Front End Intuition

It's easy to assume that the sign of a "passion" or "intuitive flash" is something intense. As a kid I used have intense feelings of "yucky" about something that repelled me or made me want to rebel. But over the course of my life, I've realized the quality of an impression about what makes a person happy or is a signal of engaging a talent is just as often more curious and subtle than the opposite shocking and obvious "yuck!"




For me sometimes, it's many different qualities that signal something "important to me" is going on. Those qualities of Importance are also different for each person. Here's some examples:

•  Me noticing myself musing over what "sticks out" as a logical fallacy or "not fitting." I find my mind has jumped over to a completely daydreaming type track of thought, despite the attraction of real life.

•  Perhaps a sense of effortlessness, as if I've just forgotten to feel bad in the last recent period of time where something that I had just been doing makes me happy, because it has completely absorbed my attention.

• * It does sometimes happen fast, in a "flash." The quality of my attention suddenly jumps to attention that makes time artificially slow down into a focal point. This happens in movies when the script writer wants the audience to notice an important point in the plot line. (Usually accompanied in movies with a curious sucking sound or whiplash sound effect! But such sounds don't happen in real life.)

• * Sometimes I only notice something was important in hindsight, after a calamity where I "should have known" to pay attention to a clue I was given, but it went over my head at the time. An example of this came for me in a flash of intuitive prediction where I didn't know I was getting a self-preservation warning message until after the (fortunately minor) accident had happened. I had to think back what made that predictive thought different from any other paranoia...so I could recognize it and be certain enough to act on it to become for me the useful intuitive warning it was.

Apparently, listing more of these from other people would be useful.  Because I've talked about this very subject in dinnertime conversations as one of my favorite Dialogue subjects to trot out in polite conversation. The results of doing it quite often over the course of my life are that these qualities that help people recognize intuitive messages are completely unique to each person.

What have you noticed?

Incarnation Objectives

A friend of mine who had been trained as a Shaman told me he had a special talent. This was to take someone back to have a little talk with the "Advisors" who had been around when the person incarnated. The useful part was these Advisors knew what your particular intent was for being alive. Of course I was interested in learning what "purpose to life" I had intended to play out. Although he cautioned me that once I got the attention of these busy and rather serious ethereal "advisors," I had better be getting with the program if I was off-course - I still wanted to know. Who would want to waste an opportunity like this if it was useful?

The experience was not particularly notable; at the start it seemed to be a garden-variety hypnosis session that was fun to tell about mostly because of the sense of humor of my particular advisors. But the session had an unexpected result. The two of them were a little like an edited conversation between Homer Simpson and Groucho Marx.

The message for me was, "if you want to help people, don't let them obligate you." This message was delivered as these Advisor characters pulled off me a strange webbed, sticky stuff. The session was an interesting experience in synesthesia, because I could hear it coming off as well as feel this stuff sticking to me as it was pulled off the backs of my legs and in places where I'd had injuries. That had never happened before in a hypnosis session.

It was obvious that helping others was my purpose, and I'd been already doing just that much of my life. It was how I was doing it that evidently needed to be reconsidered. Most of the rest of the session gave me hints about specific ways I could take more effective care of myself. Some of these choices of how to best provide for my own needs were in question for me.

What surprised me was the immediate effect afterwards. In fact, it was rather shocking. Soon after, I got a call from one of the beneficiaries of my help. There was a significant surprise in the experience of the call for me. It's as if my dopamine receptors had been scrubbed clean again. Somehow, my friendly Shaman had taken me back to a brightness level of emotional and perceptual sensitivity of decades ago! Somehow, I'd accidentally-on-purpose shut myself off from my own emotional reactions to the people I'd been helping without realizing what that would mean for me. Part of the reason I had questions about how to provide for myself better was because I'd lost this sense.

Of course, recovering my "brightness" knob of emotions had mixed results. It made me realize the cost I'd been paying for hanging out with people that most would shun. This was something that I'd actively ignored because of my convictions that these people needed help from someone - and I had nominated myself to be that "someone".

The experience my Shaman friend gave me has me re-evaluating what I actually do for people and how it realistically affects them. Since I seem to have this bent, perhaps I should be more professional in how I express it rather than personal?

Naaah.

Second-guessing

A good question came in as a comment in my last post...

What makes the difference between "genuine shape-shifting" and "applying your own thought patterns to the assumed "other perspective"?

I think what you're asking is how do you tell the difference between "shape shifting" and imposing a variation of your own ways that are really another brand of second-guessing?

