Real People
Intuition fascinates me. It seems to operate on a level all its own, disregarding what surface words and expressions and official doctrines try to legislate. It can be ignored, and therefore caused to atrophy, but I don’t think it ever dies.
Unremarkably, my intuition has spoken lots to me throughout the years – about life, the Holy, my experiences, the universe. But I’m newly learning how to be attentive to it.
This week I’ve been reading a book called Mutant Message Down Under, the memoir of an American woman (Marlo Morgan) recounting a season spent with an Aboriginal tribe. Surprisingly (to me), through this tribe, known as Real People, Morgan finds herself immersed in a world and worldview very much like the ones my intuition has recently been telling me about.
The Real People see the universe as Oneness: interconnected, interrelated, existing for purposes both within and beyond our abilities to comprehend. “Everything has a purpose,” Morgan writes of the Real People’s view. “There are no freaks, misfits, or accidents. There are only misunderstandings and mysteries not yet revealed to mortal man [sic]. The purpose of the plant kingdom is to feed animals and humans, to hold the soil together, to enhance beauty, to balance the atmosphere. I was told the plants and trees sing to us humans silently, and all they ask in return is for us to sing to them. My scientific mind immediately translated this to mean nature’s oxygen-carbon dioxide exchange. The primary purpose of the animal is not to feed humans, but it agrees to that when necessary. It is to balance the atmosphere, and be a companion and teacher by example. So each morning the tribe sends out a thought or message to the animals and plants in front of us. They say, ‘We are walking your way. We are coming to honor your purpose for existence.’ It is up to the plants and animals to make their own arrangements about who will be chosen.”
Morgan continues, “The Real People begin each day by saying thank you to Oneness for the day, for themselves, their friends, and the world. They sometimes ask for specifics, but it is always phrased ‘If it is in my highest good and the highest good for all life everywhere.’”
Their respect for the earth, for themselves, for one another, and for all living things is extraordinary. Out of this respect flows confidence and humility.
Further in the book Morgan reflects on the Real People’s use of mental telepathy as their primary mode of communication with one another. “The Real People don’t think the voice was designed for talking. You do that with your heart/head center. If the voice is used for speech, one tends to get into small, unnecessary, and less spiritual conversation. The voice is made for singing, for celebration, and healing.”
She tells the story of a young man from the tribe going off by himself to hunt. Hours later, one of the elders kneels down silently to listen. Through her interpreter, Morgan learns that the young man, some 20 miles away, has just asked permission (telepathically) to cut off the tail of a kangaroo he’s just killed. He drank some bad water, he tells the elder, and is now too sick to carry the full weight of the kangaroo back to their camp.
The elder consents and the tribe stops its walking for the day to prepare the enormous pit necessary to cook the kangaroo they know is coming. Sure enough, at sunset here staggers the young man, a disemboweled, tail-less kangaroo flopped across his back.
Wow! My intuition has been speaking for some time about the fluid nature that time and space and even substance can have. And here is an entire people, living out that reality! Would it be possible to live this reality in my context, more than just for fleeting moments? Maybe there are folks who do.
Morgan asks this question too, and describes what the Real People believe it would take to do so. “Later during our journey, when they worked with me to develop my mental communication, I learned that as long as I had anything in my heart or my head I still felt necessary to hide, it would not work. I had to come to peace with everything…I had to learn to forgive myself, not to judge, but to learn from the past. They showed me how vital it is to accept, be truthful, and love myself so I could do the same with others.”
I’m sitting with the Real People today, or at least what Morgan writes of them. And I’m thinking that the wholeness of the universe – from the planets, to Earth’s continents, to the nations and cultures and seas, right down to my individual self, and the cells that make up the spider crawling across my wall – might be furthered, or deepened, or expanded, or increased if ever more of us took Real People living to heart…if ever more of us lived in such a way that our inborn intuition was given space to speak, and be lovingly heeded.