intuition
“Notice also how the initial knowing comes from a place deep inside your body, but the negotiation happens in your intellect. This is a significant distinction: knowing with the body and thinking with the intellect.”
from The Burnout Antidote by Anne Berube
The traditional mode of perceiving the invisible and therefore of perceiving the acorn is intuition. Intuition also includes what I have called mythic sensibility, for when a myth strikes us, it seems true and gives sudden insight.
Another important characteristic of intuition is the way it works. It does not expand slowly as a gradual suffusion of mood; nor does it advance by thought, step by step; nor does it come to its insight by a careful examination of sensate details that compose the whole object before me. As I said, intuition is clear, quick, and full. Like a
... See moreOur perceptions of people are mostly intuitive. We take them in as a whole—accent, clothes, build, expression, complexion, voice, stance, gestures, the regional, social, and class cues—all delivers itself at once, as a full gestalt, to intuition.
Because intuitions are clear, quick, and full, and therefore so convincing, they can be wholly wrong, missing the mark just as quickly and completely as they can get it right. Jung, who placed intuition (with thinking, feeling, and sensation) among the four functions of consciousness, made a major point of intuition’s need for its brother and
... See moreIntuition may propose a way, but does not assure right action or even accurate perception. This we know from any of our immediate, self-evident moves such as falling in love with the wrong person, making false accusations and issuing rash dismissals, and arriving at those sure self-diagnoses of medical conditions that prove wholly hypochondriacal.
... See moreTo grasp or be grasped by myth you need intuition. The relevance of a myth to life strikes like a revelation or a self-evident proposition, which cannot be demonstrated by logic or induced from factual evidence.
Intuition sees everything at once, given as a whole. Time strings things out into a chain of successive events leading toward a finishing line.
For most people the Daemon can only communicate via images or hunches. The images are shown in dreams and the hunches are those ill-defined sensations that suggest that one course of action is a good or a bad thing.