Intuition Is Always Right Quotes

intuition is always right in at least two important ways; It is always in response to something. it always has your best interest at heart

Reason offers us many possibilities at once. Intuition infallibly chooses the best. Remember this and you cannot err; you will always make the right choice.

As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go.

Learn to hear your inner voice, be led by your heart and never stop giving back – this way you shall always walk the right path and shall never be walking alone.

But then there are those people who overidentify with their emotions. Everything is justified for no other reason than they felt it. “Oh, I broke your windshield, but I was really mad; I couldn’t help it.” Or “I dropped out of school and moved to Alaska just because it felt right.” Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks. You know who bases their entire lives on their emotions? Three-year-old kids. And dogs. You know what else three-year-olds and dogs do? Shit on the carpet.

Life doesn't always hand you the answers. Sometimes the best you can do is make a decision and stick to it. Tali's dad always says that the best business decisions rely on intuition, after all. There isn't always a right move, just a move that feels right.

Nearly all economists disagreed with Trump, but he found an academic economist who hated free trade as much as he did. He brought him to the White House as both director of trade and industrial policy and director of the National Trade Council. Peter Navarro was a 67-year-old Harvard PhD in economics. “This is the president’s vision,” Navarro publicly said. “My function really as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.

Intuition is the language of silence, the Existential language. The word "in-tuition" means to listen within yourself. Intuition is the silent voice within, which is already in contact with the Existence. Intuition is the voice of God. The more you come in contact with the inner silence, the inner emptiness, the more you have access to your intuition. Silence is the nourishment for intuition. If something increases your love, joy and silence, it is the criterion that it is the right path for you. If something decreases your love, joy and silence, it is a sign that you are on the wrong path. Do not compare yourself with others when it comes to take a decision about what you should do, follow the love, joy and silence of your heart and inner being. When you are in contact with your inner silence, you just know what you should do - you do not have to think about it, and you do not need not compare the pros and cons - you just know. You can listen to the advice of others, but always listen to your intuition, to your inner teacher and guide in life, when you take the final decision. The intuition, the language of silence, will always lead your right.

Navarro publicly said. “My function really as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.

Through learning to listen to our own intuition, it develops to a constantly available inner source of love, truth and wisdom. We can close our eyes, go within, and always receive the right guidance.

Trump’s economic adviser Peter Navarro updates this refrain when he says: “My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.

As I continued letting my right hand know what my left hand was doing (and vice versa), I could feel the split within me begin to heal. The conscious and unconscious, the rational and intuitive, the thinking and feeling sides of my inner world began to embrace each other. In times of inner conflict, I turned to this wondrous process. It always brought clarity and insight. It always left me feeling better.

Men don’t want to give the truth. They can’t face the fact that they’re assholes.’ But I realized that women can’t face the truth because often they are really naive. Really. If a woman had so much intuition, wouldn’t she know that the guy was just not that into her? Wouldn’t she realize after her friends told her so? Wouldn’t she comprehend by listening to herself crib about him continuously? Why do so many women ask for the truth when truth is staring at them right in the face? It’s probably because women need to hear it. From him. The man that she has given her heart to. That’s the real reason. She needs to hear him say the words, ‘I don’t love you. We can never have a future.’ And how many men have actually said that? None. Because they always want to leave the window of ‘opportunity’ open for a ‘what if’. And that’s why women will be shattered over a break-up for a far longer time than men. Men don’t need explanations. They think, ‘It wasn’t meant to be.’ And have another glass of beer and go back to working on their Excel sheets in the morning.

We don't have to see the whole road ahead of us to assure that we're going in the right direction. We take it in stride by staying positive, having faith, and maintaining that vision of happiness. Sometimes I obsess over trying to control the circumstances and wanting to always know the outcome, but the truth is, it is created all along the way. We aid it by our choices. The guidance is there. As soon as we take that single first step in the direction of our Destiny, signs are posted all along the way. All we have to do is keep our eyes peeled! If you want your life filled with abundance, be grateful for what you have. When you realize how abundant your life is already, you attract further abundance

If you have a library of concepts and solutions internalized as chunked patterns, you can more easily skip to the right solution to a problem by listening to the whispers from your diffuse mode. Your diffuse mode can also help you connect two or more chunks together in new ways to solve unusual problems. There are two ways to solve problems—first, through sequential, step-by-step reasoning, and second, through more holistic intuition. Sequential thinking, where each small step leads deliberately toward the solution, involves the focused mode. Intuition, on the other hand, often seems to require a creative, diffuse mode linking of several seemingly different focused mode thoughts. Most difficult problems are solved through intuition, because they make a leap away from what you are familiar with.24 Keep in mind that the diffuse mode’s semi-random way of making connections means that the solutions it provides with should be carefully verified using the focused mode. Intuitive insights aren’t always correct!25

One thing concerns me a little, nick has a girlfriend, right? Well, how do you think she'll  feel about all of this? He probed. He had this look on his face that he always had when I'm doing something a little bit naughty. You know, something you can get away with, but it's still a bit dodgy.

The principles of Jiu Jitsu can be applied to every endeavor in life. You have stay calm when you are in bad situations. You need to cover and conceal your intent with other maneuvers. You need to utilize the simplest and most efficient methods. You need to prioritize your focus of effort. You need to train until you trust yourself to move intuitively, without having to think. You need to move at the right time. You have to defend critical areas. You should not attack your enemy’s strongpoints. You must utilize leverage. You cannot let your emotions drive your decisions. You have to establish a good base foundation to build upon. You cannot be overly aggressive, but you can’t just allow things to happen. When you make a move, you have to believe in what you are doing. You have to be mentally strong. You have to keep an open mind. You have to continuously learn new techniques while always reinforcing the fundamentals. You have to adapt your plan if circumstances change.

Divide and conquer is best accomplished through silencing, through calling into question those who speak out. There is so much of this attached to the trans movement. Even just wondering about a profound concept such as transgender is labeled “transphobic”. What I think has happened is that people are now phobic about their own gut responses to life. We are being systematically separated from our own intuition. This is fatal for a civilization, I think. Not that our intuition always tells the truth with a capital T, but it is a critical piece of who we are. Without it, we remain profoundly directionless, and more susceptible to coercion of all types. What

Whether we can somehow listen in on tree talk is a subject that was recently addressed in the specialized literature. Korean scientists have been tracking older women as they walk through forests and urban areas. The result? When the women were walking in the forest, their blood pressure, their lung capacity, and the elasticity of their arteries improved, whereas an excursion into town showed none of these changes. It's possible that phytoncides have a beneficial effect on our immune systems as well as the trees' health, because they kill germs. Personally, however, I think the swirling cocktail of tree talk is the reason we enjoy being out in the forest so much. At least when we are out in undisturbed forests. Walkers who visit one of the ancient deciduous preserves in the forest I manage always report that their heart feels lighter and they feel right at home. If they walk instead through coniferous forests, which in Central Europe are mostly planted and are, therefore, more fragile, artificial places, they don't experience such feelings. Possibly it's because in ancient beech forests, fewer "alarm calls" go out, and therefore, most messages exchanged between trees are contented ones, and these messages reach our brains as well, via our noses. I am convinced that we intuitively register the forest's health.

Within each one of us there is a healer. Healing has always been a way and a deep source of joy for me. Healing is basically our own energy, which overflows from our inner being, from the meditative quality within, from the inner silence and emptiness. Healing is pure love in essence. Love is what creates healing. Love is the strongest force there is. The sheer presence of love is, in itself, healing. It is more the absence of love – than the presence of love –, which creates problems. Healing is a quality, which we can freely share without any ownership. Healing is not something that we can claim as our own; healing is to be a medium, a channel, for the whole. Healing is a medium through which we can develop our inner qualities of presence, love, joy, intuition, truth, silence, wisdom, creativity and inner wholeness. Healing comes originally from the silence within, where we are already in contact with the whole, with the divine. Healing is what makes us spread our inner wings of love and silence and soar high on the sky of consciousness and touch the stars. Healing is to be in service of God. People who have a quality of heart and sensitivity are naturally healing. With some people that we meet, we feel naturally uplifted and inspired. With other people that we meet, we become tired and heavy. With people, who can listen without judging and evaluating, it is easy to find the right words to share problems and difficulties. And with other people, it seems almost impossible to find the right words. People, who have a healing presence and quality, can support our own inner source of love, truth and silence through their presence. These people also seem to have an intuitive sensitivity to saying the right words, which lift and inspires us. This is the people whose presence can mirror the inner truth, which we already know deep within ourselves. The human heart is a healer, which heals others and ourselves. It is the hearts quality of love, acceptance and compassion, plus communication through words, that creates healing. A word that comes from the heart creates healing. A silent listening with a quality of presence and an accepting attitude creates space for healing to happen. Without love it is only possible to reach the personality of the other person, to reach the surface and periphery of the other person The gift of healing comes when we see the other person with love and compassion. It is the quality of heart, which creates the love and the genuine caring for the other person. When our words are carried by the quality of heart, you can say almost anything to the other person and he will still be able to be open and receptive. But if our words lack the quality of heart, it also becomes difficult for the other person to continue to be open and receptive. Even if a therapist is very skilful, technically, or has a clear clairvoyant ability, and still lacks the natural roots in the soil of the heart, then his words will not touch the heart of the other person.

Letting go is not about sacrifice, nor does it breed lazy inactivity; it’s simply a return to Being. It is a shift from an assertive focus on action and results in a softer, intuitive state where you will “be with,” notice, and appreciate what’s in the moment with you. It’s about moving from noise into silence. When done right, letting go is about centering, and it always leads to your home frequency.

Withdrawing. If you do this, a lot of people will call you a ‘defeatist’ or a ‘doomer’, or claim you are ‘burned out’. They will tell you that you have an obligation to work for climate justice or world peace or the end of bad things everywhere, and that ‘fighting’ is always better than ‘quitting’. Ignore them, and take part in a very ancient practical and spiritual tradition: withdrawing from the fray. Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel – intuit – work out what is right for you, and what nature might need from you. Withdraw because refusing to help the machine advance – refusing to tighten the ratchet further – is a deeply moral position. Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction. Withdraw to examine your worldview: the cosmology, the paradigm, the assumptions, the direction of travel. All real change starts with withdrawal.

there is always a single “source”: the person who took the first risk on a new initiative. That source maintains a unique relationship with the gestalt of the original idea and has an intuitive knowledge of what the right next step for the initiative is, whereas others who join later to help with the execution often lack that intuitive connection to the founder’s original insight. Many organizational tensions and power struggles often revolve around lack of explicit acknowledgment of who the source of the initiative is.

