When the nurse passed the patient’s room, he sensed something amiss. He turned around, examined the computer readouts—all’s fine. Except he didn’t believe it. He called the doctor. When he explained to the doctor his misgivings, she replied, “Well, nurse, you know we can’t go by hunches, we must have facts!”

And so that could be the end of the story. So much for being intuitive, if you can’t work intuitively with others. What if the story took a different turn?

After the nurse expresses his misgivings about the patient being in trouble in spite of what the computer says, the doctor says, “let’s each tune in to this patient and see what we get!” After a moment, she says to the nurse, “now what was it like that you sensed?” And the nurse replies, “… it was a kind of up/down, on/off, soft/loud, modulating feeling and as if it was running itself down…”

The doctor notes, “Hmm... interesting, because what came to my mind, was like a rocking sensation, the back and forth of a pendulum, but it was getting slower and slower… time running out…. What does that suggest to you?” She turned to the nurse, expecting an answer.

The nurse was smiling. He now realized the answer, suggested in the similarity among their images, and noted that the doctor was smiling also.

“Exactly!” responded the doctor, who knew what measures to take to intercept this patient’s decline, now that she and the nurse’s combined intuition had stimulated the needed diagnosis.

Just imagine, a way for us to share important intuitions with one another, to better help us use this faculty to guide us into the future. It’s one thing to learn how to be aware of our own personal intuitive promptings. But what about acting upon our hunches? Often we don’t act, because we feel our intuition lacks “credentials.” That’s why it is so important that we learn how to be intuitive together! That is, it is time to free intuition from the closet of personal, subjective experiences and introduce it to the coming world of shared, consensual intuition! As our general paradigms evolve from “identity” to “relationship,” the experience of sharing intuitions to develop even greater potential for cooperation and innovation will become more and more critical to our well-being and survival.

When I was first invited by the A.R.E. to develop a psychic development program that expressed the idealism in the Cayce material, I realized that “Be Your Own Psychic!” was his essential innovation, as he turned our attention away from admiring folks with “the gift,” to working to develop the gift within. As I worked for more than 20 years researching and developing exercises and intuitive experiments to present at the A.R.E.’s annual “Edgar Cayce Legacy” psychic development conference, I came to realize that his true “legacy” is that we can be intuitive together, that intuition is capable of consensual validation. Intuition can be as objectively “real” as stuff we sense externally and can agree about; it just requires looking in a different way, for when hearts are joined, no words will do.

The Edgar Cayce Institute for Intuitive Studies was founded with the mission “to create a socially recognized, valued and applied spiritual science of intuition following the inspiration of the life and work of Edgar Cayce.” While Mr. Cayce’s innovation was be your own psychic, his ongoing legacy is that we can function intuitively together to improve life on this planet and to accomplish our spiritual mission as souls.

*Proceeds from The Intuitive Heart Discovery Group and the Edgar Cayce Institute for Intuitive Studies go to support the work of Edgar Cayce.