The Art of Intuition

By Winter Robinson
Issue 105 March-April 2001

My grandmother knew things beyond the familiar realm of the senses. When I was a child, I asked my mother, "But how does she know? How did she know what time we'd arrive today, when we didn't tell her we were coming?"

"She just knows."

Grandma lived on a cotton farm in the middle of Georgia , without a telephone. We lived in the mountains of North Carolina , a good ten hours away. Our visits always were random and spontaneous; she never had any advance warning that we were on the way.

In an attempt to surprise his mother, my father frequently would shut off the engine to our old Chevy and coast into her driveway. It didn't work. We never caught her unprepared. She always knew when we were coming, and she was ready: fresh sheets on the beds, dinner cooked, and Grandma waiting on the front porch. This scene played out year after year until she died.

My grandmother also invariably knew when someone was in trouble. She said there was a knock on the cabinet door. I never heard the knock, but I believed her. And I believed her when she spoke of magic, ghosts, spirits, and fairies that danced in the rain. During every visit, I would sit on her knees, mesmerized, and ask her to repeat her stories of the unseen.

Sometime during my college years, between Psychology 213 and Logic 101, I let the real world--the world of "If you can't taste, touch, or feel it, it doesn't exist"--take over. Snugly settled into an educational system that valued analytical reasoning, I forgot my grandmother's world of the unseen. I chose to spend my time and my energy building a career in the mental health field.

But in 1983 my carefully designed world of psychology and mental health flipped upside down. Working as an analyst for the state attorney general, I had a precognitive experience that was so detailed and accurate that it changed the way I saw reality.

One morning my boss requested a list of some documents needed for an upcoming trial. Without a second thought, I wrote down the titles and document numbers, handed the list to my secretary, and returned to my work. She came to my desk shortly afterward and said, "These are not what Karen asked for. These are random letters that I recently boxed up to be sent to the archives this morning." I could not believe my ears. Confused by my error, I quickly wrote down the correct titles and document numbers and went off to lunch.

When I returned, my secretary met me at the door. Totally out of the blue, a new lawsuit had been filed against the state. It turned out that the initial titles and document numbers I had written down were the very ones needed for our defense team on this new case. I had managed to go into the future to "read" what we would need for a case we did not yet know we had. Thanks to my mistake, the box had not been sent to the archives, and the documents were easily pulled. This single event rekindled the intuitive side of myself that I had allowed to fade.

Because we are taught that information comes from books, I returned to my psychology textbooks, searching for answers to how I "knew what I knew." I didn't find the answers I was seeking in those books, but asking "how I knew" led me to remember my childhood.

My parents, grandparents, and my aunts, with their stories and support, played an important role in creating the person I am today. Like many settlers in the southern mountains of the US , my grandmother (and her children) used intuition, "telepathy" as the researchers called it, without being self-conscious. Nearly all of Grandma's telepathic/intuitive communications involved the well-being of her family. Using only her thoughts, she could call the men in from the cotton fields for dinner and sense the whereabouts of her children. She also said that she often talked with those who had recently passed on.

I spent a significant amount of time with my grandmother when I was four years old. At about that age, a growth spurt occurs in the brain, creating more neural connections. These connections contain our potential to develop intuition and musical ability. Music is more easily developed, as it's often a welcome part of everyday family life. (I was a music major as an undergraduate.) But intuition is almost never consciously developed and is frequently misunderstood. Still, it crops up continually in children, like the five year old who announces the arrival of a letter from Grandpa before the mail carrier brings it, and the four year old who describes his birthday present before he opens the package.

Intuition and imagination seem to fade around age seven, if they are not developed. As an only child, my imagination stayed especially active. I played in the woods with my imaginary friends. If my parents thought that my playmates existed only in my mind, they never said so. They nurtured my imagination by reading or telling stories to me at bedtime. They supported my creativity in numerous ways, allowing me to decorate my bedroom with Christmas lights, build tents with old quilts in the living room, draw, cut, color, and paint; if it could be imagined, I did it. And my mother's simple reply, "She just knows," taught me that it was acceptable to access information in ways we don't always understand.

As I continued my search for answers, a synchronistic meeting with a woman in a bookstore set me on my present path. She was a trainer at the Monroe Institute, a Virginia-based educational and research organization dedicated to exploring human consciousness. After talking with her, I decided to apply to the institute's program.