The Den of Pure Intuition: Why Enter?

People always ask me what benefit it would be to them to open, train and/or tame their intuition. It’s a good question, because without a reason for spending the time and practice to evolve this art and skill, it will not work skillfully and the time will not be given. The answer to this is simple, “why do we spend our time developing the mind, the emotions or the body?” The reasons are self-evident. Since intuition, ultimately, is a fine blend of something that involves body, mind and emotions it should not be too hard to see why we are compelled to experience it. Yet, we hang back.

Perhaps this is because where it gets a bit out of the ordinary or uncharted is that the intuition is ultimately not a function of the mind. It actually, skins, trims and takes the mind to new places of recognition and retrieval beyond the boundaries of known or controllable. To truly open the intuition, one must surrender to something out of one’s control, one must skim the surface of the believable to get to the unbelievable. When one is inordinately shocked past self-containment and becomes the kindling for the fire of spiritual being, then one discovers quickly that truth can only be born in that fire. The garden of knowing is a fertile, authentic and fiery bed where coal can alchemically be transmuted. It is only when that fire is truly hot, that intuition, like spun glass, can be skillfully blown into something translucent and beautiful.

The first image one sees that is truly intuitive, that arises from someplace outside of the usual realm of thinking or feeling is the edge-curve from which we are given a glimpse of the infinite. Intuitional development therefore is not for cowards. It requires a type of interior bravery of see/feel that is a bit foreign to us in the superficial circumstance of the Western life. The breeding ground for intuition is silence and contemplative self-recognition, but in our world all three are at a shortage. Thus, the modern world seems to require a cheekier, faster avenue of intuitive development. The modern intuitive must literally see/feel their way into the food store, their parent’s living room, the traffic jam at the end of the road and come away with a cured glimmer of the invisible.

The higher mental faculties gradually develop the practical asset of the self-recognitive. For the modern intuitive, the inner film-maker, the lower mind, with its envies, fears, angers and pain cannot be left behind on the cutting room floor. The modern intuitive is like a cyclone that has been given a pause button. He or she has to learn to handle the rapidity of environmental change, noise and confusion. The finely tuned ears of the subtle auditory and visual stimuli must contend with both Being and Traffic.

The other reason to develop the intuition is that it is the great conveyor of compassionate witness. It is the intuition that ideally informs us of what we left behind, the blindspots, weaknesses and dramas of an unhealed life. The intuition not only takes us out of our own comfort zone but imposes upon us a sensitivity to the comfort zone of others. It cries out to us about how our own narcissistic self-emphasis is blocking the way towards actually knowing that there is another human being out there. And finally, as the intuition really cooks, we realize that there is really only one being of which we are expressions. Yet it always exhorts us in a paradoxical way to mind our individuality carefully, thank you very much.

The intuition is an elliptical orbit of sensory deprivation in which one becomes deprived of the mind’s own superficial exercise of consummate ego. In return for that painful sacrifice we are gifted with a God voice that is ever-present, incumbent and sometimes even ominous. The intuition however never means to frighten us, but it does mean to give us a startling reminder of what we have left behind.

When one learns how to really translate the symbolic information that the intuition provides, be it auditory, kinesthetic, visual, or multi-sensory, the translation is always filled with ambiguity. No one’s intuition is perfectly translated just as no beautiful translation of a 2nd century Chinese poem would be. We realize that context is everything. Iconic imagery rests on its own unknowable and unfathomable laurels and the best we can approximate is a translation of depth intuitive levels that serves us or others in a fortuitous and timely manner.

The knower has to be trained and like any animal-like being, it actually enjoys good training, and will eventually repay the trainer with a taste of accomplishment, upliftment and pure joy. We develop the intuition ultimately for our own satisfaction and a sense of our humanity that satisfies a deep craving of soul/spirit to be free. And in the end, that satisfaction leads to a type of non-grasping intelligence that speaks constantly and eloquently, ultimately bypassing the means of translation altogether.