Visions: A Form of Healing Intuitive Awareness

Mary’s Vision: The Archangel Gabriel

During times of crisis, especially when serious health related issues are at stake, the occurrence of visions or other paranormal phenomenon is not as unusual as one might expect. Many people have been led to believe that seeing a vision either indicates saintliness or insanity—not a comfortable point of view to hold when an angel drops by! As a result, people tend to be very cautious about sharing their experience of visions. However, I found that quite a number of average people have visions. In my classes, many students recounted seeing visits by supernatural beings like Jesus or angels or the presence of a comforting divine light. For the most part, these experiences come at traumatic or life changing times in someone’s life.

These phenomena can be thought of as expressions of pure intuition, healing energy that breaks through when the veil between this world and other realities is made thin by the magnitude of a mind-bending reality a person is facing. The reality to be encountered can be traumatic such as life threatening surgery, a sexual assault, or death of a loved one. However, it may not necessarily be negative. It could be something profoundly wonderful such as the gifting of a special and life changing calling as Mary experienced with the visit of the Archangel Gabriel who heralded her role to be the mother of Jesus.

At these times, visions come to tell the distraught person that the overwhelming reality encountered is not all there is and will not have to be born alone—that something more abides giving comfort, love and insight. In Mary’s case, she was told she had found favor with God and that the power of the Most High would overshadow her.

Luke 9: An Intuitive Perspective on the Road to Transfiguration and Beyond

The Transfiguration by Raphael

Luke 9 is about bringing the disciples to the mountain top, literally and figuratively, and then sending them into the world while letting them know what the cost of discipleship is all about.  In the process, a growth of intuitive insight occurs among the disciples to the point where they can see the full revealing of Jesus as He is, beyond the carpenter from Nazareth.  They can see his essential energy field in all its glory and wonder, as well as those of Moses and Elijah who set in motion the forces of spiritual tradition that led to Jesus.

A Call to Let Go

After having chosen his disciples, Jesus sends them out with little in the way of backup support to proclaim the Good News and to heal.  In a sense, it is the pulling away of the usual supports we are accustomed to for a greater good.  The call to grow one’s intuition often involves a call to let go of the things we previously relied on for support.

A Discovery of Miraculous Abundance

Early on in the call to open the third eye of understanding, the seeker becomes aware that highly developed spiritual persons can summon and bring abundance of resources and good health, defying our common perspective that the pie is only so large.  The disciples witness this so many times they begin to believe it themselves.  They begin to see that life can be lived on different terms.  There will always be enough with the grace of God.

The Recognition of God’s Presence among Us

Jesus constantly asks His disciples who they think He is, testing their depth of spiritual awareness.  When Peter answers that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus knows Peter’s eyes have been opened.  In a sense, all of us are constantly being asked the same thing.  Can we see the presence of God in our lives?  If Jesus is the God for us, can we recognize Him here among us now?  As with Peter, when we can see God even in the lowliest person, we have reached a significant point of spiritual development.

Before the disciples recognized Jesus’ true nature, the demons inside possessed people were the only ones who recognized Him.  It is much the same within ourselves, our demons torment us, and make us aware until we can recognize the divine and be healed.  Their coming to the fore is almost necessary to precede the healing call of the divine.

The Mountain Top Experience

Like Peter and the apostles, we are usually relaxed, half asleep or in a state of meditation when suddenly there is a shift of consciousness and we can see auras and energy fields.  In this state the disciples witness Jesus in splendor, along with the great spiritual leaders who preceded him.  Like us, the disciples want to capture this precious moment and make order out of it by constructing something to make it permanent.  They want to build booths to contain the wonder they have just seen just as we want to write about, paint, sing, memorialize or “churchify” our spiritual experiences.

The Need to Go Out Into the World

Jesus knows it is not only about the mountain top experience.  It is also about acting as His disciples at a time when he won’t be around, spreading the news of what they have just witnessed and doing the miraculous things He has done.  He explains what this entails: the profound insight demands an equally profound and unconditional call to action.  It is the basis for the call to action.

Luke 6: It takes an Intuitive Heart to Reach Out to the Outcast

The sixth chapter of Luke tells about Jesus picking his disciples and setting the standard for what it means to be his disciples. It is the first thing any great leader does in a given situation: define the operating values which will govern the activity or endeavor at hand. What is being asked of the disciples is that they discard their accustomed ways of viewing the world, their ideas of right and wrong, likes and dislikes and see the world in a whole new topsy-turvy way that can only be understood through the eyes of an open intuitive, loving heart. Logic and our usual calculated ways of thinking strain to understand this new world view.

