You can easily experience the conflict between intuition and normal thought for yourself.

Between both extremes you have the thalamus. The amygdala begins to show the split, but beneath that you have what has been called the “reptile brain“, and the conflict between your conscious thought and your intuition registers here as physical sensations and symptoms.

Anxiety? Ah no, that’s a function of the amygdala which is between the conscious mind and the reptile mind. It actually surfaces as stress, physical impulses, repetitive stress patterns, hormone imbalances, only secondarily showing up on a level we would call emotional. Your eyes can go out of focus as the visual cortex conflicts with the amygdala say. You can develop migraine headaches as the frontal cortex begins to conflict with your chronic pain patterns. Your mind tries to reject any disagreement between your conscious thought and your intuitive recognition. But like a virus the conscious mind just uses these experiences to reproduce more of its own style of thinking.

This tension can be smoothed over. You can train yourself out of it. The most simple and straight forward practice perhaps being meditation.

So this is like the id, ego, and superego? Actually, no. Those three entities are cognitive or semi-cognitive modules at best, and don’t reliably develop in individuals across the board.

From the intuitive mind you can get a whole range of cognitive entities or sub identities. These usually show up as recurring characters in dreams, or intuitions of presence or awareness in daily events whereas those coming from the rational mind tend to take the form of stereotypes. Those ideas that make you say “You are just like so and so!”, even if that isn’t really factual. We generally aren’t very novel in our daily habitual thought.

Now the two sets of patterns or conscious / semi-conscious / unconscious patterns or structures, they can and do interact with each other, even “feeding” off of each other and taking energy for their own purposes.

And Archetypes? Archetypes are those characters that reproduce through the intuitive mind, the collective unconscious. They can and do mask themselves as characters from your conscious mind. Your shadow can show up as an observation about an acquaintance you were thinking of. Your anima or animus tends to show up every time you meet someone of the opposite gender that you feel any affinity for. These parts of our mind have what could be thought of as an artificial, secondary or symbiotic intelligence. They interact with perceptions and react to information that resonates with their nature, and they will process this information and then communicate it to other parts of your mind. In children this often shows up as unusually precocious imaginary friends. The child may have an imaginary friend that serves the role of surrogate mother, and this part of their mind will pick up on information about their “real” mother, serving as second hand empathy.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~