Spontaneous Inspiration
It is said that sometime back in the halcyon days of the 1980s Michael Jackson woke up in the middle of the night with a tune fully formed in his mind. He immediately phoned up all of his band members and made them come to the studio at once. He said he had to get that song out of his mind and recorded or else they were going to give it to Prince. That song was Billie Jean.
History is full of such stories. Paul McCartney had a similar experience with ‘Yesterday’. Newton theorised gravity after a bump with an apple and Francis Crick visualised the double helix whilst on LSD. What do we call this kind of phenomena? Inspiration? Intuition?
The English dictionary defines intuition as then ability to acquire knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning or needing an explanation. Different fields use the word “intuition” in very different ways: direct access to unconscious knowledge; unconscious cognition; gut feelings; bodily sensations; unconscious pattern-recognition; and the ability to understand something instinctively, without any need for the ‘thinking’ part of the brain.
This is something that I encounter in the acupuncture consultation process quite often. The traditional method of diagnosis is one that relies heavily upon reasoning. A patient may present with a myriad of ailments and it is the acupuncturist’s job to put all these different signs and symptoms in to a coherent diagnosis and an effective treatment plan. This would then include the selection of numerous acupuncture points from the hundreds that exist across the body. This can take a lot of mental processing.
However sometimes a particular acupuncture point will just spring in to my mind seemingly from nowhere. I will hear what sounds like my own voice in my head clearly stating for example, “Liver 5”. Over the years I have come to trust this voice so I will invariably use that point, possibly instead of the point that I was intending to use. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of acupuncture points and naturally I tend to use some a lot more than others. This means that I can actually forget what some of the lesser used points are supposed to do. So when I hear this commanding voice recommending a lesser known acu-point then I may have to look up in a book or two to remind myself of what it actually does. And the voice is unerringly accurate.
So where does this voice actually come from? The Western interpretation would be that it comes from some part of my sub-conscious where all the uses and functions of the acupuncture points are stored in the deep recesses of my memory. But there seems to be more to it than that. There are many scientifically recorded cases of spontaneous knowing which cannot be explained away as remembering. These have been given the name ‘Acquired Savant Syndrome’ and include examples of people, who usually after some sort of brain injury, suddenly have the ability to speak French, or to be able to play the piano. Things that they had no knowledge of previously.
There have been many instances in my own life where I have seemingly experienced this spontaneous knowing. Recently there have been several occasions where I have received direct telepathic messages from non-verbal autistic people with regards to which acupuncture points they want to have needled. They have also sent me messages with regards to how I should go about treating other people that they know. In one case I was given a single point was effective in treating all of the physical, energetic and psychological symptoms that the client was presenting with. How did they get access to this information of which they were never taught? How are they able to transmit this information to another mind?
All of these phenomena can be explained by the Chinese medical theory of the brain where it is seen not so much as a generator of thought but more of a filter. The analogy of it being more like a radio receiver is a good one. Some people are tuned to one channel, whilst other people are tuned in to another. Some radios can transmit as well as receive and sometimes a strong blow to the radio will cause it to pick up a different station altogether.
Let us make sure that our radio receivers are fully tuned in should the next Billie Jean come floating by in the ether.