pause here and acknowledge the limits of language. The notion of sending and receiving messages may not skillfully and realistically express the way language and communication work. But the terms sender and receiver help us follow and understand the experimental protocol.

So they ask the receiver for this ranking because a receiver may insist that they have no idea which image is the right one. The ego steps right in and insists. Think about what someone might say in this situation. They might say, “I don’t know what the sender was sending. I have no idea.”

That says a lot. The I, the ego, the fragment of a whole insists on behalf of the whole. Does that make sense?

When we say, “I,” we speak as if we mean a whole, but in fact we mean a part, a fragment. We can begin to understand this intellectually, but we’re talking about a deep, deep habit. When we say, “I know” or when we say, “I don’t know,” that “I” is just a fragment. Even when it thinks it knows, that knowing comes usually from a fragmented perspective.

Now, we have said that Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, a respected psychologist and psychotherapist working at a prestigious research university, took the opportunity to participate in this kind of ganzfeld experiment. After she spent time in the ganzfeld, a graduate student came with the six images being used in the experiment, and asked Mayer to look at them.

Mayer found herself unable to recognize any of the images she saw. We could say the conscious mind knew nothing—knowing as we know, it knew nothing.

She told the graduate student that she had no idea which image was sent to her. The grad student told her to rank the images anyway, even if it seemed random to her. In other words, she has no conscious idea how to arrange these 6 images, and it feels random to rank them in any order.

Mayer ranked the images, putting the image of a red sunset first. The grad student then left the room.

He returned with a sealed envelope, containing the image sent to her “psychically” during the ganzfeld experience. Mayer opened it. It was a red sunset, the same image she had ranked as her top choice, even though she had no conscious “knowledge” of receiving it.

Mayer describes her reaction. She writes,

And at that moment the world turned weird. I felt the tiniest instant of overwhelming fear. It was gone in a flash but it was stunningly real. It was unlike any fear I’ve ever felt. My mind split. I realized that I knew something I was simultaneously certain I didn’t know. And I got it. This is what my patients meant when they said, “My mind’s not my own.” Or “I’m losing my mind.” The feeling was terrifying. My mind had slipped out from under me and the world felt out of control.

I recovered quickly and launched in on logical explanations. First and most compelling, it must have been pure coincidence. The odds I’d picked the right card were, after all, one in six. And that uncanny feeling—I knew perfectly well that coincidence does that to people. We all want to feel magical and omnipotent and we’ll grasp for that feeling wherever we can. Uncanny feelings are one result and psychologists ever since Freud have been coming up with reasons why.

But I knew it wasn’t that simple and my arguments with myself didn’t carry the day. Once again, I was remembering my sister’s watch. Walking straight to that box in back of my husband’s closet had taught me a feeling, a full-bodied, single-minded, wholehearted feeling I’d described as being “walked by the experience.” It was as if the experience knew me. It brought a thoroughly unaccustomed sensation to the surface, a feeling that was categorically unlike ordinary knowing. The fraction of a second that had me landing on the red sunset—so brief and so ephemeral it barely registered—was an echo of the sensation I’d had when I’d walked straight to my sister’s watch. This time I’d walked not across a room but across my mind, walked straight out of my ordinary knowing into an inchoate, uncertain mental state that—maybe—deserves to be called knowing, too. It took the graduate student jolting me into the realization that I’d picked the correct card for me to consider—maybe—letting it in. After I left the lab, I realized that I’d gotten what I’d come for: some feeling for a quality of knowing that gave me that hook for believing. I wondered if I’d see the ganzfeld experiments differently, in the sense that I’d now see that there was something there worth seeing. Part of me still insisted that picking the red sunset was merely coincidence, no more than a lucky guess and nothing to do with the ganzfeld state or tuning down the noise. (207-7)

It’s funny to read Mayer trying to write this off as coincidence when she knew full well that the ganzfeld science is really clear that the success rates on these experiments exceed mere chance. This is a well-established and highly scrutinized finding that has stymied critics of anomalous data.

