JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we'll be exploring "The Intuitive Connection." What do we mean by the term intuition, and how does it relate to psychic awareness and to channeling? How does it relate to logic and rationality? With me is Dr. William Kautz, a mathematician and computer scientist; a former staff scientist at SRI International, the large military-industrial think tank in Menlo Park, California. Dr. Kautz is also the founder and director of the Center for Applied Intuition in San Francisco, and he is the co-author with Melanie Branon of a book called Channeling: The Intuitive Connection. Welcome, Bill.
WILLIAM KAUTZ, Sc.D.: Glad to be here, Jeffrey.
MISHLOVE: Bill, you've spent many decades of your career exploring the latest advances in microelectronics and computer technology, and now in effect you've made a career transition, exploring the depths of the mind, intuition, psychic phenomena, and channeling. Can we talk a bit about how that transition occurred for you? You seem to have virtually switched camps, in a way.
KAUTZ: I guess I have, Jeffrey. It happened gradually. It was an opening-up process of the type that many, many people are going through these days. It began with a curiosity about scientific creativity -- where do these ideas come from? -- and led me to the observation, the conclusion, that there are two ways to grow knowledge, and that is the goal of science. One is to use the rational process -- to use one's senses, to observe, to connect with the world, to reason. The other is by a direct knowing process that we call intuition. So I gradually went from a person with one foot in one camp, the rational camp, to someone with, you might say, one foot in each of the two worlds. And it seemed like the only thing to do then was to try to bring these together, and that's the path that I seem to be on nowadays.
MISHLOVE: So for many years you have been working with sensitives, intuitives, and channels, and posing for them technical questions, scientific questions, looking for both data and meaningful hypotheses from them.
KAUTZ: That's correct. This started because I had a session with an expert intuitive who talked about my own life and told me things that not only no one else knew, but things which I barely knew myself, and I'd never told anyone. I reasoned that if they could do this, they must be tapping some source of knowledge, and I wondered what would happen if I asked them some of the unanswered questions of science. So I tried it, and it worked. I was able to get good answers, and I could check it with other expert intuitives, and got the same answers, and so I started collecting all those and trying to apply them in the scientific world. And it was fairly successful.
MISHLOVE: You've looked at areas ranging from the causes of earthquakes, the causes of crib death, to finding missing children.
KAUTZ: That's correct, yes. And this is the work that led, step by step, to founding the Center for Applied Intuition, and it's the work we do today, working with expert intuitives -- that is, those individuals who have developed their natural intuitive abilities into very strong skills, so that they're using their intuition in a deliberate and conscientious way, not just in a sporadic, occasional, and usually weak way the way most of us do.
MISHLOVE: How would you distinguish between, let's say, intuition on the one hand, and maybe just a person who has a spiritual philosophy or metaphysical philosophy on the other hand?
KAUTZ: Well, I say first of all that everybody has intuition. It's a basic ability like learning how to walk or swim or something like that, but rather few people develop it into something that they can use. But as far as distinguishing it from the philosophy, philosophy is more of a thinking process; it's a figuring out, it's a trying to understand by using the thinking mind, whereas intuition is the process whereby knowledge can enter the conscious mind without all of this rational processing. It appears to use another part of the brain, which we sometimes call the right half of the brain.
MISHLOVE: In other words, being a philosopher, or metaphysically oriented, is not a prerequisite --
KAUTZ: It certainly isn't, and in fact it's more likely by our experience to get in the way, because if a person's trained, educated, to rely heavily on his thinking ability, this tends to block the development of intuitive skills, although it doesn't have to; but it tends to.
MISHLOVE: The term intuitive or intuition is often confused with such things as mediumship and channeling as well, and of course with psychic sensitivity. Do you make a distinction there?
KAUTZ: Well, we do. You can say that psychism, which includes mediumship and clairvoyance and so on, is an aspect of intuition. It's one way in which intuition can manifest. Intuition can also manifest with an artist, for example, or a composer of music, in which the new knowledge comes in in usually nonverbal ways, maybe pictorial ways, or in sound. Now, that's an equally valid manifestation of intuition. Sometimes it appears in very strange and phenomenalistic ways; those we tend to group under the category of psychism or parapsychology. And some people, particularly those in the health professions, it will come to you just as an inner knowing in the midst of a problem. They will know what is the difficulty, so that then they can apply their thinking mind to go to work on it.
