The Art of Asking Questions & Unleashing your Intuitive Powers

The Art of Asking Questions & Unleashing your Intuitive Powers

• Post Author:Gilbert Ross
  
• Post published:
  

The Shy Person at the Back of the Room

I have been fairly intuitive as a person from a young age. It has served me well along the years although any real practical application of this intuitive knowledge hasn’t been there all along. What I mean is that I was mostly passive to it just like we are passive to our normal day to day experiences most of the time. We receive information but we do not always act on it, at least not in any purposeful way and certainly not all the time.
Quite honestly and saying this without any embarrassment, I never really thought that I could direct this very useful information towards solving practical day to day problems until later years, when it sort of became automatic for me to combine together intuitive understanding with logic and problem-solving. But once again, this was more automatic and unconscious rather than applying a conscious effort or method in doing it.
Intuition is something everyone experiences in different amounts and consistency. Not everyone recognises it as intuition to start with and may call it or think of it in a different way. For some people there is very little differentiation between normal thoughts and intuitive ideas. Also, many people are not that intuitive not because they do not possess the ability – as I said everyone does – but more because they constrict the flow of information from this very important channel as they over-rely on solving problems through the mind alone.
Even as a child I often use to find it intriguing how I could sense things that were not obviously there through my immediate awareness of the environment. Or that extra bit of information coming ‘from nowhere’ that would shift my perspective and allow me to see better the pieces of the puzzle. Or even more surprising to me were ideas and bits of information that didn’t make sense at the time but later confirmed to be true. And this last comment points to another important point – trusting intuition as it comes. So let me take this occasion to confess and purge another one of my sins. Although I had so many intuitive episodes in my life, I many times failed to act on intuition alone because the mind was so much louder. We are so entranced into this mind dominated world that the subtle whispers of intuition very often go unnoticed. The analogy is that to someone at a party who is loud and extremely attention-grabbing in contrast to someone who is shy, soft-voiced and well-mannered. Who would usually get more noticed and heard? The mind is like the loud mouth at the party while intuition is that shy person in the back of the room.

The Tragedy of Materialism

What is also very interesting to me are dreams and guidance that come through dreams. I always had a deep fascination with dreams and I still find it to be a very exciting discussion topic especially when I meet fellow dream lovers. Not all dreams are the same. Some dreams have a different sort of energy to them and can bring to light a solution to a given problem or give you needed direction on a situation. I also had so many precognitive dreams or prophetic dreams in my life that always came mind-blowingly true down to the slightest detail sometimes even months before it happened. Although I feel like going on forever on this subject of guiding dreams and precognitive dreams, I will leave it aside as I want to focus on the practical application of intuition. Also there is a lot of different opinions as to where dreams come from – whether purely from the subconscious mind or somewhere else such as archetypal realms, the quantum field, the Akasha. other dimensions, and so on. In my opinion they come from all the aforementioned but let me drop it here and return back to intuition.
So the problem with not applying intuitive knowledge more directly in our everyday world comes down to certain common factors, I know of from my own experience and those of others I met. To be concise, these are awareness and attention, trust, the state of mind you are in and lastly, and this is something hardly mentioned, asking yourself the right questions. Let me expand a little.
So awareness and attention is fairly evident as one of the main problems. As mentioned we have been programmed by a heavy materialistic society that gives too much credence and attention to the ‘problem-solving’ level of consciousness and discounts the soft-voiced intuitions and feelings as having no place in the ‘real world’. Utter nonsense of course. This heavy programming makes it then harder for us untrained and uninitiated folks into the intuitive arts to be able to pick up the signals so easily and when we do, like myself for most of my life, we do not trust them enough to act on them all the time. This is definitely one of the tragedies of our modern materialistic world.
The state of mind you are in will also have a large effect on whether you will listen in clearly on intuitions even if you are a highly intuitive person. This is all very natural and expected. If you are under intense stress you even shut down or narrow down a lot of your normal cognitive functions and focus your resources on survival. Naturally intuition will also suffer.

