How Intuition Can Answer Life's Big Questions

How Intuition Can Answer Life’s Big Questions

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“We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.” (W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions)

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.” (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience)

In our February membership video, The Loss of Intuition – Why Too Much Consciousness is a Disease, we explored what intuition is, why it is so powerful, and how social forces are degrading our intuitive capacities. In this article, we explore how we can use the intuitive mind 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 … 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.” (Clarissa Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves)

Intuition is a process that works below the threshold of conscious awareness. “I say intuition is a sort of perception which does not go exactly by the senses, but goes via the unconscious, and at that I leave it and say “I don’t know how it works.” (Carl Jung, Collected Works V18) 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.” (Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory)

Silencing the mind, however, is the opposite of how many people attempt 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 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 reach an answer we desire. Or as she writes:

“. . .if you think of a time when you tried hard to remember something, you know the more you tried to remember it, the more you pushed it down within you. However, when you relaxed and allowed it to emerge, it bubbled right up. You accomplished that with no effort. That’s how intuition works. Effortlessness. It’s easier than you think.” (Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing)

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 well-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 Iain 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. . .” (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)

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.” (Guy Claxton, Intelligence in the Flesh)

In addition to being integral to our intuitive capacities, the gut is also intimately tied to our emotional states, or as McGilchrist writes: “The gut and the psyche have close connexions. Anxiety, depression, and other disorders have characteristic expressions in gut behaviour – and the associations work both ways: diseases of the gut affect mind and mood.” (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)

Because the gut is involved in the expression of emotions, as well as intuitive insights, it will not be surprising to learn that those who chronically suppress emotions impede their intuitive abilities. Or as McGilchrist writes: “lack of awareness of emotions negatively affects intuitive decision-making.” (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)

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.

To conclude this article, we return to Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer’s book Extraordinary Knowing. In this book she interviews many individuals who display remarkable intuitive abilities. One of the 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”. Palmer provides some practical advice for strengthening our intuitive capabilities. Here is an excerpt from her interview:

“[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.” (Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing)