Thread: Gut Feelings: Should We Trust Them?

Never give up! Trust your instincts!

Well, i think if you have a gut feeling and you can't rationalize it then i believe that it should be discarded in most cases. Not that thats always possible.

I have pretty bad paranoia unfortunately, and they started as gut feelings and hunches.

Originally Posted by GaryColemansGhost

I have pretty bad paranoia unfortunately, and they started as gut feelings and hunches.

They came later for me, but I can totally understand where you're coming from. Gut feelings have a massive part to play in paranoia.

The way I see it, if we have evolved faculties for analyzing our instincts instead of blindly following them ("faculties" being >80% of your brain), then we should most definitely use them. Aderp.

Originally Posted by Mark75

Never give up! Trust your instincts!

Best reply yet.

Gut instincts aren't always right......But they aren't always wrong either

And we use the word to mean both our instincts, and intuition. Both are communicated to us as emotions. But they are entirely different and stem from different types of consciousness within us

Instincts in this case are pre-programmed responses based on past experiences. These responses are experienced as emotions. Such as fear, anger, disgust, desire. They are automatic tendencies created by the subconscious mind, based on the information given to the subconscious mind

So these automatic responses are vital to life, it's what allows us to go on auto-pilot and just enjoy ourselves instead.

But MOST of these automatic responses have NOTHING to do with survival. MOST of them are created by beliefs held in the subconscious mind. Becuase these emotional responses are sooooo strong and can happen in our intelligent conversations we don't think of them as being pre-programmed.......But they are. It works so much like a machine, if you 'delete' the belief in the subconscious memory base...you delete the response.

Now I do believe in the Holy Spirit, however the Holy Spirit will never use NEGATIVE emotions to communicate to you. If there is fear or anger involved, that is a sure sign it is not 'divine conviction', what ever that is. I'm not saying being angry is wrong. But it's important to understand that the anger is coming from your subconscious.

Now what about intuition?

Intuition is also felt as strong emotions. So we confuse intuition with our emotional and instinctual responses. But intuition is not based on past experiences. There is no trigger for intuition. And even though it's a strong feeling, it doesn't necessarily take over you all of a sudden. It can be an emotion that always sticks with you, that seems to swell and grow. And it's at this point when it swells and grows that you can't ignore this feeling anymore.

While traditionally intuition is known as a feeling of 'knowing' something, we don't always feel it this way. Sometimes it feels like tension. Sometimes it feels like our life is falling a part, or we're going crazy. An unsettling feeling. Anxiety. This is what intuition feels like when you can't understand it's message.

Most of us think of intuition as a message, and it is a message. Unlike instinct, which is automated response. From where this message is coming from depends on your belief. The best science has to offer us is that intuition is probably your right brain communicating with your left. If the left brain sucessfully understands this emotional and sensory based communciation, it can then translate it into a logical plan of action that you can carry out in your life.

Most of us are afraid to listen to our intuition, because it seems it has been wrong in the past before.

Well it's important to understand that the message intuition has for you is entirely personal. Don't look to your intuition to confirm whether your beliefs about the world are true. The right brain is NOT concerned with the absolute truth. Only your own truth.

Our intuition is never 'wrong'. It's simply communicating what YOU need right now in your life. What YOU need to do, NOW. What YOU need to be, NOW. Now heres the catch......tomorrow you could have different needs. Intuition can't see the future.........It's not concerned with the future, it's concerned with the present. The sooner you understand your intuition, the sooner you should act. And if you're intuition includes some sort of future goal - it's important to understand that only important thing right NOW is that you are actively reaching for this goal.

How can you trust your intuition is right?

Well, we have many kinds of consciousness to our being. We have what I believe to be a Super consciousness. While most scientists just lump it together with the subconscious, I call it Super becuase of how amazing it is in comparison to just storing data and creating instinctual responses

We recieve vasts amounts of information every second. But it's not equally distributed among our types of consciousness. If the amount of information your Super Consciousness recieves is a page...your daily ordinary conscious is less than a dot on a page.
















. <--- your ordinary conscious

















It's thousands of times more information than your ordinary consciousness!!!! If your Super Conscious wasn't recieving thousands of times more information per second, we would be dead.

Remember those beliefs that were recorded in the subconscious?? Well how did they get there? Your Super Consciousnes isn't just recieving information from your environment and body, but your thoughts as well. It knows the totality of your being more than you could consciously understand. This is how you know you can trust your intuition.

It isn't controlling, it's not some god in the sky. It's very much you. But it's the you that knows you. It's the you that knows what you want. And its the you that knows what you need. Sometimes we confuse it with the subconscious mind. The two work closely together and you can meet both in your dreams. But they are strikingly different. By comparison, the subconscious isn't actually you.............The Super conscious is you.

The subconscious mind is more animalistic, creating automatic responses. But the Super Conscious will never make you automatically respond to anything. It will persistently communicate to you, nagging louder and louder every time. But it always, always, waits for you to consciously respond.

Which is what makes intuition so difficult, because in the end we must decide to act.




I'm sorry for the long rant but I feel its important to understand the difference between our emotional instincts and our genuine intuition

^Listen to this man

Although I don't agree with everything he said, I agree with most of it.

Originally Posted by WakataDreamer

^Listen to this woman

Although I don't agree with everything she said, I agree with most of it.

Fix'd (Omg my first "Fix'd" :O )

Originally Posted by Mark75

Never give up! Trust your instincts!

When I read that is was like an audio clip played in my head.

I need to read what juroara said. Just so long... but that's a good thing. I really appreciate the fact that you go to insane lengths to explain things!

I am going to the coop. Will be back with choccy!!

There's a reason why we have them, trust them.

I, too, agree with almost everything Juroara said. Excellent read!! (Holy Spirit, I believe, CAN have negative feelings such as anger associated with it. Jesus was filled with Spirit when he drove the merchants out of the temple,for instance)

If I have any STRONG immediate reactions, I step back and ask myself "why". It's never failed me. Sometimes it IS a reaction to something I was taught as a child, but other times it has no foreseen "cause" and I pay close attention to those "instincts".

My opinion is that its just a function of the human brain that hasn't been researched enough yet. I don't think it is spiritual or related to religion in any way. I just think people assume that its more complicated, because of the human need to have an explanation for how everything works.

Your 'instincts' are just another set of senses, that sadly our culture has neglected to the point of atrophy. Have you ever been out at night with no moon and been sure that you saw something that turned out to be something completely different? This is the same with someone who is not practiced at using their gut feelings. Learning how to read your 'hunches' properly will make them more useful.

I'm a bit confused at juroara's post.

You said that the subconscious is the Super conscious, and then you said that the Super conscious would not make you respond automatically, but the subconscious would.

You also said that we should not trust our intuition for answers to the world, but we can trust it in certain circumstances.

If the Super conscious knows me, then why would it not just try to convince me of things in a logical fashion? What, does it think that if it nags loud enough I'm all of a sudden going to be convinced?

Every time I am faced with a decision I always think ahead. When I am walking down the street (I am sure many people do this) its as if I am a few meters ahead of myself. If someone walks in the way of my path, I'll avoid them before getting near them. Same applies to anything I do. If I have a feeling I should go left instead of right, I try to think of all the possibilities, and think if something does go wrong would it be possible to turn back?
If in any case I do get an urge to do one thing over another for an unknown reason, its never any more accurate than any other way of making decisions.

Originally Posted by Idolfan

You said that the subconscious is the Super conscious, and then you said that the Super conscious would not make you respond automatically, but the subconscious would.

I understand the confusion, the problem is were using the subconscious to describe a whole range of activity that's actually contradictory. What I was saying was that currently science has not made the distinction between the two.

We now understand that the subconscious can hold false beliefs. An example would be if your parents told you at a young age that you aren't deserving of good things. This false belief could still effect you 30 years later at a job interview!

The subconscious is simply a machine in this case. It activates the false belief like a program. It DOES NOT CARE if losing the job opportunity makes you miserable. It's not even capable of caring. It's only job is to insure that these programs are activated. In this case, at the interview making you act like an idiot because you don't 'deserve' a good job.

Now here's why I separate the two.............listening to your intuition leads you to happiness!!

Well how can the subconscious be both?

How can the subconscious both hold false beliefs regardless of how miserable it makes us, and at the same time be a self-guiding force to happiness? The simple answer is it can't be! Guiding us to happiness requires for it to make judgemental decisions of what's good and bad for us. But as we can see in the above example, the subconscious doesn't pass the necessary judgment to guide us to happiness.That's why I decided this self-guiding force to happiness is coming from another 'mind'. I just called it Super because I thought it was super!

You also said that we should not trust our intuition for answers to the world, but we can trust it in certain circumstances.

Its not that you can't trust your intuition to tell you 'truth' about the world. It's simply you need to understand that this truth is limited to the amount of information your intuition has. The more you know the more your intuition will know......But who here knows everything????

It's much 'safer' to use your intuition to learn about yourself. Something it knows and understands very well!

If the Super conscious knows me, then why would it not just try to convince me of things in a logical fashion? What, does it think that if it nags loud enough I'm all of a sudden going to be convinced?

