How to Know When God Is Talking to You
A field guide to the spiritual machinery you were never taught to use
**Note: This piece draws from my original ideas, research, hooks, and metaphors. For editing and some wording, I’ve used AI tools trained on my own books and style, always blending technology with my hands-on curation and oversight. Thank you for being here—Jade.
About five years ago, I was an octopus.
I am not being cute. I was on LSD, the kind of dose where the words “I” and “you” and “octopus” stop pretending to be separate things, and at some point during that journey I was no longer a body in a room. I was a nervous system. The nervous system. One enormous animal sensing itself through trillions of points of contact, and I was one of those points.
I could feel the others. Not metaphorically. The way you feel your own foot when you’re not looking at it. There was no edge between me and them. There was a continuous fabric of awareness, and it was moving, exploring, reaching.
The strangest part, the part I still can’t quite explain, is that I could make myself pencil-thin. I would compress and shoot through tiny openings. I did it again and again because it felt natural, like something my body already knew how to do. I had no idea why. I knew almost nothing about octopuses at the time. I had a passing image of suction cups and tentacles, the cartoon version everyone has.
It was months later. My mom, told me about a documentary and made me watch it. And there on the screen was an octopus squeezing itself through a hole the size of a quarter. Pencil thin. Exactly the way I had moved. The narrator explained that octopuses can fit through any opening larger than their beak, because they have no bones, only that one rigid part. The rest is fluid. The rest goes wherever the animal needs it to go.
I sat there on the couch and felt something cold move through me.
I had not imagined it. I had not metaphor-ed my way into a clever insight. I had, by some mechanism I cannot account for, accessed a piece of information I did not previously possess. I had felt what it was like to be a thing I had never studied.
That was not my first introduction to the idea that we are tapping into something. A field. An information layer. Some structure of reality that does not run through the usual channels of eyes and ears and books.
Let me tell you about this other experience… because one experience can be written off as a hallucination… two starts to look like a pattern.
In the early 2000s, I was living in Seattle. My sister was in New York. I had a dream one night that my grandmother, my dad’s mother, who had passed years earlier and who I was not particularly close with, came to me and spoke. She told me a lot of things. I remember almost none of it, except for two specific pieces, and I only remember those two because of what happened next.
She told me my sister was pregnant with a boy.
And she told me there was going to be a civil war in the family, and I should stay out of it. Remain neutral. Those were her words. “Civil war.” It stuck because it was such a strange way to phrase it.
I woke up. My phone rang. It was my sister, calling from New York. I have always been the clown in my family, so I picked up and said, “Good morning, how come you didn’t tell me you were pregnant?”
She laughed. Said she absolutely was not pregnant, she and her fiancé were not planning on kids, and she was on the pill. I shrugged it off. Told her I had a dream and she was pregnant and good luck with that. We talked about other things. We hung up.
Two weeks later she called me back.
“Jade. I’m pregnant.”
She asked me to tell her about the dream. I told her what I remembered. Pregnant. A boy. She had a son. His name is Soul Jade. He is named after me.
Two stories. One on a heavy psychedelic. One in ordinary sleep. Both of them carrying information I had no business possessing.
I am not telling you these stories to convince you of anything mystical. I am telling you because they were the cracks in my own materialist worldview, and once the cracks were there I could not unsee them. Something was moving. Something was being delivered. The standard scientific story I had been handed, the one where consciousness is a byproduct of neurons firing and that is the end of the conversation, could not account for what I had experienced.
So I went looking.
The Model That Doesn’t Work
The dominant story in modern science is called materialism. It says matter is fundamental. Atoms came first. Atoms organized into molecules, molecules into cells, cells into brains, and somewhere along the way brains started doing this weird thing called being aware. Consciousness, in this view, is a kind of exhaust fume of complicated meat.
It is a clean story. It is also a story that has never been able to explain why there is any experience at all. Philosophers call this the hard problem of consciousness. You can describe every neuron in a brain, map every electrical signal, account for every chemical reaction, and you still have not explained why there is something it is like to be the person inside that brain. The lights are on. The materialist account does not tell you why.
There is another model. It is older. It is called idealism, or sometimes panpsychism in its softer forms, and it says the opposite. Consciousness is fundamental. Matter is what consciousness looks like from the outside.
