Without coins or stalks II

StevePavlina.com Podcast #003 – Consulting Your Intuition

Steve Pavlina’s ‘Personal development for smart people’ blog is always a worthwhile read: lucid, intelligent and honest. Recently he’s started doing podcasts – and these, too, are several cuts above the average. (And helped along by the fact that he’s a professional speaker, and utterly cured of the ‘um-er disease’.)

In this one I’ve linked to, I think Steve has a better answer than I could manage to that question of how to access the wisdom of Yi without the coins or stalks. It’s about consulting your intuition. He explains three reasons why this is a good idea: because of its greater ability to solve problems; because it allows you to understand yourself better; and because it helps you to make your actions more consistent with your thoughts.

If this is already sounding familiar (I was thinking of entitling this post ‘The Wheel Reinvented’ 😉 ), I can only suggest you go listen to the podcast. In it, he describes methods for consulting your intuition by creating first an inner oracle, and then an inner omen. He is simply looking for ways to access insights and truths that you don’t consciously know. In the process, he also gives a lot of advice that fits just as well for old-fashioned divination: to start with the steadfast intention to hear the truth, for instance, or to allow 15 minutes or so to move through conscious reactions and down to the deeper layers. The way he describes questioning oneself and listening for answers will be very familiar to anyone who’s read my I Ching course. Divination for me always means using questions (‘What does that represent?’ or ‘What’s the connection?’) as a way of opening doors.

Steve P doesn’t, of course, mention omens or oracles – only ‘intuition’ and ‘your subconscious mind’. Perhaps he hasn’t heard of Yi.

On second thoughts, after listening to his choice of example imagery and its meanings, perhaps he has.

In any case, the exercises he suggests certainly belong as part of a divination practice: maybe as a prelude to divination, a way of arriving at a truer question; certainly as a way to respond to the answer. The same goes for the visualisation Erin Pavlina describes in the following entry.

By the way, this podcast also provided me with the necessary push to understand a reading. It was about how to get from ‘knowing how’ to actually doing – in other words, about making thoughts and actions consistent. Yi answered with 5 changing to 29, which I can now understand as ‘attend to your unconscious’.