The ganzfeld experiments simply work. It’s no one’s fault that they disrupt the dominant culture’s paradigms.

But here Dr. Mayer found herself resisting her own experience and the experience of countless other people.

Despite the strength of ganzfeld and other anomalous data, many professional skeptics and what we could call the metaphysical police have written off such data. Many of the people who dismiss such phenomena never look at the data. Some look at the data and then ignore anything that they can’t explain away.

Mayer spoke to Hal Puthoff, one of the scientists who worked on remote viewing, which refers to the ability to view something without ordinary perception. A person sitting alone in a totally isolated room might see something on the other side of the planet, or even in another time.

Puthoff spoke to Mayer about a fellow named Joe McMoneagle, who participated in government-funded remote viewing experiments. Puthoff told Mayer,

[Joe McMoneagle] was one of our very few subjects whose ability to perceive places thousands of miles away was so reliable we could document it consistently and unequivocally. Soon after we began conducting experiments with him, he started realizing what he was doing. One day he looked at me and said he had to tell me something. He’d done duty in Vietnam and while he was there he’d seen the worst human beings can do to each other. He’d always thought that taught him fear as bad as it gets. But what he wanted to tell me was it was nothing compared to the fear he felt when he really grasped the extent of his remote-viewing abilities. It hit him—what he was seeing didn’t amount to watching some kind of movie. Instead he was there, in the viewing, immersed in a reality utterly unrelated to his ordinary life. He was terrified. It shakes the foundations. The fear Joe described and the fear you’re seeing in your patient—I think it may be as basic as any fear there is.

Hal was right. That level of fear is elemental. It reaches straight into the most deeply intimate, personal ways we’ve learned to trust the world and ourselves in it. In the face of fear like that, no wonder rational consideration of apparently anomalous experience is so elusive. No wonder the scientific establishment looks the other way, moves elsewhere as fast as it can.

Mayer had not only experienced this herself, but she also experienced it through a client of hers. In the book she gives the client the pseudonym Grace. Grace went to Dr. Mayer seeking help with a problem that frightened her: She could know things she shouldn’t be able to know.

Grace described the first time that knowing caused problems for her. As a graduate student, she enjoyed enough success that her teachers respected her and she had funding for her research.

She wanted to work with one professor in particular, and she attended one of his seminars. One day he gave the graduate students in the seminar a complicated problem to work on. Grace wrote down the problem, and then suddenly said the answer out loud, including four decimal places.

There was no way she could have known that answer, and no way she figured it out so quickly. The professor accused her of stealing his notes, and he refused to work with her. Her fellow students began to show distrust. It created a big problem for her. After that, after she left school and started working in the private sector, whenever people would start getting suspicious about things she knew, she would find a way to change jobs and even change cities.

Grace told Dr. Mayer that it scared her, and that she wanted to be normal.

Mayer got to witness the fear that would take hold of Grace when they began to revisit past experiences of knowing things she shouldn’t have been able to know.

As Grace would retell such an experience, a panic would sometimes invade her. Dr. Mayer writes the following about Grace:

I gradually became convinced Grace did have unusual and remarkable intuitive capacities. But the depth and extent of her virulent fear impressed me at least as much. As a psychoanalyst, I’m used to seeing fear. But Grace’s fear was unusual. She didn’t just fear for her mental stability. She feared for the stability of the world around her—the existence of a world she could count on, reliably constrained by boundaries of space, time, and individual identity.

That last bit matters a lot. This is where so many of us keep an entire army of scarecrows: Right along the borderline of our own skin, our sense of time, and our sense of space.

Last season, we contemplated together the insightful suggestion from Arthur Bentley that human skin is the last line of defense for the main philosophy of the dominant culture.

We suggested that professional philosophers and even scientists hide behind this Maginot Line.

Anything that threatens our identity will have a mob of scarecrows sent its way. But if something threatens the barrier of skin, and if it also threatens time and space and our sense of reality, then an entire army of scarecrows—or at least the force of an army—will show up at the limits of our thought, the boundaries of our ego, and they will defend the illusion of an independent territory.

