Knowing in Our Spirt

I think we know in our spirit more often than we acknowledge. It's understandable since we associate knowing with our brain and mind and tend to dismiss other ways of knowing.

Knowing in spirit is located in our chest. Place your hand over your breast bone. When we know in our spirit we feel it in and around this area of our chest. Sometimes it's so strong that the feeling radiates up into our throat or down into our solar plexus.

The feeling might be a burning sensation. It might also be a tightness or fullness. It has an immediate emotional charge to it. The emotion varies according to our knowing. It can be fear, anger, hurt, sadness, relief, excitement, happiness, ecstatic joy, or a mix of emotions.

Knowing in our spirit usually happens in a flash, not as the result of reaching a conclusion after a reasoned cognitive process. If intuitive knowing is a flash of cognitive knowing in our mind, knowing in our spirit is a flash of physical-emotional knowing in our chest, in and around our thymus gland. Hence the Ancient Greek association of our spirit (thumos) with our thymus gland.

Many Ways of Knowing

I know from the findings of scientific research that far more exists than I can perceive with my five physical senses. There are spectrums of light my eyes cannot see. There are high and low frequencies my ears cannot hear. There are fragrances my nose cannot smell, textures too fine for my skin to feel, and flavors too subtle for my tongue to taste. 

However, I do not need scientific findings to know that there is more "out there" than I can know with my five physical senses. My dog hears and smells things that do not exist to me. They are out of my ability to know with my physical senses. 

While it is impossible for me to know some things about the universe by my physical senses, I have other ways of knowing.

I have instincts and can, for example, "know" what to do in an emergent situation  and do it. 

I can know by intuition. For example, I can know without knowing how I know that something is going to happen before it happens. Then it happens. I can also intuit that I need to do something, do it, and discover that it was the right action to take at the time.

I can also see and hear things mentally. In other words, I can imagine what something will look like before I see it with my eyes. 

I can know things emotionally; I can feel fear that alerts me to a danger before I see or hear the threat.

I can also know things in my body; for example, I can feel another person's anxiety in my solar plexus. The muscles there tighten. 

I can also know things with relative certainty by deduction.  For example, all humans die. I am human. I will die.

I'm not always right. Sometimes I misjudge the information from my various ways of knowing just as I do with my five physical senses. But that has to do with my judgment not the information itself.

To deny my many ways of knowing is to deny the spirit in me that animates them. Rather than deny the spirit's work within me, I affirm it. I affirm it boldly.

I refuse to be like some who restrict knowing to what they can perceive with their five physical senses.