Regard yourself as a cloud, in the flesh, because you see, clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that was misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No, they always do the right thing. But, if you will, treat yourself for a while as a cloud or a wave and realize that you can’t make a mistake whatever you do. Because even if you do something that appears totally disastrous, it will all come out in the wash somehow or another. Then through this capacity you will develop a kind of confidence. And through confidence you will be able to trust your own intuition.

THE MYSTIC ALWAYS RISES As she let her soul sing to her, she let go of lifetimes’ worth of silenced truth missiles cemented in the deepest caverns of her soul. A voice snuffed out for centuries, for saying too much, for standing up too much, for being too much. Her intuition and bigness restrained for centuries, but not any more. She could not be locked away, muted, or extinguished any longer. Not now. Not ever again. As she let her spirit move her, she danced right through the flames. Resentment, anger, and memories stomped out with every blazing convulsion, sway, and kick. Sensing her in the distance, one by one her sisters joined her, knowing this dance by heart. The movement created space for their tears, which flowed deeper than all of the rivers and lakes from all of the ages. Soothing and cooling the burning that once enveloped her entire being. Her whole body. All of her bodies. All of their bodies. All of our bodies. Never forgetting. But still rising, just as she planned to. Just as we planned to. Rising and rising and rising and rising and rising. Standing taller than all the sisters who came before and will continue to come again. The mystic always rises.

We've all heard the stories. It's just that some people don't want to believe them. 'He shall rise from the green' doesn't have to mean coming from the Blood Forest or Ruthgar. It could mean he starts out drafting green. One of the first glimmers of Breaker's magical genius showed whyen he went green golem in the Battle of Garriston - he'd never even heard of going green golem. He intuited it on the spot. His will was so strong, he drafted a green that stopped musket balls, Teia. 'He shall kill gods and kings'? He already done both. 'He'll be an outsider'? How much more outsider can you be than a mixed-blood bastard from Tyrea? Each of those things offend the luxiats, and all of them together make their blood boil - as it makes them furious that a Lightbringer would be necessary to put their worship right - but hasn't Orholam's work always offended those in power? I won't put myself on the wrong side of Orholam. 'In the darkest hour, when the abominations come the sores of Big Jasper, when Hope himself has died, then shall he bring the holy light and banish darkness.' 'Hope himself,' Teia. That's Gavin Guile. He's dead. our darkest hour is coming. We have to pick a side.

Another feature distinguishing Emily from the multitude was a kind of special sensitivity that couldn’t be explained from a stereotypical point of view. It was natural for her to make decisions based on so-called sixth feeling instead of logic. Sometimes, she simply felt and knew that it was right to act in a certain way, or that something particular was going to happen in the closest future. It’s interesting that, when she tested decisions made up by intellect and the ones when followed intuition, the latter always won. But how could she explain it to an average person, like those surrounding her in everyday life?

Listen closely to that inner voice. The answer is almost always right there in your gut, and science backs that up. Western culture has a long history of discounting the importance of intuition in favor of so-called rational thought. Only over the last few decades have researchers begun to discover that reason is far from perfect: everyday human cognition is limited, slow, and distorted by unhelpful biases. Meanwhile, intuition has increasingly revealed itself to be a mind-bogglingly quick, sensitive, and perceptive tool, rapidly picking up on subtleties and patterns in the world that the conscious mind isn’t powerful enough to spot.

Preceding the birth of every religion, there was someone who was an incarnation of this process: imagination causes inspiration causes intuition causes beauty, which causes imagination…the dynamic that takes place in the dimension of spirit. That is, for whatever reasons that will remain mysterious, although they are suggested in various schools of thought, someone got the cause thing down right, and the rest flowed. After the fact, an effort was made, almost always by others, to control both the impact of this and the possible benefits from it. Ambition and desire took over. Where you had an exact presentation, or manifestation, of beauty and truth, somebody began using it for other purposes.

Your life is always speaking to you in whispers, guiding you to your next right step. And in many situations, the whisper is also the first warning. It’s a quiet nudge from deep within saying, Hmmm, something feels off. A small voice that tells you, This is no longer your place of belonging. It’s the pit in your stomach, or the pause before you speak. It’s the shiver, the goosebumps that raise the hairs on the back of your neck. Whatever form the whisper takes, it’s not a coincidence. Your life is trying to tell you something. Heeding these signs can open the doors to your personal evolution, pushing you toward your life’s purpose. Ignoring them or sleepwalking through your life, is an invitation to chaos.

Most of us may intuitively agree about right and wrong, but we also, and far more significantly, differ enormously in the ways in which we rank the virtues and the vices. ... To put cruelty first is to disregard the idea of sin as it is understood by revealed religion. Sins are transgressions of a divine rule and offenses against God; pride - the rejection of God - must always be the worst one, which gives rise to all the others. However, cruelty - the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear - is a wrong done entirely to another creature. When it is marked as the supreme evil it is judged so in and of itself, and not because it signifies a denial of God or any other higher norm. It is a judgment made from within the world in which cruelty occurs as part of our normal private life and our daily public practices. By putting it unconditionally first, with nothing above us to excuse or to forgive acts of cruelty, one closes off any appeal to any order other than that of actuality. To hate cruelty with utmost intensity is perfectly compatible with Biblical religiosity, but to put it first does place one irrevocably outside the sphere of revealed religion. For it is a purely human verdict upon human conduct, and so puts religion at a certain distance. The decision to put cruelty first is not, however, prompted merely by religious skepticism. It emerges, rather, from the recognition that the habits of the faithful do not differ from those of the faithless in their brutalities, and that Machiavelli had triumphed before he had ever written a line. To put cruelty first therefore is to be at odds not only with religion but with normal politics as well.

While a 10x improvement is gargantuan, Teller has very specific reasons for aiming exactly that high. “You assume that going 10x bigger is going to be ten times harder,” he continues, “but often it’s literally easier to go bigger. Why should that be? It doesn’t feel intuitively right. But if you choose to make something 10 percent better, you are almost by definition signing up for the status quo—and trying to make it a little bit better. That means you start from the status quo, with all its existing assumptions, locked into the tools, technologies, and processes that you’re going to try to slightly improve. It means you’re putting yourself and your people into a smartness contest with everyone else in the world. Statistically, no matter the resources available, you’re not going to win. But if you sign up for moonshot thinking, if you sign up to make something 10x better, there is no chance of doing that with existing assumptions. You’re going to have to throw out the rule book. You’re going to have to perspective-shift and supplant all that smartness and resources with bravery and creativity.” This perspective shift is key. It encourages risk taking and enhances creativity while simultaneously guarding against the inevitable decline. Teller explains: “Even if you think you’re going to go ten times bigger, reality will eat into your 10x. It always does. There will be things that will be more expensive, some that are slower; others that you didn’t think were competitive will become competitive. If you shoot for 10x, you might only be at 2x by the time you’re done. But 2x is still amazing. On the other hand, if you only shoot for 2x [i.e., 200 percent], you’re only going to get 5 percent and it’s going to cost you the perspective shift that comes from aiming bigger.” Most critically here, this 10x strategy doesn’t hold true just for large corporations. “A start-up is simply a skunk works without the big company around it,” says Teller. “The upside is there’s no Borg to get sucked back into; the downside is you have no money. But that’s not a reason not to go after moonshots. I think the opposite is true. If you publicly state your big goal, if you vocally commit yourself to making more progress than is actually possible using normal methods, there’s no way back. In one fell swoop you’ve severed all ties between yourself and all the expert assumptions.” Thus entrepreneurs, by striving for truly huge goals, are tapping into the same creativity accelerant that Google uses to achieve such goals. That said, by itself, a willingness to take bigger risks

In every area of thought we must rely ultimately on our judgments, tested by reflection, subject to correction by the counterarguments of others, modified by the imagination and by comparison with alternatives. Antirealism is always a conjectural possibility: the question can always be posed, whether there is anything more to truth in a certain domain than our tendency to reach certain conclusions in this way, perhaps in convergence with others. Sometimes, as with grammar or etiquette, the answer is no. For that reason the intuitive conviction that a particular domain, like the physical world, or mathematics, or morality, or aesthetics, is one in which our judgments are attempts to respond to a kind of truth that is independent of them may be impossible to establish decisively. Yet it may be very robust all the same, and not unjustified. To be sure, there are competing subjectivist explanations of the appearance of mind-independence in the truth of moral and other value judgments. One of the things a sophisticated subjectivism allows us to say when we judge that infanticide is wrong is that it would be wrong even if none of us thought so, even though that second judgment too is still ultimately grounded in our responses. However, I find those quasi-realist, expressivist accounts of the ground of objectivity in moral judgments no more plausible than the subjectivist account of simpler value judgments. These epicycles are of the same kind as the original proposal: they deny that value judgments can be true in their own right, and this does not accord with what I believe to be the best overall understanding of our thought about value. There is no crucial experiment that will establish or refute realism about value. One ground for rejecting it, the type used by Hume, is simply question-begging: if it is supposed that objective moral truths can exist only if they are like other kinds of facts--physical, psychological, or logical--then it is clear that there aren't any. But the failure of this argument doesn't prove that there are objective moral truths. Positive support for realism can come only from the fruitfulness of evaluative and moral thought in producing results, including corrections of beliefs formerly widely held and the development of new and improved methods and arguments over time. The realist interpretation of what we are doing in thinking about these things can carry conviction only if it is a better account than the subjectivist or social-constructivist alternatives, and that is always going to be a comparative question and a matter of judgment, as it is about any other domain, whether it be mathematics or science or history or aesthetics.

Well, I’ll tell you this, Mr. Michael. You’re going to walk in there, people are going to tell you things and they’ll say it’s true, but know this: instincts beat advice. Your instincts beat everyone else’s conviction. Including mine. What anyone ever tells you can absolutely expire the second something new happens. We already know what to do, sweetie. And most advice can be narrowed down to: it’s best you try again. But our instincts are a powerful tool, you ought to listen to them. And you know, Michael, it’s not always worth explaining to people. We are too rational to believe extraordinary things can happen sometimes. But”—she smiled—“the most extraordinary times I remember were when I quieted the other voices beside me and embraced the room. The other person. A look. Their voice. Their body. Timing. You’ll feel it Michael and it’s more important you snatch those moments right when they appear. Chase that. Does that make sense?

