The Intuition Dilemma
Intuition is our most important portal for connecting to reality. Our need for intuition can be stated quite clearly: rational thinking that ignores intuitions wastes the vast majority of understanding and information that is available to us, from our bodies and our unconscious awareness as well as most of our social perceptions. Rational thinking is often dependent on the narrowed, conscious attention of our left brain. This focused consideration is valuable but so much more limited than intuition. If we don’t trust our intuition, our perception of what is “true” will be distorted by the domination of that limited focus.
Examples of intuition include first impressions, insights that arise without focused attention (like an “Aha! moment” when listening to music hours after reflecting on a problem), “gut feelings” and other awareness based in bodily feelings, and many other ways of “knowing” that are hard to put into words or follow in a linear fashion.
The problem is that, for many of us, relying on such gut feelings and other intuitions about what is real and true – and how we should engage what is real and true – can also be erratic, possibly even dangerous. Intuition can be led astray; the quality of our intuitions relies heavily on what we have valued and given our attention to over the course of a lifetime as well as on the social contexts in which we live.
Iain McGilchrist describes the imperfect but crucial value of intuition:
Intuition appears to be something that, while inevitably fallible, is often more reliable, much quicker, and capable of taking into account many more factors, than explicit reasoning, including factors of which we may not even be consciously aware. It also underlies motor, cognitive and social skills, and is the ground of the excellence of the expert. The attempt to replace it with rules and procedures is a typical left hemisphere response to something it does not understand – a response that is, alas, powerfully destructive. - McGilchrist in The Matter with Things
In other words: viewed optimistically, intuition is a superpower; pessimistically, it can seem a dangerous risk.
Clearly, this creates a dilemma, but it’s a dilemma that we need to embrace rather than avoid.
I believe that it’s crucial to hone our intuitions1 with a rich, contemplative engagement with life, and we must culturally embed practices that hone and support good intuitions. We can recognize cultures that enhance intuition because they will deeply value and ritualize living traditions while always enabling openness and shared correction. Our present society’s cultural thinness heightens the dilemma – when we most need our intuitions to get us through the rapidly shifting reality we live in, we have the least cultural support for well-trained intuitions.
I’ve never been to a Quaker gathering,2 but Quaker tradition is probably one of the best examples of cultural and community support for good intuition. There are two key contributions:
A practical belief that our best wisdom is gained by attending to our “inner light” (or “that of God in everyone”) and then living intentionally in response to that attention
A shared practice and encouragement of silence to make this inner attention an experiential one that is naturally sharpened by the wise listening of a gathered community
Of course, there are many ways of tipping the intuition dilemma toward optimism without being a Quaker.3 Valuing intuitive insights and the wisdom of our embodied minds is a commitment that can get us started.
Self-awareness is also a good starting place. Knowing ourselves enough to be familiar with our temptations, our fears, our avoidance of pain, and our cultural biases means that we learn to recognize intuitions that are conveniently self-serving and self-confirming, and take them with a grain of salt. This is why key touchstones like the Golden Rule, honesty, and mutual respect are so important for developing good intuition: even if they are familiar commitments, they still effectively challenge and balance our self-serving natures.
In our capitalistic and individualistic society, we cannot take a reliable intuition for granted. The advertising industry is largely designed to disrupt good intuition (assuming that you agree with me that consumerism is harmful). In our family, one of our first parental intuitions was passing on a belief that skepticism is the best first (and usually last) response to ads. Corporate and political manipulation of social and mass media has programmed all of us more than we would like to admit. Do we pay attention to our inner intuitions of protest? To our quiet imagining of what our own deepest wisdom is regarding the world around us?
If we don’t pay intuitive attention, we’ll be fighting off these societal pressures, “groupthink,” with the weak tools of our left brains alone. And they are not up to the task. Look at how useless logic and words have been to stop our environmental trainwreck! We need our intuitions, and we need to interact with friends, allies, neighbours — especially those who think differently from ourselves — on a richly intuitive basis. One spontaneous, mutually respectful, conversation “from the heart” with an old acquaintance or even a stranger is likely to be way more powerful than a dozen Substack essays!4 Much as we believe that most problems are caused by the irrational thinking of others, that thinking is all thoroughly defended by thick walls of left-brained systems that “make sense” to those involved.
We need to help each other listen to our deeper and better intuitions. This is a spiritual journey. In spite of regular evidence to the contrary, I deeply believe (in the words I recite weekly as part of a small liturgical service) in “the goodness of God at the heart of humanity, planted more deeply than all that is wrong.”
I never say those words lightly because they’re a counterpoint to my deepest faith crisis. In 2003, I framed this crisis in this lament: “How could such a majority of evangelical Christians be supporting the American invasion of Iraq when it is so obviously based on lies that will lead to the wrongful deaths of so many civilians? Is there no Holy Spirit at work?” It was unbearable to see this unfolding with such a callous lack of discernment (and yet there has been so much even harder to bear since), but from that moment on, I declined any identification with evangelical Christianity (which was just a bit tricky as a part-time pastor in an evangelical church). Whatever that movement was following was not what (or who) I was following. I so wish that there has not been so much confirmation of this since.
So, I don’t say the words about the goodness planted deeply within us lightly; I declare them with intuitive trust. We can all listen deeply enough to hear the wisdom of Love in the depth of our souls and consent to that wisdom’s role in our intuition. We must not let the potential weakness of our intuitions allow us to give up on this crucial core to our discernment.
Reliable discernment is, of course, not based on intuition alone. We need to reflect rationally, even analytically at times, on the fruit of our intuitions, and we’d best discuss our intuitions with wise and diverse others. But well-honed intuition is a more important foundation than focused, left-brained reason.
My last couple of posts have emphasized that “getting unstuck” tends to require the kind of approach to reality characteristic of our right hemispheres rather than our left. Our right brains provide us with a more reliable view of reality in all of its unique diversity and complexity, and they interact more directly and richly with our intuition and imagination. And good intuition is what is so sorely needed to deal with our current reality. Intuition, when we listen well, is what moves us and enables something new.
[This is part of a series of posts exploring a contemplative pathway to healing/maturing that I call “a compassionate consent to reality.” For an introduction to the project, you may want to see this post here, or perhaps better, a summary here.
I’m so grateful for your interest and for any comments that you may have!]
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McGilchrist quotes economist John Kay to make this point: “Much of what we call intuition is the result of what John Kay calls ‘finely honed, well-developed skills’. ‘Well-developed’ here means repeatedly exercised through practice, and it is on the grindstone of experience that our intuitions are honed.”
Though I have been to discernment gatherings led by a Quaker and many gatherings afterwards that were patterned somewhat after it.
I’d recommend Parker Palmer’s A Hidden Wholeness as one of the best places to deepen an understanding of this for non-Quaker contexts.
And if I wanted this post to be twice as long, I’d add the role that the arts can play in speaking on an intuitively powerful level to all that is going on around us.