Where the Intuitive Flash Comes From

This time out I thought it might be interesting to think about what we mean by intuition. I imagine most readers will count intuition among the most important guides along the spiritual path. But what is it?

Often we use the word interchangeably with feeling as in, I have a feeling about this street, night, person. This muddies our task of isolating intuition as a discrete phenomenon because of another word we use interchangeably with feeling, the word emotion. The difference between intuition and emotion can be clearly seen in moments when our emotional attitude conflicts with our intuitive. We might find a person or situation emotionally compelling while our intuition says stay clear of that person or situation. Or we might have a “negative” emotional attitude toward a person or situation (fear, contempt, etc.) but our intuition tells us that we must face it/them. But the distinction is not always clear cut. Our use of the word “feeling” to refer to both emotions and intuitions goes deeper than a semantic distinction. It points to the difficulty we all experience from time to time in distinguishing our emotional states from our intuitive insights.

One way we might come to appreciate the contrast between intuition and emotion is to observe the way these states are inter related. Emotions are, to a large extent, rooted in the body. We all come into the world with a basic set of emotional responses: love and fear. Love compels us to lean into what nurtures and supports us while fear compels us to shrink away from what seems to threaten. A lot of this is explained by animal instinct. The complexity of our nervous and endocrine systems makes each of us a finely tuned instrument in the service of protecting and furthering the needs of the bodies we inhabit. If we add to this any karmic factors arising from the possibility of past lives, the bodies we inhabit will have their systems weighted in different ways. Some babies are more affectionate and curious while others are more withdrawn and reticent. Whether these differences are bound up with genetics or karmic influences, our basic emotional dispositions at birth will determine our orientation toward the world.

This basic emotional orientation (combined with that of the people around us and the situation into which we are born) will determine the experiences we will have. A person who is more emotive born into a family or culture that prizes emotional reserve will experience the conflict between their emotional needs and the response of their environment as rejection. Another person, perhaps born more reserved into a very emotionally demonstrative family or culture might grow up feeling intruded upon and seek solitude. In this way, love and fear become articulated into a wide spectrum of human emotion from empathy and curiosity to resentment, irritability and anger. Over time the development of an emotional body begins to shape our hopes, fears and expectations of the world around us. If there is any such thing as objective reality, a state of things apart from our feelings about them, the main thing that keeps us from seeing it (apart from the limitations of our senses) is the accretion of emotional responses and expectations which color and filter what we see of it.

But what about intuition? It is helpful to consider the way we experience intuitive insights. We often use the word flash to describe a moment of intuitive clarity. Often these come unbidden and at odd moments. We might recognize something as obviously the case at a moment when we weren’t even thinking about that thing. The source of a conflict or the resolution of a challenge might come to us while we are folding laundry or upon opening our eyes from sleep. Upon examining such an insight we might realize that this flash of insight had been forming beneath the surface of our awareness for some time. I suggest that such moments of clarity are, in fact formed from recognition and realizations that have been rejected by our emotional personality. To see how this is so it will be helpful to look at another subjective state separate from both intuition and emotion, the state of thought.

When we think about something we are talking to ourselves. We form mental images of people, things and situations and arrange them in various configurations within a mental space. This process sometimes goes by the name reasoning. For several centuries now, especially in the so called West, reasoning has been counted among the most essential and most highly prized traits. The ability to imagine situations and outcomes before the fact allows human beings an enormous amount of freedom and power in relation to the world around us. But we are mistaken if we believe that this reason is not shaped by accumulated emotional conditioning. We think about what we wish to happen or not and we conceive stratagem to bring about the desired state of affairs. But everybody knows that it is possible to think our selves into or out of situations that might be bad (or good) for us in the long run. This is because what we want may be incompatible with the situations in which we find ourselves. Common examples of this might be constantly seeking out certain kinds of relationships that do not serve us. If we grew up around people who would, or could not meet our emotional needs, we might learn ways of seeking their attention and approval only to meet with disappointment. It might not occur to us, especially if we are young, that the other might simply not posses what we need. So we seek out people who will with hold what we need emotionally in an attempt to complete what we tried to find in earlier life.

Although such behavior might strike us as unreasonable, the situations that arise from such behavior were arrived at through reason. We have, in our mind, the image of the one from whom we seek love and support. That person will be a pastern of character traits (and sometimes even physical traits) that remind us of that person. So we seek out someone like that and proceed to do what we have always done, devise a series of stratagem that we hope will elicit the response we want. All very reasonable.

