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The Knowing: Trusting Your Intuition

“All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, 19th-century Essayist & Poet

Intuition FloweringSo many people have asked me about building their own psychic connections that I thought I would begin an occasional series on techniques that can be used to develop the sixth sense. (No, not that Bruce Willis movie.) This is the human mind-spirit connection.

I call this gift “the Knowing” and it constitutes not only talking to spirits, or knowing the future but also a certainty, an acceptance of what you feel and hear inside of your heart and mind.

These techniques will not be requirements, you do not have to follow these posts in any order. These are simply possible ways to awaken your mind to the possibility of experiencing guidance, knowledge and visions that come from beyond the material world in which we live.

Trusting you own Intuition is a big door-opener for more intense psychic awareness.

Let’s look at “Intuition” in its strict dictionary definition. Oxford English Dictionary defines Intuition as: “immediate insight or understanding without conscious reasoning” it also uses the synonyms “instinct” and “inspiration.”

This is a very good definition indeed and it illustrates what I am going to be saying here.

Intuition is a natural capacity that we all have wired into us. Why? Because a saber-toothed cat can run faster than us. Our only hope of surviving in the environment in which our species lived for so long was to be aware of the presence of a thing before our eyes could see a thing.

Today this sense is dulled and often made into a joke. We have so much external to distract us, shopping and mass-media. What do we need our Intuition for now, knowing which outlet mall will have the designer purse that we want and getting there before the next lady?

In this exercise we are going to train the mind to suspend doubt and insist that the Ego give up the reins once in a while.

I bet that you cannot even count how many times you have heard a little voice in your head saying DON’T do this particular thing or DO do this particular thing.

You don’t know where it comes from, but you hear it anyway. It is irrational, this voice. It’s opinion doesn’t seem to based on any known evidence about the situation at hand. Yet it is insistent.

At least you think that it is insistent, but as soon as you begin to ponder on it you can see that it is just a silly thought. You say to yourself, “I must be crazy.”

How many times have you ignored the crazy voice only to have exactly what it said proven right later? How many times have you kicked yourself over this happening?

What is going on here is that we westerners live in a society where we expect things to be explained TO us.

We are so externalized in our view of self that we try to fit our physique, our language, our personality, even our very thoughts into a widely-accepted societal view of what the good specimen of an individual should look like, should behave like.

We begin to believe the flashy news stories that tell us a sixth sense is a fallacy, un-proven by science and therefore non-existent. The sixth sense is a joke, not real, a conspiracy theory that is only believed in by wackos and acid-dropping, tie-dye wearing hippie-types.

So the first step to development for most people is simply to build a trust in your own Intuition. By doing this you will make its voice become louder. You tend to speak more when you know that someone is listening than you do if it obvious someone is ignoring you. Right?

Now, because each one of us has this pushy, know-it-all, dominant voice inside of us known as the Ego…you know, the one convinced of its own superiority even though it has an extreme tendency to lead us astray into struggle and personal suffering….Well because we have this voice we must begin by:

1. Listening to the record of doubt that our dominant mind-voice plays to us in our head and disallowing it to affect us.

This will allow us to pinpoint and isolate all of the falsehoods that our own day-to-day mind tends to run off of and to stop this record.

We can hear our Ego say: “Oh the world is in a terrible state, so I should be frightened.” We can then stop the record, by not trying to ignore what the Ego says but instead paying attention to it and explaining gently to the Ego all of the ways in which it is wrong. (After a while this can become quite a fun game, especially when you see that the Ego begins to chatter less inside your head and leaves you in peace more often.)

In this case you can explain to the Ego that in your own life you are not suffering, that there are no bombs in your front yard and that you have enough food to eat. You explain to the Ego that the peace you feel inside is not false and that the images on the “news” are not exactly true at all. You can calm the Ego by refusing to give in to ITS irrational fear-mongering.

Now we can begin the listening and allowing part of the exercise. We must hear the little voice of Intuition and allow it to affect us.

We are so used to letting the Ego get away with anything and punishing the Intuition for even existing. So when we DO go with what the Intuition says we have a tendency to change our minds several times, back-and-forth. In this exercise we will begin by making a decision, one decision, using our Intuition.

Because the difference between the Ego and the Intuition is that the Intuition is always telling you what will be best for you overall, in the long-run. The Intuition is the “big picture” mind. The Ego is always telling you what it thinks is best for you RIGHT NOW, it is always basing its ideas on limited evidence, the evidence that it deems to be obvious. The Ego is the “pixel by pixel” mind.

The Intuition has the preservation of the whole you in mind while the Ego has the preservation of the conscious you in mind. The Ego is built upon years of accumulated misperception whereas the Intuition is based on the same simple truths with which we are born. Another way to put it is that the Intuition is “nature” and the Ego is “nurture.”

You are free to make either one of these minds into your dominant mind, but as the Nurture has a set of actual voices attached to it and the Nature simply is and has a subtle, universal voice, it becomes easier to listen to the Nurture because it screams louder.

We must train ourselves to hear the subtle voice that is Intuition.

2. Make a decision, big or small, using your intuition. Hear the Ego voice telling you what to do, trying to interject its views into the internal conversation, but then just let it fall away. Calm yourself and ask you heart: What should I have for breakfast? Where should I go to college? Which new house should I buy? I promise that the answer you get will be unlike anything that the Ego would say.

Often the Ego needs to give you examples of why it MUST be right about something. But the Intuition just knows. It often gives no examples, only an answer.

Practice this more and more often. Even when you are just trying to avoid rush-hour traffic. Quiet the conscious mind and ask the Intuition should I take the highway or the back roads?

The challenge is in hearing the answer that seems to come from nowhere and allowing yourself to “go with it,” even though the Ego says “No, no. This is wrong, because we have no proof. What if there is more traffic that way instead of less?”

Well in that case you sit in traffic and you listen to yourself more. Did you get it wrong? What does your intuition know that you don’t? What were you meant to learn in this traffic? What did you avoid by going the intuitive way?

The more you listen to the Intuition, the more that you will understand its ways and why it looks out for the long-term you and not the short-term you.

But don’t be surprised if after sitting in that traffic, you get home and find out that there was an awful accident on that short-cut that the Ego wanted you to take.

Between traffic and death, I’ll take traffic.

  • Sarah

    Thank you for affirming what I have started practicing this year. It's so funny for me to read about the "traffic" example because I do this frequently now and have had startling positive results. I have been practicing daily to listen to my "intuition" more with even the little things, and I am constantly amazed and grateful at the outcomes. My life has been more joyous, happy, and pleasantly surprising! I enjoyed reading this and it's a good reminder for me to stick with trusting my inner voice :)