What Is Intuition?

0:00In mystery school, we develop the intuition because it helps us to navigate the inner world, but it has many more uses than that. Intuition is a way of understanding yourself and the world around you. There's a sense in which intuition, when it arrives, will be quite clear. And it's clear because it's your truth. Hi, I'm Shakti Doga. Welcome to mystery school, ancient wisdom for everyday life. A space where we explore the sacred, awaken the inner knowledge, solve problems and learn to live from the divine within. Hi, everybody. Welcome back to mystery school. Today's topic is intuition. How do you develop your intuition? And what is intuition? In mystery school, we develop the intuition because it helps us to navigate the inner world. But it has many more uses than that. Intuition is a way of understanding yourself and the world around you

1:02that comes from a very deep place. It comes from a place you could say beyond your conscious mind. It comes from not a logical, rational and linear approach to reality, but instead it comes from the core essence of who you are. There's a sense in which intuition, when it arrives, will be quite clear. And it's clear because it's your truth. It's what you're really perceiving. And I guess the biggest challenge that we have is not to discover our intuition, but to trust it. And that comes, I think, as we practice. Let's just have a little summary of what is the difference between rational consciousness and intuitive consciousness. As a child of my era, growing up in the 1960s and the 1970s, and going to school and university and getting degrees in economics and law,

2:06my background is very much about the rational. And that was my education. And in fact, at that time, the rational consciousness was very much given preference over any other way of knowing. And this is in contradiction to some of the ways that Indigenous people, the world, over, learned. And their way of learning was far more the intuitive way. And then rational things would come in around that. So we're different in our different cultural times in history that we live in. And we are living in a very rational period. So let's just have a look at the qualities and characteristics of rational consciousness, which, by the way, is very important in mystery school, but is not to be used in isolation. So as the culturally dominant paradigm, logic is task-oriented.

3:10And it's analytical. It is rational. And education or focus of our era is very much on logic. Logic as a way of knowing is sequential, which means because I know this, I then can learn this, I can learn this, I can learn this, and I follow this step to get to that step, this step to get to that step in a logical progression. Perfectly great, but we just have to understand that intuition works differently to that, and I'll come to that shortly. Anything numerical comes under the logic heading, and logic claims to be objective. And it is yang, you could say, it's an active way of interacting with reality. Now, in order for logic to actually work, there have to be parameters upon which it sits.

4:17And the parameters for our logic are the beliefs, some of which we're conscious of, and some of which we're not conscious of, that sit often just below the surface of our mind, and because of those semi-conscious beliefs that we hold, our logic is built upon those beliefs. So there are always parameters for logic to operate. And you need only to think about any social type issue, and to look at the way people are behaving in relation to a social issue, that you can see that somewhere that they are perceiving, that they are correct in their orderly thinking about a subject, and often the logic that people resort to is based on a

5:21parameter that might be scriptural, for instance. And so we think about religious beliefs, and the logic that flows from those, that if it says something in a holy book, be it the Bible, the Quran, or any other holy book, that that is the basis upon which then I build my sense of what is right and what is wrong, and it's entirely rational. Whereas there's another way of thinking about things altogether, because sometimes the logic can give you strange results. You only have to think about rationalisations, for instance, for slavery, or rationalisations as to why it is that women should be treated differently to men, should be discriminated against, should be kept out of the workplace, should be forced to do anything, any sort of force upon any minority, or even I think women are probably a majority

6:21in the world, because they live a bit longer, but anything that is of a discriminatory nature, you will find that at the base of it, there are some parameters sitting that give rise to a logic that rationalises why it is that that kind of behaviour is actually okay. And all of us have these kinds of semi-conscious rationalisations going on inside of us, because we're human and we're built that way. And every now and again, it's a really good thing to start to look at and question the assumptions that we make and to find out where is our train of thought coming from. Intuitive consciousness is a different kind of animal, you could say, whereas rational or logical consciousness is something that's in action, it's like a train

7:25of thought, it's kind of moving from here to here to here. Intuitive consciousness is actually much more in or still and receptive. So when we're intuiting, we are relating to the world around us as a field of energy. And that field of energy is sensed not just in the conscious mind but in your body, it's sensed through your energy field, and it's sensed as a Gestalt. So whereas rationality or logic is a step-by-step process, when something arrives in your awareness as an intuitive impulse, the whole thing comes all at once. And so suddenly you just go, oh, and you just know something and you know what to do and how to do it and where you need to be and who you need to contact, the whole thing just comes like that. And it might take you an hour

8:30to describe what came through in that moment of inspiration. But the whole notion of inspiration is in fact inspiring or breathing in something from the environment around you. So if you think about feelings you're having your body, whether it's a gut feeling, whether it is a tingle that happens down some part of your body, or just a deep sense of awareness or knowing, these are the sorts of signs of an intuitive piece of information landing for you. The other part about intuition is that it's very, very useful in any kind of emotional situation because you know what, emotions, they're not rational. We might like them to be, and if we designed the world, perhaps they would have been, but the fact of the matter is that people

9:33are human and people have different backgrounds, different wounds, different expectations, different sets of parameters that they're living by, and emotions arise as a result of the way their mind is set. So if I, if my mind says I should be given this and this and that I expect this and this to be part of my reality, and then someone doesn't give me that, then I might get upset about it. But in fact, if I didn't have any expectation there and someone sometimes gave me that thing, I might feel very happy about it. You see what I mean? So it depends where our parameters are set there on our expectations, expectations themselves are logically arrived at. So emotions come into play and then they just blow up your logic and over the two, you'll probably find that your emotional body is going to override your rational mind most of the time. And for those people who say,