Ask and it Shall be Given

The last factor is the one that merits more discussion I believe as it is something that I am exploring lately and I believe is the most effective one in its simplicity to not only kick-start and maintain your intuitive abilities but also the most effective way to direct intuitive knowledge into practical application. This is one of those things that are so simple and obvious that we rarely see it. It’s kind of that thing in the room that everyone takes for granted and hence never really notice.
When you ask a question, you are always bound to get an answer one way or another. Think of it as a simple truth about how things work for now – let’s not philosophise too much about it. Why am I saying this? because this is the part that gets missed the most. If you are not conscious that whatever question you put out there you WILL always get an answer, then you will not expect it or pay attention to it when it arrives. Sounds simple and true enough yes? How can you pick up information about something if you weren’t even aware of the fact that you are going to receive it (unless you do not have a highly expanded awareness).
Now this is such a beautiful notion I believe. As Jesus said “Ask and it shall be given”. I am imagining a younger version of me shrugging his shoulder and I am really inclined to slap him in the head and say “yeah but did you even ask?” or “do you realise that the only one getting a bad deal out of your skepticism is yourself?”.
Even for those who are skeptical of metaphysical notions like I was when I was younger, there is a more direct answer to this. Our subconscious mind is not totally shuttered behind a wall that separates our conscious and unconscious thoughts. When you ask a question to a problem, it immediately starts to work on it and search through a repertoire of connections, ideas, understandings, metaphors and bits of information as it stitches everything back together waiting for that perfect moment to send it back to your conscious awareness – the iconic a-ha moment! So yes, when you ask, you are starting off a process that will some way or another bring you to an answer or at least clues that will lead you to it.
Yet the important message is this. If you want to get intuitive knowledge working for you all the time, or at least most of the time, you need to do two things. First you need to be aware of a simple rule – that when you ask something, your subconscious mind, the Universe, your higher Self, or whatever suits your paradigm, will go and fetch it right away just like a happy dog that has been thrown a stick to play. Be mindful that this is how it is and you don’t need to find out how or why (although it would be interesting if this is what drives you).

Formulating the right Question

The second important step, now that you know that whatever you ask will be answered, is to ask the right questions. If you ask wrong questions, it won’t help, right? If the question is too broad or too biased or, let me say it, a shitty question, don’t complain if the answer is not that fantastic either.
So how do you formulate the right questions? First it is clearly defining the objective. If it is a problem that you need a solution for, you need to for example check first whether you clearly understand the problem (not just aspects of it that are bugging you). Then see whether the objective is to simply find a direct solution to the defined problem or perhaps to get insights and clarity on the obstacles that are giving rise to the problem in the first place. Do you see the difference? Let’s put it into context with an example.
Let’s say your problem is that you do not have enough financial means to cover all your expenses within the next two months. So first you check whether you understand the problem fully. Is the real problem your worry of not covering your immediate expenses or the source of your current financial situation that you want to solve? Next is to be clear whether you want a direct solution – such as finding another source of money to cover the bills for the next two months – or to get clarity on why you are in this situation and how to correct it in the longer term. The only way to be clear and to know which is right or not, is to step out of what your mind thinks is right or wrong and rather wait for a feeling that clicks, a deeper knowing that this is right (well, this is already intuition at work).
When you are clear of all this, you are ready to formulate the question. For example “what idea or insight do I need to fix my relation with money that is bringing up this current problem?” or if you chose to go for the immediate short-term solution only – “what is the solution to cover my expenses now?”
Now obviously you will not get an immediate answer there and then like instant messaging (although it can). Allow it to process and be receptive to answers. Be aware that answers can come in slightly different forms and this is were attention needs to be given, or rather awareness needs to be broadened. For example it might come in as an idea that suddenly pops in your head or an insight or a shift in perspective that leads to a deeper understanding (this is of course the most common form of intuition). But it can also come as a synchronicity such as you are somewhere and somebody says something out loud, or a paper falls in front of you and you notice certain words that have complete meaning to your question, or some other ‘coincidence’ that shows up at the right moment and lights up your mind.
If you are into dreams, it might come in a dream as I alluded to before. This happens quite often with myself. I might have a dream that I wake up from (I believe this is purposeful) and as I go through it I immediately realise what it means. This might be more suitable for people who are very intimate with dream language (which is a beautiful and expressive language in my opinion). It would take a lot of space, possibly a series of articles, to go even into the basics of this, so I prefer not to do so here.
Ultimately what is most important is to be open to receive in whatever form it comes. Also related to this point is not to restrict or limit the answers by focusing or expecting any particular answer – in short not to interfere with your mental bias on what the answer should be like or what it should say. Leave it open. This is not up to your conscious mind. The less your conscious mind interferes (this is totally not its domain after all), the better.

Thanks to: https://soulhiker.com