The reason I would restate this question is I have gotten many benefits from checking out and clarifying meaning by communicating how I understand the other person who is responding to me. I might do that by asking questions or by responding to what I think they mean to check out if my guessing matches. I only learned to do this because my supposing was wrong! I also learned that, compared to shape shifting, it was a more respectful way of learning about a person's values - by asking.

People often tend to second-guess to address their own interests, so that's another main comparison between shape shifting and second-guessing. I would ask myself, does the motive for the guessing address an interest I have, and what is that interest? The answer usually is that almost every motive comes from some sort of self-interest. It's quite telling exactly what the motives are. Often there are many motives, and it's telling what order the hierarchy of this list might contain.

I first realized that my talent for shape-shifting originally came from a sincere desire for approval from others, coupled with not having any clue how to choose which one of the many codes of mannerly behavior I should be applying. So I would merely open myself and take away my own questions to experience what it would be like to actually be the other person.

As I suspended my desire for approval, I began to observe things about ways the other person felt about themselves and the world that went far beyond my own purposes. This is what allows me to emulate - essentially stand in another man's shoes for awhile.

I began to regard mannerliness as merely communicating a desire and intention to please - usually without the ability to actually do so because of an unfamiliarity with that person's unique values. So I assumed that it was more efficient to find a way to read or to directly absorb each person's unique values, rather than to merely be mannerly. Of course, when I eventually ran into some people who really did want mannerliness and felt there existed a code of how people "should" treat each other...I felt as if I was being held at arms' length!

The advantages are that you usually do have the other person present to ask and respond to what you do. But what you do usually isn't the point - it's how you read the way the other person interprets significance and meaning - which is usually different from the meanings that you would assign and sometimes wildly different. You can check out to see what your guessing means by asking the person. Or you can do whatever you are guessing at and note how they respond.

But all this is akin to conducting a scientific experiment and noting results in order to amass enough information to use. As a shape-shifter, I more often emulate what the other person seems to be doing, without question, to see where it takes me. I make observations what it is "like" to "be" the other person as I'm hanging out with them, while suspending my own goals and concerns.

The other means I use to enhance shape-shifting ability is to search for a positive motive of why another person acts the way they do. This can be a creative challenge. More commonly, when people confront a motive that doesn't make any sense to them, they are so quick to assign a negative motive to it. This is a clue that you are second-guessing and assigning your own values to another person's behavior, rather than shape shifting without value judgements being present. I believe that finding negative motives to explain other people's behavior usually comes from a reaction for self-protection.

Although there are many situations where the shit hits the fan in people's lives and leaves much to clean up later from their apparent purposeful behavior, I do not believe that anyone does anything for a negative reason. People merely can be terribly short-sighted and come up with some solutions to their concerns that have some serious drawbacks they did not count on or foresee. In some cases, people accept these choices come with these particular drawbacks and it doesn't even occur to them that there could be other ways or means that wouldn't include these problems that are occuring. I think that's where creative problem solving comes in. Finding out and agreeing on criteria is crucial in these situations. The ability to guess correctly the foundations of criteria will make you seem to another person as if you are reading their mind.

Hope You're Going to Have a...

Wondering about this poor snowman, who has just made one of those fatal losses of judgment some time back previous and and is now on the brink of suffering the consequences...

Car-less in Hawaii

Finally our Hawaiian car is being fixed at the mechanic's today. After being without a car for a week and a half, it's been challenging for Chris. He's managed to make enough money to fix the car without having to spend it on gas, so that's how there was extra money, strangely enough. He also managed to work some extra hours with an electrician.

Evidently Chris has been surreptitiously investing in his boss's business to the tune of about a hundred and fifty dollars a week paying for gas. We're going to have to talk to his boss about that, because that means we've been living off of Chris working for a little more than $7.50 an hour! No wonder Chris has had to borrow money from me at the end of each month to pay for gas to get to work. given that Chris has been expected to foot the bill for the mileage of driving his car around for his boss, it seems that it was quite unreasonable for his day job to demand that Chris quit his second job.

But if that wasn't the case, we would have never started to track expenses to determine how much of the gas bill I should be paying to split the costs with Chris for rent, food and other expenses. Keeping track of your money and where it's going is a really good idea to find these things out ahead of time before the car breaks and there is no money to fix it. I'm hoping that Chris gets a raise out of this fiasco.

Points of the Patriot Act finally declared by a Federal judge to be unconstitutional!

I can't believe this isn't all over the front page news already:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070926/ap_on_re_us/patriot_act_lawsuit

How Does Intuition Work, Anyway?

Somehow, I can just approached doing something that I've never done before - a skill, a game - and somehow, I can do it - usually at a mid-range skill level, quite far beyond any familiarity that I might have to know what I'm doing. Now, some people would call that "talent," but after experiencing "beginner's luck" many, many times, I think it's "intuition."

