Me being serious - are you serious?

It's time for another outpouring of drivel from your favourite weirdo. This one's on the nature of intuition. I read something recently referring to women's intuition. I always thought that was a silly term. Men get it too, they just call it a 'gut feeling' instead. Same shit, different bucket. But my gender-differentiation ranting aside, as I said, I'm interested in the nature of intuition.

People seem to have this idea that there's something mystical about it. Rubbish, says I. It's not the ghost of your dead granny trying to tell you something, nor is it The Force (though never shall I speak ill of The Force!) or anything grandiose like that. Now don't ask me for references, because I don't recall where I found all this (or if I did, and it isn't all my own construct), but I say it's your own subconscious talking to you.

The subconscious (or 'unconscious' as some call it, though I don't much go on the term) stores information, pure and simple. All our memory and experience wanders off down there into that handy-dandy mental archive. The little dude down there (a bit like the guy who turns the light on in your fridge) sorts files and hands them up to you when you're thinking about stuff. Where did I leave my keys? The little dude gives you a file on your favourite places to put shit down when you come home. Where was my cute, fluffy little kitten when I came home from school that day and Mum said he 'ran away'? The little dude discreetly holds back the file from that day, illustrating how you saw some freshly tilled earth in the back yard. Well, you get the picture.

Some days, the little dude in your subconscious archive realises he's spilled his delicious iced coffee on one of your precious files and he can't really read it, so he calls up to you with what he remembers. That's your gut feeling.

Even without realising it, we observe an awful lot about our environment, and about what's going on with us internally. For instance, we notice other people's body language, speech patterns, etc. So, let's say you have a friend who you think may be a nasty rotten two-faced piece of crap, but you can't work out why you think this may be so, because they haven't really done anything to prove it. You may have had a nasty rotten two-faced friend in the past. The things you never realised you'd noticed about the first horrid friend may be cropping up in your new horrid friend. Maybe there's a certain narrowing of the eyes or nervous 'I'm lying my arse off' twitch. Your iced coffee-spilling archivist yells to you 'she's lying!' and you suddenly feel uneasy about this new person in your life. Maybe your dead granny's trying to tell you that too - far be it from me refute the existence of your ectoplasm-dribbling dead relatives - but your subconscious is the thing you rely on to (hopefully) keep you out of too much trouble.

Let it also be said that what the subconscious contains is information. It is by no means the root of all truth, as the information it contains is coloured by your own thought processes. It is not objective. What that means, essentially, is that there's a reason your gut feelings are as often wrong as they are right. Balance your decisions between your own reasoning/judgement and the feeling that comes to you. But if your gut feelings keep being right (even if it is only on certain subjects), learn when to follow them. Had I trusted my (remarkably accurate) instincts regarding human character, I never would have dated a guy who liked getting into physical fights with me (don't worry, I traded him in on a superior - and younger - model). The moral of the story is that getting laid isn't worth ignoring your strongest foreboding feelings... or something like that.