UNIVERSE WITHIN by Gwen Randall-Young
WHEN I was in Maui recently, I watched a mother whale and her calf cavorting in the ocean. She was teaching her baby how to slap the water with its pectoral fin while some distance away, a male rested lazily near the top of the water, keeping pace with the mom and calf. I was told that a male – not the father – would attach itself to a mother and baby to watch over and protect them.
I marvelled at the perfection of nature. For instance, how do the whales know when it is time to swim to warmer climes? How do they manage to come back to the same place each year?
Then I thought about monarch butterflies. These delicate creatures fly 50 miles per day making their trip from Canada to Mexico. Why do they go all the way to Mexico when California is so much closer? Why don’t they get lost?
I also remember reading about homing pigeons. They could be put in a box and driven 500 hundred miles away by car and upon release effortlessly find their way home.
There was also a study about a dog that would move from his sleeping place to the front door at the exact moment his master, many miles away in his downtown office, decided it was time to go home and reached for his briefcase.
The plant kingdom is equally as amazing. There is a type of tree in the forest, which only releases seeds when there is tremendous heat, such as a forest fire, clearly showing that the forest has a built-in mechanism to regenerate itself.
Whether we are talking about the plant or animal kingdoms, we realize that amazing wisdom and genius are built-in and that it extends far beyond the ability to simply survive.
It is inconceivable that all living things can possess such amazing potential, other than humans. What is our wisdom, our genius? Apparently, we use only 10 percent of our brains. What is the other 90 percent used for? I believe we have incredible, untapped potential, but have forgotten how to access it.
In the animal kingdom, wisdom is intuitive. Animals do not use words or read books and they likely give little thought to what other animals think. Humans have the ability to use language, but that is also our limitation. We speak, think and learn using words. We are limited by our vocabulary. No doubt, you have known people whose first language is one other than English and you have heard them attempt to express a thought that was difficult to translate into English. “I don’t know how you would say it in English,” they typically say, despite having an excellent command of the English language.
It is astounding to me that we humans think of our babies as blank slates to be filled with information. We assume they know nothing other than what we teach them. Children learn that you get smart by listening to adults and by obtaining information from books or computers. It is no wonder our intuitive ways of knowing get shut down early in our lives.
Think of the amazing things early people figured out on their own: from Socrates to Copernicus and from Aristotle to the early Egyptians. How did the Chinese, more than 3,000 years ago, figure out energy patterns in the body, acupuncture points and which plants could heal the body?
I believe there is a universal intelligence and that these humans were accessing it. I believe we all have the power to access the universal intelligence, but we have to learn to use our minds differently.
When we really quiet our minds, completely stopping the mind chatter, and if we do this long enough and regularly enough, we can begin to tune in to that intelligence. If we create that space, inner knowing can enter. In this way, the mind can be used to explore the vast intelligence that surrounds and enfolds us.
Gwen Randall-Young is a psychotherapist and author of Growing Into Soul: The Next Step in Human Evolution. For more articles, permission to reprint and information about her books and “Deep Powerful Change” personal growth/hypnosis CDs, visit www.gwen.ca