One evening, while sitting with a friend at the dinner table, as the clock edged close to midnight, I observed how peaceful the candle light was. It was a simple thought, but I put it into words and shared it verbally. Then, a discussion developed, and from that an insight into what might be called a "crystal view". This is a starting point for all the work we might do hereafter with crystals, and so it seemed worthwhile to remember and set down the insights of that moment.
It was obvious that we were feeling this peace because we were conscious. What seemed a greater stretch of the imagination was the notion that something else which was conscious was communicating to us. It flew in the face of many years of schooling to think that candle flames communicated anything to anyone. Yet my sense was that, in the absence of those flames, the feeling in the room would have been different, and that both I and my friend would have noticed that difference.
It became clear then that our schooling had been a form of mental conditioning in which we had been taught to disregard feeling, or instinct, or intuition as a way of knowing. We have systematically been trained to think a certain way, empirically, and to consider only "factual" evidence, supported by the five senses, and inferences based on logic, as a valid way of knowing anything. By embracing this way of knowing, we had all moved into a certain way of being in which we were no longer in the same relationship with cosmos, with all that was, with the sky, clouds, flowers, candles and stones and crystals through which Nature and her spirit spoke to our ancestors in milennia past. And while scientific thinking had many successes to its credit, I could hardly begin to imagine what the implications for humanity have been as a result of cutting ourselves off from the entire mode of knowing which is based on feeling.
Yet, it seemed to me in those moments, as I shared the insight with my friend, that unless we could return to a way of experiencing cosmos with total openness and to embrace our intuitions and feelings as valid sources of cognition, that we would be crippled and limited in our interactions. What we needed, and continue to need, is a view of things that opens doors of perception, not closes them. We need a form of interactive awareness which accepts ALL forms of input, not only the logical ideas that science can validate, based on the five physical senses.