what about … intuition?

Intuition – a little personal story

When i was teaching preschool, way back in the 1970s, i had to drive for an hour every day to get to my school. And i liked to drive fast, real fast on those winding backroads of the Austrian countryside.

Still now i clearly remember how sometimes vague pictures of a police car appeared somewhat at the edge of my awareness or a voice quietly said “Polizei”.

Even more clearly i remember the – more or less conscious – struggle to recognize this message from “inner space” ; ) (from where did it actually come?).

Sometimes i guess, my ego, my adrenaline, the clock or some other more interesting train of thought interfered and made me block out the message.

And there – more often than not – they were … the police.

Quite an expensive learning curve. But learn i did.

Quite a practical real-life way to learn about intuition at a time when this word was just another colloquial word for me, not very much more.

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Now, looking back at this episode, at this little story of mine, i can see that it already encapsulates quite a number of the elements of intuition that are essential for its working.

– Intuition is a innate ability of any human being to know things that she/he actually, logically can not know

– Intuition is practical and appears in a certain context

– Intuition can appear in the form of a picture, of a “movie” in the mind, a voice or a feeling.

– Intuition usually appears on the periphery of our awareness in an unobtrusive, quiet way. It is not trying to grab our attention or make us do something.

– intuitive “messages” often come to our attention when we are in a focussed mode – like driving fast – or in a very relaxed mode – like the mode we may be in when we are under the shower or before falling asleep.

– For the untrained person intuition is often hard to distinguish from the usual chatter of the mind, from personal biases or fears.

– Intuition often runs counter to our known behavior patterns, the usual ways of our personality, our habits.

Our ego’s drives.

That may be the reason we often doubt the validity of such messages and don’t follow those subtle hints

– Fears and specific expectations can camouflage as intuition

– Generally speaking, we don’t know much – actually almost nothing at all – what Intuition actually is and where such messages are coming from and why.

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Now, ever since those days of my youth, Intuition has been a fascinating theme for me.
This out-of-the-usual experience that gives me goosebumps every time i experience it.
A glimpse in the world beyond the mind and senses where direct knowing is the natural way to know something that i could actually not know.

So, over the many years since then i have “collected” a wealth of experiences and insights that helped me to not only experience Intuition and make one of the foundations of my personal life but also to understand Intuition, to get an idea and a context for whats going on whenever i get my goosebumps ; )

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I am sure there are many definitions of Intuition, many interpretations of this phenomenon.

I guess that each definition is a reflection of the consciousness of those people who made the effort to define it. And relevant for the specific time period and context of their life.

For me, definitions are not the truth of a thing, they are merely a mental concept that can help me to put something that is of special interest to me into a mental focus in order to understand it better.

Without definition and a general agreement about such definitions we will never be able to understand each other when we communicate about it.

Definitions will also change, expand, become more precise over time, when we explore something sincerely.

Or end up in the garbage bag altogether ; ) because i realize that i do not understand the thing at all.

I just wish to make clear that i don’t intend to intellectualize life and the mysteries of intuition here.

So, having said that, here are some definitions and understandings, some context that makes sense to me at this time of my life:

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INTUITION

– The word stems from:

the Latin root intueri, which means “look at, consider”

and has been used since the 15.Century in Latin as intuicioun, “insight, direct or immediate cognition, spiritual perception”

– From the Websters Universal Dictionary:

The immediate knowing or learning of something without the conscious use of reasoning and active thinking processes.

– Instantaneous apprehension and insight

– Direct perception of truth, independent of any reasoning process

– Pure, untaught, none-inferential knowing

– Some definitions also interpret Intuition also in the context of instinct, automatic reaction, association, sixth sense, psi, extra-sensory awareness, clairvoyance, unmediated perception, divination, dowsing, inspiration …

Interesting stuff i would say! Which student would not like to know all what’s written in the books he/she needs to read for an exam without actually needing to read them page by page ; )

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C.G. Jung found four psychological functions that we humans all have:

Thinking

Feeling

Sensing

Intuition

As Jung saw it, Intuition is one of the basic function of or psyche, the ability to instantaneously perceive all the possibilities inherent in a situation.

(Very handy, i would say ; )

But he also found – that intuition is mostly unconscious and undeveloped, unappreciated in most western “civilized” people, especially so in males.

His four psychic functions correspond to specific regions of the brain:

the reptilian brain – sensing

the Limbic System – feeling

the Left Neo-Cortex – thinking

the Right-Neo-Cortex – intuition

Which is really interesting to know if we wish to consciously develop and use intuition in practical ways in our life.

But more about this later on.

What really interested me is the question: Where is the intuitive information, intuitive knowing coming from, those messages and insights.

How can i know something that i actually have no way of knowing???

The answers are becoming much more clear the more i understand about consciousness.

Consciousness, both in Western philosophy and psychology as well as in Eastern Wisdom teachings is a Unity, a – somewhat mysterious and still unexplained – continuum of the same “substance” that underlays all phenomena.