Who you are is terrific. You are here to become yourself as fully as you can. Always weigh the costs and consequences of your choices as they affect others, but you are here to live your journey, not someone else’s and certainly not mine. I am living my journey so you won’t have to worry about me. You have within you a powerful source — call it your instinct, your intuition, your gut wisdom — which will always tell you what is right for you. Serve that, respect that. Be generous to yourself and others, but always live what is right for you. Life is really rather simple: if you do what is right for you, it is right for you and others. If you do what is wrong for you, it will be wrong for you and others. Know that we may not always agree on things, and that is fine, because we are different people, not clones. Always know that I will respect you and value you no matter your choices, and you will always find here people who love you and care for you.

11. Never give up on yourself Everyone may give up on you but never give up on yourself, because if you do, it will also become the end. Believe that anything can be achieved with effort. Most important of all, we must understand that dyslexia is not just a hindrance to learning; it may also be considered a gift. Multiple studies have proven that dyslexic people are highly creative and intuitive. Not to mention the long list of dyslexic people who have succeeded in their chosen fields; Known scientist and the inventor of telephone, Alexander Graham Bell; The inventor of telescope, Galileo Galilei; Painter and polymath, Leonardo da Vinci; Mathematician and writer Lewis Carroll; American journalist, Anderson Cooper; Famous actor, Tom Cruise; Director of our all time favorites Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg; Musician Paul Frappier; Entrepreneur and Apple founder, Steve Jobs; and maybe the person who is reading this book right now. We must always remember, everything can be learned and anyone can learn how to read!  

We enjoy the poetics but also know we can’t always live off our feelings. We’ve long intuited that a long-distance marathon like ours must be run on more than romance. We delight in each other enough that when we don’t, we still push each other to push through the pain barrier. To try to make it to the next level. Ali calls this “the work of love,” and maybe some days that’s shorthand for me being hard work. But she’s right: love is work. Good work. We may let the scaffolds fall, but we have built our wall. Ali gets fidgety when I get too serious. As I am now. Struggling to express how every day that we give to each other adds both weight and … weightlessness. Gravity and grace. Am I more desperate for our marriage to make it than Ali, who is never as desperate as her husband? I have the most to learn from this relationship, and one of the profoundest lessons it has taught me is in raising children. I’d had that blood-brother compact with my childhood friend Guggi to never grow up, but as Ali and I had kids, I slowly understood that you can’t have a child and remain a child. I really don’t like goodbyes, but sometimes you have to say goodbye.

I truly believe that the history of the world would change if we could just imagine parents healthy enough, wise enough, mature enough, evolved enough to say to their growing children something like the following: “Who you are is terrific. You are here to become yourself as fully as you can. Always weigh the costs and consequences of your choices as they affect others, but you are here to live your journey, not someone else’s and certainly not mine. I am living my journey so you won’t have to worry about me. You have within you a powerful source — call it your instinct, your intuition, your gut wisdom — which will always tell you what is right for you. Serve that, respect that. Be generous to yourself and others, but always live what is right for you. Life is really rather simple: if you do what is right for you, it is right for you and others. If you do what is wrong for you, it will be wrong for you and others. Know that we may not always agree on things, and that is fine, because we are different people, not clones. Always know that I will respect you and value you no matter your choices, and you will always find here people who love you and care for you.

The idea that he might write a book worth reading had appealed to Teddy, and he imagined that if he followed Tom’s advice and example, then one day the right subject would present itself. Except somehow it never did. The problem was that no single interest felt more urgent than the next, and a good case could always be made for both. Maybe for him the right subject didn’t exist, or, conversely, they all were right, which ironically amounted to the same thing. Over time he came to suspect that what he lacked was an obsession, and apparently there was no cure for that. Had he been a horse, his trainer would’ve put blinders on him, narrowed his field of vision. Intellectual curiosity, moreover, was not the same as talent, and he gradually came to understand that his own particular aptitude was for fixing things. From an early age he’d possessed an intuitive grasp of how and why things went off the rails, as well as how to get them back on again. He enjoyed taking things apart and putting them back together. Whereas most people hated assigned tasks, especially complex ones, Teddy in fact enjoyed them. For this reason, the notion of fixing Everett’s botched job was appealing.

All my best decisions in life have come when I tuned into what felt like the best moves for me. I’d spent much of my life looking to others for answers, allowing their opinions to drown out my instincts. My default was to substitute others desires for my own. In fact, I’d done that so much that it became a habit, one I’m still unlearning. I’ve needed a lot of practice at putting my own ideas and intuition at the forefront and Oprah was encouraging me to again rehearse. ... That afternoon Oprah articulated the lesson to me in a way that turned on the lights. “You know what a resounding ‘yes’ feels like,” she said, “it’s undeniable. Nothing’s going stop you from doing it. You’re excited. You don’t have to convince yourself to move forward. You simply know this is the right thing.” And that is what I live by. I’ve made a lot of decisions from my head. I’ve chosen to go in this direction or that one based on finances, or because something seems like a great opportunity, or because I don’t want to hurt peoples feelings or disappoint them, or because someone is pushing me toward an agenda that serves them. But when I’ve listened to my heart, when I’ve trusted what my spirit is telling me, that ‘yes’ has always steered my right.

Brains with insufficient life experience have not had the chance to model the world into a few heuristics, and must instead try to reason their way to the right result, not unlike how psychopaths, who lack any moral intuitions, must reason their way through moral dilemmas. When teenagers are placed in a scanner and asked things such as whether it is a good idea to swim with sharks, they show substantially more frontal activation than adults, most of whom have learned over many years that swimming with sharks belongs in the “don't do” category without having to think much at all about it. That is, teenagers can reason, but their worldview is still too constricted to allow that reason to reliably result in rational outcomes.48 Of course, brains develop at rates that differ across individuals, just as some seventeen year olds have had more brain-tuning experiences than others. As a result, as all parents know, some teenagers are more responsible than others. Likewise, some adults are less responsible than others. Until neuroscience can tell us which brains are sufficiently responsible on an individual level, and indeed what “sufficiently responsible” is, the law must continue to do what humans have always done – make gross classifications based on categories rather than on individuals.

Psychoanalysis has suffered the accusation of being “unscientific” from its very beginnings (Schwartz, 1999). In recent years, the Berkeley literary critic Frederick Crews has renewed the assault on the talking cure in verbose, unreadable articles in the New York Review of Books (Crews, 1990), inevitably concluding, because nothing else really persuades, that psychoanalysis fails because it is unscientific. The chorus was joined by philosopher of science, Adolf Grunbaum (1985), who played both ends against the middle: to the philosophers he professed specialist knowledge of psychoanalysis; to the psychoanalysts he professed specialist knowledge of science, particularly physics. Neither was true (Schwartz, 1995a,b, 1996a,b, 2000). The problem that mental health clinicians always face is that we deal with human subjectivity in a culture that is deeply invested in denying the importance of human subjectivity. Freud’s great invention of the analytic hour allows us to explore, with our clients, their inner worlds. Can such a subjective instrument be trusted? Not by very many. It is so dangerously close to women’s intuition. Socalled objectivity is the name of the game in our culture. Nevertheless, 100 years of clinical practice have shown psychoanalysis and psychotherapy not only to be effective, but to yield real understandings of the dynamics of human relationships, particularly the reality of transference–countertransference re-enactments now reformulated by our neuroscientists as right brain to right brain communication (Schore, 1999).

Can you please also give me instructions for dancing?” “Excuse me?” “I need instructions for dancing. Like how do I move my body to music in front of other people? Break it down. Step by step.” “Seriously? Dancing isn’t one of those things that come with instructions. It’s not like putting together Ikea furniture.” “Please help me.” “Well, first of all, this is not the sort of music that will be playing.” She motions to the pianist, who is bald and bearded, which I’ve always found to be a bizarre combination. You would think you would want cranial and mandibular hair consistency. “No Ravel’s Bolero. Got it.” “No classical music, period. They’ll probably just play all the crap that’s on the radio.” “I amend my original request. I need instructions for dancing to noise.” “You just move your body to the beat. Feel the music.” Miney puts her arms up and sways to sounds I do not hear. She closes her eyes, leans on the tips of her toes, and jumps. After approximately ninety seconds, she stops and looks at me. “Your turn.” “I don’t think so.” Miney doesn’t respond. She just waits. “Fine.” I copy her, jump up and down, though I don’t actually jump down, which is a misnomer. I let gravity do its job. My sneakers make discordant squeaks along the marble floor. “No. Stop. You look like you’re having a seizure. Think of dancing like having a conversation but with the music instead of with another person. It’s all intuition and instinct.” “Right. Because I’m good at all three of those things. Intuition, instinct, and having conversations with other people.” “Little D, sarcasm becomes you. 

Live to start. Start to live. Don’t Wait. Start Stuff. People are innately passionate about certain unique aspects of life. You are innately passionate about certain unique aspects of life. And people are blessed with bouts of clear and concise intuition that drive them toward distinct goals and aspirations within their jobs and their lives as a whole.(You are not excluded from this group.) But people disregard these inspired thoughts, these high-potential opportunities, as “just another stupid idea.” Why? Perhaps they are concerned about a lack of support (perceived or otherwise) from others, or maybe they are afraid of what others will think of them if they fail. Whatever the reason, they convince themselves: “This would be a great idea for someone who has more free time.” “This would be a great idea for someone with a higher level of education.” “This would be a great idea for someone who has more money.” “Everybody thinks this idea is crazy. They must be right.” No matter the justification, the response is the same. These inspired thoughts, these high-potential ideas, are stuffed deep into the drawer labeled “stupid,” and they’re never heard from again . . . or the waiting game begins. People wait. They wait for that elusive day when they’ll finally have enough time (guess what? — you never will), enough education (there is always more to know), enough money (no matter how much you make, someone will always have more). They wait until the children are grown (news flash: just because they’re grown, it doesn’t mean you’re rid of them) or until things settle down at work (they never will). People wait until . . . until . . . until . . . They wait, and they wait, and they wait, until that fateful day when they wake up and realize that while they were sitting around, paying dues, earning their keep, waiting for that elusive “perfect time,” their entire life has passed them by.