MISHLOVE: Many of the expert intuitives with whom you work are people who are so-called trance channels. They go in, they have a spirit guide who has another name -- Hilarion or Tom McPherson, some kind of another character, another personality that provides information. Am I correct in assuming that when you work with these people you're more concerned about the nature of the information than where it seems to come from?
KAUTZ: That's right. By understanding this as an intuitive process, we see that channeling is just one way in which information can come to the surface. And our experience with channels is that whereas some of them are deep-trance channels, in which they appear to go to sleep so that what are apparently other beings are speaking through them, an equal number of capable channels don't do that at all. They're just talking the way you and I are talking; it's just that they are able to at will expand their own consciousness outward to embrace this greater reservoir of knowledge and pull it in when it's needed. We call those light-trance channels. It's very similar to what are traditionally called clairvoyants. And there are several in between, of course. Even those who are deep-trance channels don't necessarily bring in other entities or beings or personalities; some do, some don't. So these more spectacular aspects of channeling don't appear to be essential to the process. What's really going on is information and knowledge coming out, and this process can take place in a number of different ways. What most people observe on television or hear about in the media are the more spectacular ways of deep-trance channeling with entities, but it doesn't have to be that way.
MISHLOVE: Let me ask you a pushy one at this point. With regard to these entities, I know you work closely with channels. Do you yourself accept these entities as having an autonomous, independent existence?
KAUTZ: That's a good question, and I don't think any of us have the last word on that. I accept them to the extent of working with them.
MISHLOVE: In other words, when you enter into that kind of situation you're willing to, in effect, treat them as if they were.
KAUTZ: That's right. I can talk to Tom McPherson just as if he's another person, and we play this game together. Now, the extent to which Tom McPherson is really an independent entity I think is still an open question. He certainly has many of the qualities of being a separate entity.
MISHLOVE: We should mention, I suppose, for our viewers that Tom McPherson is the entity that is channeled by Kevin Ryerson, and about whom Shirley MacLaine has written extensively.
KAUTZ: That's right, and who contributed significantly to the book that you mentioned -- Channeling: The Intuitive Connection. So I play this game with these entities or beings, but I can work just as well with deep-trance channels or light-trance channels where there are no entities involved. I think we know too little about what the nature of individuality is, to pass judgment as to whether these beings are really independent or not. We're learning more and more every year, it seems, about who we are as creatures, as beings within this universe. And the boundaries seem to be getting thinner and thinner between one person and another, between one person and a spirit being or an entity, and even between these spirit beings themselves. It seems like we're all merging together. So this raises serious questions about individuality, and I think we're going to be learning a lot more in the next twenty years about all of this.
MISHLOVE: As a scientist, I suppose you've developed a world view that we are separate beings, and that there are separate objects in the world that we study objectively. And I guess your world view has changed quite a bit as a result of your intuitive explorations.
KAUTZ: It certainly has. Perhaps I wouldn't say changed so much as extended. I'm coming to learn that life in the broad sense exists on different levels, and whereas in this reality, this physical reality, we operate on one level where everybody is obviously separate, as one begins to spend more and more attention, time, and focus in other realities which seem to be higher or deeper, we realize that time is not what we thought it was, physical separation is not what we thought it was, and the point at present, the nature of individuality, is not what we thought it was either.
MISHLOVE: So there's a sense in which you would accept that you and I and those who are viewing us at this moment are all one, are all linked.
KAUTZ: That's right. This is strongly suggested as one moves into these other levels, and in fact our teachers, who are speaking from these other levels, say this is absolutely the case, which raises the probabilities a little higher perhaps.
MISHLOVE: And then on the other hand, as a scientist you seem to pay quite a bit of attention to the verifiability of the information that comes through intuition.
KAUTZ: Well, I do in the sense of communication, Jeffrey. When it comes to talking to other people about inner experience -- this is not just me, it's many others -- then we have to speak in a language that the listener is willing to use and to function with. I think this is really what the major role of science is, is that it's a communicator. It's a way of converting private experience, private knowledge, into public knowledge. It's a way of taking one person's insights, inner experience, and putting it into a form so that it can be immediately made credible to a large number of people, like the scientific community, and eventually everybody else who places some credence in scientific knowledge.
MISHLOVE: Well, when you're attempting to work on a problem, such as the cause of earthquakes, or attempting to locate a missing child, for example, you need concrete information, verifiable information, don't you?
