intuition

The word 'intuition' comes from the Latin word 'intueri', which is roughly translated as meaning 'to look inside’ or 'to contemplate', and is defined by dictionary.com as, pure, untaught non-inferential knowledge – which is why I like to call it inner tuition.

But where does this come from? Jung defined intuition as "perception via the unconscious", (the source of higher knowledge, or infinite intelligence, that we are all somehow connected to. According to Jung, the Ego (the "I" or self-conscious faculty) has four different fundamental ways of perceiving and interpreting reality, and two ways of responding to it. They are: Sensation, Thinking, Feeling, and Intuition; thinking is the opposite of Feeling, and Sensation the opposite of Intuition.

According to Jung, if a person has a highly developed Thinking function (an analytical "head"), the Feeling function (the empathetic, value-based  "heart") will be correspondingly underdeveloped, and in some cases suppressed.  The same goes for Sensation and Intuition.  Sensation is orientation "outward" to physical reality, and Intuition "inward" to psychic reality.”(Is there a psychic reality?)

Jung is also famous for coining the terms extraversion and introversion as a way of describing the diametric oppositions within an individuals responses to the world; the extravert being orientated out to the physical, the introvert orientated in to the psychic.

 An introverted-sensation type, such as an artist, experiences the physical world (sensation) from the perspective of the psychic or inner consciousness (introversion). Whereas, extroverted-intuition types, which Jung categorizes as most clairvoyants and psychics and even entrepreneurs who are able to see opportunity without evidence and experience revelations (intuition) that they can easily convey to others at the social (extrovert) or interpersonal level.  

In other words, “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Is there any difference between imagination and intuition? It seems both bestow us with the gifts of foresight, is intuition not simply the guidance system of the imagination?

There is a passage in Conversations with God when Neale Donald Walsh asks: “How do I know I am talking to God? How do I know this is not just my imagination?”

And the answer came: “What would be the difference?”

A beautiful thought is that if god and imagination are synonymous, daydreaming is Holy. I wish I had worked this out in the classroom as a child, it would have answered my boring teachers demands to pay attention perfectly. 

Do we all, as Madeleine L’Engle said, have to move into a slow intellectual acceptance of what our intuition has always known? As Jung outlined, the greatest opposition to our intuition is our perception of what is actual - sensation. We can easily talk ourselves into or out of anything, given the right frame of mind.

But scientists who have made the most important breakthroughs’ in their field have all needed to follow hunches to make the discoveries they have. “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” Albert Einstein.

For most of us, dreams are the most important source of intuitive guidance, according to many psychologists this is due to us being in a more receptive state to our unconscious pulls when we are sleeping. Timothy Freke, in his illuminating essay Lucid Living, proposes that all life is a dream (hardly a new idea) and we are the dreamers; each of us with a whole dream world existing within us.  

The world, according to Freke, is not an outer experience, but an inner one. “Knowing you are dreaming is the secret of enjoying the dream.” He calls on his readers to enter an ultra-awake state called lucid living, where we can awaken from the “sleeping sickness” that keeps your unconscious in a “life dream.”

Or as Eileen Caddy put it, “cease trying to work everything out with your minds. It will get you nowhere. Live by intuition and inspiration and let your whole life be Revelation.”

Is our intuition proof that there is a benevolent force somehow steering our path, one that cannot be defined by reason? It is a question I rarely stop asking myself. Every step we take in this world, we take with our mind first. But are we co-creating with a divine hand? Is trust in what we cannot see more important than a faith in what we can?