Intuition: Knowing Beyond Logic
deals with the difference between the intellectual, logical mind and the more encompassing realm of spirit.
Intuition is the highest rung of the ladder, the ladder of consciousness. It can be divided into three division:
1. The lowest and the first is instinct.
Instinct is the world of the animals–everything is instinct. Even if sometimes you see indications of other things, it is your projection.
For example, you can see love in animals–the mother looking after her kids lovingly, caringly–and you can think that it is not just instinct, it is something higher, not just biological. But it is not higher, it is simply biological. The mother is doing it like a robot in the hands of nature. She is helpless–she has to do it.
You fall in love with a woman, or a woman falls in love with you, and you think it is something great. It is nothing great, it is simple instinctive infatuation: it is hormones being attracted by the opposite hormones. You are just a plaything in the hands of nature.
Instinct does not make you human, it simply keeps you an animal–two legged, but still you are an animal.
2. The second, the middle one, is intellect.
The second rung, intellect, gives you something that is higher than biology, chemistry, the animal nature. Intellect is also inborn, just as intuition is, just as instinct is. There is no way to increase your intellectual capacity; all that can be done is to make your whole potential actual, which will look as if your intellect has grown.
The intellect tries to dominate, and because it has logic on its side–reason, argument, a thousand and one proofs–it can manage, as far as your conscious mind is concerned, to convince you that the instinct is something evil. That’s why all the religions have been condemning instinct.
Instinct makes you do things, forces you to do things even against your will. Intellect helps you to find ways if you want to do a certain thing, or to find ways if you don’t want to do a certain thing. Intellect’s function is to find a way.
3. And the third, the highest one, is intuition.
Intuition is like instinct because you cannot do anything about it. It is part of your consciousness, just as instinct is part of your body. Intuition can give your answers for ultimate questions–not verbally but existentially.
Intuition has something similar to intellect, but it is not intellectual. It is intelligence. The functioning of intellect and intelligence are totally different.
- Intellect functions through steps, step-by-step. It has a procedure, a methodology. If you are doing a quesiton in mathematics, then there are steps to be followed.
- Intuition functions in a quantum leap. It has no methodological procedure, it simply sees things. It has eyes to see. It sees things that you have never even thought of as things–for example love. You have never thought of it as a thing. But a man of intuition can see whether there is love in you or not, whether there is trust in you or not, whether there is doubt in you or not. He can see them as if these are things.