Instinct and Intuition

EXPLAINING LIFE’S MYSTERIES June 06, 2009
By Stephen Ellis

Nobody asked me, but…
Last week I received a comment on my blog from my daughter, Frieda. Frieda is a very insightful young lady with a J.D. degree and about to receive her PhD in nutrition. I’m really quite proud of her and love her very much.

The fact is, however, that she misinterpreted what I wrote. If someone as intelligent as Frieda misunderstood my writing, perhaps other readers did, too. More likely, my writing was simply not clear enough. In my last blog I spoke about a “sixth-sense”. Of course the term “sixth-sense” has become another trash-pot into which many paranormal/ mentalist buffs put a lot of different things.

For example: Most people tend to put all déjà vu experiences into the sixth-sense pot. Others will throw dreams and/or encounters with ghosts into that pot. Still others will include retrocognition (past life experiences), faith healing, instinct, intuition and numerous other non-scientific experiences into that one pot. The fact is that none of those things I have named really fit the meaning of a sixth-sense…although they all border on it.

Each of the things mentioned above can be experienced by most people without a sixth sense. You start thinking of someone you haven’t seen in a while and suddenly the telephone rings and it’s that person. You meet someone for the first time and you get a “gut-feeling” that the person is good (or evil). You have a dream in which a dead loved one appears only he/she really seems to talk to you….and even gives you a message, etc. These are things that happen to almost all normal people…and they are not indicative of a sixth sense.

Let’s break some of it down for everyone to understand: The two most common things often referred to as a sixth-sense are instinct and intuition. These are really not a sixth sense although there are many similar aspects to them:
Instinct – Instinct is not learned, it is inherited. Instinct makes an insect with almost no mind run away and hide from someone about to swat it. Instinct makes a baby turtle run towards the ocean as soon as it is born. Instinct makes a human avoid the path of a falling boulder or hitting the brake on your car when someone swerves in front of you.

Intuition – This is the part of your mind that comes to a conclusion without any reasoning. You meet someone and you get a “gut feeling” that this person will be good (or not good) for a relationship. Someone writes you a check and you feel strongly that this check will not be good at the bank. You’re thinking of going on a trip and, without any real reason, you feel it will be unsafe if you go.

Now let’s look at a sixth-sense:

The sixth sense tells you things that you should have no way of knowing: A specific person is going to die shortly. A business deal you are involved in is being plotted against you behind your back. You’ve met and communicated with ghosts of dead people not necessarily from your own family. You pick up a piece of someone’s jewelry and it communicates the owner’s life history to you. You are sitting in a room with someone and their thoughts come to you as if they were your own.

Instinct and intuition belong to everyone to a greater or lesser degree. Having a sixth sense, obviously, is far more rare. But because it’s rare, it has a material value and can be worth a lot of money. Most people alleging to have a sixth-sense are nothing more than frauds cashing-in on that material value.

I’ve had the pleasure (or honor) to meet two people who really had a sixth-sense. One was Peter Hurkos, the internationally famous psychic and a German woman named Christa Gantz. Peter took my keys in his hand and related a number of things that had happened in my lifetime that he had no way of knowing…or even finding out about. Christa was met at a “Psychic Fair” in Wiesbaden, Germany. I tested her by looking at cards with different geometric symbols and she identified each one as I looked at it. Although I could see the faces of the cards, she couldn’t. To be certain there wasn’t some trickery involved, I did the same thing with my own deck of cards and made her guess the identities of five cards. She was correct on four and only missed the one by naming clubs instead of spades (she got the number correctly). I tested her further by thinking of a sentence, then I spoke the beginning of the sentence aloud…and she finished the sentence correctly.
Unfortunately, both of these people have passed-on.

If you believe you have a sixth sense, please let me know. Stebrel@aol.com.

As I said, nobody asked me.