The other example of intuition is that I can sometimes dream original music - usually far beyond my ability to play it. I have to learned to play it by spending alot of time. How is it that this music comes complete with verses of words, etc. ?

I imagine that self-preservation more commonly sparks "knowing without knowing" intuition - and the safety of people you care about.

Learning to recognize my own intuitive hunches that became established fact as opposed to erroneous fantasies came from having a number of accidental spills. It was only afterwards that I realized that I had already gotten foreknowledge of the event before it happened. Because the realization was always after the fact, it was uselessly confounding.

So my question came to be, "how can I recognize a "hunch" or "warning" BEFORE it happens and USE it to my advantage to avoid the accident?"

My answer was very ideosycratic, as I imagine many other people's answer would be. Asking the question and then watching what happened next time seemed to work best. It led me to describe the characteristics of the "intuition." With common observations of the qualities that makes an intuitive thought unique, you can recognize the "intuitive" thought as having a different quality than any other thought.

For example, my observation of the qualities of my own "warning hunches," I gradually observed what they had in common were these points:

• Always for me the thought came to me in a full sentence. There was a voice talking very dispassionately, sort of like the old "mutual of Omaha" animal documentaries. The sentence always understates the possible damage to me, as if the situation were sort of mildly interesting.
• There sometimes is a day-dreaming type of a film clip attached, depicting the moment before the possible calamity.
• This "warning" thought doesn't come after a string of associative thoughts - it cwould come as a complete subject change, sort of "out of the blue." This as opposed to random paranoid thinking, which comes in a string of associative thoughts designed to get a rise out of my emotions as if I seem to want to make myself upset.
  
• It's easy to miss - meaning, because there is no emotional "charge" to the passing intution, my brain just goes on thinking the next thought as if the warning or intuition never happened and I often have to stop myself, "Whoa, I just had a hunch which could be one that I'd better slow down and consider in depth a little more carefully."
  

Eventually I learned to volutarily open myself up to getting an intuitive "hunch" on purpose during hitch-hiking. I learned to purposefully turn on my intuition as I was running up to get into the vehicle. As I was approaching the vehicle, I'd open myself to get an impression whether the vehicle was "safe" for me or not. Then I'd look into the car and ask my rote question of where the driver was headed and just observe the driver's response.

Sometimes the intuitive thoughts I got when I was approaching the vehicle during hitch-hiking would not match the impression that I got from the driver - passengers, because once I saw who it was, I was convinced that that people were 'safe.' It turned out that in two of these situations, where I got a "hunch" that the vehicle was not "safe" and I had decided the driver was "safe," what something was wrong was the vehicle which resulted in a breakdown.

In another case, my intuition sent a warning, and during the ride a van door came open while going around a curve. Everything in the back where I was slid out onto the road. I would have
been out the door also, had I not been hanging on & talking to the driver, which I was there doing that because I had been given the "hunch." So now if I get that hunch during hitch-hiking I will forgo that ride!

Could other people describe what makes them take an "intuitive" thought seriously for more consideration? How does your intuition work? I'd love to read more about that.

Recording Your Choices

I've spent quite a bit of time learning to decipher the I Ching, and using it to decipher my intentions...since I was 12. When I was in my twenties, I decided to keep a journal over the years and ask the I Ching every time I made a major life decision. In the beginning I had NO idea what the symbols were saying of course. But just by writing the questions down, a very consistent "catalogue" of what questions I had asked emerged over time - with the corresponding answers. Strangely enough, some of the questions and corresponding answers from the coin tosses were EXACTLY the same, even when the same reoccuring question was asked over a period of years.

I still keep that journal of questions, and add to it.

So eventually I learned quite a bit about what this Chinese symbolic language meant, because the book helped me remember what I tried last time I got that same symbolic answer. Trying something else in the now similar situation gave me another option to try out. I could recognize that this was a similar situation from getting a similar answer from the I Ching the last time it came up in my life. Otherwise I would have never noticed any similarities because too much time had passed in between what turned out to be very similar, virtual questions. I would have never connected the
two circumstances if I hadn't had the I Ching to draw the parallel.

So literally, the dangerous Hexagram # 29 says to "Be like water, follow your true nature to emerge from the ravine." What I found that meant to me was much more practical. It meant that I'd already imagined in the past about what I was going to do in this rather precarious situation, so I'd better not change my mind now about it. Make a new decision about how to proceed when I'm out of the danger, not when I'm in it. Not bad advice, under those circumstances, no matter what the means of getting the advice.