Intuition and Intelligence and their effects in our lives - Paper I

Intuition and Intelligence The only reliable disciplinarian and guide for the ego-self is the true Self, or omniscient soul. "Wisdom never lies."

Soul wisdom is revealed to man through the agency of intuition, direct perception of truth, not by amassing knowledge through the intellect.

The seeker after wisdom should understand the difference between intuition and man's limited faculty of intelligence.

Intuition — the Bridge between the Soul and the Ego

Intuition is developed by Regular Meditation.

Life Forms of Intuition

(1)             Basic Feeling

(2)             Knowledge of Life Forces

(3)             Direct Knowledge of Mind

(4)             Direct knowledge of Intellect

(5)             Direct Knowledge of Bliss

    Guidance From Within

    Ways to Develop Intuition

Thoughts and sensations are like searchlights: they throw their rays in front on material objects; they do not reveal the soul behind them.

Intuition is like a spherical light, with rays on all sides, revealing the soul and also its outward projections of thoughts and sensations connected with the ego. Intuition is the bridge between the soul and the ego's thoughts and sensations. If one can for a sufficient length of time remain unidentified with thoughts and sensations, and without being unconscious, he will know through the development of intuition the nature of the soul.

When one is thus perfectly calm, neither thinking or sentient, nor unconscious, yet knowing he exists, a keenness of joyful being in which the thinking, thought, and thinker have become one (unity of the knower, knowing, and known)—therein is the soul's consciousness.

The advanced student should meditate deeply until his thoughts become dissolved into intuition. In the lake of intuition, free from the waves of thought, one can see the unruffled reflection of the moon of the soul. Forgetting his dreams of the body, he knows that the soul exists behind the screen of thoughts and is therefore unknown to them. When the one perceives the soul as made in the image of Spirit, he knows himself to be unchangeable, unmanifested, and ever calm, like the Spirit. All devotees should meditate and interiorize their consciousness until they realize the true nature of the soul.

Ordinary human beings, studying and working with material life, are circumscribed in their understanding by their sense perceptions and rationalizing intelligence. With undeveloped intuition, their limited power of intellectuality cannot truly comprehend matters of the spirit even when such truth is expounded to them. Though colossal intellects and famous theologians may be well read about the soul, they may nevertheless understand little about it! On the other hand, even illiterates given to deep meditation will be able to clearly describe the nature of the soul from their own direct experience. Intuition bridges the chasm between intellectual knowledge of the soul and actual realization of the divine Self.

Soul and Spirit and all inner truths can be apprehended only by developing the power of intuition by regular deep meditation.

Intelligence and sense perceptions can perceive only phenomena or qualities of the Eternal substance; intuition alone can perceive the essence of that Substance. Therefore, it is evident that the cultivation of intuition by meditation must precede true perception.

In the life of every person, two forces of knowledge are operative from birth:

(1)             the power of human reason, along with its sensation, perception, conception, and so forth;

(2)             the power of intuition.

The former is developed through social institutions and interactions. The latter usually remains uncultured, undeveloped, because of lack of proper guidance and methods of training.

In almost everyone, lower forms of intuition now and again express themselves in otherwise inexplicable experiences of "knowing", those that come of themselves independent of the testimony of the senses and reason.

These intuitive glimpses are so-called hunches, strong inner feelings, premonitions, "prophetic" dreams. These are sometimes the crystallized experiences of former experiences (for example, certain knowledge about people or events carried over from the past that have a predictable future), and have no great spiritual value.

Other such experiences indicate a little capacity for being calm and intuitively receptive; others indicate just an unusually keen but passive rationality.