As a child, I used to always wonder why depictions of people experiencing “paranormal” events would show them experiencing fear.

For instance, Why wouldn’t someone feel joyful and excited to discover they had the capacity to “read minds” or to encounter something truly mysterious in the World?

But fear seems the most typical reaction—and this explains in part why we keep these experiences at bay, at least in our context, a context severely lacking in its capacity to empower us to receive and work with them.

Given our degraded cultural context, people may experience fear and confusion in the presence of Extraordinary Knowing and other anomalous events, and that fear may extend into a fear of ridicule or suspicion, because so much habit energy has gone into the dominant paradigms.

This in turn helps explain why we cannot take up the arts of awareness necessary for a better way of knowing like a bag of tricks. Not only do we need a sense of ethics and sacredness to work properly with better ways of knowing, but if we leap foolishly into practices that invite powerful experiences they might overload our system.

Too much meditation, for instance, can send someone to the hospital with a case of psychosis or other kind of mental breakdown. That too used to puzzle me. Does it puzzle you? Don’t we all want to experience reality?

But I admit that some of my own experiences of extraordinary knowing came with some level of confusion.

For instance, I come from coal mining folk. My grandparents had little money. I would guess wealthy people rarely bother playing the lottery. But my poor grandmother played fairly frequently.

When I was very young, I dreamed lottery numbers. I told them to my grandmother. She didn’t play the lottery that day, but the numbers I told her were the winning numbers. Naturally this produced astonishment, but also excitement. She encouraged me to try and dream more lottery numbers, but I had no idea how I had done it in the first place, and the excitement around my doing it again left me unable to dream further numbers.

My friend Terra recently reminded me that, many years later, I learned how to work with tarot cards. At first I tried to read the cards in a standard way. It’s kind of like interpreting a dream, and it draws on something like archetypal patterns.

But one day I didn’t know how to make sense of the cards in relation to the question the person had asked me, which had to do with buying a house. I was drawing a blank, because the cards didn’t seem to have any practical advice for choosing a house. She was asking about real houses, and the cards seemed to express patterns too deep to connect to the worldly details of finding a home.

While staring at the cards, the energy in the situation intensified. The woman was waiting, and I had nothing to say. Then something happened. Instead of reading the cards directly, the cards seemed to evoke a vision in me, and I read that vision to the questioner. I almost felt like I was making it up. But the questioner confirmed key details, concrete details that I should not have been able to know.

I told her that not far from the house she had recently looked at, she should find a dilapidated house. I told her that she shouldn’t buy that dilapidated house, but that dilapidated house would be for sale with a different real estate agent than the one she was using. I told her that other real estate agent had the perfect house for her.

The woman was shocked. She said that she had actually passed a dilapidated house on the way to see the last property she looked at, and she did notice that it was for sale and that it was a different realty company. She had no interest in that house, but just remembered passing it because it was at a place where she had to make a turn.

I found this fascinating and really cool, but I didn’t really know how it happened, and life at that time was too busy for me to do serious experimental inquiry into it. It happened a few other times, and not long after that I stopped reading tarot cards.

Now, on the surface, I stopped reading tarot cards because I got a better job, got busy with other things, and also became more interested in working with the Yijing. But, the ego may have backed me away from tarot cards because it got too hot too fast, and I didn’t know how to skillfully work with what was coming through.

In other words, I haven’t experienced any extreme forms of fear of extraordinary knowing, but I still understand how uncanny those experiences can feel, and it seems that some significant part of us feels uncomfortable with the whole situation. It’s like suddenly being breathed by the great mystery, being played like a flute by sacredness and wonder.

These days, when speaking with clients, friends, or family, I often know what a person needs to say, even if I shouldn’t be able to know it. And I often wait a long time while the other person musters up the confidence to say it. It brings an awareness of how much we may already know that we won’t allow ourselves to know, and how much we could know but won’t even allow ourselves to try.