In this view, the brain is not a generator. It is a receiver. A transducer. A radio.
A radio does not produce the music. The music is in the air, broadcast as electromagnetic waves, and the radio tunes a particular frequency and converts it into sound your ears can use. Break the radio and the music does not stop. The radio stops. The signal is still there. Other radios still pick it up.
If consciousness works this way, the brain is the radio, the body is the speaker, and the signal is something larger. A field. Physicists, when they are being honest about the strangeness of quantum mechanics, talk about something called the Zero Point Field, the ZPF.
I call this “universal field” Source or the Source Field or Source Consciousness. New Age types call it spirit. Religious types God. It is the lowest possible energy state of the vacuum of space, and it is not empty. It is humming. It is full of information. It is the substrate underneath everything, and everything that exists, including you, is a localized expression of it.
This is not the fringe view it used to be. It is becoming respectable. Slowly. Quietly. The way these things always shift.
I do not need you to believe any of this is true. I need you to consider it as a possibility. Because the moment you do, the experiences I just described stop being weird. So do the ones you have probably had yourself and never told anyone, because there was no framework for them.
If consciousness is the substrate, then under the right conditions... psychedelics, dream states, certain kinds of meditation, certain kinds of trauma... the radio’s bandwidth widens. You pick up signals you normally filter out. You feel what it is to be octopus, because octopus and you are running on the same underlying field. You hear from a grandmother because the part of her that was her did not vanish. It returned to the field. And the field still contains her.
One Big Octopus
There was something else that happened in that octopus story. I got a “download” of what the universe (or God if you wish) is like…. and how we fit in. While I was being the octopus I had an understanding that an ocotopus is a great metaphor for the universe.
Imagine the universe is one giant octopus. I know. It is a strange image. Stay with me.
The whole thing is one nervous system. The tentacles move in every direction at once, exploring, reaching, sensing. The skin is covered in bumps of every imaginable size, from microscopic to large enough to grip and manipulate. Each bump is a sensor. Each one is in contact with the world, gathering information, feeding it back.
Now imagine you are a small bump. Tentacle six. Just to the left of suction cup nine trillion. You occupy a unique location. No other bump occupies it. No other bump ever will. You are picking up information that only you, from your exact position in space and time, can pick up.
You may feel small. You may feel like one of countless. But the octopus needs you to be exactly where you are, sensing exactly what you sense, because without your data the whole animal is missing a piece of its understanding. That is what you are. A piece of how Source understands itself.
This is the part that broke me open during that journey.
I was not a small fragment of something bigger. I was a unique vantage point of the only thing there is. I was Source experiencing itself from that one position, just as every other person, animal, and aware being is Source experiencing itself from theirs.
We are not separate from the field. We are the field, locally aware.
And we are co-creators. The bumps do not just receive. They feed back. What you do, who you become, how you respond to your life... that information returns up the tentacle, into the larger nervous system, and it changes what the whole organism knows. You move the whole. The whole moves you. There is no one-way arrow.
This is a strange way to explain it ill admit, but it is the only model that makes sense of the two stories I just told you, and of the thousands of similar stories every human being has buried somewhere in their memory and stopped telling because nobody had a framework for what they meant.
The Car You Were Given
If we are extensions of Source, and Source is communicating with us all the time, then the obvious next question is: how. How does it talk. How do we listen. How do we know.
The answer is that you came pre-installed with the machinery. Nobody taught you how to use it. That is the problem. We are walking around with sophisticated equipment we do not know is there.
Think of it as a car.
The body is the vehicle. It is beautifully engineered, but it is just a car. It does nothing on its own. It needs a driver. It needs a navigation system. It needs feedback from the road. Without those, it is metal sitting in a driveway.
You have four pieces of equipment, all of them built in, all of them working whether you know it or not. I call them the Four Intelligences. Most people use one of them, badly, and never learn the other three.
Insight is the destination. It is the download. The moment when you suddenly know where you are going, even if you cannot explain why. Insight does not arrive through logic. It arrives whole. You wake up knowing you have to leave the job, or move, or call the person, or write the book. You did not work it out. It showed up.
