Why do we regularly ignore the wisdom available via our unconscious mind (our intuition)? I believe the 3 main reasons have to do with ignorance, ego, and fear.
IGNORANCE
Most people never come to understand the power available to themselves via their unconscious minds because they’ve never take the time to seriously consider it. Thus they live entirely by means of reason, prudence, and logic. These are people who say things like “I’ll believe it when I see it” and so forth. Most people of this variety consider themselves “down to earth”, “realists”, and “practical” in nature.
Ignorance disappears whenever what it is you are ignorant about pops up on your personal radar screen. You didn’t have a clue about it but now its there. At this point, you can either choose to pretend it’s not so (deny it), refute the the new information (doubt it), or accept it as a new aspect of your ever changing environment. Quite often, we go through that exact progression when adopting new beliefs: Denial - Doubt - Acceptance. Its entirely normal, and is something many people had to deal with once Galileo figured out the sun didn’t revolve around the earth, and when Columbus made it back to Europe without falling off the edge of the planet.
EGO
Our identification with the human experience resides within our ego. If we’re all a part of the collective unconscious, then it is our egos that help us stand out from the crowd. Through our egos we express our individuality, our smartness, our sexiness, and our coolness. Our egos are what make us “us”, and this is not a bad thing at all. Lose the ego completely and you become very spiritual, very knowledgeable, and also probably very boring to others. Gurus on mountaintops aren’t usually very busy on Saturday nights, though admittedly neither do they care.
The key is to find a healthy balance, yet many people resist accessing the collective unconscious via use of their intuition. Why? Because it requires us to think differently. Thinking differently may generate new ideas, and some of some of these new ideas might threaten our established self image. For the ego that’s a big no no. On the whole we’re very proud of who we are and resistant to change how we identify ourselves. Our ego’s sense of self identification finds comfort in stability, even if the stable nature of our lives is uncomfortable. Its much easier to resist new information at first and later accept it only when it becomes blatantly obvious. The ego only begins to acquiesce to intuition after we fall flat on our faces one too many times relying solely upon our senses and ignoring how we feel.
FEAR
Our fear of trusting in our intuition resides in the idea that it somehow seems too nebulous. We assume that what we can see, smell, hear, taste, and touch must be “real” and have “proved” this to ourselves too often to believe otherwise. At one level this is a good thing, because pretending a brick wall isn’t in front of you and attempting to run right through it typically doesn’t work out too well. The problem with trusting exclusively in our senses is that we filter all of our sensory perceptions in order to understand what they mean. So what we think is “real” by virtue of our senses is still largely a matter of perception.
Trusting in our intuition can seem uncomfortable. We’re afraid of making important decisions while feeling uncomfortable about the process and often retreat back to the familiar safety of our senses. After all, if we make a decision and fail based our senses who will blame us? We acted on “legitimate” information. But if we trust in our intuition and act upon a “hunch” that doesn’t work out, we might look downright foolish to everyone around us. That scares us, often enough that we don’t even bother to try.
So, how can you learn to trust in your intuition? Stay tuned and check out my next post titled “Trusting Your Intuition”.
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