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What is intuition and how do we come by it?  Two little questions that inspire some pretty complex and long winded answers these days.  Over a million websites have taken on the definition and the accessing of intuition, so you know it’s in the air.

Speaking of which, most of the definitions are no better than air pollution, but here’s one I almost like from an article by Hara Estroff Marano in “Psychology Today”:

“There are many ways to define intuition, but all present a kind of conundrum. The act of reflecting on intuition is precisely what intuition isn’t. Intuition is really your brain on autopilot, performing its actions of processing information outside of your awareness that it’s operating.  It’s nonconscious thinking.”

Ah me, if only  Ms. Marano had substituted ‘Knowing’ for ‘thinking’ in her last sentence (nonconscious knowing) and if only she hadn’t used the word brain as if intuition is seated there.  Don’t look now, Ms. Marano, but I think you presented your own conundrum.

As far as accessing intuition goes, though, everybody and his mama claims to do it. Many purveyors of the intuitive art will teach you  to awaken your intuition, as if it’s hibernating, or snoozing in a corner somewhere.

Other teacher types tell us we have to call on our intuition, implying it might be next door or hard of hearing.  (”Yoo hoo, Intuition, can you hear me, now? You better get your naughty butt home this very instant!”)

Back to Ms. Marano’s defintion: Why in the world did she try to define intuition using a mental process like ‘thinking’ and a word like ‘brain’?  Asking the mind to come up with a definition of intuition is like asking the devil to define god.  I can just hear ole Beelzebub now:  God is this supreme dictator dude who demands constant worship and unquestioning obedience, or he punishes the living daylights out of you.  If you stick with me, Satan, I’ll let you live exactly how you want.  It’s not my idea to send you to hell.

Now that we’ve brought religion into the picture, let me say this: The intuition experts that seem most confused, are the ones who junk it together with the soul as if the soul knows exactly what it’s doing.

Writer and Mystic Alice Bailey (1880-1949) is one such human.  Ms. Bailey sees intuition as coming from the soul, and then she precedes to define it in terms of itself.  See what you think:

“The situation is, therefore, as follows: The mind receives illumination from the soul, in the form of ideas thrown into it, or of intuitions which convey exact and direct knowledge, for the intuition is ever infallible. This process is in turn repeated by the active mind, which throws down into the receptive brain the intuitions and knowledge which the soul has transmitted. When this is carried forward automatically and accurately, we have the illumined man, the sage.

Her definition makes the mind sound like a big blender in the sky that gets a bunch of stuff ‘thrown into it’, chomped up and then ‘carried forward’ by some automatic, perfect process which results in a wise dude or dudette.

No offense, ‘Alice Bailey in Wonderland’, but when I sat around with my friends back in the Sixties, we even sounded better than that.

At least, I think we did, because the truth is, I don’t remember what we said. I just know it was ‘heavy’.

Here’s an idea:  Intuition is not limited until we define it using limits.  In other words, intuition is limitless in its ability to find the answer for any question, but as soon as we define it with our brains, we program limits into its natural state of limitlessness.

So let’s don’t define it, let’s just use it.  And how, pray tell, will we do that?

More later.