The most common psychic experience, yet also one of the most intriguing and underestimated, is the phenomenon of psychic intuition or clairintuition, also known as premonition, presage, foreboding, presentiment, and informally as ‘gut feelings’ or ‘hunches.’
The term intuition derives from Latin intueri meaning ‘to look at, consider,’ and intuicioun meaning ‘insight, direct or immediate cognition, spiritual perception.’
The mainstream notion of ‘intuition’ is however rife with myth, misconception, and even controversy. This muddle is in part due to different fields using the term to mean different things. “Given this range of uses, nothing can be said about intuition in general,” remarks philosopher Richard Rorty.[1]
For example, psychologists define intuition as ‘unconscious thought,’ [2] or ‘unconscious pattern-matching cognition’ [3], while in spirituality and metaphysics intuition is customarily regarded as an innate spiritual knowledge. It is in fact described by mystics and spiritualists of many traditions throughout the ages [4], while occultists, esoteric scholars and metaphysicians conceive of it as the true ‘sixth sense.’
The phenomenon of 'intuition' or authentic psychic foreboding is generally misconceived by science and misconstrued in popular culture.
Dictionary definitions of intuition range from it being ‘direct access to unconscious knowledge,’ or ‘inner sensing and insight,’ to ‘unconscious cognition,’ or ‘the ability to understand something instinctively, without any need for conscious reasoning.’
For both the practicing and developing psychic or medium it is vital to understand the true nature and role of intuition in the context of authentic psychic perception, beyond these misconstrued popular notions.
INTUITION & INSTINCT
Primitive man relied heavily on his everyday intuition. He thought in images and symbols, listened to his ‘inner voice,’ and followed his ‘gut.’ Early man fluently spoke the language of the soul, the metaphysical dialect of his spiritual origins.
Intuition is the ‘native tongue’ of the mind-soul. It transcends the everyday time-space reality and the physical senses. We are all born with this innate ‘soul language,’ because we are spirit beings in human form. Orthodox science however typically argues that intuition is merely an ‘evolutionary intelligence’ that developed from our primitive, animalistic survival impulses and instincts.
Statements like ‘rely on your instinct’ and ‘trust your gut’ are therefore often used interchangeably. It is typically assumed that instinct and intuition are the same thing, but this notion is based purely on a physical, ‘mind-brain’ view of consciousness and does not accurately reflect everyday intuitive experiences.
Psychologist Marcie Boucouvalas writes “the intuitive realm has been functional since the dawn of humanity” and “we are all still pioneers and pilgrims on the pathway of better understanding human consciousness.” She believes it essential to transcend the traditional ‘either, or’ way of thinking about rational and intuitive modes of knowing. She adds however that “even if one accepts the validity of intuition, questions beckon.” Is the source of knowledge outside of and beyond the senses, located in a capacity of the human species that we do not yet fully understand? Or does it originate in the senses at a less than conscious level of awareness? [5]
Neuropsychiatrist George Dearborn finds intuition is indeed “outside the range of physiology and neurology and is an unconscious process of the mind.” [6]
Psychologist Mike Arons says the ‘problematic status’ of intuition is “somewhere between the instincts and the gods,” and the scientific ‘muddle’ around it is due to “skeptical rationalism which is a reactive pole to blind faith.” This has caused the notion of intuition to be either discounted or dismissed. He proposes instead that intuition is supraconscious and its study should thus include spiritual and transpersonal considerations, instead of only pure rationalism.” [7]
The human body speaks in urges, impulses, and physical needs, while the soul speaks in premonitions, forebodings, hunches, and gut feelings.
As spiritual beings we indeed have physical bodies with certain natural drives and impulses, like the ‘fight or flight’ response when we sense danger, or primal urges to seek out pleasure and avoid pain. These primal instincts have not evolved or changed much since prehistoric times. Despite our many modern advances and sophistication, we remain subject to our primitive instincts. [8]
However, as you know from your own intuitive experiences (such as knowing who is calling you before the phone rings, or thinking of long-lost friends and later bumping into them) we cannot attribute all of our gut feelings, hunches, premonitions, and forebodings to mere ‘instinct,’ or a simplistic urge for ‘physical survival.’
In my experience instinct is the subconscious language of the mind-body, while intuition is the subliminal language of the mind-soul. The human body speaks in urges, impulses, and physical needs, while the soul speaks in premonitions, forebodings, hunches, and gut feelings.