True understanding is to see the events of life in this way: “You are here for my benefit, though rumor paints you otherwise.” And everything is turned to one’s advantage when he greets a situation like this: You are the very thing I was looking for. Truly whatever arises in life is the right material to bring about your growth and the growth of those around you. This, in a word, is art—and this art called “life” is a practice suitable to both men and gods. Everything contains some special purpose and a hidden blessing; what then could be strange or arduous when all of life is here to greet you like an old and faithful friend? I had a dream many years ago that sums up this thought in a different way, one that has become a sustaining metaphor for me. I am on a train going home to God. (Bear with me!) It’s a long journey, and everything that happens in my life is scenery along the way. Some of it is beautiful; I want to linger over it awhile, perhaps hold on to it or even try to take it with me. Other parts of the journey are spent grinding through a barren, ugly countryside. Either way the train moves on. And pain comes whenever I cling to the scenery, beautiful or ugly, rather than accept that all the scenery is grist for the mill, containing, as Marcus Aurelius counseled us, some hidden purpose and a hidden blessing. My family, of course, is on board with me. Beyond our families, we choose who is on the train with us, who we share our journey with. The people we invite on the train are those with whom we are prepared to be vulnerable and real, with whom there is no room for masks and games. They strengthen us when we falter and remind us of the journey’s purpose when we become distracted by the scenery. And we do the same for them. Never let life’s Iagos—flatterers, dissemblers—onto your train. We always get warnings from our heart and our intuition when they appear, but we are often too busy to notice. When you realize they’ve made it on board, make sure you usher them off the train; and as soon as you can, forgive them and forget them. There is nothing more draining than holding grudges.

In less than a week, Harvard was going to call on his darling Neil and explain how sorry he was for all his imaginary offenses, and Neil would say that he’d only been put off by Harvard’s awful best friend. Then Harvard would realize everything had been Aiden’s fault all along, and also Neil would tell Harvard that he missed him, and they would get back together. Aiden would have to pretend he was happy for them. This was one of a very few, very precious days, like fairy gold turning to dust and leaves as they slipped through his fingers. And Aiden was wasting it by being sick and disgusting. “Sorry for being gross,” Aiden murmured into his pillow. “Hey, no,” said Harvard. “You’re still really cute.” Aiden scoffed into the pillow, which turned into more coughing. Harvard patted him on the back. Harvard was so good at this boyfriend thing it was ridiculous. He was screwing up the boyfriend curve for all other boyfriends. That was why Aiden didn’t want any of the others. He felt horrible and unpleasantly hot, and he could only bear this when Harvard was with him. Most of life was generally unfair and unpleasant, but it was all right if Harvard was there. “Stay with me until I go to sleep,” Aiden murmured, willfully forgetting that lunch was over and Harvard should go to class. For Aiden, Harvard would usually break the rules. “If you want me to,” Harvard murmured back. Aiden was ill and miserable and unguarded enough to whisper, “I never want anything but you.” “Okay.” Harvard laughed quietly, kindly. “I think the cough syrup has made you a little loopy.” Aiden wanted to be angry with Harvard for never understanding, but thank God Harvard didn’t. Besides, Aiden never could entirely manage to be angry with him. The emotion wouldn’t coalesce in Aiden’s chest, always collapsing in on itself and changing into different feelings. As Aiden slid into sleep, like tumbling beneath a blanket of darkness, he felt an awareness even with his eyes closed that someone was stooping over him, like an intuition of a shadow, and then the soft press of Harvard’s lips against Aiden’s forehead. More a blessing than a kiss.

What are you thinking you need to do?” “I’m not thinking anything,” I said. “That’s the problem.” “Are you sure? Thoughts feel different once you get connected with the energy.” I gave him a puzzled look. “The words you have habitually willed through your head in an attempt to logically control events,” he explained, “stop when you give up your control drama. As you fill up with inner energy, other kinds of thoughts enter your mind from a higher part of yourself. These are your intuitions. They feel different. They just appear in the back of your mind, sometimes in a kind of daydream or mini-vision, and they come to direct you, to guide you.” I still didn’t understand. “Tell us what you were thinking about when we left you alone earlier,” Father Carl said. “I’m not sure I remember it all,” I said. “Try.” I tried to concentrate. “I was thinking about Wil, I guess, about whether he was close to finding the Ninth Insight, and about Sebastian’s crusade against the Manuscript.” “What else?” “I was wondering about Marjorie, about what happened to her. But I don’t understand how this helps me know what to do.” “Let me explain,” Father Sanchez said. “When you have acquired enough energy, you are ready to consciously engage evolution, to start it flowing, to produce the coincidences that will lead you forward. You engage your evolution, in a very specific way. First, as I said, you build sufficient energy, then you remember your basic life question—the one your parents gave you—because this question provides the overall context for your evolution. Next you center yourself on your path by discovering the immediate, smaller questions that currently confront you in life. These questions always pertain to your larger question and define where you currently, are in your lifelong quest. “Once you become conscious of the questions active in the moment, you always get some kind of intuitive direction of what to do, of where to go. You get a hunch about the next step. Always. The only time this will not occur is when you have the wrong question in mind. You see, the problem in life isn’t in receiving answers. The problem is in identifying your current questions. Once you get the questions right, the answers always come. “After you get an intuition of what might happen next,” he continued, “then the next step is to become very alert and watchful. Sooner or later coincidences will occur to move you in the direction indicated by the intuition.

I have a friend—she is the kind of friend that all of us have—who is a true believer in astrology and psychic phenomenon, a devotee of reiki, a collector of crystals, a woman who occasionally sends me emails with cryptic titles and a single line of text asking, for example, the time of day that I was born or whether I have any mental associations with moths. None that come immediately to mind, I write back. But then of course moths are suddenly everywhere: on watercolor prints in the windows of art shops, in Virginia Woolf’s diaries, on the pages of the illustrated children’s book I read to my nieces. This woman, whom I have known since I was very young, also experiences strange echoes and patterns, but for her they are not the result of confirmation bias or the brain’s inclination toward narrative. She believes that the patterns are part of the very fabric of reality, that they refer to universal archetypes that express themselves in our individual minds. Transcendent truths, she has told me many times, cannot be articulated intellectually because higher thought is limited by the confines of language. These larger messages from the universe speak through our intuitions, and we modern people have become so completely dominated by reason that we have lost this connection to instinct. She claims to receive many of these messages through images and dreams. In a few cases she has predicted major global events simply by heeding some inchoate sensation—an aching knee, the throbbing of an old wound, a general feeling of unease. This woman is a poet, and I tend to grant her theories some measure of poetic license. It seems to me that beneath all the New Agey jargon, she is speaking of the power of the unconscious mind, a realm that is no doubt elusive enough to be considered a mystical force in its own right. I have felt its power most often in my writing, where I’ve learned that intuition can solve problems more efficiently than logical inference. This was especially true when I wrote fiction. I would often put an image in a story purely by instinct, not knowing why it was there, and then the image would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for some conflict that emerged between the characters—again, something that was not planned deliberately—as though my subconscious were making the connections a step or two ahead of my rational mind. But these experiences always took place within the context of language, and I couldn’t understand what it would mean to perceive knowledge outside that context. I’ve said to my friend many times that I believe in the connection between language and reason, that I don’t believe thought is possible without it. But like many faith systems, her beliefs are completely self-contained and defensible by their own logic. Once, when I made this point, she smiled and said, “Of course, you’re an Aquarius.

The object of the mediating function, therefore, according to Schiller, is “living form,” for this would be precisely a symbol in which the opposites are united; “a concept that serves to denote all aesthetic qualities of phenomena and, in a word, what we call Beauty in the widest sense of the term.”75 But the symbol presupposes a function that creates symbols, and in addition a function that understands them. This latter function takes no part in the creation of the symbol, it is a function in its own right, which one could call symbolic thinking or symbolic understanding. The essence of the symbol consists in the fact that it represents in itself something that is not wholly understandable, and that it hints only intuitively at its possible meaning. The creation of a symbol is not a rational process, for a rational process could never produce an image that represents a content which is at bottom incomprehensible. To understand a symbol we need a certain amount of intuition which apprehends, if only approximately, the meaning of the symbol that has been created, and then incorporates it into consciousness. Schiller calls the symbol-creating function a third instinct, the play instinct; it bears no resemblance to the two opposing functions, but stands between them and does justice to both their natures—always provided (a point Schiller does not mention) that sensation and thinking are serious functions. But there are many people for whom neither function is altogether serious, and for them seriousness must occupy the middle place instead of play. Although elsewhere Schiller denies the existence of a third, mediating, basic instinct,76 we will nevertheless assume, though his conclusion is somewhat at fault, his intuition to be all the more accurate. For, as a matter of fact, something does stand between the opposites, but in the pure differentiated type it has become invisible. In the introvert it is what I have called feeling-sensation. On account of its relative repression, the inferior function is only partly attached to consciousness; its other part is attached to the unconscious. The differentiated function is the most fully adapted to external reality; it is essentially the reality-function; hence it is as much as possible shut off from any admixture of fantastic elements. These elements, therefore, become associated with the inferior functions, which are similarly repressed. For this reason the sensation of the introvert, which is usually sentimental, has a very strong tinge of unconscious fantasy. The third element, in which the opposites merge, is fantasy activity, which is creative and receptive at once. This is the function Schiller calls the play instinct, by which he means more than he actually says. He exclaims: “For, to declare it once and for all, man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly man when he is playing.” For him the object of the play instinct is beauty. “Man shall only play with Beauty, and only with Beauty shall he play.”77

February 13 The Devotion of Hearing Speak; for Thy servant heareth. 1 Samuel 3:10 Because I have listened definitely to one thing from God, it does not follow that I will listen to everything He says. The way in which I show God that I neither love nor respect Him is by the obtuseness of my heart and mind towards what He says. If I love my friend, I intuitively detect what he wants, and Jesus says, “Ye are My friends.” Have I disobeyed some command of my Lord’s this week? If I had realised that it was a command of Jesus, I would not consciously have disobeyed it; but most of us show such disrespect to God that we do not even hear what He says, He might never have spoken. The destiny of my spiritual life is such identification with Jesus Christ that I always hear God, and I know that God always hears me (John 11:41). If I am united with Jesus Christ, I hear God by the devotion of hearing all the time. A lily, or a tree, or a servant of God, may convey God’s message to me. What hinders me from hearing is that I am taken up with other things. It is not that I will not hear God, but that I am not devoted in the right place. I am devoted to things, to service, to convictions, and God may say what He likes but I do not hear Him. The child attitude is always “Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth.” If I have not cultivated this devotion of hearing, I can only hear God’s voice at certain times; at other times I am taken up with things—things which I say I must do, and I become deaf to Him, I am not living the life of a child. Have I heard God’s voice to-day?

