September 10^th, 2008

You ever wonder why, if we humans are supposed to have ESP, the true clairvoyants of the world aren't stinking rich living off in their crystal palaces somewhere ... um, er, wait a second: Maybe the "lucky" successful are the true clairvoyants of the world!

Hmm ... imagine that: Out of 100 entrepreneurs you might find a percent or two of them who rose to multi-million-dollar heights, while the rest of the venturing schlubbs toil and fuss among the rest of us regular 9-to5-ers. Maybe the successful are not really in the right place at the right time after all, but are actually successful because they were able to use their psychic talents to gain that success.

(Now, I have a friend who gets all irritated and itchy when he starts to hear talk like that. I think he has mother issues, since his mother is a bona fide fruitcake. I mean, I would have a hard time being normal if she were my mother; I don't know how he does it ... maybe he goes out at night and stalks small animals with a machete.)

But let's look at how that nebulous grey area we call "intuition" serves entrepreneurs ... and let's see if we can figure out what that "intuition" thing is anyway.

Implicit Knowledge

Well, let's start with something the scientists, mystics, and entrepreneurs themselves can all agree on: Entrepreneurs rely on integrating their intuition with traditional decision-making procedures; physiological response is as much a part of the process as their thinking. And, certainly, some value must be attributed to "Implicit Knowledge"— that is, they don't know they know something (or forgot they know something) that suddenly bubbles up to the surface in one of those "aha" moments. It's a simple matter of buried memories that become unburied, except we don't always know they were buried to start with.

Mood Sense

But what about those times when you just "feel" the mood of a group or a situation? Just about everyone I know has walked into a room and instantly felt tension between the occupants. Or have you ever sat or stood next to new sexual partners and just felt that sexual energy oozing out of them? I have, I know lots of people who have. You could blame pheromones, but that's pseudo-science.

Here's some real science: We all emit EMF and magnetic waves (low-level). EEGs, ECGs, MRIs, and PET scans are all medical diagnostic tools developed to measure these waves and (hopefully) diagnose whatever ails us. Heck, even the mighty Princeton University has the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research project (PEAR), which finished up a couple of years ago after decades of testing. It came up with the conclusion that people can somewhat control random physical processes with their minds. (Here's a Wikipedia article about it.)

So intuition may possibly have this ability integrated with the buried "implicit" knowledge and the straight logical decision-making as well.

Remote Intuition

Okay, bring on the criticism, but ... we can tune into the "feel" of information; the body and heart respond and can be a predictive, measurable ability. There are too many instances for this to be coincidence. I've experienced a couple of them myself:

• As a teenager, I once had a song running through my head while I sat up late at night. At one point, something astonished me and the song in my head stopped, mid-verse. And an instant later, my sister, who was sleeping in the next room, picked up the song at the same point in the verse and in the same key, and continued the song to its end ... and all this without her ever waking up.

• As an adult, the telephone rang in the middle of the night, and as I woke up before answering it I said out loud to my sleeping partner, "It's about my grandmother. She's dead." I was right; my grandmother had died in her sleep. By the way, I remember saying something, but I don't really remember the words themselves, but the person I was with swears up and down about this incident. I have no reason to doubt her: She's not the type to make something like this up.

And I am not unique. Everybody who wants to admit it has had lots of other -er- coincidences. The fact that Quantum Mechanics not only supports weird simultaneous coincidences like this, but actually predicts them, should be considered. Before one pooh-poohs this all as nonsense, one should at least keep an open mind. Critical thinking does not immediately equate with disbelieving anything unproved. There is the Quantum Information Theory which argues that the body creates a field that interacts externally with its environment. The heart responds first, the brain responds second, and then the body response follows the brain. This all happens, as measured in biofeedback loops, in 5 or 6 seconds. Ever stared at the back of someone's head, and noticed how they suddenly realise it 6 seconds later? Try it.

Synthesis

All decisions are based on a cognitive and emotional/intuitive blend. We think along the lines of how we feel ... not feel along the lines of how we think (okay, here is where that friend of my would bristle and get all fidgety again ... except he is the kind of person I am thinking about when I write this). I think that it is possible the really successful entrepreneurs have developed (or maybe it's innate) the ability to synthesize the four parts of decision-making and, basically, use their ESP (whether they think they are doing it or not) to formulate the right business decision.

But what about us mere mortals? We need to integrate the feeling with the cognitive part of the process. It is important to learn to discriminate between the heart and the mind. While it is true that we should not always just "follow our heart" and we should always remember that emotions can cloud our reasoning skills, we should also develop the skill of integrating what we feel with what we think. I mean, forget all the ESP stuff for a moment, just being able to "search our feelings" a lá Luke Skywalker would make us better-informed and stronger decision makers, wouldn't it?

Right now, the most of us suffer a form of Inattentional Blindness. We only perceive what we are paying attention to, and this applies to intuition too. So if we don't pay attention to those inner feelings, we don't "hear" them. In fact, if we don't listen for them, we probably won't even think they are there. Completing the vicious circle of ignoring your feelings at your own peril ... but not believing they are there and so not hearing them. And so on.

I mean, there is a reason why we suddenly discover ourselves doing unthinkably self-destructive or just plain stupid things from time to time. We may try to rationalize these actions later, but let's get one thing clear: Buried feelings—whether we hear them through our ESP intuition, or just through our own buried emotional reasons—erupt in poorly-understood random actions that baffle even ourselves as we do them.

Stop that behaviour, and we will be on our way to intuitively improving our lives.

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