Intuition is an omniscient, archetypal, transcendental wisdom. It is the core dialect of our inner divinity, our spiritual origins, the eternal soul. We cannot fully access the sagacious, omniscient wisdom of the higher self, or divine self, or spirit through pure human intellect, logic, reason, and analytical thought alone. Instead, we need the ‘soul language’ of our metaphysical ‘inner guidance system.’
Intuition is an aspect of our spiritual essence; an awareness arising from our metaphysical resonance with the universal consciousness or the akashic field. We all experience this mind-soul resonance daily, in the form premonitions, forebodings, hunches, gut feelings, and so on. It is a soul language we are all born with, and it can be further fostered through various spiritual practices, such as meditation, dreamwork, and divination.
Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.” Psychic Edgar Cayce recommends if we seek to have psychic experiences in our daily life, it should ideally be in the context of spiritual growth, learning about ourselves, or helping others. [9]
Of course, as human beings, psychics and mediums also speak the everyday ‘soul language’ of intuition. However, when we channel or read, the intuitive impressions we perceive are not merely ‘inner guidance’ impressions, but instead clairintuitions. Clairintuitive psychic perceptions are not personal spiritual insights or private affirmations, but instead transpersonal and universal insights and affirmations, essentially resulting from an enhanced mind-soul dialect we are ‘wired’ to speak.
Clairintuition is an expanded lexicon beyond the everyday language of the soul. It is a supernatural perception aptitude or gift, and not merely a form of ‘developed’ inner guidance.
PSYCHICS & INTUITIVES
It has become the trend in recent years for some psychic practitioners to refer to themselves as ‘sensitives’ or ‘intuitives,’ instead of using the term psychic. This is mainly a consequence of the negative connotations often associated with the word ‘psychic,’ especially in the mainstream media.
For example, reporter Lisa Held writes, “while psychics have traditionally profited from claiming to predict the future or communicating with deceased relatives, many are now working in the general field of wellness, calling themselves ‘intuitives’ or ‘intuitive healers,’ who channel ‘energy’ that helps people discover what they want out of life.”[10]
Intuitive counselor Susan King confirms, “I call myself an intuitive because I think it takes away any barriers and removes potential erroneous stereotyping.” [11]
Journalist Sara Coughlin notes “as mystical as the professional title ‘intuitive’ might sound, the [intuitives] we spoke with described their abilities in highly sensible, practical terms. Intuition is like a muscle — you need to train it and use it regularly to maintain its strength. Intuition is best utilized if channeled through a more tangible medium, like numerology or tarot. And, most resoundingly, they also made it clear that everyone, spiritual or not, does have a sense of intuition that they can hone beyond that gut feeling. It's just up to the individual whether they choose to do so or not."[12]
Psychic ability is an expanded capacity for supernatural perception that transcends the personal sphere of everyday intuition. Clairintuition is not merely a ‘honed gut feeling.’
Although it is indeed true that as spirit beings we all have a built-in capacity for intuition, authentic psychic channeling or reading is in my experience certainly not merely a form of ‘honed intuition.’ Everyone does experience precognition, presentiment, and premonition, because it serves to guide us on a daily basis as metaphysical beings on a spiritual mission — whether we are conscious of it, or not. However, this kind of everyday intuition is personal, private, and individual, and mostly focused on one’s own needs, as well as the welfare of your loved ones.
Author Carolyn Myss agrees, “intuition is neither the ability to engage prophesy nor a means of avoiding financial loss or painful relationships. It is the ability to use energy data to make decisions in the immediate moment.”[13]
Patent psychic ability or the expanded capacity for supernatural perception transcends the personal sphere of everyday intuition. Clairintuition is not merely a ‘honed gut feeling.’ In fact, many people often fail to recognize their gut feelings and tend to disregard their hunches — only to later realize its validity, or discover its true meaning (sometimes with disastrous, even tragic consequences).
Psychics and mediums however perceive profound transpersonal impressions of clairintuition, mostly on behalf of others. Ironically, we tend to be better at channeling these perceptions for others, instead of for our own benefit!
Intuition is an aspect of the inner guidance system or our ‘spiritual GPS,’ while psychic perception is transpersonal, prophetic, omniscient, and numinous. Clairintuitive perception is not merely developed inner guidance or ‘honed intuition.’ It is metaphysical gift of prophetic intuition on ‘supernatural steroids.’