Intuition is the street-level navigation. It is the turn-by-turn. It is how you get to the destination Insight gave you. Intuition is the green lights, the open road, the feeling of “yes, this way.” It is expansive. It pulls you toward possibility. When you are tracking intuition, you do not have to force the route. The route reveals itself.
Instinct is the road signs and the stoplights. It is the safety system. The flinch. The gut-level no. Instinct is constrictive. It pulls you away from danger. Its job is to keep you alive long enough to get to the destination. It is essential, but it is not the driver. It is the warning lights on the dash.
Intellect is the dashboard readout. It is the part that puts the experience into words. It explains. It justifies. It builds the story. Intellect is incredibly useful, and also deeply suspect, because intellect does not lead. It follows. Whatever the other three are doing, intellect will explain it and tell you it makes sense. If instinct is driving, intellect says “of course we should stay home, it’s safer.” If intuition is driving, intellect says “of course we should go, it’s the right move.” Intellect is the spokesperson. Not the strategist.
Most people are running their whole lives on instinct and calling it intuition.
That is the single most expensive mistake in the spiritual machinery, and almost nobody catches it.
Instinct says no. It says hide. It says stay. It says you are not ready. It says they will hurt you again. It says do not try. It is convincing because it sounds reasonable, and intellect is right there cosigning every word. But instinct is not your higher self. Instinct is your survival system, which was wired up before you were five years old by a small child trying to keep you safe in a world it did not understand.
Intuition feels different. Intuition is quieter. It does not argue. It does not panic. It is a slow pull toward something that, on paper, looks foreign and a little scary, but feels right in a way you cannot quite defend.
If you want to know which one is driving, ask whether the choice is pulling you toward expansion or away from threat. Both are valid in their place. Only one of them is going to take you somewhere new.
The Two Roads
You always have two roads in front of you. Always.
One is the Familiar and Frustrating road. This is the instinct road. It is the one you already know. It is the one your survival system prefers, because the survival system trusts the devil it knows. It will keep you in the same job, the same relationships, the same patterns, the same body, the same arguments with the same people. It is safe in the sense that nothing new can hurt you. It is also where your purpose goes to die.
The other is the Foreign and Fearful road. This is the intuition road. It is the one that does not look safe, because it is unfamiliar. Your nervous system does not have a map for it. You cannot predict what will happen. Your instinct will scream. Your intellect will cosign the scream. And underneath both of them, if you can get quiet enough, intuition is steady and pointing.
The Familiar and Frustrating road leads back to the same version of you. The Foreign and Fearful road leads to your essentia. Your purpose potential. Your next-level self.
This is not a metaphor I am dressing up to sound nice. This is the actual structure of how Source/God/Universe moves people forward. The frustration is the signal that the road you are on is not yours anymore. The fear is the signal that the road you are avoiding is.
Most people spend their whole lives mistaking the first signal for laziness or bad luck, and the second signal for proof that they should not try.
How Source Speaks
Once you know the machinery is there, you can start to read what it is telling you. Source speaks in two registers, and your body is the receiver for both.
When you are off-track, the signals look like this:
Repeated patterns. The same problem keeps appearing in different costumes. Recurrent obstacles. You hit the same wall over and over, no matter how you approach it. Stuck emotions. The same feeling will not leave. It loops.
And a specific emotional climate I call AFRAID: Anger, Frustration, Resistance, Anxiety, Insecurity, Depression.
These are not punishments. They are the friction the river creates when you paddle against the current. Source is not trying to hurt you. Source is trying to redirect you, and the only language it has is the language of your nervous system. It cranks up the discomfort until you stop and pay attention.
When you are on-track, the signals shift completely.
Signs. Things in the environment that seem to confirm where you are going. Synchronicity. You are looking for something, and you find more than you were looking for. The Easter egg hunt where you trip, roll down the hill, and end up at exactly the right angle to see a huge cache of eggs hidden under a fallen log. Serendipity. The same hunt, but instead of eggs, you find a pile of luxury chocolates. Something you did not know to want, that turns out to be better than what you set out to find. New opportunities. Doors open. People appear. Conversations land.
