Intuition

Okay I realize its been a while but here's a new post. :)

So I recently had the experience of interviewing potential roommates. This is something I’ve done before but this time it was different. Before I kind of always went with the first person I talked to and that worked out fine. But this time we interviewed over a dozen people in a little over a week. Never have I tried to asses so many people in such a short time and what I found interesting about the experience was how I went about it. I relied heavily upon my intuition. Listening to my intuition or my gut if you want to call it that, isn’t new to me, but seldom have I sat down and analyzed my intuitive reactions the way I did in this process. A person would interview and then after they left my roommate and I would sit down and discuss our impressions. Often times it would result in us trying to define the feel of the person, that intuitive read we got off the person.

This might strike the non intuitive types as a little strange, but my life has taught me to trust my intuition. But then what is intuition? Webster defines it as quick and ready insight, or the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference. The best explanation I’ve come to is that my intuition is my brain subconsciously piecing bits of information together. This information can be obvious things but often as not its putting together the bits and pieces of information that aren’t readily apparent. You may ask, what I mean by that. I mean that our brains receive more input than we consciously register. Things like vocal inflection, posture, facial expressions.
There are things called micro expressions, they are brief, involuntary expressions shown on the face according to emotions experienced. The mind perceives these, but unless you’re trained to recognize them, you wouldn’t consciously register them. All this kind of information goes into your subconscious and mills about. Big deal you say. It is a big deal, because unlike computers one of the things the brain does best, is to piece together disparate bits of information that would otherwise seem unconnected and that’s the key to intuition. The minds ability to collect, analyze, and collate information until it comes to a conclusion. Then the subconscious presents this conclusion to the conscious mind.

The way this looks in action is I’ll be doing something and all of a sudden I’ll have an idea or a feeling about something, I can’t tell you why I feel that way or what made me think what I think, but as often as not I end up being right. Most of the time it’s not a clear cut fully formed idea as it is more of a feeling or gut reaction, which in turn requires interpretation. Do I not like this situation because something is wrong, or did I just eat something bad last night?

So back to interviewing, we would end up trying to describe the feel of people, using words like clean, or uncomfortable. But once we had a description we would usually try to work backwards and figure out what it was that lead to that particular impression. This person felt awkward, why was that. Well perhaps it was because he was constantly shifting his weight back and forth. Why? Maybe because he was nervous or maybe he just needed to go to the bathroom. But if we take it in the context of his hesitant speech, it’s likely that he was nervous. What does that mean about him as a person? Well it doesn’t necessarily mean much of anything, as interviewing is hard and most everyone is nervous. But after half an hour of talking if he’s still nervous that might mean something. Perhaps the person lacks confidence. Who knows.

What I find interesting is I can often get a read/ impression off someone in five min or less. That impression is not all ways 100% accurate but I’d put it in at least the 80% range. Which brings up another question how is it possible to asses a person in less than 5 min. There is generally not enough speech in a 5 min conversation to get to know a person, and really how many nonverbal ques can you pick up in that time as well. This moves us a little more into the realm of auras, the idea that people have a physical and metaphysical presence. I don’t personally buy completely into the concept of auras but I will accept that there is more going on in this world than can be explained by science. I can tell you from personal experience, it is possible to detect the presence of another person in complete darkness. You can literally feel them, even if they are several feet away. It is also possible to identify someone who you can’t see by their feel, though this usually requires familiarity with the person. Science tells us that we are an electromagnetic system, our bodies are full of energy. So is it outside the realm of possibility that we can sense or feel the energy field of another person, I don’t think it is. And is it possible that this field could tell you something about the person? I don’t see why not. I know from my study of the body and personal experience that as strange as it sounds muscles can hold memories. Tension in the muscles will also affect the rest of the body and not just by throwing other parts of the body out of alignment. Acupuncture works upon the principle of the flow and interconnectedness of energy in the body and the idea that the flow can be manipulated to help healing. That knots or blockages in the flow affect other parts of the body. So if we can feel the electrical field of someone why couldn’t that field tell us about what’s going on in their body. If they are stressed or off balance somehow and if muscles can hold memories than why not be able to pick up on thoughts or feelings through that same field.

I don’t know but it seems at least plausible. So call it auras, call it spiritual sensitivity, or electromagnetic detection, or intuition, call it whatever you want but I’m going to keep trusting my instincts on people and situations, and perhaps the next time you have a nagging feeling in the back of your mind about something, you should stop and think about why that is.