PRECOGNITION & PREMONITION
Researchers generally do not apply distinct, separate terms for various forms of predictive psychic perception, as parapsychology traditionally does not distinguish between different forms of prophetic psi. Instead, the term precognition is generally used as an umbrella term to represent all forms of foreknowing (claircognizance), foreseeing (clairvoyance), forefeeling (clairempathy), foresensing (clairsomatica), and foreboding or forewarning (clairintuition).
However, psychics and mediums know from direct experience that using such a broad term for all these nuanced prophetic phenomena is an underestimation and a gross misrepresentation of predictive psychic perception.
It is not as if new terms must be invented for these concepts, because appropriate, distinguishing terms for these predictive phenomena already exist in the dictionary! Classic terms like prescience, presentiment, premonition, and presage have been around for centuries, yet one is unlikely to find them in modern scientific papers, much less in psychic blogs and social media posts.
Prescience: foreknowledge, advance insight, anticipation of the course of future events, divine omniscience.
Presentiment: to feel beforehand, a foreboding, an intuitive feeling about the future, a feeling that something will happen, a feeling that misfortune or calamity is coming.
Premonition: forewarning, advance warning, prior notice, a strong feeling that something is going to happen
Presage: something that foreshadows or portends a future event, a foretoken, a prophetic foreboding, an intuition or feeling of what is going to happen in the future, something sensed beforehand.
With the advent of a Newtonian worldview and mechanistic, reductive science, these long-standing, time-honored terms have regrettably become outmoded archaisms. Our ancestors conceived these linguistic concepts to communicate their everyday mystical experiences. Yet, you will not find these terms, for example, in the American Psychological Association’s (APA) online dictionary. [14] The only related terms I found listed are precognition, retrocognition and premonitory dream.
It is in fact peculiar that in both psychology and psi research the concept of ‘premonition’ is mostly only found in the context of dream phenomena, as demonstrated by the aforementioned example. Science apparently accepts the possibility that premonitions may occur in dreams, and even in altered states of consciousness, but when a premonition or presentiment occurs in the realm of waking awareness, it can only be a conscious or unconscious ‘precognition.’
True psychic perception is so much more than mere ‘mind-brain’ cognition. In fact, the APA essentially agrees, as it states that cognition is only one of the three traditionally identified components of ‘mind,’ along with affect (feeling) and conation (motivation). Yet, when it comes to predictive psychic phenomena, only one of these three ‘components of mind,’ receives attention and recognition in parapsychology? To my knowledge the APA currently offers no ‘affective,’ nor ‘conative’ terminology for what it calls ‘the purported ability to see or experience future events through some form of extrasensory perception.’[15]
I suspect the concept of precognition has been adopted as the preferred scholarly term because it is more empirically convenient and academically conceivable.
The reductive notion of focusing on psi ‘cognition’ only, and the absence of clear terminological distinctions that reflect the fundamental differences between various clairsapient and clairsentient psychic perceptions, is in my view another result of the ‘arranged marriage’ between parapsychology and orthodox science.
A recent neuroscience study proposes, for example, that all emotions are merely ‘cognitive states resulting from the gathering of information.’ Conscious experiences, regardless of their content, arise from one system in the brain. Specifically, the differences between emotional and non-emotional states are the kinds of inputs that are processed by a general cortical network of cognition, a network essential for conscious experiences.[16]
But philosophers, spiritualists, metaphysicians, occultists, and mystics, including psychics and mediums, have through the ages always known we are not merely ‘computerized robots,’ or ‘information-processing machines.’ Instead, we are inspired, directed, guided, and protected every day by our feelings and intuitions — by ineffable, subjective, and mostly non-cognitive presentiments, premonitions, forebodings, forewarnings, hunches, and gut feelings. Yet, conventional science reduces these prophetic ‘qualia’ — that sometimes save lives and prevent disasters and tragedies — to one simplistic umbrella concept of ‘precognition’ and ‘anomalous cognition.’
