Whenever you step firmly into heart-centered consciousness, your awareness immediately becomes more connected to your inner source of intuition. Through intuition, you become aware of information about people, places and events that springs from the essence of those people, places and events. This information is not delivered through the outside senses, although it may unfold within you at the same time that you receive sensory information.

While visual information relates only to the sense of sight, intuitive information includes much more. It includes all sensory information - sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste - and, in addition to that, the thoughts, feelings and memories that are relevant to the situation.

First impressions are more than just visual. They are intuitive as well. When you are about to meet a person for the first time and you are approaching them, you will receive a visual impression and your consciousness will also receive impressions about the nature of their consciousness, such as their true emotional state. That intuitive stream of information will come into your awareness alongside the visual stream and, if you are aware that it exists, you can add the intuitive information to your conscious impression of the person.

Everyone receives this intuitive information stream unconsciously, but, for it to arrive in your conscious mind, you have to:

1. Be aware that it exists.
2. Be open to receiving it.

The more you practice having an openness to intuitive information, the more this will develop.

Most people are not aware of their mental and emotional transmissions. In a crowd of people, these transmissions add together and there is as much mental noise as there is physical noise. As you become more in tune with your inner senses, you will find that, on some occasions, it's better not to access your intuitive information for a time, just to give yourself some peace from the volume of mental noise.

At night, when you travel out-of-body in the spirit realms, communication is different than when you are awake in your physical body. The natural method of communication in your spirit body is to exchange information with others via thought. In the spirit world, people naturally know when to open for a communication and when to close down their thought transmissions again. There, you sense when a person 'opens' to you and sends a mental greeting, or when they are 'closed' and not offering any communication.

In daily life, first impressions are intuitive as well as visual. The reception of such information is automatic, but the conscious mind misses this information feed when it is focused entirely upon the external world.

Be aware of your own intuitive information. Be open to it. Then, it will flow right into your conscious mind along with the visual information that your conscious mind is receiving.

Owen Waters is editor and cofounder of Infinite Being LLC. He promotes a philosophy of spiritual empowerment through inner connection to the source of your ultimate potential. For more Spiritual Words of Empowerment subscribe to his free weekly newsletter. For the full picture, read Owen's book, The Shift: The Revolution in Human Consciousness.

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