KAUTZ: That's right. I need concrete and specific information, and we found it to be possible at the Center to work with a team of expert intuitives in a consensual mode to get from them information that has this kind of accuracy and credibility about it. We use a team because none of these intuitives is absolutely perfect, and also they don't like to be put on the spot and feel that a hundred-thousand-dollar research project is going to be based solely on what they say. So it puts them at ease if we use a team. So this method of intuitive consensus can be used very well to pull in scientific information which is accurate, which is complete and relevant to the inquiry at hand.
MISHLOVE: What would be some of the best examples of that, in your experience?
KAUTZ: Well, as you alluded to earlier, we did a study on the earthquake triggering mechanism. This isn't so much the long-range cause of earthquakes, which are pretty well understood -- you know, the plates scraping against each other.
MISHLOVE: Tectonic plates.
KAUTZ: Yes. But that theory doesn't tell you where and when earthquakes are going to occur. We wanted a more local physical explanation of what's going on in the ground just prior to an earthquake, so that we might through that understanding be able to instrument those regions in the right way so that we could predict those changes. So we did an intuitive-consensus inquiry on that problem, working with seven intuitives in that case, and we got a very consistent explanation of what's going on that went well beyond the current theories, such as they are. Oddly enough, they pointed in a completely different direction than current inquiries, saying that the cause of earthquakes lies more in the atmosphere than in the ground, and that's where we should do our instrumentation. And sure enough, part of that has been verifiable through research projects that we conducted, and through reports from other researchers who were discovering this by their own means, not intuitive means, since the time we did that study.
MISHLOVE: I gather that when you're working with intuitives like this you're liable to get, I suppose I might say, two types of information. One might be something that could be verifiable -- a hypothesis or even particular data, where the lost object was. And another type of information that comes through and may be really more powerful and profound is -- I guess you could call it inspirational; something comes through that changes a person's attitudes.
KAUTZ: Exactly. In fact we found that latter to be really the most valuable. Intuitively derived information can be used in three ways when you're working on a problem, I would say. One way is as specific information that could then be tested; we call that a hypothesis in science. These hypotheses are normally very difficult to derive, because they have to be derived by trial and error by the scientific method. So here we've got a way of going directly to them. This is perhaps eighty percent of the effort in most of science. The second way is as providing a new perspective on things. Almost every great discovery was of this type -- that not so much new facts or new information came through, but the discoverer discovered a new way of looking at things -- "Aha!"
MISHLOVE: An outlook.
KAUTZ: A new outlook, yes, a new view. So that's the second way. And the third way is just to come up with ideas -- specific ideas that can trigger off the mind to go exploring, perhaps in new directions, perhaps going over old things in a different way. This is what we call in normal parlance ideas. So they're very inspirational, that's right.
MISHLOVE: You used a term earlier in defining intuition; you called it direct knowing.
KAUTZ: Yes.
MISHLOVE: That seems to say that the human mind is capable of apprehending knowledge, facts, concepts, outlooks, without the mediation of the senses, without the mediation of logic or philosophy.
KAUTZ: That's exactly right, and it's an incredible idea, isn't it? As one begins to study this, both practicing it oneself and working with others who have good intuitive skill, you realize that this is actually true. And this raises the question, where did we ever get the idea that it wasn't true? We are trained in our educational system that there is only one way to generate knowledge, and that's through direct experience -- through our senses and reasoning about that knowledge, talking to experts, and so on. And yet, what one learns as one inquires into this area is that it's possible, and actually very easy, to tap this universal source of knowledge, wherever and whenever it is, and just pull knowledge into the mind in response to serious inquiries.
MISHLOVE: What does that say to you about the nature of the mind itself? What is the mind, that it is able to directly access knowledge this way?
KAUTZ: Well, it says to me that the mind is somehow strongly linked to, and perhaps even a part of, something universal and unifying. We call it the superconscious in our models. It's really linking everybody together at this high level. It's as if this knowledge, universal knowledge, is just everywhere. It probably doesn't even have a where to it; it's just omnipresent. And it can be tapped by anyone who's willing to open themselves up to receiving it.
MISHLOVE: Of course it's not as if -- except perhaps in mystical states, and even then it's questionable -- we would know all knowledge at once.
KAUTZ: Well, it has to come through our conscious mind, of course, and also what's normally called the subconscious mind, and that tends to filter out a lot so that we can handle it, because our brains just can only handle so much at once.
MISHLOVE: If I were to visualize the mind in this model, the image that comes to me, Bill, is as if it's reaching out like an amoeba stretching out pseudopods or tentacles that can touch and conform to the shape of anything. I think of the immune system that forms antibodies that immediately counteract every body, because they wrap around or conform to the shape somehow.