On February 26, 1993, financial executive Barrett Naylor had a premonition, while stepping off a train in New York's Grand Central Station. He felt he should immediately turn around and go home. He followed this gut feeling, which probably saved his life, as later that day a bomb detonated below the World Trade Center, where his office was located. Amazingly, Naylor experienced a similar foreboding eight years later, on the morning of September 11, 2001. Once again, it saved his life. Later he confessed that he felt guilt and regret for not sharing his premonition with others, as he believes it might have helped to save more lives before the attack on the World Trade Center.[17]
On the evening of Wednesday, March 1, 1950, a Nebraska church exploded five minutes after the weekly choir practice was supposed to start. Miraculously no one was injured, as the church building was inexplicably empty that evening. All the choir members were ‘coincidentally’ and unusually late for the weekly rehearsal.[18] Although some choir members had mundane reasons for being tardy, including car trouble and overnapping, others had no specific reason to explain why they were late that night.[19]
Did the choir members all have a foreboding premonition? If so, it was a shared intuition that was either subconscious or unconscious, but certainly not something of which they were ‘cognitively’ aware. Yet, parapsychology calls it ‘precognition.’
I suspect the concept of precognition has been adopted as the preferred scholarly term because it is a more empirically convenient and academically conceivable concept, while ineffable, old-world notions like presage, presentiment and premonition are inconvenient carriers of esoteric, supernatural, numinous, or mystical connotations. But using terms like these to differentiate between sapient and sentient psychic impressions is necessary in developing a universal psychic vocabulary, as it more accurately reflects and represents our true psychic experiences.
For example, not all psychics and mediums have a claircognitive psychic preference for ‘foreknowing.’ They might not necessarily ‘know’ or ‘understand’ something beforehand, but they do ‘feel’ or ‘sense’ it, or even ‘see, hear, taste, or smell’ it. Psychic mind-soul perception is much more than mere ‘mind-brain cognition.’
To clarify the intuition 'muddle' it is therefore necessary for the concept of clairintuition to be clearly differentiated from other types of prophetic or predictive psychic impressions. For a more accurate new conceptual model of psychic perception, I therefore propose the following terms to distinguish distinct types of prophetic or predictive psychic impressions, according to the relevant ‘clair’ preference:
Premonition: clairintuitive foreboding
Precognition: claircognitive,prescient foreknowing
Presentiment: clairempathic, affective forefeeling
Prognosis: clairsomatic, somatosensory foresensing
Presage: clairsensory apprehensions of foreseeing, forehearing, foresmelling; foretasting; foretouching
© 2022 Anthon St. Maarten
REFERENCES
[1] Rorty, R. (2021). Intuition. Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Encyclopedia.com.
[2] Sinclair, M. (2011). Intuition And Unconscious Thought. Handbook Of Intuition Research. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd
[3] Rosenblatt A.D. & Thickstun, J.T. (1994). Intuition And Consciousness. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly.
[4] Intuition. (2018). New World Encyclopedia. NewWorldEncyclopedia.org.
[5] Davis-Floyd, R & Arvidson, P.S. (2016). Intuition: The Inside Story: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Routledge.
[6] Dearborn, G. V. N. (1916). Intuition. Psychological Review.
[7] Arons, M. (1993). Instinct, Intuition And Supraconscious: De-Alienating Reflections. The Humanistic Psychologist.
[8] Nicholson, N. (1998). How Hardwired Is Human Behavior? Harvard Business Review.
[9] Harmon, H. (1970). Edgar Cayce On Religion And Psychic Experience. Paperback Library.
[10] Held, L. (2019). Psychic Mediums Are The New Wellness Coaches. The New York Times. Nytimes.com
[11] Garfinkel, P. (2015). Don’t Call Her A Psychic: ‘Intuitive Counselor’ Susan King Sets Up Shop At Hotel Bel-Air. Los Angeles Times.
[12] Coughlin, S. (2018). We Asked 5 Spiritual Workers To Define ‘Intuition’ - Here's What They Said. Refinery29.com
[13] Myss, C. (1996) Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing. Harmony.
[14] APA Dictionary Of Psychology. (2021) American Psychological Association. Dictionary.apa.org
[15] Precognition. (2021). APA Dictionary Of Psychology. American Psychological Association. Dictionary.apa.org
16] New York University. (2017) Emotions Are Cognitive, Not Innate, Researchers Conclude. ScienceDaily.
[17] Naylor, B. 20/20: The Sixth Sense: ‘Seeing The Future’. Oct 26, 2012. ABC News.
[18] Nichols, L. (2010). Remember The Miracle: Church Explosion 60 Years Ago Not Forgotten. Beatrice Daily Sun.
[19] Edeal, G. (1950). Why the Choir Was Late. Life Magazine.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anthon St. Maarten is a psychic medium and destiny coach with a global clientele of thought leaders, business executives, celebrities, politicians, academics, and luminaries in the arts and sciences in more than thirty countries spanning five continents.
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