There’s a fair amount of discussion on the Internet about the difference between imagination and intuition. In a sense, imagination is active, sometimes day dreaming play and sometimes the mind working to figure out what something is like or might be like whether it’s a novel, a prospective new job, a relationship, or a thousand other “what if” kinds of questions.
Intuition is passive, listening to what’s variously described as one’s inner self in contact with events or people we cannot–at that moment–see or hear or otherwise logically know about.
Participants in mental improvement courses, such as The Silva Method and others that lean toward the development of intuition, often begin exercises by being asked to imagine something. The intent of this is to focus and connect the relaxed mind on, say, a person or a place, and then allow one’s attention to to take over and begin providing impressions, visual or otherwise, about what is really happening (outside the scope of what we could possibly have known already).
Beginning with one’s imagination is easy because most of us can imagine just about anything. There’s no pressure in that. Since there isn’t any pressure, the mind is now free to widen that imagination into “seeing” what we previously didn’t know about.
When your imagination “switches” over to intuition, you will–as people often say–experience stronger feelings about the images, along with an inner knowing that they are true. When you are practicing, try to get feedback.
For example, have your spouse or your friend tell you (when you’re in a relaxed state) the name and location of a person you don’t know and have never heard about. Imagine that you see that person in your mind’s eye, and then just start talking about what you’re “seeing.” While you’re doing this, your spouse or friend might blurt out “OMG” and other surprised comments when you get something right. Or, they might wait until you finish “your reading” and then say where you were accurate.
The more you do this, the better you will get at it because you will begin to know what the intuited information feels like.
If you have nobody to practice with, you can pick out a town or other location that you’ve never visited, never seen on the news or the Internet, and never heard about. Just pick the name of a town off a list of the towns in one state or another. Then imagine you are there and see what you see. After doing this, Google the town and find some pictures and see how many of the parks, streets, and building match your impressions.
I have always found imagination to be a perfect doorway into intuition, though over time the need for lengthy imagination becomes less unnecessary. Some people are born with “psychic abilities” and know things without having to walk through that “doorway.” For the rest of us, imagination is a wonderful threshold into the innate abilities of our minds that we are working to develop.
Yes, it seems like magic.
Malcolm R. Campbell’s novels and short stories almost always include magic because that’s how he sees the world.
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Great post! Thank you for the idea about imagining a town and then looking it up on the internet.
The biggest problem I have and, I am finding, most people have is figuring out when and if we cross that line between imagination and intuition.
I’m constantly being asked, “How do I know I’m not just making this stuff up?” Your idea helps answer this question.
We are taught from the moment we learn to speak that the stuff we see in our minds is either stuff we’re remembering or stuff we’re making up, or imagining. This is not true. Much of what we call imagination and dump into our mental recycle bins is valid and sometimes important information.
Thanks again for doing these posts.
The use of a town is something we can do without having a friend giving us names of people. There are probably other ways, but it seemed like a potential way of getting feedback.
As writers, we use our imagination all the time. So, we certainly know about “making it up.” Intuition just seems to feel different, though without feedback, we may never really know about some instances of it. My biggest problem is using intuition with people/things I know. It’s hard to separate what I know–or what I might logically think up–from my intuition.
Having/using intuition is not really supported in our upbringing, so we don’t have mental guidelines for it.
Now I want to talk someone into playing the intuition game with me! What a great idea for deepening our ability to “go there” and to trust what we know.
After you practice a while, you’ll be able to cheat at charades because you’ll know what’s written on the others’ sheets of paper for what they have to act out.
“Having/using intuition is not really supported in our upbringing…” I find so sad. At any rate I am going to continue my thoughts that writers tend to be able to pierce the veil to see things that others cannot see, feel, or even imagine. For that I thank you. 😀
We use our imagination a lot, and I think that tends to make us a bit psychic. We write stuff and people say, “how on earth did you think up that.” The response I want to make is, “how can one not come up with that?” But that doesn’t sound very friendly, so I don’t say it.
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