According to Bob Proctor in the the hit movie The Secret, one of the greatest metaphysical authors of the last 100 years was Thomas Troward (1847-1916). A judge in British-administered India, Troward set out to apply logic and a judicial weighing of evidence to the study of spiritual cause and effect.

The philosopher William James characterized Troward’s Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science as “far and away the ablest statement of philosophy I have met, beautiful in its sustained clearness of thought and style, a really classic statement” (quoted in wikipedia).

Trusting your intuition is an important part of developing your psychic abilities.

One of his Edinburgh lectures included his ideas about intuition. He started off by explaining that, while the subconscious (or as he called it, subjective) mind is open to control by the conscious (or objective) mind, the reverse is also true. He says that “the individual’s subjective mind is pure spirit” and that it can “consequently inform the lower mind of things removed from its ken either by distance or futurity”. In other words, Troward is saying that the subconscious mind, because it is connected to the Source, is sometimes able to access knowledge that is not available to our conscious minds (what we would call clairvoyance).

Troward says that there is “…no limit to the subjective mind’s power of perception, and therefore the question arises, why does it not keep the objective mind continually informed on all points? And the answer is that it would do so if the objective mind were sufficiently trained to recognize the indications given, and to effect this training is one of the purposes of Mental Science”. So in other words he is saying that most of us are too busy to notice what our subconscious mind is trying to tell us.

He also says that “once we recognize the position of the subjective mind as the supporter of the whole individual we cannot doubt that much of what we take to be the spontaneous movement of the objective mind has its origin in the subjective mind prompting the objective mind in the right direction without our being consciously aware of it”. This means that as we come to understand the power and importance of the subconscious mind, we will realize that it is largely responsible for our thoughts, and hence our reality.

He continues by saying “But at times when the urgency of the case seems to demand it, or when, for some reason yet unknown, the objective mind is for a while more closely en rapport (in contact) with the subjective mind, the interior voice is heard strongly and persistently; and when this is the case we do well to pay heed to it”. Here he is saying that many of us, often for unknown reasons (but especially when we need it), experience acloser connection (or gut feeling) that we know comes from inside and contains the truth.

The rest of the lecture is as follows (with my summary at the end):

Bob Proctor in The Secret calls Thomas Troward one of the greatest metaphysical writers of the last century.

“The importance of understanding and following the intuition cannot be exaggerated, but I candidly admit the great practical difficulty of keeping the happy mean between the disregard of the interior voice and allowing ourselves to be run away with groundless fancies.

The best guide is the knowledge that comes of personal experience which gradually leads to the acquisition of a sort of inward sense of touch that enables us to distinguish the true from the false, and which appears to grow with the sincere desire for truth and with the recognition of the spirit as its source.

The only general principles the writer can deduce from his own experience are that when, in spite of all appearances pointing in the direction of a certain line of conduct, there is still a persistent feeling that it should not be followed, in the majority of instances it will be found that the argument of the objective mind, however correct on the facts objectively known, was deficient from ignorance of facts which could not be objectively known at the time, but which were known to the intuitive faculty.

Another principle is that our very first impression of feeling on any subject is generally correct. Before the objective mind has begun to argue on the subject it is like the surface of a smooth lake which clearly reflects the light from above; but as soon as it begins to argue from outside appearances these also throw their reflections upon its surface, so that the original image becomes blurred and is no longer recognizable.

This first conception is very speedily lost, and it should therefore be carefully observed and registered in the memory with a view to testing the various arguments which will subsequently arise on the objective plane. It is however impossible to reduce so interior an action as that of the intuition to the form of hard and fast rules, and beyond carefully noting particular cases as they occur, probably the best plan for the student will be to include the whole subject of intuition in the general principle of the Law of Attraction, especially if he sees how this law interacts with that personal quality of universal spirit of which we have already spoken.”

Summary

So what this long section is saying goes something like this:

*It is really important to listen to your intuition, but sometimes it can be hard to distinguish true messages from all the crap running through your mind on a daily basis.
*We can learn through experience when to listen to our intuition.
*If your gut-feeling is to follow a certain course of action then you should, regardless of what your head is telling you (in other words, follow your heart).
*First impressions are often the best, but it can be hard to remember what they are once your noisy conscious mind takes over.
*Use the Law of Attraction to improve your intuitive abilities (by desiring and believing it to be so).