The Practical Uses of Intuition - Lent 2023: Day 20

There is, I believe, this sixth sense within us - except it manifests itself in different degrees. Just as some people by natural physique and training become great athletes, while most of us don't. Or some people by predisposition and practice become chess grandmasters, while most of us don't. Some of us become aware of the power of their intuition at an early age, some as they grow older. Some of us will go on to train that power, others will either ignore or neglect it.

Even if you feel it weakly, it can be of practical value in life.

What for? Certainly intuition will not to make you exceptionally wealthy and worshipped by the masses. But it can, I believe, guide you towards a more comfortable existence, richer in meaning and fuller in purpose - so yes, it can help.

Believing in, and being able to identify, intuitions is the vital first step. Noticing that quiet moment of insight appearing suddenly into the stream of your consciousness, cutting through the buzz of your thoughts - and accepting that it is a sincere and extraneous wish to help you. Sifting away your wishful thinking, if you can say with total honesty to yourself - yes - that's absolutely right. 

I am uncertain whether you can draw down intuitions at will. Some people claim they are able to, for the purposes of divination. I feel the intuitions that I notice are the unbidden ones; answers to problems that have been bothering me for some time - I focus my thought onto something else - and then PAFF! - here's that intuitive answer I'd been seeking. On noticing it, my first task is to parse that intuition - is it genuine? Is it just my inner voice, just the workings of my brain - of does it feel extraneous, arriving from beyond?

Some people seem to have greater powers than most. Some can actively divine a future outcome, turn it into a future dichotomy or fork in the road, and resolve it to their favour. There is one caveat. That resolution should not be related to the Ego.

My life experience leans towards one thing - 'don't force it.' (nic na siłę). Hammering a square peg into a round hole is not as good as eventually finding a square hole, a perfect fit. Going with the flow may seem like giving in to fate, a weak, passive, approach - but given guidance from above (as it were), willing it, listening out for it, feeling its sincerity, is a certain basis for decision making, better (in my book) than over-intellectualising a decision and then justifying the outcome.

Consider this Informed Taoism. Being guided by intuition, letting things take their course but steering them with a conscious desire for a just outcome is better than banging your head against a brick wall in a display of obstinate determination. As I wrote, knowing when to hold on and when to let go is an important skill, but that knowledge when informed by an intuition that you consciously know to be right is all the more powerful.

Lent 2022: Day 20
Free will, consciousness and determinism

Lent 2021: Day 20
No, but who are you really?

Lent 2020: Day 20
Applying Occam's Razor to your religion