But why do we not simply seek a different kind of person? Usually it is because the type of person we seek isn’t based on a “reasoned out” list of character traits that we know will meet our needs. The type of person we find ourselves drawn to is usually someone who resembles, in some essential way, a parent, sibling, close friend, “authority figure” or early romantic partner who awakened in us a strong need for connection. The mental object of our affection (or respect, admiration, fear, etc) is usually based on a concrete experience of having deep emotional needs met (or not). That concrete experience or experiences becomes abstracted through the process of thought into an image. This image then acts as a stand in within the mental process of what it means to be in a certain relationship space. The supposedly abstract thought is, in fact, the crystallization of a particular experience.

This process is also responsible for the way we feel about risk, security, novel situations and all manner of relevant aspects of human life; our career choices, our aspirations, the way we deal with success or failure, all of these are rooted in the complex of key life experiences which become rarefied into abstract symbols of what these things mean.

Through the process of moving and re configuring these symbols we must ignore, either actively or passively, information which doesn’t fit our schema. We might not recognize people, situations and opportunities that might better serve our immediate emotional needs and long term goals because they don’t look like what we expect them too. But often rejected and ignored information and impressions are held in a kind of mental buffer. It is this buffered information which becomes the material that comes forward in an intuitive flash.

This information finally presents itself when the conflict between our emotional and mental bodies becomes too great to bare. There are moments when our strategies for gaining what we need are so clearly not leading to satisfaction that the psychic dissonance leads us to reject, if only for a moment, the mental picture we have of the world. In those moments, all the minute inconsistencies and conflicts present themselves as potential keys for resolving our inner conflict.

Notice though that such intuitive flashes seldom come in an emotionally “heated” moment. This is because in such moments we are too invested in our own idea of the world to allow it to be compromised by conflicting information. Usually such insights come when we are unguarded. This is why dreams are such a common way that unrecognized reality comes to us. We are never more unguarded than in sleep.

This is also the main engine of divination. Since we can’t force an outcome when we consult the Tarot, I Ching, Runes, etc., we are forced to make sense of what ever we are presented with. Now sometimes we try to manipulate the results to fit what we hope. But even if we are successful in that, we will sooner or later come to see what we were really meant to see because our manipulation of the oracle falls apart in the face of continued experience. More commonly, by the time we consult an oracle we are already feeling the inconsistencies in our world view and experience that lead to intuitive insight. The oracle opens the “crack” and what we have known all along comes forward. This is why some of the most profound readings involve confirmation of what we already knew rather than presenting something novel.

Nor do we need to wonder whether an intuitive insight comes from “inside” or “outside”. In even the most mundane sense, everything “inside” of us comes from “outside”. For the purposes of intuition, the inside and outside is defined by the paradigm that we carry around as a map of reality. As has been said, we absorb all manner of information and impressions from the world around us, but not all of it seems relevant (or welcome) to those mental maps. The information that becomes available to us in an intuitive insight is literally off the map but never the less real.

One of the most common ways of increasing our intuitive “reach” is by taking up a divination practice. As a student of both Tarot and The I Ching, I can attest to the power of this path. Another popular way is to keep a dream journal. I do not keep one but I always try to decode significant dreams. But one method that perhaps doesn’t get as much attention as it should is to simply observe the environment around you, especially in emotionally charged or intellectually confused moments. Try to catch, out of the corner of your eye, so to speak, things that are happening that do not seem to have much to do with the object of your attention. A lot of what reveals itself as important in a moment of intuitive insight are things that escape our attention in the moment. For this reason, it is helpful to practice just noticing the small details of your environment and interactions. This is why any form of mindfulness meditation has the side effect of increasing intuition. By getting out of our head, and the constant replay of mental scenarios, and simply focusing on our surroundings (including the activities within our own bodies), we train the attention to notice things beyond the train of our thoughts.

Intuition forms a bridge of sorts between our thoughts and emotions, bringing them more into alignment with the larger reality. Everyone, but especially practitioners of any form of magik will benefit from consciously developing their intuitive reach. As this happens, sudden intuitive flashes will no doubt loose some of the dramatic impact that makes us notice them. But this will be more than made up for when our intuition shows up, more and more, as a familiar and nearly expected old and trusted friend.