These are two very different stories. Andrew likes Matthew’s story because it features Peter’s passion and intuitive understanding of who Jesus is. I prefer Luke’s version with its more gradual relationship-building process. Both are in the Bible. The question is which path should Joe have taken? Matthew’s or Luke’s? If he had followed Matthew, he would have left immediately without telling anyone, and set out for Georgia. Had he followed Luke’s model, Joe would take several months of waiting and watching before he made his journey. For Joe, the question was whether or not he was correctly discerning God’s call to a kingdom journey. My advice to him was that hearing God can be a hard habit to start. If we’re ever going to learn to hear God, we have to give him the benefit of the doubt. Since Jesus already commanded his disciples to go out into the nations, our posture should be one of leaning forward, assuming that Luke 10 applies to us, too. At the same time, we should seek confirmation from other believers who hear the voice of God, that’s always wise. Joe didn’t quit his job and start hitchhiking to Georgia that day, but the seed of kingdom journey was planted in his soul. A few months later, he came to a conference that our organization hosted in Georgia. Several months after that, Joe left for a year-long trip around the world knowing he was finally following God’s call. Joe was right when he e-mailed me. He sensed the Gift of Restlessness — God’s call to leave everything. Mirroring the path we see in Luke’s version, however, he had to get more confirmation.

Courage does not require rappelling across rocky cliffs but rather, day in and day out, overcoming our fears by stepping outside our personal comfort zone, following our intuition, and making ourselves available to the larger plan. It means we transcend our limited self-definitions to be open to new information and stretch beyond the way we’ve always done things in the past. It means we listen within and sometimes turn left when everyone else seems to be going right. It allows us to risk ridicule to create something new, or to risk rejection when we are being true to our sense of what’s right.

DECISIONS Useful: Graphical Presentation Monitor Key Indicators Effective Measurements Wisdom Knowledge The Goal: Strategic Thinking Predictive Value Experience and Judgment Automated Exception Notification Information Structured: Voluminous Grouped and Summarized Relationships Not Always Evident Raw Data: Massive Fragmented Meaningless Data EVENTS Figure 1-01. The Pyramid of KnowledgeToyota, this begins with genchi genbutsu, or gemba, which means literally “go see it for yourself. ” Taiichi Ohno, a founding father of Lean, once said, “Data is of course important in manufacturing, but I place the greatest emphasis on facts. ” 2 A direct and intuitive understanding of a situation is far more useful than mountains of data. The raw data stored in a database adds value for decision-making only if the right information is presented in the right format, to the right people, at the right time. A tall stack of printout may contain the right data, but it’s certainly not in an accessible format. Massive weekly batch printouts do not enable timely and proactive decisions. Raw data must be summarized, structured, and presented as digestible information. Once information is combined with direct experience, then the incredible human mind can extract and develop useful knowledge. Over time, as knowledge is accumulated and combined with direct experience and judgment, wisdom develops. This evolution is described by the classic pyramid of knowledge shown in Figure 1-01. BACK TO CHICAGO So what happened in Chicago? We can speculate upon several possible perspectives for why the team and its change leader were far from a true Lean system, yet they refused any help from IT providers: 1. They feared wasteful IT systems and procedures would be foisted on them.

I am at peace with everyone around me. No person, place, or thing has any power over me. I am the power and authority in my world. I choose the thoughts that recognize my own true worth. I recognize my own intuitive ability. I trust my intuition, for I am always in contact with Universal Wisdom and Truth. I always go in the right direction for me. I love and appreciate my beautiful nose!

I’d never been one to believe in my powers of intuition. I always thought it was more like guessing and a certain amount of the time you were right, and other times, you weren’t.

Following your intuition will always lead you to the best experience for your growth right now.

Peter Navarro, the director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, said about working for Trump, “My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.

Some of you may be struggling with discovering your vocation and feeling a little frustrated that your intuition is not helping you more. Alas, intuition can also stand in your way because it makes you aware of too many inner voices speaking for too many different possibilities. Yes, it would be desirable just to serve others, thinking little of my material gain. But that rules out a lifestyle with time to pursue the finer things in life. And both exclude the actualizing of my artistic gifts. And I have always admired the quiet life, centered in family. Or should it be centered in the spiritual? But that is so up in the air when I admire a life close to the earth. Perhaps I would be happiest working for ecological causes. But then, the needs of humans are so great. All the voices are strong. Which one is right? If you’re flooded with such voices, you will probably have trouble with decisions of all sorts; very intuitive people usually do. But you’ll need to develop your decision-making skills for whatever vocation you choose. So start now paring down the choices to two or three. Maybe make a rational list of the pros and cons. Or pretend you have made up your mind definitely one way and live with that for a day or two.

Trust that what causes alarm probably should, because when it comes to danger, intuition is always right in at least two important ways: 1. It is always in response to something. 2. It always has your best interest at heart.

Trust that what causes alarm probably should, because when it comes to danger, intuition is always right in at least two important ways: 1. It is always in response to something. 2. It always has your best interest at heart. Having just said that intuition is always right, I can imagine some readers resisting, so I’ll clarify. Intuition is always right in the ways I noted, but our interpretation of intuition is not always right. Clearly, not everything we predict will come to pass, but since intuition is always in response to something, rather than making a fast effort to explain it away or deny the possible hazard, we are wiser (and more true to nature) if we make an effort to identify the hazard, if it exists. If there’s no hazard, we have lost nothing and have added a new distinction to our intuition, so that it might not sound the alarm again in the same situation.

Trust that what causes alarm probably should, because when it comes to danger, intuition is always right in at least two important ways: 1. It is always in response to something. 2. It always has your best interest at heart. Having just said that intuition is always right, I can imagine some readers resisting, so I’ll clarify. Intuition is always right in the ways I noted, but our interpretation of intuition is not always right. Clearly, not everything we predict will come to pass, but since intuition is always in response to something, rather than making a fast effort to explain it away or deny the possible hazard, we are wiser (and more true to nature) if we make an effort to identify the hazard, if it exists. If there’s no hazard, we have lost nothing and have added a new distinction to our intuition, so that it might not sound the alarm again in the same situation. This process of adding new distinctions is one of the reasons it is difficult at first to sleep in a new house: Your intuition has not yet categorized all those little noises. On the first night, the clinking of the ice-maker or the rumbling of the water-heater might be an intruder. By the third night, your mind knows better and doesn’t wake you. You might not think intuition is working while you sleep, but it is.

The Gift of Fear, and Other Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence, security expert Gavin de Becker writes, “When it comes to danger, intuition is always right in at least two important ways: 1) It is always in response to something. 2) It always has your best interest at heart.”3

December 21 Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. Ralph Waldo Emerson The warrior has to trust his instinct, even if it goes against what everyone else thinks is right. Warriors must be able to count on their own sense of right and wrong, and be able to choose the right course of action. This only comes with time. You have to develop confidence in your own intuition. Your intuition will not lead you in the wrong direction, but you do have to learn how to listen to it. A few years back my wife and I were both teaching school in a small school district in Missouri. We were not happy there and wanted to get back to the Rocky Mountains, but couldn’t find teaching positions for the both of us in the same area. The choice was for us to stay where we were or just pick up, pack a truck, and move back to Colorado without any jobs. Now this would seem like an obvious choice to most people – keep your job. But we decided to listen to our instinct instead and stepped out on a limb. Our instinct told us it was time to go, so we packed a truck and moved to Colorado with no job prospects. Everyone who knew us thought that this was a ridiculous decision, but we felt it was right. In the end, we both found great jobs and everything worked out for the best. We listened to that inner voice instead of all the outside voices and outside reasoning, even though what our intuition was telling us seemed to be the unwise move to make. Always trust your instinct, even when you can’t figure out the logic behind it. I trust my intuition and it always guides me right.

The starting point of every crisis is always ridden with confusion and cluelessness. If we knew how to solve a problem, we would solve it, right? It is Life’s nature to present us with a problem that we are confounded by, that which we can’t immediately fathom, understand or solve. We begin by first denying the problem exists. Then we try resisting, try pushing back. But the problem does not let go of its stranglehold. Intuitively our response to a crisis is swift, aggressive, decisive action. But often times, when you can’t solve a crisis that way, you must pause, reflect and take calculated decisions, calmly. That’s the whole reason why a crisis arrives in the first place – to teach us faith and patience.

In this chapter I tried to show that Hume was right: • The mind is divided into parts, like a rider (controlled processes) on an elephant (automatic processes). The rider evolved to serve the elephant. • You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn’t change his judgment. • The social intuitionist model starts with Hume’s model and makes it more social. Moral reasoning is part of our lifelong struggle to win friends and influence people. That’s why I say that “intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.” You’ll misunderstand moral reasoning if you think about it as something people do by themselves in order to figure out the truth. • Therefore, if you want to change someone’s mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant first. If you ask people to believe something that violates their intuitions, they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch—a reason to doubt your argument or conclusion. They will almost always succeed.

Well, surely Kant was right in his claim that awareness is normally if not always awareness under concepts. Normally if not always my perception of the table is the perception of it under the concept of table, or the concept of item of furniture, or the concept of brown thing, or whatever. This part of Kant we should most definitely hang on to. We do interpret our experience conceptually. But notice that if we understand perception of an object as awareness of the object—rather than as awareness of a mental representation caused by the object—then it will not make sense to follow Kant in the further step he takes of thinking of concepts as rules for structuring the objects of our awareness. For now the objects of our awareness are not mental states but eagles and dogs. And eagles and dogs are already structured; they don’t await structuring by us...Concepts are not barriers between mind and reality but links. The concept of eagle is at one and the same time one of the concepts that I possess and one of the concepts that is satisfied by the thing I perceive, namely, an eagle. As I myself see the matter: to possess the concept of table is to grasp the property of being a table. If that is so, then properties are at one and the same time entities that we grasp and entities that external objects possess. They are the links. On this picture, how might God be gotten in mind? Notice that Kant’s use of the metaphor of boundary now no longer has applicability. We no longer have to suppose that the applicability of our concepts is confined to our intuitions. So one way we might get God in mind is by the use of definite descriptions. The expression, 'Creator of the universe' might pick God out; synonymously: 'The one who brought about all that might not have been.' And secondly, it may be that some human beings have had God in mind as that of which they were aware. For a possibility that we now have to take seriously is that human beings might sometimes have awareness of God.

Well, surely Kant was right in his claim that awareness is normally if not always awareness under concepts. Normally if not always my perception of the table is the perception of it under the concept of table, or the concept of item of furniture, or the concept of brown thing, or whatever. This part of Kant we should most definitely hang on to. We do interpret our experience conceptually. But notice that if we understand perception of an object as awareness of the object—rather than as awareness of a mental representation caused by the object—then it will not make sense to follow Kant in the further step he takes of thinking of concepts as rules for structuring the objects of our awareness. For now the objects of our awareness are not mental states but eagles and dogs. And eagles and dogs are already structured; they don’t await structuring by us...Concepts are not barriers between mind and reality but links. The concept of eagle is at one and the same time one of the concepts that I possess and one of the concepts that is satisfied by the thing I perceive, namely, an eagle. As I myself see the matter: to possess the concept of table is to grasp the property of being a table. If that is so, then properties are at one and the same time entities that we grasp and entities that external objects possess. They are the links. On this picture, how might God be gotten in mind? Notice that Kant’s use of the metaphor of boundary now no longer has applicability. We no longer have to suppose that the applicability of our concepts is confined to our intuitions. So one way we might get God in mind is by the use of definite descriptions. The expression, 'Creator of the universe' might pick God out; synonymously: 'The one who brought about all that might not have been.' And secondly, it may be that some human beings have had God in mind as that of which they were aware. For a possibility that we now have to take seriously is that human beings might sometimes have awareness of God.

