INTUITION… that still, small voice

I don’t know if it is a sign of the times or just a backwash from a long period of ‘Science knows all’ but it seems to me that, these days, more and more people are interested in, and prepared to take seriously, Intuition.

I was a reasonably bright little boy, very curious (still a defining feature!) but only so-so in school and like everyone, I developed a series of strategies that I used to navigate my world and keep me safe. I may not be the brightest bunny, but I always had a pretty quick, agile mind, and so it isn’t surprising that I soon learnt to use it as one of my key allies in this quest. Ask questions, gather data, deduce meaning and act – was pretty much what I did. I had a pretty average middle class upbringing within a family who ‘got on with it’. Once I left school I joined the accountancy profession in the City of London, certainly not a place to focus on much other than facts & data.

However, again, like so many of us, I had a small ‘passenger’ within me who was much more sensitive and intuitive and ‘in touch’, but as I never paid him any never-mind, I was barely aware of his existence. Then I embarked upon a journey that was to change me and my life (it built on roots I put down when I was around 11, but this a blog not an autobiography, so back to the blog!). Through it, I learnt a series of disciplines that enabled me to get much more in touch with the intuitive part of me and over the years I have come to rely on it more and more, to the extent that these days I make major decisions largely based on the ‘gut feel’ and then analyse the data.

So what is Intuition? Here is my theory: our brain is taking in information every moment, every day. Think about it: all those bits of sensory data that you are ignoring right now. Stop and listen and become aware of all the different sounds that you have been shutting out. Notice how your body is feeling; hot, cold, comfy, the sensations of your skin etc. It is literally millions of bits of data and we would be totally overwhelmed¹ if we tried to handle it all, so we have developed a filter² that shunts off all the stuff it regards as unnecessary into a data dump for background processing by the unconscious (which, if you like, is a secondary processor that never sleeps and just trawls through this data shifting for meaning and value). When it comes up with something, it attempts to pass it to the conscious mind, using, I believe, the mechanism we call Intuition.

I don’t think it is magic or comes from otherworldly places (although there is more data available to us than just what coming in through our 5 senses). The more we use it, the easier it gets. In my life, it has paid huge dividends, hooking up an amplifier to that still, small voice. I wonder what yours is telling you now, if you stop and listen?

 “The only real valuable thing is intuition.” Albert Einstein

 “Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.” Robert Graves

 

 

 

1. In fact we can only handle about 7 pieces of information at a time (plus or minus 2)
2. I will write more on this soon, as it is very useful to understand how it functions

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 10:27 and is filed under Hints, Tips & Techniques, Mini-Articles, Values & Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.