…from a correspondence to Journeyman, Askvárðr — 5/5/2011
“Finally, to respond to your question about “instinctive knowing” during new experiences. I understand your take on it, that it’s a reflection of hamingja or fylgja attuned. Recently, after sending you the letter about that, I read a book that dealt with this honing of instinct. It was terribly written and its purpose was more for the business world and modern flash-”chicken soup for the soul”. But the activity and description of what occurs with intuition was informative. The process the author described is “thin slicing”, where the observer subconsciously breaks down the multitude of actions, expressions and initial phrasing or feeling about a situation within the first moments. According to the author, this is a trainable skill, but often comes more easily to some than others. Honestly, by the end of the book, it seemed to me that the author was being exceptionally critical of every interaction he’d experienced and spent far too much time ruminating on past relations and situation than on how to actually develop the skill of which he so prominently spoke: Being able to tighten down on the myriad bits of information we see, and quickly filtering it with what is true vs. what is implied or expected.
To describe this in the Germanic terminology, as you request, I feel it mandates ongoing assessment and awareness of Huginn and Muninn; a balance thereof most of all. Hamingja, being the transferable and shared part of ourselves puts this in a very dynamic state as our relationship to thought and memory oscillates and weighs interpersonal communications with both people and objects/situations alike. As this is going on, our all-too-often hindering conscious self vacillates in a febrile nonstop revolution of uncommitted choices and options. We second guess ourselves faithfully even after our initial “I know this is the right way… BUT I still need to see if anything else makes sense.” While we are trying to assemble a ‘sense’ of things, we fill in the holes of intuition with unrelated data only to cobble together nonsense based upon only what we’ve accepted previously. Our brains, and hamingja, are far more capable of taking in and connecting the dots which are beyond our immediate memory. Of course, this is purposeful — having parts of our intrinsic memory (information) turned off, otherwise we’d overload on [past] information and be incapable of taking in new things. We can’t have Muninn speaking more loudly and Huginn, but we cannot rely solely on the latter. “
Vax vel, vaxa og ná,
Gandvaldr Bláskikkja
