After years of slow training for ultramarathons, I began to be interested in learning to run fast. Thumbing through my stack of running magazines, I found no methods that evoked enthusiasm. So I prayed for help, and the next day, I visited a used-book store where I found a copy of Arthur Lydiard’s Running the Lydiard Way. It had exactly the advice I needed.
I don’t know how runners can train without inner guidance. I suspect that many successful runners do use their intuition, even if they don’t call it by that name. I’m sure they consult their calm, impartial feelings about the best training for the day.
The conscious mind is problem-oriented, but the intuitive mind holds solutions. The conscious mind is good at analyzing, but the “superconscious” sees underlying unities. The 16th-century Spanish mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, said that in a single moment of superconscious ecstasy, one understands things which it would take years to discover with the rational mind alone.
But it isn’t always easy to “hear the news.” The biggest obstacle is the ego – it resists asking for guidance and receiving it, believing “I can do it myself.” Also, restless thoughts and feelings create static. It takes a degree of inner quietness to hear the intuitive guidance clearly.
Years ago, I asked a respected spiritual counselor for advice about some problems I was experiencing. His answer startled me. He said, “There are no personal problems.”
It was an amazing statement, and one that I imagine most people would reject as absurd. But from a superconscious perspective, it’s true. At a higher level of our consciousness, there’s an awareness that holds all the solutions we need.
The superconscious doesn’t simply drop the answers in our lap, however. But if we ask humbly, with calmness and intense focus, God devises the solutions we need, crafting them with boundless ingenuity from the resources at hand. You pray, and you receive the answer – in a dog-eared copy of a book by Arthur Lydiard, hidden in a used-book store.