Although it is considered a Unity, generally speaking it is thought of having four or five distinct different “realms”:

– the Ground of Being (the absolute substance of everything in Existence)

– the Unconscious (the collective consciousness, including human, animal, plant, and raw matter kingdoms, the whole evolutionary chain from the Big Bang till now)

– the Subconscious (the personal unconscious in humans)

– the Conscious Realm (the normal state of fragmented consciousness in humans, our daily state of awareness and what results from it in ways of Culture and Society)

– the Superconscious (the higher, more and more subtle dimensions of consciousness, the “Higher Self”, the Soul, Atman, “the Divine”, Brahman, God …

I admit that i don’t totally know what i am talking about here. This is my – rather intuitive – grasp of such big transcendental realities : )

But what it means to me is, that everything that is to know about anything in existence is already there, somewhere on this spectrum of consciousness.

Ready to be picked up intuitively/directly and translated thru our mind into concepts that we can understand and language we can communicate with.

And – for reasons that are still hard for me to understand – we as human beings have the potential and inborn capacity to do that.

To “surf” the spectrum of consciousness up and down and “read” the universal data banks (called Akasha in Sanskrit).

Rare individuals throughout the ages have been able to do that, from the Rishis of the Vedic times in India to some Lamas and yogis of Tibet to a few high level Trance mediums of our times.
And of course a couple of other folks that i have never heard of.
But really love to meet in person : )

Obviously not you and me or the neighbor next door : )

Obviously inner development, spiritual maturity and specific methods were/are necessary for such things to happen.

A development and fine-tuning of abilities that are given to us as a birthright but lay dormant in everyone of us, waiting to be activated.

What an exciting possibility awaits humanity!!!

(hahaha, my inner critique laughs, just take a look at the TV News …. )

Well, i have no illusions about the state of mind of the general population of Planet Earth.

But still …

The potential is still there for anyone who feels a longing to raise above the usual jumble and malaise that is going on inside out heads every day.

I am talking about our “normal” state of mind, our fragmented awareness and the resulting brainwave pattern.

To learn to recognize what going on “up there”, develop ways to shift from the Beta Brainwaves of everyday reactive mind activity into Alpha, Delta and Theta and Gamma Brainwaves at will … this will give us the key to the door of different levels of consciousness, direct access to knowing and probably abilities of the brain/mind/soul/spirit that we only can dream of now.

Does not matter how much i consciously know about brainwave states, it is clear from experience that intuition as well as any other “higher” form of perception is most possible when i am in a calm, wakeful, openly receptive state with very little mental noise going on in my mind/brain to interfere with the intuitive “input” ; )

In eastern symbolic & poetic language this state has always been compared with a perfectly peaceful pond under the full moon, no ripples or waves breaking the surface.
Like a mirror it perfectly reflects the full moon above.

Or the perfectly calm turquoise sea at sunset on a remote pacific atoll, when you can see deep into the transparent water down to the seafloor, see all the colorful wonders there.

In scientific language, this state is associated with brainwave coherence, which means the synchronization of brainwaves across different regions of the brain. Regions that I have mentioned before:

the reptilian brain – Sensing

the Limbic System – Feeling

the Left Neo-Cortex – Thinking

the Right-Neo-Cortex – Intuition

Coherence is also associated with moments of high creativity, so called “Flow States” of the brain, mental flexibility, openness and presence in the Here&Now.

Also there is an experience of Transcendence, like we would quietly allowed to peek over the edge of our personal existence into the bigger world beyond our confines.

Researchers who have studied people with Near-death Experiences – as well as other peak experiences that transcend “normal” everyday life experiences – found that such people are likely to be highly intuitive and can talk about things that they actually could not know by normal ways of thinking about such things.

For me, this means that a healthy and coherent nervous system (mind-body/psycho-physical) can process higher-level knowledge in an orderly fashion and naturally lead my attention to the needed information at the right time without my personal effort involved.

This is exactly how i experience those moments of intuitive knowing, that give me the goosebumps.

It is also my experience that the depth and clarity of my intuitive perception and insight can be increased by my own spiritual practice, whatever this may be.

In my case it is meditation, for other people it may be Tai Chi or a deep artistic process that creates a Flow state of mind, where time and space and identity is somehow transcended.

Meditation has been the traditional way in the East, the most deeply explored and developed path to understand and utilize our inner potential, the abilities of our mind and what lays beyond.

That it is not taught in kindergarten and not practiced in school is – in my eyes – one of the tragedies of our present culture.

Instead of practicing “inner methods of development and happiness/coherence” most of us are busy practicing technological methods of distractedness and entertainment.
And our educational systems and institutions are content with filling the brains of children with secondary information and tons of secondhand knowledge.

Technology can be pretty cool and helpful, i am not against it at all.
Neither am i speaking against education / edu-care

But i guess it, technological progress needs to be in balance with the development of inner abilities, character and value development, spiritual growth and soul qualities like empathy, compassion and the understanding of service to All There Is.

What a Crown of Creation we humans could be then, it is even hard to imagine.

If only we could transcend our ego-based identifications ; )

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More to come …..

But – in case you are interested, you may want to check out some articles about related issues:

Brainwaves:

The Mind, the Brain and the rest

Meditation and Brainwave states

Meditation:

Dealing with the Monkey Mind / A short & sweet primer on How to Meditate

How to meditate – a bit more seriously this time

Consciousness: