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Tuesday 20 November 2018

The inspired self, and intuition: The Sufi Way

“How will I know if I'm being inspired and intuitive?”

Mind brain connections.
“How will I know if I'm being inspired and intuitive?”

In individual instances, you may every now and again realize that something you've thought, or said, or done, was in some way inspired, and you may congratulate yourself on what you take to be *your* inspiration, or you may assign congratulations to some “other”, perhaps someone who has influenced you, or to a psychic Muse.

Overall, however, you may not think “I'm inspired” or “I'm intuitive” and label yourself as such, in the early stages of such mastery. These instances may be few and far between, apparently random, or sporadic, and the process may well be prone to error.

Let's move on a few years, though, and say that one of your interests is computer programming, which most people would take to be a logical or “left brain” task. After that time, you may be able to look back, and see that in the initial stages, the tasks you set yourself were all very mechanical, approached in a very logical and methodical way, and perhaps that you surrounded yourself with a wall of reference books that you frequently consulted, out of necessity, to “borrow” material, or “just to be sure”. But now, years down the line, instead of being unsure about your abilities, when you are presented with a task, you may know instantly that some way or other the project is feasible, and even if you don't yet know how to complete it, you know whether or not you're likely to be able to find a solution either by yourself or with the aid of others who have already completed similar tasks. While initially it was more a matter of theoretical “know what” (which you can now see is “ten a penny”), now the primary approach is practical “know how”, and you can rest on the assurance that you have successfully completed similar, complex tasks before, and at the same time you realize that you may have to attempt several different approaches to the task, and often hit “brick walls” that you cannot get over, before you eventually complete the task.

You may also notice, looking back, that many of the linear actions that you took to solve smaller parts of your overall task, have now been replaced by a mental thought or picture in your head of patterns of prefabricated building blocks (just as a chess master will visualize a game-in-play), and that you no longer have to mechanically think about the task, rather that thoughts are presented to you as and when and if you need them (“just in time” (JIT)), even that for the most part, you just trust your fingers to do the typing. In the case of an author writing text, you will probably find that the words flow effortlessly from your mind, via your fingers, to the page, and that somewhere, some inner editor / correspondent has done most of the work for you. That is not to say that thought has no role to play, it's just that thinking has been shunted out of the “left brain” and is now largely sub-conscious. And also, you will most likely find that you still need to step through the code sequentially, and apply logic, in order to debug the code, or look for typos, grammatical errors, repeated words, and also to refine and add to what you originally wrote (again running it past your inner editor and gaining fresh ideas and insights).

And there will come a time where, though you may not be able to say “I'm a great programmer” or “I'm going to be a best seller”, you *will* nonetheless be able to say, “I still have a long way to go, but my patience has paid off”, “I've learnt something”, “I've changed for the better”; “I am more fluent and fluid”; know that you are being inspired and intuitive; that trust has been established; and also be eternally grateful that you are being helped along the way by something greater, and that we tend to consider “other” — even that you are “well connected”, and well cared for, at a psychic or heart level.

~ Image: "Mind Brain Connections".
~ Image author: GDJ.
~ Image source: OpenClipart.

Text: Copyright (c) 2018, Eric Twose. Licence for re-use: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).