I forgot to go over this in my post, but that's okay because I knew you would ask

Why doesn't our intuition just verbally shout in our heads what to do, this way there is no confusion and the message is clear? Well, that would lead to utter disaster!! The intuition isn't the only part of your mind that's speaking in your head..................Your not so smart subconscious is also speaking!! Trusting the voices in your head if you don't practice daily meditation, isn't a very good idea.

Our intuition FIRST communicates to us via imagery and emotions. This leads us to the second problem. How do we know the difference between emotions trying to guide us to our personal happiness? And emotions from the subconscious 'machine'?

The answer is.......to uncover and dissolve your false beliefs in your subconscious. If you can do this, the distracting mind chatter goes away and you can gain control over your emotions again. Making intuition easy to listen to and UNDERSTAND.

But...........this proces can take years!

If you want to begin listening to your intuition now, you need to temporarily silent the subconscious mind. And consciously ingage with your intuition. There are meditations to help you do this.

If we ignore this initial feeling and fail to quiet the mind, the feeling only comes back stronger. Till the point it becomes stress or anxiety. The stress and anxiety can even get to the point where we become physically ill. What's the point of making us physically ill? To get us to slow down. To get us to take a day off a work and relax.

And unknowingly, in the process we quiet our mind. Just long enough to realize that were not living the life we WANT to live. Or were not being who we WANT to be.

If we continue to ignore our intuition this time, to ignore our deepest desires - we unknowingly turn off the part of our mind that experiences the intuitive feelings. Making us numb and apathetic to life. And since without our intuition, we won't know even know what we want- we make even poorer choices for ourselves.




Good news!! The more you quiet your mind and resolve the past, the more your left brain gets involved and transforms your intuitive feelings into a logical plan of action. This is the way intuition is supposed to work. You SHOULD understand it. Were just all a little dysfunctional right now....!






I do NOT think intuition is necessarily mystical or magical. Keep in mind intuition has always been believed to be a feminine feeling of knowing without knowledge. The 'without knowledge' part has made science skeptical of intuition for years

It's only now, thanks to quantum physics and the digital age, that science is beginning to take intuition seriously.

The digital age has really showed us that energy can carry vasts amount of information. What quantum physics is explaining is that we have a field of energy around our body. Some now even believe our consciousness is a field of energy. Some are theorizing this field of energy we have carries information. And can read vasts amount of information from other fields of energy in the environment......But if this is true, where is all of this information going? Not our consciousness, otherwise we would be conscious of it

I think of those gut feelings this way:

I see, hear, feel, smell, and taste many things. I don't directly notice all aspects of these things at all times. Occasionally my subconscious may pick up on something that my conscious half may have missed. These gut feelings are a sort of survival reaction from the subconscious trying to avoid negative situations/gravitate toward positive ones.

As for your experience where following your gut would have led to homophobia... recall all the experiments and research regarding hypnosis, subliminal messages, brain flooding, etc.? They all suggest to me one thing: once the subconscious decides something is either positive or negative, it is very hard to change that decision. You only recently changed your views on homosexuality, and part of your mind might not be totally with it just yet.

juroara, your post was brilliant. This is exactly how I thought of it. Conscious, subconscious, and super-conscious..or universal-conscious

I woke up prematurely from sleeping one morning to here a voice..or to be more precise a "thought". A thought that wasn't mine, it's not something that I would even think or tell myself.

I think this might have been a subconscious communication type of thing. This happend like maybe 2 or 3 months back.

I didn't want to accept the message it gave me...I ignored it, but it's definitely something i needed to hear. Recently I have applied to message. And you are right about listening to intuition, it really does lead to happiness.

But it's hard to hear that voice, and even harder to communicate with it because there is so much fear, and other chaotic shit rooted in the subconscious mind. Most of it having to do with waking life.

What was the meditation technique you spoke of?


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Something else like this also happened about 2 weeks ago, when i was high as hell off weed...some random/chaotic/fear based thoughts were racing through my mind..I haven't been high like this in a long while. In between all the chaotic thoughts, another message came to me. This one didn't seem alien like the first time, I felt like this message was from me or the subconscious mind again, it was something else I needed to hear.....a message that I felt was for my own well-being too.

I think weed REALLY does take you to the subconscious mind..or rather lets it surface. I'm just not ready to access "GOD-conscious or super conscious" or being enlightened...

I know it's all about love and whatever. But I just need it to achieve goals. I don't want to come back, feeling like some spiritual guru, or being enlightened, petting cute little animals and watching rainbows and sunsets. After being in the universal consciousness...I probably wouldn't want to come back....people have committed suicide after knowing about all of this with psychedelics like salvia and mushrooms.