KAUTZ: Well, that's similar to what we use. We think of the conscious mind as kind of a sphere of activity which represents where the mind is focused; it's an attention focuser. And that's surrounded by a shell of subconscious mind, which is our memories and all that stuff down there, most of which we would like to forget, but we can't. And then that's immersed in a sea of superconscious material that I alluded to, which is sort of the reservoir of all knowledge. So this is where the term channeling comes in. It's like this amoeba-like crack that can be made through the subconscious, so that superconscious material can flow in. If you have very few cracks, it has a hard time getting through. It'll pop through in dreams, maybe, and hunches. If you work on it, you can widen those cracks so that it can flow through more easily and more clearly, without the chance of great distortion.
MISHLOVE: I gather from your work that the kind of information that can come through is limited only by the questions that you might pose of it. I mean, you could ask what's good for business, or what's good for my country or my family, or how to solve this scientific problem or that personal problem.
KAUTZ: That's what we found, that there are very, very few limits on the kind and the depth of information that can be obtained through good intuitive channels. It's like everything's there, and it's up to us to focus our inquiry so that we get what we want to get. There needs to be a good motivation for the information. Mere curiosity works sometimes, and sometimes it doesn't work. But if the information is in some sense necessary, or connected with strong human values or social values, it comes through much more easily. People who are trying to test the process often have difficulty because that's not really a very good motivation, to try to prove something by standards which are not really very socially valuable. So I think this is one of the reasons why parapsychology has had so much difficulty over the last hundred or hundred and fifty years -- because they're almost always asking questions of clairvoyants and mediums and channels for which they already know the answers, or could easily obtain them. So that defuses the process; it weakens it considerably.
MISHLOVE: In other words, it's as if there's a certain insincerity about what they're doing.
KAUTZ: Well, yes; a-sincerity, perhaps, a lack of sincerity, a lack of motivation.
MISHLOVE: You seem to be suggesting that one gets the best results if the intuitive connection is approached with an attitude of reverence.
KAUTZ: Well, respect, yes; reverence -- need is the word I like to use. When we're coaching people to approach intuitive channels, we suggest they think carefully about the questions they want to ask, and imagine that they are asking these of themselves. This tends to improve the quality of the inquiry considerably; it gets them out of the testing mode, it gets them into an attitude of beginning to question what they would do with that information if they had it. And it helps to crystallize the session and make it work much better.
MISHLOVE: How do you distinguish between a good intuitive and one who isn't so good?
KAUTZ: Well, there are many, many criteria which can be applied here. When we're working to add new expert intuitives to our staff, we use the standard measures, such as they must provide information which is accurate and complete and relevant to the inquiry at hand. They must be individuals with integrity and a sense of responsibility, and that of course is pertinent to hiring anybody for any job. But to answer your question perhaps a little more broadly, we like to work with people who see what they're doing in a broader context. You might say they have a more spiritual perspective. They are not just information collectors, or information gatherers. They are not just channels, but they have a conscience about what they are doing, and they have an understanding of the purpose of life, they have an understanding of their own path, why they are doing what they are doing, and how their channeling efforts, their intuitive efforts, fit into the bigger picture.
MISHLOVE: And if I were to want information from this level, and I had spent a lot of time sincerely formulating my questions, based on my real needs, would I be better off seeking such an intuitive consultant, as opposed to really looking within myself for that same answer?
KAUTZ: No, as long as you can do it. That's always a better way to go, is to use your own intuition and just go for those answers directly. But this is a skill, after all, and therefore if you're having difficulty with that, or you need assistance, then these expert intuitives are available to help you. But they are acting as guides, and this is particularly important when we are doing intuitive counseling for individuals who come to us with a desire to understand their own lives better -- what is the purpose of my life? What can I do to fulfill that purpose? What are the dynamics by which I'm living, the spiritual and psychological dynamics, and how does this relate to all these problems I'm having with relationships or my body or whatever? It's important to realize that the intuitive source is acting as a guide.
MISHLOVE: To help us ask the great questions of ourselves, ultimately.
KAUTZ: Yes, so that we can rely more and more and more on our own intuitive abilities to get the answers to these questions.
MISHLOVE: Bill Kautz, we're out of time. It's been a great interview, Bill. Thank you very much for being with me.
KAUTZ: It's a real pleasure, Jeffrey. I'm glad to be here.
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