But she did find out. And she had only one question for me after I confessed to being bullied. “Dear girl, why didn’t you just tell the truth right away? To your teacher? To me? To anyone?” Then she cried and embraced me with such force that I was never able to answer her question. But I had an answer. I did. I didn’t tell the truth because the truth hurt. What happened at school was bad enough, but Gran knowing about my suffering meant she experienced my pain too. That’s the trouble with pain. It’s as contagious as a disease. It spreads from the person who first endured it to those who love them most. Truth isn’t always the highest ideal; sometimes it must be sacrificed to stop the spread of pain to those you love. Even children know this intuitively.

Simple Fast Funnels may be the new kid on the block when it comes to a complete bumper to bumper CRM system, but it’s a force to be reckoned with! Business owners are switching over right and left and I’m going to outline 10 of the best features of Simple Fast Funnels so you can see what all the buzz is about! Funnel builder: Simple Fast Funnels has easy intuitive software so you can build your own landing pages, funnels, websites, sales pages etc. No developer needed, everything included and simple to use Email Software: Instead of paying hundreds or thousands per month to send emails, this software does it for you! You can have your entire email list automated or send emails on the fly, whatever fits the bill for you, they’ve got you covered and it’s so easy to track your email results so you can modify and make improvements as you go. Online Membership Area: Now, for no additional fees that lot’s of CRM software likes to charge, you can build glorious membership areas for your clients. You can control timing on video releases, give access for certain time periods upset packages… whatever your business looks like, if you can dream it, you can build it in the membership area. Survey and quiz generator: Ramp up your lead capture game to grow your customer list! One of the best ways to get leads is to get your customers talking about themselves. Not only do people love to take surveys and quizzes, but it can help you gather information about your clients to serve them better and grow your sales! SMS Marketing Software: If you’re not messaging your customers, you’re missing out, and if you are messaging your customers you’re probably over paying. Amazing automated intuitive SMS marketing can make your life much easier and allow you to reach your customers in more ways. Being where your customers are more present is always good for business. Simple Fast Funnels helps you get the cheapest SMS rates around and it automatically integrates into the system for your unified messages. Appointment booking: Another expensive thing you used to have to pay for and try to get to work properly with your website AND look decent is also built right in. Now, without leaving Simple Fast Funnels, you’re able to capture the lead, follow up with the lead all over the place, engage with them, build trust, book appointments, schedule calls and even send them automated text reminders. E com Purchases: Directly on your website, you’ll be able to take payments. No more invoices sent from other platforms, everything buttoned up nice and clean. Unified messaging: From now on, whether a client emails, texts, calls etc, it all shows up in one place at your end. This might not seem like a big deal, but it’s a HUGE pain to have to follow customers about and keep track of conversations. Now you see all your communication with customers in a neat little area. Blogs: Blogs these days can really help your marketing efforts across the board, and of course your blogs will be a perfect fit in your simple fast funnel account. Analytics: Data tracking when you’re dealing with features on various platforms is a nightmare. If you capture a lead on a Word press landing page, send it an email software like Keep, mail chimp or whatever, send them to a new website to schedule calls and another to make purchases… How could you possibly expect to get good customer data? Hosting all of your “business” in one location makes tracking flawless. The more customers you have the more data you need to be efficient. Cheers to making it easy. All that software and that’s just the top 10, guys there’s more. Simplefastfunnels.com also lets you have a 2 week free trial. Don’t take anyone word for anything. Go try it for yourself.

Your body has always been smarter than you. Your body works on instinct and intuition, both of which have access to really profound information. Your body knows when you need to eat, when you need to sleep, what you need to eat, and even knows when you aren’t on the right path. Your body is where the wisdom is. Trust it.

Look at stocks as part ownership of a business. 2. Look at Mr. Market—volatile stock price fluctuations—as your friend rather than your enemy. View risk as the possibility of permanent loss of purchasing power, and uncertainty as the unpredictability regarding the degree of variability in the possible range of outcomes. 3. Remember the three most important words in investing: “margin of safety.” 4. Evaluate any news item or event only in terms of its impact on (a) future interest rates and (b) the intrinsic value of the business, which is the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out during its remaining life, adjusted for the uncertainty around receiving those cash flows. 5. Think in terms of opportunity costs when evaluating new ideas and keep a very high hurdle rate for incoming investments. Be unreasonable. When you look at a business and get a strong desire from within saying, “I wish I owned this business,” that is the kind of business in which you should be investing. A great investment idea doesn’t need hours to analyze. More often than not, it is love at first sight. 6. Think probabilistically rather than deterministically, because the future is never certain and it is really a set of branching probability streams. At the same time, avoid the risk of ruin, when making decisions, by focusing on consequences rather than just on raw probabilities in isolation. Some risks are just not worth taking, whatever the potential upside may be. 7. Never underestimate the power of incentives in any given situation. 8. When making decisions, involve both the left side of your brain (logic, analysis, and math) and the right side (intuition, creativity, and emotions). 9. Engage in visual thinking, which helps us to better understand complex information, organize our thoughts, and improve our ability to think and communicate. 10. Invert, always invert. You can avoid a lot of pain by visualizing your life after you have lost a lot of money trading or speculating using derivatives or leverage. If the visuals unnerve you, don’t do anything that could get you remotely close to reaching such a situation. 11. Vicariously learn from others throughout life. Embrace everlasting humility to succeed in this endeavor. 12. Embrace the power of long-term compounding. All the great things in life come from compound interest.

Your intuition always knows what’s right for you. The only reason you’re hesitating is that you’re not accustomed to listening to your instinctual voice.” She

To apply first principles thinking to the field of value investing, consider several fundamental truths. Understand and practice the following if you want to become a good investor: 1. Look at stocks as part ownership of a business. 2. Look at Mr. Market—volatile stock price fluctuations—as your friend rather than your enemy. View risk as the possibility of permanent loss of purchasing power, and uncertainty as the unpredictability regarding the degree of variability in the possible range of outcomes. 3. Remember the three most important words in investing: “margin of safety.” 4. Evaluate any news item or event only in terms of its impact on (a) future interest rates and (b) the intrinsic value of the business, which is the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out during its remaining life, adjusted for the uncertainty around receiving those cash flows. 5. Think in terms of opportunity costs when evaluating new ideas and keep a very high hurdle rate for incoming investments. Be unreasonable. When you look at a business and get a strong desire from within saying, “I wish I owned this business,” that is the kind of business in which you should be investing. A great investment idea doesn’t need hours to analyze. More often than not, it is love at first sight. 6. Think probabilistically rather than deterministically, because the future is never certain and it is really a set of branching probability streams. At the same time, avoid the risk of ruin, when making decisions, by focusing on consequences rather than just on raw probabilities in isolation. Some risks are just not worth taking, whatever the potential upside may be. 7. Never underestimate the power of incentives in any given situation. 8. When making decisions, involve both the left side of your brain (logic, analysis, and math) and the right side (intuition, creativity, and emotions). 9. Engage in visual thinking, which helps us to better understand complex information, organize our thoughts, and improve our ability to think and communicate. 10. Invert, always invert. You can avoid a lot of pain by visualizing your life after you have lost a lot of money trading or speculating using derivatives or leverage. If the visuals unnerve you, don’t do anything that could get you remotely close to reaching such a situation. 11. Vicariously learn from others throughout life. Embrace everlasting humility to succeed in this endeavor. 12. Embrace the power of long-term compounding. All the great things in life come from compound interest.

Meditation is the art of learning to listen to our own heart. Meditation is the art of learning to listen to the intuition, the inner guide. Meditation is the art of learning to not listen to the voice of the outer spiritual teacher, but one's own inner spiritual teacher.  Our intuition, the inner guide, the spiritual teacher within, is always available within ourselves. Our intuition, our inner guide, our spiritual teacher within, is our being, which always wants to talk to you. In each situation, it gives you a message, which is always right. The being shows you what to do and in which direction to move. You will always be able to see the light by listening to the being. In the inner being, there is immense light and clarity.  The inner being is already in contact with the whole. But mostly we live on the periphery, because our mind is the periphery. So slowly we forget that there is something inside ourselves, which has significant messages to us. Meditation is the process of moving within to the inner being. Rather than listen outside we have to listen inside. To be in contact with the inner being is going the right way.  God is your inner voice. You have to move within to hear the still, silent voice of God.  When you have learnt to hear it, your whole life is transformed. Then you have learnt to listen to your being and to follow your own heart. One who can listen to your inner being has learnt a new language. One who can  listen to his being has become capable of listening to the being of the whole  existence. He can hear the song of the birds, he can hear the wind passing through the trees and he can hear the silent whisperings of the trees.  The meditator has to begin with himself. The meditator begins to listen to his own being, and ends with listening to the being of the world. The day that you realize that your being and the being of the world are not separate, but one is the day of enlightenment. This is the ultimate fulfillment of life.  The meditator has to make a commitment to put his energy into realizing the phenomenon called God, Tao, dhamma and truth. 

But then there are those people who overidentify with their emotions. Everything is justified for no other reason than they felt it. “Oh, I broke your windshield, but I was really mad; I couldn’t help it.” Or “I dropped out of school and moved to Alaska just because it felt right.” Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks. You know who bases their entire lives on their emotions? Three-year-old kids. And dogs. You know what else three-year-olds and dogs do? Shit on the carpet. An obsession and overinvestment in emotion fails us for the simple reason that emotions never last. Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more. A fixation on happiness inevitably amounts to a never-ending pursuit of “something else”—a new house, a new relationship, another child, another pay raise. And despite all of our sweat and strain, we end up feeling eerily similar to how we started: inadequate. Psychologists sometimes refer to this concept as the “hedonic treadmill”: the idea that we’re always working hard to change our life situation, but we actually never feel very different. This is why our problems are recursive and unavoidable. The person you marry is the person you fight with. The house you buy is the house you repair. The dream job you take is the job you stress over. Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice—whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. What we gain is also

It is impossible for one who is lodged in mundane consciousness to evaluate definitively the competence of any guide to transformation and transcendence, without having already attained to an equal degree of transcendence. No number of “objective” criteria for assessment can remove this “Catch-22” dilemma. Therefore the choice of a guide, path, or group will remain in some sense a subjective matter. Subjectivity, however, has many modes, from self-deluding emotionality to penetrating, illuminative intuition. Perhaps the first job of the seeker would best be to refine that primary guide, one’s own subjectivity.10 Ram Dass (Richard Alpert), who has functioned on both sides of the fence (as a devotee of Neem Karoli Baba and as a teacher in his own right), has made the following complementary observation: Some people fear becoming involved with a teacher. They fear the possible impurities in the teacher, fear being exploited, used, or entrapped. In truth we are only ever entrapped by our own desires and clingings. If you want only liberation, then all teachers will be useful vehicles for you. They cannot hurt you at all.11 This is true only ideally. In practice, the problem is that in many cases students do not know themselves sufficiently to be conscious of their deeper motivations. Therefore they may feel attracted precisely to the kind of teacher who shares their own “impurities”—such as hunger for power—and hence have every reason to fear him or her. It seems that only the truly innocent are protected. Although they too are by no means immune to painful experiences with teachers, at least they will emerge hale and whole, having been sustained by their own purity of intention. Accepting the fact that our appraisal of a teacher is always subjective so long as we have not ourselves attained his or her level of spiritual accomplishment, there is at least one important criterion that we can look for in a guru: Does he or she genuinely promote disciples’ personal and spiritual growth, or does he or she obviously or ever so subtly undermine their maturation? Would-be disciples should take a careful, levelheaded look at the community of students around their prospective guru. They should especially scrutinize those who are closer to the guru than most. Are they merely sorry imitations or clones of their teacher, or do they come across as mature men and women? The Bulgarian spiritual teacher Omraam Mikhaёl Aїvanhov, who died in 1986, made this to-the-point observation: Everybody has his own path, his mission, and even if you take your Master as a model, you must always develop in the way that suits your own nature. You have to sing the part which has been given to you, aware of the notes, the beat and the rhythm; you have to sing it with your voice which is certainly not that of your Master, but that is not important. The one really important thing is to sing your part perfectly.

I am confident in following and listening to my heart because I trust that it will always guide me in the right direction.

Always heed a warning," my father used to say. Your gut instinct will tell you when something doesn't feel right, but your mind will override it and make you do things. Intuition is there to protect you from danger, and you should trust it.

General Tips for Better-than-Average Lie-Detecting Sit back and let the other person volunteer information, rather than pulling it out of them. Don’t let on what you know too early—or at all. Stay relaxed and causal. What you are observing is not the person themselves, but the person as they are in a quasi-interrogational situation with you. So don’t make it seem like an inquisition, otherwise you may simply be watching them feel distressed about the situation itself. Don’t worry about individual signs and clues like touching the nose, looking up to the right or stuttering. Rather, look at how the person responds in general to shifts in the conversation, especially at junctures where you believe they may be having to concoct a story on the fly. Listen for stories that seem unusually long or detailed—liars use more words, and they may even talk more quickly. Take your time. It may be a while before you uncover a deception. But the longer the other person talks, the more chance they have of slipping up or getting their story tangled. Watch primarily for inconsistencies—details of the story that don’t add up, emotional expressions that don’t fit the story, or abrupt shifts in the way the story is told. Being chatty and then all of a sudden getting quiet and serious when you ask a particular question is certainly telling. Always interpret your conversation in light of what you already know, the context, and other details you’ve observed in your interactions with this person. It’s all about looking at patterns, and then trying to determine if any disruptions in that pattern point to something interesting. Don’t be afraid to trust your gut instinct! Your unconscious mind may have picked up some data your conscious mind hasn’t become aware of. Don’t make decisions on intuition alone, but don’t dismiss it too quickly, either. Takeaways Casual observation of body language, voice and verbal cues can help with understanding honest people, but we need more sophisticated techniques to help us detect liars. Most people are not as good at spotting deception as they think they are. Bias, expectation and the belief that we can’t or shouldn’t be lied to can get in the way of realizing we’re being deceived. Good lie detection is a dynamic process that focuses on the conversation. Use open ended questions to get people to surrender information voluntarily, and observe. Look out for overly wordy stories that are presented all at once, inconsistencies in the story or emotional affect, delays or avoidance in answering questions, or inability to answer unexpected questions. Liars are easier to spot when lying is spontaneous—try not to allow the liar any time to prepare or rehearse a script, or else ask unexpected questions or plant a lie yourself to watch their response and gain a baseline against which to compare the possible lie. Increasing cognitive load can cause a liar to fumble their story or lose track of details, revealing themselves in a lie. Keep drilling for detail and be suspicious if details don’t add up, if emotion doesn’t match content, or if the person is deliberately stalling for time. Look out for specific signs that a person is cognitively overloaded. One example is that the liar will display less emotions while speaking than they or an average person normally would in their situation. These emotions will instead leak through in their body language. Most commonly, this manifests in more frequent blinking, pupil dilation, speech disturbances, and slips of tongue. Spotting liars is notoriously difficult, but we improve our chances when we focus on strategic and targeted conversations designed to make the liar trip up on his own story, rather than trying to guess hidden intentions from body language alone.

Science is now giving us a very helpful language for what religion rightly intuited and imaged, albeit in mythological language. Remember, myth does not mean “not true,” which is the common misunderstanding; it actually refers to things that are always true!

Gut Instinct The hallmark of any seasoned investigator is knowing when to follow their intuition. You subtly absorb information from the System that leads to making the right decision. Whether in the heat of conflict or after considering all the facts, those around you will be amazed by your ability to always make the right call. Effect: The user has an uncanny, System-assisted knack for making occasional connections others miss and discovering hidden information.

This may not seem like rocket science, because it isn’t; however, there is a very clear message being given from within, you just have to be still and listen to your intuition. Intuition is our body’s self-regulating system that is designed to help us. It is associated with the right, more creative side of the brain, and, if we truly listen to it, we will always do what is right for us. Intuition is always the first voice you hear in your head. This is the voice that lets you know what you truly want. The second voice you hear is your ego. The ego is associated with reason and reality, the left side of the brain, which is the more rational and logical side. This is the voice that will challenge your intuition, causing you to question what you want. This is usually the voice that tells you that you will fail, that you can’t make it on your own, that s/he is good inside even though they sometimes hit me, etc.

Everything is justified for no other reason than they felt it. “Oh, I broke your windshield, but I was really mad; I couldn’t help it.” Or “I dropped out of school and moved to Alaska just because it felt right.” Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks.

intuition is always right in at least two important ways; It is always in response to something, it always has your best interest at heart.” Intuition is defined as the ability to understand, know or consider a thing likely without exclusively using conscious reasoning.

How hard can it be to follow five black SUVs?” Serge leaned over the steering wheel. “Except we’re in Miami.” “So?” “Miami drivers are a breed unto their own. Always distracted.” He uncapped a coffee thermos and chugged. “Quick on the gas and the horn. No separation between vehicles, every lane change a new adventure. The worst of both worlds: They race around as if they are really good, but they’re really bad, like if you taught a driver’s-ed class with NASCAR films.” He watched the first few droplets hit the windshield. “Oh, and worst of all, most of them have never seen snow.” “But it’s not snow,” said Felicia. “It’s rain. And just a tiny shower.” “That’s right.” Serge hit the wipers and took another slug from the thermos. “Rain is the last thing you want when you’re chasing someone in Miami. They drive shitty enough as it is, but on top of that, snow is a foreign concept, which means they never got the crash course in traction judgment for when pavement slickness turns less than ideal. And because of the land-sea temperature differential, Florida has regular afternoon rain showers. Nothing big, over in a jiff. But minutes later, all major intersections in Miami-Dade are clogged with debris from spectacular smash-ups. In Northern states, snow teaches drivers real fast about the Newtonian physics of large moving objects. I haven’t seen snow either, but I drink coffee, so the calculus of tire-grip ratio is intuitive to my body. It feels like mild electricity. Sometimes it’s pleasant, but mostly I’m ambivalent. Then you’re chasing someone in the rain through Miami, and your pursuit becomes this harrowing slalom through wrecked traffic like a disaster movie where everyone’s fleeing the city from an alien invasion, or a ridiculous change in weather that the scientist played by Dennis Quaid warned about but nobody paid attention.” Serge held the mouth of the thermos to his mouth. “Empty. Fuck it—

When a Roman soldier was told by his guide that if he insisted on taking a certain journey, it would probably be fatal, he answered, “It is necessary for me to go—it is not necessary for me to live.” That was true depth of conviction, and only when we are likewise convicted will our lives amount to something. But a shallow life lives on its impulses, impressions, intuitions, instincts, and largely on its circumstances. Those with profound character, however, look beyond all these and move steadily ahead, seeing the future, where sorrow, seeming defeat, and failure will be reversed. They sail right through storm clouds into the bright sunshine, which always awaits them on the other side.

