Peirce - Leap of Perception: New Attention Skills for the Intuition Age: The Transforming Power of Your Attention

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This book is dedicated to the misfits, rebels, and rabble-rousers, to those who feel they were born at the wrong time, or in the wrong family, who use their differentness to do good; to the poets, artists, dreamers, mediums, and mystics, to the inventors, innovators, and change-agents, to the leaders of integrity in all fields, to the teachers of every ilk; especially to the spiritual teachers who have come again and again to patiently reframe the wisdom lessons for each new time. I thank you for courageously carving the path for us today.

W hen it comes to books about spiritual and personal development, I am a very hard person to please. I grew up in a religious community bursting with good intentions, pearls of wisdom, and a great deal of what I later came to see as utter nonsense. Then I got three social science degrees from Harvard, where I learned to question absolutely every claim made by every author I read. Harvard also exposed me to a sort of dogmatic materialism, a cultural denigration of anything that could not be measured in purely physical terms, which struck me as woefully shortsighted in a post-Newtonian scientific era. Physicists had proven that matter and energy are in fact different manifestations of the same phenomenon, and I doubted even the doubters.

I left academia to become a self-help author, unintentionally motivating many other writers in that genre to send me their work. Nowadays, I receive several new manuscripts, galleys, and hardcover volumes each week that I stack in a pile I call Books for Which I Did Not Ask. Some of them are terrific, but many more are just well-meaning regurgitations of a sort of verbal pabulum. My process for them has three steps: (1) read a few chapters; (2) roll eyes; (3) donate book to a home for the bewildered. I know I should respect people who worry about cleansing their auras as much as I do about tooth decay, who consult psychic gynecologists when their chakras feel muddy, or who spend whole chapters attributing their writers block to the fact that Mercury is retrograde (Mercury, as far as I can tell, is virtually always in retrograde). But I dont.

My point is that between battle-hardened skepticism and jaded overexposure, I am an extremely tough critic of books written by people like Penney Peirce. I am skeptical to the point of outright hostility.

However.

The thing about Penneys advice is that it works. Instead of making vague positive statements, she gives specific counsel with pragmatic steps that readers can use to create specific outcomes. True, both the instructions and the outcomes have to do with the readers subjective experience, and most arent physically measurable. Do I have more calm and peace when I follow her advice? Yes. Do I experience the world as if all humans, including me, are going through a transformation that requires a leap of perception? Yes. Do Penneys instructions make me more intuitive? By using them, can I more accurately see situations that are far away, either geographically or in the future? Do these perceptions test well when I check the details in the physical world? Yes, yes, and yes.

I might not believe a word Penney writesexcept that pretty much everything she describes is happening to me, too. Weve never met, but our experiences seem to be marching in perfect synchrony. The day before she asked me to write this foreword, I told my literary agent that the only book Id want to write would be something called The Leap , and I was pretty sure I wasnt the one who had to write it. Well, youre holding that book in your hands right now, and that probably means youre marching to the same exciting, joyful, delighted tune that so enthralls Penney and me.

Most writers who take on this issue describe it in terms that reveal a rather shallow and cursory experience of energetic transformation. Reading their books is like trying to use a guidebook to a citysay, Manhattanthat the author has seen in movies but never visited. Theyre describing something real and fascinating, but their information is skewed by preconceptions that have never bumped up against real-time experience. Leap of Perception is like a guidebook written by a native New Yorker. Penney has walked and driven and taken the metaphorical subway through this territory. She knows how to hail a cab, where to find great restaurants, which landmarks are worth seeing. When you follow her guidance, you actually get to the places she describes. And the place she describesthe world on the other side of the leap of perceptionis a magical, wonderful place. Youre probably going there already, on purpose or accidentally, by choice or by happenstance. This book will make the trip much easier, much more joyful. I recommend that you consult it often, as I intend to.

Ill finish by quoting Penneys own words: Whatever or whoever has real presence is authentic, trustworthy, convincing, vital, magnetic, universal in some way, and naturally attention-getting and attention-giving. I doubt she knew as she wrote this that it was a verbal self-portrait, but it perfectly describes this book and its author. Im so grateful that Penney has offered this to the worldso that I can feel someone holding my hand as I make my own leap of perception. Her other hand is also extended to you. Grab it, hang on, and leap.

Martha Beck, PhD

November 16, 2012

There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

E ventually time proves to be our friend. You think you know what youre doing until a revelation unfolds and you see what youre really doing. Then another urge and revelation come, and you see one more facet of the picture. Another comes, and soon you see the connections. If you pay attention, you notice that a cohesive, intelligent pattern to your life is materializing rather deliberately. You realize theres a higher wisdom guiding your story, and you learn to trust it.

In my unfolding story of coming into greater consciousness, I think back to a time when Id been teaching intuition development for several years and noticed I was feeling bored. Though I was still in love with intuition, and the experience with people always came alive in new ways that entertained me, I felt a nagging urge to change. Whats my next courageous act? I asked myself. Its time to write a good, classic book, my inner voice responded.

At that time, my colleagues and I were on a pioneering, leading edge trying to mainstream intuition, that magical sense of knowing something directly without reference to logic or proof. Even saying the word intuition to an unprimed professional or businessperson could cause ridicule and rejection. We were constantly seeking credibility, and vocabulary was everything. I walked on eggshells to prevent people from labeling me as a psychic or an airy-fairy New Age channeler, and discounting me as someone who lived in a dream world. I remember latching on to the word demystify to help describe my motivation. I was going to demystify supposedly supernatural abilities and the superstitious beliefs that kept us locked in limited ways of thinking and knowing! I was going to help make intuition normal!