Jesus presents his standards in the Sermon on the Plain where he clearly states—contrary to what we all have been taught and led to expect by society—that it is the poor, the hungry, the sorrowful and the hated who are blessed. However, none us, if we believe what society thinks, wants to be included among this ragtag lot and so spend much of our lives avoiding being identified with such a group. Instead, we align ourselves with the very group who Jesus calls woe upon: the rich, the well fed, the happy and those with sterling reputations. The questions are 1) why do we do this, and 2) why does Jesus call us to do otherwise?

I think we identify with the rich and well off because we ourselves are afraid of being poor, hungry, sad and hated. We know that deep down inside there are aspects of each of us that feel want, loss and dislike—inner outcasts we all would rather avoid and deny.

Intuition is knowledge arising out of empathy and compassion

It takes an open, loving intuitive heart to understand why Jesus says the poor are blessed. Unlike rational, waking consciousness which separates and divides while delineating likes and dislikes, intuition knows the full spectrum of what it means to be human and sees it all as one. Unlike psychic ability, intuition is a form of profound awareness about another person that arises out of empathy and compassion. When I see someone through an intuitive heart I understand this person is no different from me, and is actually part of me and I am part of her or him in an interconnected, mystical universe. Therefore the intuitive heart sees the other, no matter how strange, awful, disgusting, fearsome, or loathsome as not only someone out there but as someone representing an aspect of myself which needs accepting. When I can accept that in myself, I can accept it in others.

Acting intuitively means reaching out to the outcasts in our own selves and in our neighborhoods

And this is why I believe St. Francis’ defining moment on his spiritual journey was the embracing of the leper. Lepers represented to him everything he feared and loathed. Embracing the leper meant dissolving all that separated him from his own deepest Self and from a group he had previously avoided. People who seriously embark on a spiritual journey at some point must drop their conventional thinking, see the world in a new, intuitive way, and embrace their own leper in order to be at one with their deeper Self and others. Reaching out to and identifying with the poor, bereaved and oppressed are ways to embrace the feared lepers in our own selves. These outcasts hold the key to our own transformation on the spiritual journey

Luke 2: Insight as a Personal Gift and a Gift for the World

The Song of Simeon (Luke 2:29-32) sounds a note of joy in a fulfilled personal promise from God and then connects it to a salvation for the wider world. Have you ever had such a connection with God? How do we connect the “I” of our being with the “We” of those around us, and then with the “World” as a person/people of Faith? Have you ever had a “Song” like Simeon, Mary or Zechariah?

Simeon – Painting by Rembrandt. Image courtesy of the Queen of Angels Foundation.

Profound intuitive insights are often “mountain top” experiences in that it is from the ecstatic heights of those events we can touch the sacred yet it is also from there we may be gifted with a 360 degree view that more deeply connects us to the reality around us. However, it may take time for the clouds to clear on the mountain top before we can see the grander view.

Sometimes, the personal experience may be so complex and so disruptive to one’s life that the person will need a long while to develop the “song” that he or she can give back to the world.  It often takes time to understand the meaning of the personal gift.  Sometimes, an initiation or education is required to understand how this experience fits into the greater context of one’s life before one can present one’s gift to the world that is characterized by the song.

This is exactly what happened to me with my kundalini event when I experienced, along with the release of powerful energy, an oral intuitive insight.  I heard a gentle but quite authoritative voice say “I have chosen you.”  While I was never told specifically what I was chosen for, dreams have suggested certain tasks.  Seven years later, I am still trying to discover what I have been chosen for while I try to pursue a spiritual path with every choice I make.  One thing I know very clearly is that what I do and the choices I make must serve a higher purpose in line with my ideal. These choices in turn connect me with the wider world.  I trust my song will include the choices I make on a daily basis that reflect my highest ideal.

One Purpose for Visions and Intuitive Insights

Sometimes one can only trust that one has made the right choices and it will come out all right in the end, as it did for Simeon.  He must have lived for a long time with nothing more than his choice to trust and hope in the revelation he received.  One wonders how this divine inspiration transformed him personally.  Certainly, it gave him clarity of sight to recognize the redeemer in a little infant.  In a dark time of spiritual decay and foreign oppression, Simeon was the perhaps just one of the few bearers of a saving vision for his people.  When he saw the truth of his vision in the flesh he was then able to sing his song to the world. The Song of Simeon underscores the importance of holding on to intuitive insight in time of adversity.  I personally believe this is one of many reasons why we are given visions in the first place: to get us through the hard times.

Holding on to a vision keeps us steady in the difficult business of undergoing transformation.  The new awareness arising from the struggles of our transformation is the song we will give others.

Related articles

• Luke 1: On Visions and Faith: A Comparison of Zechariah’s and Mary’s Responses to the Angel Gabriel (frankramer.wordpress.com)