Intuition is the sixth sense that everybody possesses, although it varies in degree from person to person. It can best be described as an illogical sensory experience that comes from a location outside of personal awareness and temporal reality. The five senses—taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight—depend on the physical body and your own consciousness.

Everything is relative to you in the moment of experience, so it’s safe to say that these senses operate within the confines of linear time. For example, you see this Website now, not yesterday; you touch the fur on your dog’s head now, not tomorrow.

The personal consciousness of time is important to mention because the mind is like a computer that stores every five-sensory experience you’ve ever had, creating individual memories that relate to the past. All that you’ve learned intellectually or felt emotionally is housed there, too. Your unique personal awareness is governed by memory, as well as by the automatic intelligence inside you that makes your heart beat, your skin sensitive to touch, your nose smell, and so forth.

Everyone believes that he or she is an individual with a unique personality, operating under the personal identity called Me. My memories, my knowledge, my emotions, my identity, my preferences are some examples of what helps make up the definition of self, which then dictates our moment-to-moment personal experience.

Our intuition, however, operates outside these limits. Is your intuition giving you messages? Here are 8 ways that intuition guides us in common, everyday situations.

See if any of these ring true for you:

1. You have an urge to make a right-hand turn while you’re driving, although the directions you were given clearly tell you to turn left. You later see on the news that you avoided a terrible accident by going the other way. (What made you ignore the directions you were given?)
2. The phone rings and you have a flash in your mind—a name or a face—accompanied by the spontaneous insights that a friend you haven’t spoken to in years is calling. You answer and it’s your long-lost pal. (How could you have logically known this?)
3. You walk into a party and meet a man who’s charming and charismatic, yet you feel really nervous around him and dislike him immediately. You find out later that he has a history of abusing women. (You’ve never met him before, so what made you feel that way?)
4. You’re in a great mood, but when you sit down at a business meeting, you’re suddenly overwhelmed with sadness. You find out that the person who’d just been sitting in your chair had to put his dog down that morning. (What made you feel that sorrow?)
5. You know when someone is lying to you on the phone even though you can’t see his or her face. (How did you detect this?)
6. A feeling that something bad has happened overwhelms you, and you know that your child has been hurt at school. Then you get a call from a teacher confirming your suspicions. (How does this happen?)
7. You experience déjà vu—as if you’re reliving the moment you’re in for the second time—and you know without a doubt what will happen next. (How do you explain this?)
8. You’re late for a job interview, yet something inside you tells you to linger for a moment in front of a store window. The next thing you know, a really important person shows up and offers you the best job of your life (What made you risk being late for your interview?)

Experiences like these happen to people every day and are generally said to be lucky coincidences or hunches, or are simply discounted altogether. However, these are really just examples of our intuition informing us of things outside our personal Me reality. As these situations illustrate, intuition gives us access to spontaneous bursts of knowledge and insight from beyond our conscious awareness.