More on Intuition

I am curious how "natural" the intuitive function is. Apparently some people seem to be born with high intuitive skills. Women especially are seen as being more intuitive than men. some think this is because they have a slightly different brain structure; others say it is that at least in this country, there is a kind of permission for women to make decisions on intuition--a permission that culturally assigns men to functioning more strictly "rational". David Myers book, called "Intuition, Its Powers and Perils", has some interesting reading on the subject. We all have examples in our lives of thinking of someone, and then the next thing comes a phone call from that person. Some people have this kind of thing happen more frequently. Others get a "warning" from their dealing with another person, especially someone you meet for the first time.It is enough to make you think that there is some kind of  consciousness that connects us all, if we would just tune into it. By definition, it is not rational. Neither is is irrational; just non-rational.
    The TV show, " The Mentalist", shows our fascination with the sharp discerning skills of Simon Baker. "Sherlock" on PBS, who has a cult following, is another good example of paying attention to subtle clues, many of which are non-verbal. These are some of the things that a good psychotherapist will give attention to as a way of reading unconscious material in a counselee. For me it is a kind of meditative thing, being fully present to the person, empathic, open, trusting/testing what I read between the lines.
  As for personally employing intuition, I tend to rely on my dreams for a "reading" of what I am picking up unconsciously in my waking life. I use this especially when I am troubled by something.It is like my subconscious self is collecting data all day, some of which I am not consciously paying much attention to, then at night this subconscious puts things together and tells me a story--if I can just figure it out. There is an account of a sixth grade girl who dreamt that her teacher was pregnant, which had not been announced anywhere. She was picking up on signals of the teachers comments, behaviour, and putting it together as an intuitive conclusion.
   As I meet more people who are high intuitives, or "empaths", I think I have a theory on how the average person gets turned on intensely to their intuitive skills and insights. I think that these exceptional people learn early in their life to trust what the rest of us usually dismiss. One example is a women whose grandfather died when she was 12. He was her only real father, because her birth father had left the family. She was devastated in her grief, and lying on her bed, she "saw" her grandfather, who gave her some comfort in her grief. It was after that when she began to be aware of more things that she could see in other people. She did not think of her experience as a "normal" grief phenomenon, which it likely was, but as an initiation into the mysteries of the paranormal. I once tried to "telecommunicate" with her, over 100 miles away. That didn't work, but she told me that she awoke one morning with a strong sense that my wife was homesick, and wanted to shorten the vacation trip we were on. It was true, but was it intuition or deductive reasoning? I need more data from other people's experience on this, but it seems like adaptation and survival hightens intuitive abilities. This woman said it was sometimes a burden to see so much, some of which for her was a kind of futurecasting.
    The psychic I saw for the card reading had a lonely childhood because of the preoccupation of her parents with two sick brothers. They were in and out of the hospital with hemophelia, and she was neglected. She started to think that she was odd with her intuitive powers, and kept it to herself until she grew up, got married. It was then that she embraced these abilities.