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Video Description
Intuition is not a mystical afterthought — it is a real way of knowing, and it can be trained. This lecture from Academy of Ideas lays out how. The intellect asks the right question, the unconscious assembles a symbolic answer, and the body — especially the gut — delivers the signal. The practical sequence it teaches: formulate a question that truly matters, quiet the thinking mind, return to bodily sensation, and stay emotionally aware. As Schopenhauer found, the answer often arrives only after we stop forcing it.
Full Video Transcript
We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived, not in the brain, but in the whole body.
Intuition is one of the most powerful faculties for gaining knowledge about the world.
Along with reason, science, and imagination, it is one of the primary means by which we discover
truth. The great psychologist William James went so far as to suggest that intuition is the deep
thing in us. The reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition.
In this video, we explore how we can tap into our intuition to answer life’s big questions.
Questions such as, what is my purpose? How do I find a meaning in my existence? Should I make a
major career change? Should I end a relationship? Asking the proper question is the central action
of transformation, writes Clarissa Estes. The key question causes germination of consciousness.
The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands
behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.
Intuition is a process that works below the threshold of conscious awareness.
Tapping into the innate wisdom of the psyche, the embodied wisdom of the physical self,
and a lifetime of experience, our intuition utilizes these sources of knowledge to yield
insights that are beyond the reach of conscious thought. How it does this is not well understood,
Or as Carl Jung wrote,
While intuition is a mysterious phenomenon, there are steps we can take to help us generate the intuitive insights that can answer life’s big questions.
The first step is to clearly formulate the question.
Our question should not be trivial in nature, but transformational.
It should be one that if answered will have a lasting impact on the course of our life.
This step is simple, but many people never take it.
They don’t consciously formulate the big questions of life that beg for answers.
And as Bernardo Kastrup writes in More Than Allegory,
For as long as the right questions aren’t asked by the intellect,
the ultimate answers of life and reality will remain elusive.
To put the intuitive mind to work in finding the answers we seek,
it is best to get our self-reflective reasoning mind out of the way after it has done its job of
formulating the question. For just as a wise sage spends much time in meditative silence,
so too the intuitive mind works best when not interfered with by too much conscious thinking.
Or as Kastrup writes,
The intellect self-reflectively contemplates its circumstances and asks progressively more
refined questions, while the unconscious mind, nudged along by these questions,
reacts intuitively with symbolic answers. As a matter of fact, this is how every creative person
ordinarily operates in any area of intellectual activity, from science to business. First,
the intellect contemplates the problem and iterates upon the right questions to ask.
Then, you must stop thinking, so the questions have a chance to sink into the unconscious mind.
Once they do, inspiration suddenly strikes, as if out of nowhere. Silencing the mind, however,
is the opposite of what many people do when attempting to answer the big questions of life.
Due to the misconception that conscious reasoning is our most powerful cognitive tool,
many of us endlessly ruminate on these questions and hope that the more we think about them,
the more likely we are to discover a solution.
Often, however, all we do is spin ourselves in circles of thought
and we never arrive at satisfactory answers.
In her book, Extraordinary Knowing,
the psychoanalyst Elizabeth Lloyd-Mayer suggests that the phenomenon of having something on the
tip of the tongue is a simple example that shows how intuition works best when we stop trying to
consciously find an answer to a question or problem. Or as she writes,
That’s how intuition works. Effortlessness. It’s easier than you think.
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer also emphasized how the wisdom that emanates from the intuitive mind
is most forthcoming when we diminish the rumination of the conscious mind, or as he writes,
I have familiarized myself with the factual data of a theoretical and practical problem.
I do not think about it again.
Yet often a few days later the answer to the problem will come into my mind from its own accord.
The operation which has produced it, however, remains a mystery to me.
Quieting the mind can be encouraged through activities such as relaxation techniques,
meditation, napping, listening to music, or walking in nature.
We just need to do something that distracts us from the problem at hand.
The moments just prior to sleep, or just prior to awakening,
are also known to be ripe for intuitive insights,
as these are times when our conscious thought is at a minimum.
Along with quieting the mind, we should strive to connect to the body,
for intuitive insights present themselves both as bodily experiences and as conscious thoughts.
Our ability to detect intuitions, therefore, is promoted by exercises that ground us in the physical body.
Or as Ian McGilchrist writes,
Even if intuitive insights manifest as cognitive, they are embodied,
in the sense that they are both informed by and inform the motion of our limbs, our breathing and pulse.
the emotion of our heart and gut and mind.
Gut feelings are one of the primary forms of intuitive communication.
In his book Intelligence in the Flesh, Guy Claxton notes that
If you are told the best way to do this task is to go with your gut feeling, you do better.
Just this simple suggestion is enough to redirect your attention
from more rational to more intuitive strategies.
If you’re interested in this topic, check out our membership video titled
The Loss of Intuition, Why Too Much Consciousness is a Disease. This is just one of over 100 videos
available to our members, and we are adding new videos to our membership library every month.
Support our work and sign up today for $5.99 a month or $49.99 a year at academyofideas.com
slash members. In addition to being integral to our intuitive capacities, the gut also plays a
prominent role in our emotional experience. Or as McGilchrist writes, the gut and the psyche have
close connections. Anxiety, depression, and other disorders have characteristic expressions in gut
behavior, and the associations work both ways. Diseases of the gut affect mind and mood.
Recognizing the role that the gut plays in emotional processing, it will not be surprising
to learn that chronically suppressing emotions impedes our intuitive abilities. When we sever
our connection to the emotional signals that emanate from the gut, we also sever our connection
to an important source of intuitive communication. Or as McGilchrist writes,
Lack of awareness of emotions negatively affects intuitive decision-making. Asking questions,
quieting the mind, connecting to the body, and being more emotionally aware are steps we can
take to increase the chance of having an intuitive insight that can transform our life. In her book
Extraordinary Knowing, Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer interviews many individuals who display remarkable
intuitive abilities. One of her interviewees was a woman named Helen Palmer, who, as Mayer
notes, has written extensively about intuition and travels all over the world through her
school which teaches people to develop intuitive abilities. To conclude this video, we will
turn to Palmer’s insights for some practical advice on how to strengthen our intuitive
capabilities. Intuition is a very different variety of knowing than the knowing we call
rational. It’s different in kind, and you cannot, simply cannot, engage in both kinds
of knowing at the same time. This degree of intuitive knowing relies on different, subtler
signals than rational knowing. Those signals only become perceptible with a shift in consciousness,
a shift out of rational thinking. That’s a jolt for intellectually trained people to
realize. But as you learn to shift back and forth, you learn to trust it. And the shift
gets easier, quicker, and more automatic. Our minds resist intuitive knowing. Once you
learn to relax that resistance, you can start to reclaim intuition from its suppression
by the rational mind. The more you work with it, the more remarkable your knowing becomes.
You free the receptive state from its armoring by the ego. You learn to live closer to receptivity.
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Source: Academy of Ideas