The Psychic Arts have been with us throughout history. In this insightful article, Bede Nicholson explores how intuition still helps us in our everyday lives.

Psychic arts has been with us since time immemorial. From the Native American shamans, to the medicine man of South America, the druids of Europe to the oracles of Asia, as well as the Australian Aboriginal people. Across all cultures, people have accessed their psychic powers to help themselves and their people, and to guide them in their daily lives. Though the myriad of different practices and beliefs, traditions and customs, the one thing shared by all of these cultures was the ability to use their intuition and move into a different realm of consciousness and access knowledge which they could then pass on to others or use themselves. This wasn’t considered spooky or scary - it was a natural part of life that was respected, accepted and recognised as being of great value. Now let’s get things clear. No-one is saying that these people where perfect and everything they saw came to pass. They were just as fallible as us. We live in an ever changing universe and nothing is set in stone. I would imagine that a lot of their rituals and customs became rigid and restrictive and in the end probably blocked out a lot of real intuitive insight. There was probably also a lot of political wrangling and manoeuvring, which would have distorted or biased certain insights. So looking at it from today’s point of view, you can say that not much has really changed, as we still can operate out of rigid and restrictive beliefs, and there is always a certain amount of political manoeuvring going on. The one thing that has changed is the lack of intuitive insight and guidance in our everyday lives.

How did we get to a stage where we no longer value or give credence to psychic insights? In our Western civilization, the erosion of insight started with the centralization of the Church. From the 4th century AD, as the Church spread out from its Roman base, there was a gradual integration and suppression of the various cultures it encountered. The Church in its quest for supremacy and control, quashed local customs and beliefs in its drive for homogenous religion. This is exemplified in the dismantling of the Celtic Church in Britain, which for a time still integrated old customs and beliefs from Druidic times into the new vision of Christianity. The next subjugation of intuition came with the development of scientific imperialism. Within this paradigm, if something couldn’t be proven through scientific experiments, then it could not exist. Anything to do with intuition or psychic ability was criticised and dismissed. This attitude has continued to today. Even though quantum physics has shown that there can be many different levels of reality, this has not quite sunk through and been accepted by other levels of the scientific community.

So, where does that leave us today with regards to psychic work? People have used their intuition through the ages. Leaders of various countries have always had advisors next to them who can work at an intuitive level, so there has always been an informal acknowledgement that these abilities are useful. Sometimes they were celebrated for it, sometimes persecuted. In recent years, there has been an upsurge in people wanting to develop their own intuition and psychic abilities, as well as using services like our own. This has come from an acknowledgement that there is something out there that can be of benefit, which is beyond rational thought and perception, and which can provide guidance and insight into our lives.