If I were to hand you a book and say “Here, take this” you reach out to receive it. If I say “Here’s some coffee for you, take a sip” you pick up the cup.
You successfully perform these actions automatically, without thinking about how you accomplish them. You don’t think about the complex neurology, brain chemistry, and muscle responses that make it possible for to reach out and to receive or to grasp. You don’t identify that the thumb and index finger did most of the hard labor, that the pinky finger just kind of went along for the ride. You are not required to understand or to intellectually process the miraculous anatomy of your body in order to function.
Your intuitive channels function in a comparable automatic state — somewhere in between, or encompassing, the miraculous and the mundane.
You don’t have to understand how or why your intuition works in order to work it.
I receive innumerable questions from clients and students about the difference between imagination and intuition, about the relationship between the Thinking Mind and the Heart or the Spirit…
Intuition, instinct, impulse, inspiration, and imagination are like individual fingers on the same hand.
Intellectually understanding the mechanics involved, or the relationship between the individual parts, may be complex, confusing, mind-boggling, mysterious, miraculous… automatically using the synergistic Whole in a practical synthesis is also common place.
In other words, if your goal is to use your intuition… Well, thoughts are things, and these things have handles — words, images, feelings — if you can reach out and grab, if you can pick up and apply, if you can hold and manage, isn’t that really the bottom line? Isn’t that enough?
I’m more guilty than most of contributing to the over-analysis, of complicating the issue, navel-gazing and philosophizing and zooming in far deeper than is necessary or practical. I can claim that it’s my job to understand it and explain it, but outside this classroom, I simply want to use my intuitive abilities to enhance my life, just like anybody.
I can assure that it works, but intellectually knowing how or why may not necessarily contribute much to practice — that understanding may be an entirely tangential, meandering adventure, a path followed for the sheer joy of exploration. This may or may not put a paved, straight-shot commuter highway on the map anytime soon…
If you can grasp the tool, what can you build with it?
If you can pick up the key, what door might it unlock?
If you can pluck out a piece of the puzzle, where does it fit into your bigger picture?
If you can receive a brilliant idea, who can you share it with?
If you can hold power, how can you wield it?
image credit — dhammza via Creative Commons on Flickr
Hi Slade,
I suppose there is a list I have of why I’d want to know more about how and why and where and when my intuition works and serves me. It is the same list I apply to everything else I have fascination and curiosity about, especially when I apply the curiosity to a subject. Currently psychology and the alchemy with/to/of spirituality.
I have been unable to get off the give me more knowledge train, for it is what has provided me so much sustanence for so many years.
It is also true, now that I have some of this knowledge it is ingrained and I can ‘call it up’ for use without effort or thought, it has the element of automatic. Definitely having moved from the early wonder, the miraculous, to the commonplace mundane of expectance to know, since I absorbed it with that intention.
But then there are moments when I ‘know’ something with no reason to know. I’ve not studied or read or craved the information. Yet, there it is. And I’m just as fascinated it came out of my mouth as whoever may have heard it.
Hard to put that in any other category than a heavenly gift.
So for me, the process, this learning curve, seems to be the same, with maybe a different result. But then, I may also find in the future, in the progression, the regular expectation that the intuition just works when I need it.
PS Your article is so absolutely short and sweet today, or as Goldilocks said, just right, I feel my comment may have gone right over the proverbial line! That too, is often my way to things. Have to step over to see I’ve moved farther than I wanted.
Have a nice Sunday, Mr R…
I’m reminded of the Nike commercials: Just Do It.
The “need to know” is our mind, getting in the way. Because when we begin to USE our intuition and ACT on it … well, the mind is no longer running the show!
So, before we get there, the mind tries with all its might to insist on its food – knowledge and understanding. That way, it actually becomes stronger, rather than being dethroned by Spirit.
I’m with you – just pick a frame of reference that works and start using it!
Blessings,
Andrea
Slade,
I live in a state of perpetual amazement at my own fine motor skills and have a hard time making people understand just how amazing all these mundane physical tasks like writing actually are… your analogy really spoke to me there.
But I’d like to expand the point of view you offer somewhat. It’s true that intuition, just like alomst anything in life, can be used without understanding every last detail of its process. However, knowing your tools inside out can add orders of magnitude to your skill level with them.
For example, I love making fractals, but I never quite understood how they worked… until I built a program that renders them, all by myself. It was like going from voluntarily handicapping myself to using my full potential from one moment to the next.
Vitor
I have a few questions about intuition itself, and any advice or guidance anyone can impart here would be much appreciated. I know how to recognize and call upon my intuition (sometimes, it’s not always cooperative), but I wonder what to do with the knowledge I gain from it. Often I know in advance of events that aren’t going to anything fun; big life changing events, deaths, and things of that nature. Often it’s been good to be able to mentally prepare for these things, but sometimes the knowledge they’re coming tortures me even more than the actual event. Even when I know how to prevent an event from occurring I sometimes feel compelled to let it happen anyway, by my feelings on either, or both, a mundane or spiritual level, even when it’s not at all logical. It makes me feel a little crazy at times.It almost seems like a blessing and a curse because it makes things so much more complicated. Should I always pay heed to the warnings my intuition imparts? Or should I willingly and heedlessly let myself suffer (to learn my lessons painfully)?
Thanks for listening,
Jen
The black-boxing of anything is useful for those who don’t need or want to know the workings of the black box. It allows for those who just want to know the necessary inputs and outputs of any system. Understanding the mechanisms inside the black box allows for further development and greater understanding of the box (i.e. hand and fingers) (including it full potential and limitations), and possibly how to teach it’s abilities to others. Moreover, it allows for a more difficult time to remove such knowledge from public circulation, as such has happened continually since hominid consciousness began on Earth. Also, the more people understand the black-box, the greater the grid consciousness of their “soul type” becomes, allowing for the 100-Monkey-syndrome to take hold.
