Divine Communication

Recognizing Egoic vs Divine guidance

I get asked this question often: "How do I tell the difference between egoic communication and divine guidance?" This post will help to clarify some of what you may experience when I suggest people close their eyes and ask to be guided.

There is something that became incredibly obvious on the return from my NDE. The Divine communicates. Constantly. Not metaphorically. Directly. Recognizably, and with a precision the ego cannot manufacture.

After my NDE, the channel was opened. You could say several channels. What might have been mistaken as background noise resolved into something I could hear, feel, and experience. Something I could distinguish from every other form of communication I may have been mistaking it for.

This is a process. What follows is a map, not a solution.

Egoic Communication

Most of what spiritualists call divine communication is the ego talking to itself.

This is as true in prayer as it is in conversation. The ego usually approaches communication with a conclusion already formed, looking for confirmation. In other words you ask for something and you receive "communication" in line with what you asked for.

In this case, you, the ego, isn't seeking guidance at all. It seeks validation. The question the ego appears to be asking is rarely the question it's actually asking. What you really desire to know is: Am I right?

Become "the witness" and watch yourself in conversation. Are you listening, integrating and feeling, or are you waiting to speak? Are you asking a genuine question, or one you already know the answer to? The ego and the intellect compose its response while the other person is still talking. It processes what it hears as useful material, discards the rest, and returns always to its original position, slightly reworded, and newly justified.

It does the same with the Divine. What looks like prayer is often a presentation. Here is what I've decided. Here is why it's reasonable. Here is what I need from you to proceed.

This isn't communication. It's a pre-written monologue dressed up as a conversation, certainly not divine communication.

Heart Based Communication

Divine communication is different in quality before it is different in content.

Heart based communication arrives with a type of ease. It doesn’t arrive as the ease of someone who has just talked themselves into calm. It is something quieter. A surrendered settling, not a resolution. The body recognizes it before the mind has processed it. There is a physical resonance to genuine guidance that the ego's desires and conclusions don't carry. You feel it before you think it.

It is also, reliably, outside the ego's framework. This is the clearest marker I can give you. The ego is sophisticated enough to mimic wisdom, patience, even humility, and even divine communication. What it cannot do is produce guidance that contradicts its own preferences.

When something arrives that you wouldn't have chosen, that runs counter to what you had already consciously or subconsciously rationalized or decided, pay attention. That is a good sign that it is not you talking to yourself.

Heart-based communication with others has the same quality. You are actually present. Actually open to being changed by what you hear. The outcome is not already written. You bring a genuine question and you wait with patience, not strategically, for what comes back. And usually it will look nothing like what you would have expected through your egoic framework.

Heart-based communication opens you to a receptive state. A state where you can genuinely share and receive love and truth. It is itself a form of surrender. The willingness to remove what you think you know, what you believe you need, and what you have already decided, in exchange for something greater. This is what prepares the channel.

Surrender As a Key

I receive constant communication from the Divine and what I have noticed most is that divine guidance doesn’t always arrive as a complete solution from A to Z.

Sometimes, it will only show me the first step. Only that step. To receive the second step, I must move to take the first step without the guarantee of knowing where it will lead. An exercise in Divine trust.

This is where understanding and being in the state of surrender is actually a requirement to open the channel to divine communication. Surrender as a willingness to be in contact with something larger than your plan. And if it gives you one step or inch of information at a time, that is what is intended.

The ego will find this absolutely intolerable. Intellectually it wants the full map, the entire view, before it makes any moves. You want the outcome secured before you commit. Give me the whole picture and then I'll trust you.

Divine guidance and communication doesn't work that way. It will ask you to trust the process rather than seek a destination. It will ask you to recognize that the process is the destination.

When you are about to speak and ask another person a question or the Divine, ask yourself: Am I seeking an outcome, or am I open to being guided to one? Is there tension in this, or ease? Does this confirm what I already wanted, or does it ask something of me I hadn't planned to give?

The ego insists. Guidance invites. 

The ego secretly believes it already knows. Guidance reveals that you don't. 

The ego seeks the full answer. Guidance offers the next step.

Asking vs. Choosing

You view your life through your lens. And you believe you know what is best for you. The truth is that your lens is a very small sliver of reality. But all possibilities exist outside of that lens and it involves trust. You are truly better off being guided than choosing. This practice is about recognizing: am I seeking an outcome or am I being guided to it?

This is a practical framework for how divine intelligence, the infinite which can see what you cannot, actually operates.

When you are choosing, you are working with what you know, your lens, filtered through what you want. When you ask from a state of surrender, you open up the possibility of receiving something outside of that closed view.

Asking from the state of surrender is an act of trust. Deciding is an act of control. One connects you to something larger than yourself. The other leaves you alone with your own conclusions.

Surrender is not passivity. It is the purest state plugged into divine intelligence available to you. The acknowledgement that you are not the only intelligence in the room, and that the one you cannot fully see has a far better view than you do.

The channel is open. The question is whether you are transmitting without realizing you're not receiving.

Shut your eyes, surrender, and ask.