How Is Intuition Experienced In Different Parts of the World?

You can also get a fuller understanding of intuition by looking how it is experienced around the globe. Many cultures include intuition in their childhood education, healthcare, social interactions, ideas about death and the afterlife, and spiritual or spiritual traditions.

• North America. If you were a Native American Indian child, you would probably have been encouraged to seek out and speak with the spirits of plants, animals, mountains, rivers, and other parts of nature.
  
  If you were a member of the Six Nation Confederacy or a member of the Iroquois tribe, you would believe that the tribe was one "long body." You would see the scouts your tribe sent out ahead of the rest of the tribe as acting like the tribe's eyes and ears and sending back intuitive pictures and sounds to tribal leaders just as your nerves send messages to your brain.


• Latin America. If you were raised in Brazil, you might seek the aid of a psychic surgeon when facing an illness. If you were a Mayan chosen to be a medicine person (shaman), you would receive an education that your culture respected just like Western cultures respect medical school.


• Asia. If you were raised in China, you might be taught to sense when you were vulnerable to illness so you could give yourself an acupuncture treatment (much as we take aspirin).

• Africa. If Kenya was your home, and you were raised in a traditional tribe, you might believe that people can control the moment of their death and can will themselves to die. Western suicides would look very strange, because as a traditional Kenyan asked, "Why do you have to hurt yourselves to die?"

Many people throughout the earth believe that their ancestors, who have died and entered the spirit world, can speak to them and guide their lives through dreams and visions. Can you imagine yourself being comfortable having inner conversations with the spirit of a beloved person who has died?

If you lived in one of these cultures, you might feel differently about intuition. You could speak about your intuitive experiences with other members of your culture as openly as you now speak about your ideas, opinions, and logical conclusions in Western cultures.

© 2006 Charlson Meadows, used with permission.