In this instance, she’d not heard him count. He’d not hit a wall, unless the brick-headed stubbornness of Dmitri’s face counted. Thwack! “Yay.” Yes, that was her cheering for her Pookie aloud. Since it seemed he hadn’t heard, she said it louder, yodeled it as a matter of fact. “You get him, Pookie. Show him who’s the biggest, baddest pussy around.” Leo turned his head at that, narrowing his blue gaze on her. Totally annoyed. Totally adrenalized. Totally hot. “Vex!” How sexy her nickname sounded when he growled it. She could tell he totally dug the encouragement. She waggled her fingers at him and meant to say, “You’re welcome,” but instead shouted, “Behind you!” During that moment of inattention— which really Leo should have known better than to indulge in— Dmitri threw a mighty hook. Had she mentioned just how sigh-worthy big her Pookie was? The perfectly aimed blow hit Leo in the jaw, and the force snapped his head to the side. But it certainly didn’t fell him. Not even close. On the contrary, the punch brought the predator in him alive. As he rotated his jaw, Leo’s gaze flicked her way, his eyes lit with a wildness, his lip quirked, almost in amusement, and then he acted. His fist retaliated then his elbow, snapping Dmitri in the nose. Any other man, even shifter, might have quickly succumbed, but the Russian Siberian tiger was more than a match for the hybrid lion/ tiger. Put them in a ring and they’d have brought in a fortune. They certainly put on a good show. Blood trailed from Dmitri’s lip from where Leo’s fist struck him. However, that didn’t stop the Russian from giving as good as he got. Size-wise, Leo held a slight edge, but what Dmitri lacked in girth, he made up for in skill. Even if Meena wasn’t interested in marrying him, it didn’t mean she couldn’t admire the grace of Dmitri’s movement and his uncanny intuition when it came to dodging blows. Leo wasn’t too shabby either. While he’d obviously not grown up on the mean streets of Russia, he knew how to throw a punch, wrestle a man, and look totally hot in defense of his woman. Sigh. A man coming to her rescue. Just like one of those romance novels Teena likes to read. Luna sidled up alongside her. “What did you do this time?” Why did everyone assume it was her fault? “I didn’t do anything.” Luna snorted. “Sure you didn’t. And it also wasn’t you who put Kool-Aid in Arik’s mom’s shampoo bottle and turned her hair pink at the family picnic a few years ago.” “I thought the short spikes she sported after she got it shaved looked awesome.” “Never said the outcome wasn’t worth it. Just like I’m totally intrigued about what’s happening here. That is Leo laying a smackdown on that Russian diplomat, right? Since I highly doubt they’re sparring over who makes the better vodka or who deserved the gold medal in hockey at the last winter Olympics, then that leaves only one other possibility.” Luna fixed her with a gaze. “This is your fault.” Meena’s shoulders hunched. “Okay, so maybe I’m a teensy tiny bit responsible. Like maybe I made sure my ex-fiancé and current fiancé got to meet.” “Duh. I already knew about that part. What I’m talking about is, how the hell did you get Leo to lose his shit? I mean when he gets his serious on, you couldn’t melt an ice cube in his mouth. Leo never loses control because to lose control is to lose one’s way, or some such bullshit. He’s always spouting these funny little sayings in the hopes of curbing our wild tendencies.” Pookie had the cutest personality. “What can I say?” Meena shrugged. “I guess he got jealous. Totally normal, given we’re soul mates.

Cizek had used art as the point of entry of his thinking into a whole new world of education—an avenue that had never occurred to me. He realized that children by nature are capable of real, indeed often great, art; that artistic activity is natural for them; and that adult interference in the natural development of children as artists was detrimental to that development. From that starting point, he made a leap into the entire realm of education and child development, concluding that the natural, unhindered growth of children enables them to reach their full potential as human beings, and that adult interference in general is more of a liability than an asset in this process of growth. That leap, from art to all domains of maturation, was an intuitive one for Cizek and his followers. It was not until I read the article referred to in the opening paragraph of this section that I not only gained an understanding of the real basis for Cizek’s intuitive leap, but I also achieved a new and enriching perspective on the nature of education, one that I had hitherto hardly noticed. The key is the observation that certain activities are universal, transcultural, and therefore related to the very essence of being a human. Even more significant and telling—and here once again Cizek hit upon the truth, albeit not consciously—is the fact that these same activities are engaged in by children from the earliest age, and therefore are not, indeed cannot be, the products of sociocultural influences. This places these activities in the realm of biological evolution rather than the realm of cultural history.50 And because these three activities—making music, decorating things, and talking—are the outcome of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, they must represent in and of themselves an important aspect of the exalted place humans occupy in the natural world. In other words, these activities not only represent the outcome of evolution, but they also represent important features that account for the specific place that the Homo sapiens species occupies in the natural order. To allow children—and indeed adults—to engage in these three activities to their heart’s desire is to allow them to realize their fullest potential as human beings. External interference in their exercise, although perhaps sometimes justifiable for social reasons (man is, after all, a social animal too, another aspect of evolution), always involves some diminishing of their ability to become what they by nature are inclined to be. Once this is realized, it is almost impossible to comprehend the enthusiasm with which educators and child development specialists advocate systems for coercing children, against their clear inclination and will, to curtail these activities in favor of an externally imposed adult agenda. Although there might have been some economic justification for such curtailment in the industrial age, there is no longer the slightest pretext of an advantage gained through the suppression of the natural, evolved behavior of children. In

There is an inner gift that each of us possess as deep insightful knowing, regardless of our circumstances. It isn’t as difficult to access this gift as some would make it out to be. It is quiet simple. We can always choose the way of Love, the “knowing”, and in so doing, we live the life that is our divine right and legacy, a life worth living.

Listen to the discussion between any two philosophers one of whom upholds determinism, and the other liberty: it is always the determinist who seems to be in the right. He may be a beginner and his adversary a seasoned philosopher. He can plead his cause nonchalantly, while the other sweats blood for his. It will always be said of him that he is simple, clear and right. He is easily and naturally so, having only to collect thought ready to hand and phrases ready-made: science, language, common sense, the whole of intelligence is at his disposal. Criticism of an intuitive philosophy is so easy and so certain to be well received that it will always tempt the beginner. Regret may come later,—unless, of course, there is a native lack of comprehension and, out of spite, personal resentment toward everything that is not reducible to the letter, toward all that is properly spirit. That can happen, for philosophy too has its Scribes and its Pharisees.

Words such as receptive, feminine, yielding or mother can be misleading as we tend to understand them as poles with opposites. However, they hint at what lies beyond them, so we need to consider them in a different way if we are to grasp what the 2nd Siddhi really means. This is something that can only be grasped intuitively. Thus when the One externalises itself as a manifestation in form, it has not created a duality, but a trinity. Every duality is really a relationship, and every relationship is really a three — there is a man, a woman and instantly there is also a couple — the relationship itself. In Divine mathematics, the number two is always an illusion — it cannot logically exist. If you can say anything at all about the number two you might say it is a bridge — a dynamic process that is instantaneously transmuted before it is even born. These are concepts that cannot be approached with ordinary logic. Just like the quantum particles in physics that avoid our definition because they appear to be linked to our very perceptual apparatus, oneness cannot be comprehended, only lived. Enlightenment is not an experience. This is a sentence to meditate upon like a Zen koan. If you see oneness as an experience to be attained or that may one day happen to you, then you are caught within that straight line between two points. The third thing is transcendence. It does not occur to you — rather it negates you. Ironically, transcendence does not take you away from life, as its name might suggest — it places you right in the heart of life, where you have always been. It unifies all opposites, ends all riddles, leaves all mysteries just as they are and brings a sense of trust that cannot be described. One cannot even really use a word like trust to describe the Siddhi of Unity because trust suggests duality again — that there is somehow a truster and a trustee. This is the wonderful dilemma of the siddhic state.

Instinct doesn’t always tell us to choose the easier path, but it will guide you towards the right one. Your subconscious intuition wants you to survive and to thrive. It isn’t clouded by ego or others’ opinions - those fickle things live in the conscious mind. Your instinct has a clearer purpose: to help you. Listen to it. Learn to recognize it. Acknowledge it when it speaks and have faith in it. Instinct is the nose of the mind. So trust it.

Think of life as a drama workshop. When you go out into the world, everyone is an actor dressed up for their part. Believe half of what you see, and none of what you hear. Do right, and fear no one. Always do right and be just in your actions and deeds. The hardest adversity you will face in life is your intuition. It is your source for wisdom, trust in yourself, and trust in your gut feelings.

Neither nature nor history can tell us what we ought to do. Facts, whether those of nature or those of history, cannot make the decision for us, they cannot determine the ends we are going to choose. It is we who introduce purpose and meaning into nature and into history. Men are not equal; but we can decide to fight for equality. Human institutions such as the state are not rational, but we can decide to fight to make them more rational. We ourselves and our ordinary language are, on the whole, emotional rather than rational; but we can try to become a little more rational, and we can train ourselves to use our language as an instrument not of self-expression (as our romantic educationists would say) but of rational communication. History itself I mean the history of power politics, of course, not the non-existent story of the development of mankind has no end nor meaning, but we can decide to give it both. We can make it our fight for the open society and against its antagonists (who, when in a corner, always protest their humanitarian sentiments, in accordance with Pareto's advice) and we can interpret it accordingly. Ultimately, we may say the same about the 'meaning of life'. It is up to us to decide what shall be our purpose in life, to determine our ends. This dualism of facts and decisions is, I believe, fundamental. Facts as such have no meaning; they can gain it only through our decisions. Historicism is only one of many attempts to get over this dualism; it is born of fear, for it shrinks from realizing that we bear the ultimate responsibility even for the standards we choose. But such an attempt seems to me to represent precisely what is usually described as superstition. For it assumes that we can reap where we have not sown; it tries to persuade us that if we merely fall into step with history everything will and must go right, and that no fundamental decision on our part is required; it tries to shift our responsibility on to history, and thereby on to the play of demoniac powers beyond ourselves; it tries to base our actions upon the hidden intentions of these powers, which can be revealed to us only in mystical inspirations and intuitions; and it thus puts these actions and decisions on the moral level of one who, inspired by horoscopes and dreams, chooses his lucky number in a lottery.

He had taken the bias so fatal between married people of supposing when his wife disagreed with him that she did it on purpose, not because she herself thought so, but because it was opposition. Perhaps this was because of that inherent contempt for women which is a settled principle in the minds of so many men, perhaps because he had been used to a narrow mind and opinions cut and dry in the case of his sister, perhaps even because of his hot adoration and faith in Lady Markland as perfect. To continue perfect in his eyes, after their marriage, she would have needed to agree always with him, to think his thoughts. He exacted this accord with all the susceptibility of a fastidious nature, which would be content with no forced agreement, and divined in a moment when an effort was required to conform her opinions to his. He would not tolerate such an effort. He would have had her agree with him by instinct, by nature, not even by desire to please him, much less by policy. He could not endure to think of either of these means of procuring what he wanted. What he wanted was the perfect agreement of a nature which arrived at the same conclusions as his by the same means, which responded before he spoke, which was always ready to anticipate, to give him the exquisite satisfaction of feeling he was right by a perpetual seconding of all his decisions and anticipation of his thoughts. Had he married a young creature like Chatty, ready to take the impress of his more active mind, he might have found other drawbacks in her to irritate his amour propre, and probably would have despised her judgment in consequence of her perpetual agreement with him. But the fact was that he was jealous of his wife, not in the ordinary vulgar way, for which there was no possibility, but for every year of additional age, and every experience, and all the life she had led apart from him. He could not endure to think that she had formed the most of her ideas before she knew him: the thought of her past was horrible to him. A suspicion that she was thinking of that, that her mind was going back to something which he did not know, awoke a sort of madness in his brain. All this she knew by painful intuition now, as at first by discoveries which startled her very soul, and seemed to disturb the pillars of the world. She was aware of the forced control he kept over himself, not to burst

Once you become conscious of the questions active in the moment, you always get some kind of intuitive direction of what to do, of where to go. You get a hunch about the next step. Always. The only time this will not occur is when you have the wrong question in mind. You see, the problem in life isn’t in receiving answers. The problem is in identifying your current questions. Once you get the questions right, the answers always come.