How You Can Develop Profound Intuition (3)

This is the third part of a series of posts I am writing here on CLN about how to develop powerful intuitive skills (integrated intelligence). Integrated intelligence is closely related to the classical idea of intuition, connecting us with a stream of consciousness which transcends the limits of immediate space and time. Each of these posts is an extract from my upcoming book “How to Develop Profound Intuition.” So stay tuned for further insights (Part 4). (Here's Part 1, and Part 2).

The third thing you are going to need if you want to develop profound intuition is commitment. And this means dedication, persistence and patience.

The intuitive mind is an alien beast to most of us in the modern world. We all use intuition, of course. But few of us employ it regularly, nor trust it emphatically. Our cultures have left us living “in the head”, deferring to the yabbering voice in the skull, and existing primarily dissociated from the body and the spirit in a state of chronic abstract conceptualization. We live in the mind, in imagined futures and remembered pasts, and miss the present moment – where intuition is most powerfully sensed and activated.

Computers and mobile phone culture are other obstacles. More and more people are dissociating from the world and their bodies, living as distracted, disembodied zombies. How on earth is a person ever going to pay attention to the energy of people and places when they have allowed themselves to become conditioned to reaching for their mobile device as soon as they enter a room? I cannot emphasise the importance of this issue enough. You are going to have to discipline yourself to spend many hours a day away from your phone and computer if you are ever going to develop empowered intuition.

So the choice is yours. What will it be? Fiddling with your phone or empowered consciousness? Most people today are choosing the fiddling bit. What about you?

I became very conscious of this problem in my own life. I realised that I was becoming disconnected from the world and other people because of the distraction of using mobile devices. But I came up with a very powerful solution. I committed to not using any mobile or wi-fi device for the first eight hours of every day. And I followed through with it. Nowadays, when I do finally turn my phone or connect to the Internet in the late afternoon, I find that the world has not ended. Most of the email I receive is useless, and does not require responding to. The world remains intact even though I have missed reading BBC news. And certainly nothing is missed on Facebook – unless you count pictures of other people's lunches and videos of cute cats as being significant.

The essential problem is that your mind has been conditioned to operate in a state of distracted dissociation. You are comfortable with verbal-linguistic modes of operation. If you are well-educated you probably enjoy critical thinking, analysing problems, communicating thoughts and opinions. You are possibly comfortable with philosophical and mathematical ways of knowing.

There's nothing wrong with any of these ways of knowing and being. But they do operate in quite different ways from the cognitive functions of integrated intelligence. Allow me to explain the prime differences.

To activate intuition you need to release the need for control. At least temporarily. You need to be able to relax deeply and note what is RECEIVED by the mind. I implore you to note the idea of receptivity. This is the key to activating intuitive ways of knowing and being. With rational modes of knowing, the mind retains its sense of agency and control over the thinking process.

Now, some may argue that this sense of control is an illusion. That is a popular argument in the mind sciences today. But this is largely irrelevant to my main argument. The key point is that you probably enjoy feeling that you have great deal of control over your thoughts. And you probably tend to identify with the voice in your head. It is very likely you believe your thoughts ARE you.

Conversely, with intuition you develop a capacity to witness what emerges from the mind. There is a distancing process. There comes an awareness that many thoughts emerge of their own accord. Even more disturbing, you will come to realize that some of your thoughts are not your own, and that other people and groups impact your thoughts. Yes, this means that you are not in control of everything back there. That's a scary realization.

By the time you are an adult your mind/brain system is basically set. It's like a boulder rolling down a hill. It takes a great deal of energy to shift its direction. The mind resists. This is why you need to commit time and energy to expanding your ways of knowing. If you enter the project half-hearted, you will soon give up.

What I am talking about is a very, very different way of relating to your mind. It is, I beleive, an evolutionary step beyond “rationality”, at least as expressed in most modern societies.

This shift takes time, patience and practice. You need to set aside a significant amount of time to make this happen. The thing is, you have probably not spent much time at all developing such receptive modes of cognition. Few people in modern western countries have. As an aside, the same is now normal in China (where I live), and where these ideas have been equated with superstition.

When I was twenty-six I had no experience with the intuitive mind. I had lived in my head my entire life. But I began to set aside time for meditation, dream journaling and practicing visionary states. I admit, some of what I experienced was frightening. Much of it was uncomfortable. But it was also fascinating. A whole new world opened up before me, one I never knew existed. I discovered that I was a natural visionary. I had regular spiritual and visionary experience which included spiritual guidance, precognition and clairvoyant perception of other paces, times and people.

A few years later I engaged in deep healing processes, notably inner child work. Part of the way I was taught to work with the psyche was to allow the intuitive data from within me to bubble up to the surface, and then to act on it. After two years of solid work in this area, I became extremely intuitive. In particular my ability to feel had escalated dramatically. Best of all, I was far more grounded in my body, because when we are shut out hurt and pain, we are actually disconnecting from ourselves. You can't work well with the intuitive knowledge within if you are shutting down emotional pain.

The other thing that this inner child work did for me was that it gave a me deep insight into the way emotional pain is tied to human behavior, to our sense of self. This includes the way we unconsciously attempt to control and manipulate others and life itself, such that we do not have to address our pain and in particular the fear of abandonment and death – the two greatest fears which lie within the human psyche. In fact they are the same fear, as for the inner child abandonment represents death.

Even suicide is, strangely enough, often an attempt to cheat death because in many cases the individual's psyche is unable to deal with the finiteness of existence and the fact that all things pass. This creates a terror and despair so profound that for some people they just cannot bare to tolerate existence any longer – and so seek to end it. This is of course, a terrible irony. But it is part of the madness of mind. And make no mistake, the human mind IS a kind of madness, because it rarely deals in the reality of what IS in the present moment. It deals in fearful, imagined futures and painful, remembered pasts.

The prime means by which you will develop powerful intuition is by developing your ability to identify, sense and interpret your feelings. It is via your feelings that you will become an empowered intuitive being. Now, this can be quite a shift for many people, because as I wrote, many are used to suppressing their feelings. But more about that next week.

Marcus T Anthony, PhD is the author of ten books about human awakening, including Discover Your Soul Template. He is also a life coach and teacher of profound intuition. His web site is www.mind-futures.com.

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