Whence Intuition?

Intuition:  the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.

That’s quite a definition.  Also known as a hunch, gut-feeling, and conscience, the information experience we call intuition is remarkable.  That it exists is undeniable – everyone has hunches, even if not abided. 

“Why did you take that way home?”  “Something just told me too.”  You know the experience.  It seems as if some external voice or personage was providing  guiding information or feelings which, if acknowledged, resulted in obtaining something good, or avoiding something unpleasant or even dangerous.

Okay, but whence intuition?  Where does it come from?  Some will chalk it up to angel whispers, which is a pleasant way of describing such otherworldly guidance.  Some will minimize the experience as a “brain fart” or some chemical aberration in synapse firing or whatever – a side effect of some activity of the brain organ.  Notice that hunches and gut feelings are, well, feelings – rather than conscious data processing via the brain. 

I have a hunch that the experience called Intuition is a vestige of a more direct access to universal information.   Where does knowledge come from?  It is a fine distinction between intuition and an idea.  “Where’d you come up with that idea?”  “I don’t know, it just came to me.” 

Much more to Intuition than appears

You keep looking at something.  You don’t mean too, but for some reason, your attention is called over and over to  something, say a desk drawer.  Later, it’s time to go.  OMG!  I’ve lost my car keys!  Guess where they are?  You’ve had that experience in some form or other.

Where does such information come from?  It’s not coincidence – it happens too often.  It’s not accidental – the information is invariably correct.  A sculpturer describes seeing the final work inside the raw stone.  Now, what the heck is that?  An artist gazes a blank canvas and envisions the scene.  Einstein explores time-space perched on a beam of light.  How’d he come up with that idea?  You look at the phone an instant before it sounds.  You think of someone just prior to their calling, sending an email, text (or, in the ancient times, a letter.)  Or you call someone and they say “I was just thinking about you...”  What’s going on here?

This is communication.  It’s not language, it’s a knowing.  It is a sense.  I suppose it could be considered Extra-Sensory Perception, or ESP, although ESP is popularly considered mind-to-mind communication.  Or, as the Baptist preacher said at the end of his sermon on the wickedness of such things as ESP, “Now, let us pray...” 

It’s real, it’s universal – in that it “happens” to everyone, all the time, and, as Jiminy Cricket says “always let your conscience be your guide.” or, follow your intuition.