“Intuition ist ein anderes Wort für fehlende Bereitschaft nachzudenken.”
Helmut Willke in Zur Rationalität der Intuition
It seems wildly popular these days to have disdain for thought. That we should instead trust our intuition, our ‘gut feelings’, our ‘heart’… which is supposedly a more pure manifestation of what, really? A connection to the pure world of Ideas? A channel to the wisdom of the Pleiades? A direct line to the thoughts of God himself? Which could only get clouded by thinking, infected by the poisonous illusions of duality, warped by the deformities of language?
Thought is tainted yes… it is receptivity and reflection in the shape of a warped mirror. It is the possibility of being affected, of being infected. It is a mirror that exists in the images reflected through it: tainted by the tints of imagination. But intuition hides what is on the other side of that mirror. It is the unreflected mirror’s knee jerk reaction that informs the quicksilver habits of the mind.
We would not be able to speak without the shorthand of intuition. It is a direct expression of the apparatus of implicit knowing: it is a machine comprising the fast paced habituation of our sense-making, that judges for us, before us even knowing what the thought process was. It is the dumbfounding capacity of our minds to compress an entire history of experience into one single moment, into the inkling of an intuition. And it is wonderful and deceptive precisely for this reason.
Intuition is rooted in the dark side of mind. Intuition emerges from the cobwebbed basement of thought: it is the gossamer spun from the unconscious collection of information, gathering the dust of all the impressions that are spinning in front of our eyes. It gives shape to the floor on which we stand, and woven from it is the carpet under which we shove what we like to hide from our view. From this we build the house of our mentality: the structure of our habituated thought process.
There is this old trope of the fear of the basement. The resistance against descending into the underworld; fear of the spiders in the corner, the skeletons in our closets, the play of shadows in the dark. This is the realm of the disavowed unconscious: it is the dark water on which our intuition is adrift.
The art of thinking is coming to terms with this play of shadows that lies at the heart of mind. It is the examination of the channels we have dug within ourselves, through which the waters of consciousness flow. These channels are not just personal, confined to the privacy of our individuality. There are entire trenches there dug by the machines of ideology, by the dogma’s of church, and the propaganda streaming through our news-feeds. The unconscious strappings of our intuition are connected in the transpersonal world wired web, through which our delta works of our thought are dug, effecting the flows of our minds, and the shape of our intuition.
So take care of your intuition. There is a deceptive undertow hiding there below the reflective surface. Do not take the reflections that pop up at face value, but examine them closely. Don’t get lost in them like Narcissus, but drink from the water, grow some roots there, or become the wind that blows over its surface.
Image: The High Priestess by Manzel Bowman, ‘Manzel Tarot’ 2017