“Just do it” is right for those just beginning or not interested in the box’s mechanism, though I can’t seem to stop attempting to understand its mechanisms. It seems the understanding of the box is necessary to break through the cognitive barrier, to ascend without death.
Just a thought. To each their own.
Im am learning to accept my intuition, interpret and be at peace. I use to try and figure out why and how but as of yesterday and early parts of today I began to just want to operate. This blog came right on time. I no longer need to know how or why I just need to trust my intuition and listen to it.
I was just saying to a friend the other day regarding Spirit and Awakening, “It has nothing to do with the Brain”.
Barbara,
Thanks for sharing where you are in studying intuition versus using your intuition. It’s interesting that this message was intended for those who stuck thinking they have to study something that is inherently part of them before they can use it.
I guess it could be a chicken/egg question — the experiences you’ve had with divine inspiration/intuition are a motivation to refine, to study, to learn more.
Tom,
… and he takes the short-ish post down to the bumper-sticker truth — score!
Andrea,
I love the insight about feeding the Thinking Mind and actually giving it more power to run the show. Excellent point, thank you!
Vitor,
Again it’s interesting that the people who are responding here seem to be the ones who “already get it” and have moved on to another stage.
I absolutely agree with everything you say about knowing your skill set/understanding your tools inside and out… But isn’t this the Next level of understanding, after doing?
Then, you have to consider that there are skills and abilities that only develop with exhaustive practice — you can read about riding a bike for the rest of your life and it will not give you the body-knowledge…
I understand your point about studying fractals as an intellectual pursuit — but making fractals is not something that is a universal experience, as intuitive is.
I would also point out that your creative process is itself an action taken following after an intuitive vision or impulse. As for studying and writing programming or code or dissecting machinery and creating a new version of it — these are even more elaborate, powerful actions.
What you describe feels to me to be an Advanced level of creative intention and action beyond the natural impulses that everyone is born with…
Jen,
Your questions are excellent, but I must say the purposeful suffering part disturbs me a bit.
Precognition, or prolepsis, premonition, prophecy, etc a very tricky form of claircognizance. The linear time construct is always hard to pin down for me… I can tell you that I don’t personally believe in “predestination” at all, so I would not assume that choices made in any given moment don’t have the ability to constantly affect that time line.
To better answer your question, I would ask you about the pattern of your premonitions — are they consistent? Do they tend to be symbolic or literal? Do you recognize situations that you could have impacted with your choices, after the fact? Do you look back and think “I had the opportunity to do something differently?”
Really, I would suggest you apply some scientific approach — take the pattern of what seems to be true from one experience to the next and test how taking different courses of action affects the outcome.
As for coping with unavoidable difficulty, challenges, or hardship, the warnings can if nothing else allow you to have some philosophical distance from the experience, so that you are not reacting in an irrational or emotional way. Do these red flags of impending circumstances give you an opportunity to adjust not what may happen, but how you FEEL about what is happening, how you use what is happening to some advantage?
I don’t believe you HAVE to suffer as some default path to wisdom; I believe you CAN suffer and be okay with it, because of your understanding or changed perspective. Someone who has foreknowledge has additional opportunities to choose her experience, seems to me…
I don’t personally experience prediction very often — only rarely, and when I do, the messages are more likely to be for other people, not myself. In which case, I create an opportunity to communicate the warning in a constructive, non-alarmist way…
Nathan,
You’re right — this is a message intended for those who are just beginning. Much of the conversations here are already deeply in progress, and this post is just a nod to those that may feel like they have walked into a series of some kind Intuition IV and feel lost. They’re trying to catch up and they missed a crucial first step in recognition.
I am usually focused on the inner workings of this black box you describe, myself — but I can’t teach it to someone who’s saying “What box? Where is it?”
It is also a reminder for all those, myself included, that purely intellectual research about something like intuition is NOT going to produce the results that actions do. The paper doesn’t mean jack shit if you don’t run the experiments to gather the data. If it’s a history paper, so be it…
Dee,
I’m glad that this post supported where you at right now regarding trusting your intuition. Build that trust and explore it to a level of comfort where you feel that further study will expand on it, not hinder or confuse it.
Ginger,
There are definitely parts that don’t have anything to do with the Brain. Of course, those parts do interface with the Thinking Mind, participate with it. But I agree, there is a basic enlightenment that the Brain or the Thinking Mind can not provide.
I just let events unfold and act on the spur of the moment. I have been like this ever since my consciousness developed. I have had a lot of ups and some downs, living like this. In retrospect however, I have come to the conclusion, that living like that is what nature wants me to do. I have no regrets and intend living like this in the future as well.
Rummuser,
I totally relate!
I call it chaos surfing — it scares the hell out of some people, watching me from the outside. But it’s a thrilling ideal expression of flexibility and flow that works best for me. If I wipe out, so be it; there’s another wave coming…
Slade!
Rummuser!
“Chaos Surfing”… You guys! I am Floored!
My USER NAME to sites is : “catchawave”!
I am so hip to this analogy!
Last summer, after pulling myself up from a very hard place,
I adoped the phrase “just catch a wave”!
It means exactly that.
“Move! Ride with it! Flow!”
“If you think you don’t have a choice… make one up”!
or be willing to go with your intuitive promptings.
When your Ego is aligned with Spirit, it serves you rather than hinders you.
peace, love and all that groovey stuff,
ginger
Ginger, Slade, How has this conversation started? Why? Where do you think will it take us?