And an emotional climate I call ELEVATED FLOW: Enjoyment, Love, Excitement, Vitality, Appreciation, Trust, Engagement, Delight, Fun, Laughter, Openness, Wonder.
You do not have to engineer ELEVATED FLOW. It is what naturally emerges when the bump is feeding the octopus the data it actually needs. When you are doing your purpose, in your unique position, with your unique signal... the whole system rewards it. Not because you earned it. Because the system is designed that way.
We have been told for a long time that fulfillment is the prize at the end of a long, grinding road. That you suffer first, and the rewards come later. That is the materialist story applied to meaning. It is wrong. Fulfillment is the signal, not the reward. It is the dashboard light telling you the engine is running clean. If you are deep in AFRAID for years, that is information. The road is not yours. Or the way you are walking it is not.
Why Most People Stay Stuck
The machinery is in there. Nobody is missing a piece. So why is everyone so lost.
A few reasons.
Nobody taught us. There is no class in school called How Your Nervous System Receives Information From The Field. We were given math and grammar and told the rest was either superstition or the soft stuff you figure out on your own. So we walk around with a fully equipped car and we never learn to drive.
Instinct drowns out intuition. Most adults are running a low-grade survival pattern at all times. The amygdala is the loudest part of the dashboard. If you are anxious, hypervigilant, exhausted, or chronically stressed, you cannot hear intuition. You cannot feel insight. Instinct is the only frequency coming through, and instinct is going to keep you exactly where you are.
Intellect is a flattering liar. It will explain anything. If you are choosing the familiar and frustrating road for the tenth year in a row, intellect will produce a beautifully reasoned argument for why that is wise. It will use words like realistic and responsible and grounded. It will sound so good you will forget to ask what it is defending.
And we are afraid of being wrong. The foreign and fearful road requires you to make a move without proof. Intuition does not come with receipts. Insight does not show you the whole map. You have to step. And if you have spent your life being punished for being wrong, you will not step.
This is what coaching is for. Not because the answers are outside you. They are not. The answers are inside the machinery. But the machinery is muffled by years of conditioning, and most people cannot hear it on their own. A good guide does not give you the destination. A good guide helps you clear the static so you can hear what was always already broadcasting.
Back to the Octopus
I want to go back to that LSD journey for a second. Not the psychedelic part. The part after. The part where I sat on the couch and watched the documentary and felt the cold move through me.
What I understood that day is that the experience was not random. It was not a chemical accident. It was an answer to a question I had not yet learned to ask. Some part of me wanted to know what the structure of reality was, and Source, through the temporary widening of my radio, showed me. The octopus was not a hallucination. The octopus was a teaching.
We are bumps on a vast, sensing organism. Each of us is gathering data the whole cannot gather any other way. When we do our work, when we show up in our actual position with our actual signal, the organism learns. When we do not, when we stay small, when we mistake instinct for intuition and familiarity for safety, the organism is missing a piece of itself, and we feel that absence as AFRAID.
The two roads are real. The machinery is real. The signals are real. You have been receiving them your whole life. You probably have your own octopus story, or your own grandmother dream, or your own moment when something arrived that you could not explain through the channels you were taught to trust.
I am not asking you to believe any of this on my account. I am asking you to start watching. Watch what your patterns are telling you. Watch which road you are on. Watch what your body does when you sit with the foreign and fearful choice versus the familiar and frustrating one. Watch the signs. Watch the synchronicity. Watch what shows up.
The bump cannot become the octopus. But the bump can do its job. And when enough bumps do their job, the whole animal gets a little clearer about what it is.
That is what we are here for.
PS: If you are ready to stop running your life on instinct and start using the full machinery you were given... insight, intuition, and the navigation system that actually leads somewhere... explore The Human Game. It is the program where I walk you through this work step by step, in the same way I have walked clients, patients, and friends through it for over two decades. Spots are limited.... do not wait. 👉 http://www.nextlevelhuman.com/the-human-game
PS: If you are someone who has already done a version of this work in your own life, and you feel the pull to do it for others.... the Human Architect Certification is where coaches, clinicians, and practitioners learn the full Next Level Human framework and how to guide people through it. The world needs more guides who actually know the machinery. If that is you, the path is here. 👉 https://www.nextlevelhuman.com/human-coach