10:39no, no, no, I'm very rational and I don't actually get emotional about stuff. Could I suggest that sometimes what we do is we swallow down our emotions, we store them in the body, and men particularly have a habit of storing their emotions, particularly in the heart center. And this may explain the phenomena worldwide that men experience more heart attacks on balance than women. And that men have for a long time, particularly in my kind of generation, been taught that it's not manly to have emotions. So hopefully we're starting to rectify that. I think we are. I see evidence all around us of very sensitive, emotionally available men now. And it wasn't really the same back in the in last century. It seems funny saying last century, doesn't it? But in the 60s and 70s, when there's plenty, plenty of people like me who remember those times and it was, it was very different to what it is now. So here we are. One is a more conscious mind-born way of knowing things,

11:46whereas the intuitive path is more a spirit way of knowing things. And it's more tuned into energy. And that's the way it is. So if we want to compare and contrast these things, you might say that the rational way of thinking in the mysteries, it's thought of as masculine. And the intuitive way is thought of as feminine. And there's a great image of people on the intuitive side of the brain sitting in a park, flying kites and flowers everywhere, relaxing, having fun. And in the rational model, everybody's in a cubicle, working away kind of isolated from everybody else. And there's a few bridges that come back and forward between the intuitive and the rational. Women tend to have more of those bridges between the different parts of their consciousness, just the way we're built. And I'm sure that was because it was necessary for survival skills for

12:50women, back in the day, and even still now, today sometimes. So if we think about the intuitive, it is actually a fun-loving, playful, emotional, intuitive, spiritual state. And if you think about the rational, it's more a task-oriented, analytical, logical, kind of modern in a way, because that's what we value, a sequential state. And it's objective by its nature, given these circumstances, we make a rational decision. Whereas the intuitive framework is more subjective. And therefore, it can be something that requires deeper exploration to get to the root of why that consciousness is sitting there. So let's just have a think for a moment about how we develop intuition. There are eight main cultivators of intuition. And each one of them can be an absolute

14:01blessing in your life. And in fact, the last of them is blessing. But let's go from the beginning. So the first of the cultivators is being in nature. By being in nature and intending to connect with the ocean, the forest, the plants, the earth, the sun, we all know that it feels great, don't we? That it's relaxing. And it will turn on your intuitive framework. The second of the cultivators of intuition is simply being able to relax. So what is it that you need to be able to switch from the sympathetic activation of your nervous system to the parasympathetic system that is all about rejuvenation, regeneration, and relaxation, and also connection. So by getting into that relaxed state and there's many, many teachings around really good teachings

15:03all over the internet about how to relax. And so that's the second cultivator of intuition. The third cultivator of intuition is meditation. I've been practicing meditation since the early 1990s. And I've got to say that over the years, meditation in both form and experience has changed a lot. But it's worth learning. And we might do a separate program on how to meditate and some kind of cheats or hacks in the system to help you meditate more easily. But suffice to say meditation is a fabulous cultivator of intuition. The next method for cultivating your intuition is laugh. Laughing is good medicine, enjoyable, and free. So laugh yourself intuitive. It's when you are in

16:03that state that the world is a good place and that you are relaxed and you're laughing. You're happy that intuition will flow. Another cultivator of intuition is music and singing. Music seems to suit the soul and will help you open. So if you're wanting to activate your intuition, think about playing some music that you like, something relaxing, something perhaps gentle that moves you into a state where you can just be instead of worrying about doing things. The next one and one of the ways that I found very, very effective is energy healing. Energy healing has been such a gift in my own life and there are many different modalities. The one we use is called Ignite Your Spirit and you can find out more about that at our website IgniteYourSpirit.com

17:05and you can have healing and you can train as a therapist. But energy healing whether you are receiving it or you're giving it develops your intuition. It cleans the inner workings of your spirit and frees up energy and blockages so that you can more fully understand what's going on around you and we might have a separate look more deeply at that another time as well. And the final cultivator for the development of your intuition is spiritual activations and blessings. So this is the very ancient method of teaching and it's part of the oral tradition. So a lot of indigenous cultures relied on the oral tradition of learning because the energy and the pulse of the teaching was passed intuitively to the student so that the words would carry the energy but also

18:10there's an old maxim for teachers that says more is taught than court. That when you're around a good teacher their lived experience in whatever they're they've mastered and in our teaching that will flow into the student and this method of flow is what we would say is a spiritual activation if you're in the flow of a spiritual teacher Guru Rishisage St. Holy Master and there's many real ones and very good ones in the world and I travel each year to India to see my teachers who are exquisite extraordinary beings of light love and divine consciousness and so I'm always wanting to learn more from them and then when we learn we pass it onto others. So spiritual activations and blessings it'll change your consciousness and open your intuitive framework and allow you access to the universe of all possibility faster than anything else I know

19:17anyway I hope you've enjoyed our little exploration of developing intuition today and if you'd like to know more about the work we do check out shantymission.org and my website shuktedoga.com and also for more on our healing work look at igniteyourspirit.com I'll see you next time. Thanks for joining me for mystery school ancient wisdom for everyday life the deeper experiential spiritual exploration join me for mystery school living light series and for more information visit shantymission.org see you next time