Intuition, the secret power of your consciousness – Lent 2025: Day 16

Our current scientific paradigm, based on the notion that everything in the Cosmos is based on matter,  rejects the idea of intuition as a sixth sense outside of the five connected to sensory organs – sight, hearing, taste, smell and hearing. Yet most people will to some degree accept intuition on the basis of what they have personally experienced.

Often mistaken for instinct, intuition is something different. Instinct is set of behaviours, innate and learned, that an organism carries out unconsciously in response to external conditions. Blinking, recoiling, shielding one's face, reaching out to grab – these are instincts. Watching a cat as it sit perched on the window ledge, watching the ground below. Its attention is fully focused on detecting movement in the undergrowth that could signal the presence of prey. The cat's ears swivel independently of one another; one rotates clockwise by ten degrees, the other anti-clockwise by 45 degrees, at the same time. This happened instinctively. The ears are not guided by the brain, but respond reflexively to external stimuli. 

Intuition is also different to thought or cognition. Thought is a process; intuitions come instantaneously. Intuition is a sense of knowing something without the act of reasoning. Intuition involves accessing information or insights that are not immediately apparent through logical thought. And now it's time to dive into the speculative: is intuition proof of non-local consciousness? It implies a interconnectedness of minds and potentially access to information that's not limited by space and time. And this implies magic; intending a physical effect without a physical cause. 

Now, is it something that we can tap into if we are open to it? Are some people gifted with greater intuitive powers than others? Or can we develop our intuition through practice and exercise?

Below: How Google Imagen 3.0 sees the difference... The AI must have learnt from somewhere that "hair are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into the brain."

Again, I return to my analogy about laptops. It's a very useful analogy. One laptop is fully-featured, has huge processing power and a vast hard drive, but stands alone. The other has a weaker processor and little read-only memory, but unlike the first is connected to the internet via wifi. Which laptop is more useful?

And further questions... As humanity makes the leap to being a technological species, are our intuitive powers losing out to our highly trained cognitive skills? Has our intuition atrophied during our evolution from hunter-gatherers?

Lent 2024: Day 16
Do we tend to get more spiritual as we get older?

Lent 2023, Day 16
Intuition – is it magical?

Lent 2022: Day 16
The difficulties of focusing on the spiritual

Lent 2021: Day 16
This planet is my home, today and tomorrow

Lent 2020: Day 16
My metaphysical journey, as I see it