To get the most out of your intuition, it helps to prime the pump, so to speak.
When you give the unconscious a task, it goes right to work and often gives its answer as a flash of intuition.
But first you have to give it some fuel. This can be done in a number of ways.
One way is to engage the logical brain through old fashioned research and digging. There is the apocryphal story of German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé who fruitlessly labored over the puzzle of the structure of Benzene. Until, one night he had a dream of six monkeys holding on to each other forming a large circle. He realized if you substitute a carbon atom for each monkey you have the formation of a benzene molecule.
Although some now doubt the truth of the story--a New York Times article suggests that Kekule's dream was a way to quash competing claims by other scientists of the discovery--still most of us can resonate with the experience of working very, very hard consciously on a problem while seeming to make little headway.
And then, out of the blue, voila! a dream, or a flash of intuition, and here is your solution-all nice and neatly packaged.
If you are using divination tools such as Tarot, you begin by asking a question. Even readings that are 'general' have an underlying question which might go something like, 'what is the best advice for me now?'
The question, in a Tarot reading, is what primes the pump, or directs the intuition.
Laura Day uses an example to illustrate the importance of phrasing your question carefully.
She recounts the example a question put to the Oracle at Delphi by a ruler in Ancient Greece. He wanted to know if a great battle would be won. The Oracle replied that it would indeed be won. Indeed it was... by his opponent...
To be continued...
