Intuition concept
"Well, are we going to the cinema tomorrow?" "You know, my intuition tells me that it is better not to do this." Such dialogues, of course, have happened in your life more than once. Quite often we can be tormented by some vague premonitions, sensations, some knowledge or understanding of the essence of what is happening. The ancient Greeks called this phenomenon "intuition" several millennia ago. The conversation comes about intuition when it comes to something inexplicable, beyond the control of reason.
So what is intuition
The very word intuition came to us from the Latin language: intuition - from lat. intuitio - contemplation, from lat. intueor - I stare intently; or from lat. the verb intueri, which means "peer", "penetrate with a glance" (sight), "instantly comprehend." As we can see from the definition, intuition is associated with a special inner, maybe even mystical vision, which is not included in the category of logic. Incidentally, there is a long-standing and rather confusing relationship between logic and intuition.
Intuition is responsible for human survival. Cavemen intuitively (instinctively) chose a place to live, plants for food, a suitable time for the best hunting - their life directly depended on this. Then several successful intuitive decisions were consolidated in the form of experience passed down from generation to generation. This is how scientific knowledge appeared, which declared itself to be the only correct one.
I will not enter into a long and fruitless discussion about which method of comprehending reality is the most correct. The world is diverse, and the methods of its cognition should be just as diverse. For centuries, intuition, the intuitive method, has been in the background. Although Plato still said that intuition is the most important way of cognizing eidos, that is, the root causes of things and phenomena, that the mind cannot comprehend the entire depth of the world of eidos.
It is important to understand that intuition since the time of Plato is a very broad concept, as broad as reason, consciousness, science, philosophy. Intuition is one of the fundamental principles of the world, one of the fundamental concepts of human existence. Why? Because wherever you look, whatever thinker you turn to, whatever you have to face in your daily life - everywhere you will encounter the problem of intuition. What is the reason for this? The fact is that most of all discoveries, not to mention creations, occur with the help of intuition. After all, not a single great discovery or great invention, not a single brilliant work of art or philosophical thought was made only by logical reasoning.
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So intuition is incredibly important to scientists and inventors, but what about ordinary people? For them, the ability to foresee is also important, it works at the everyday level as well as at the scientific one. The only trouble is that we do not always understand its signs. Let's try to figure out what intuition is.
Over the centuries of studying such a phenomenon, many definitions of intuition, scientific concepts and theories have been accumulated. Psychology, philosophy, physiology, psychoanalysis, art, literature are engaged in the study of this ability …
In fact, everything can be considered intuition: from simple premonitions of certain events to the ability to predict the future. Yes, clairvoyance is also from the field of intuition. All such diverse phenomena touch in the unconscious and it is there that they are born.
Intuition is located beyond common sense and rational perception of the world, but it is a bridge between our heart and consciousness. After all, what a sin to conceal - our heart is not always able to reach out to our mind. Speaking of intuition, we enter the domain of the domination of subtle matters, which are open for understanding only to yogis and other enlightened ones. The ability of foreboding is elusive, multifaceted, incomprehensible, but it is always with us, always ready to help us.
Intuition is never wrong - it is the mind that can draw wrong conclusions, if at all. This happens because intuition communicates with a person with symbols, metaphors, archetypes, signs, accumulated over many millions of years of human history. It relies on all the power of the unconscious, because its capabilities are much wider than the capabilities of standardized and logical forms of consciousness. No, I am not telling you to completely abandon consciousness: I urge you to pay great attention to those vague sensations that sometimes appear in you.
Logic is an important, albeit limited, thinking tool that is used to understand things. Logic cannot replace all thinking. She helps to process information, but is not able to create new knowledge; logic operates with judgments, checks the correctness of the construction, but it cannot know anything about the reasons, it will not say what is true and what is false. Since the Renaissance, rational thinking has been considered the highest type of thinking capable of discovering truth.
This was the greatest delusion of the era, which, incidentally, was discovered by the titans themselves. The same Leonardo da Vinci recognized intuition as primacy in matters of creativity. And although he left us treatises and notes on the anatomy of creativity, the great Leonardo admitted that intuition always played a decisive role in his inventions: “It may seem ridiculous and ridiculous,” he wrote. "But nevertheless, it is very useful in order to inspire the mind to various inventions."
The paradox is that people cannot think only logically and rationally. This does not correspond to their nature: only 5% of the human brain belongs to consciousness, and the remaining 95% is an infinite area of the unconscious. It is from here, of these 95 "sleeping" percent, that prophetic dreams, premonitions, unexpected insights and the ability to cognize the truth come to a person. This very ability of pre-logical knowledge or, if you like, knowledge was called intuition by ancient philosophers. Intuition is what is a priori in man.
However, in fairness it should be noted that there is also a posteori intuition - this is professional intuition. When the mind slowly and step by step goes to the goal, going through all the stages of logical analysis, intuition is triggered instantly, like a flash. This can be compared to inspiration, because intuition and inspiration are phenomena of the same order. Intuition does not need long reasoning and proof: it will immediately give the result.
Reason and intellect comprehend the world in parts, dismembered, and intuition embraces the world as a whole, in its indissoluble unity. And what is most pleasant: for logical thinking you need to apply will, you need to know the rules, and intuition does not need any dogmas, it does not require the slightest effort, but simply always prompts the right decision. And one more curious moment: when a person does not use his "brains" for a long time, they begin to fail and at some point may fail; intuition will never fail - it always sends us signals, even if only during sleep.
It has already been said above that intuition and reason have a complex relationship. When a person begins to think only logically, trusts only facts and evidence, then he blocks his channel of intuition (a person has such). When a person relies only on intuition, then he quickly loses orientation in time and space, becomes unable to think logically, he lives in a world of images, vague premonitions, sensations, incomprehensible symbols. Both are equally bad. One should strive for harmony of intellect and intuition. Although I will make a reservation again: many scientists consider intuition to be one of the components of intelligence.
The problems of intuition and its relationship with reason have worried philosophers since ancient times. The above-mentioned Plato understood intuition as a way of holistic knowledge of the truth and the fundamental principles of being: Past, Present and Future, Life and Death, Evolution, Space and Time, Eternity, Visible and Invisible, Archetype and Form, Spiritual and Material. Plato divorces intuition and intellect because he was convinced that the mind was too limited to know the other world.
Intuition is, first of all, recognition by the Immortal soul of its past lives, "recalling" the reality of the world of eidos and the experience that it received during all its incarnations. This kind of recollection occurs during illumination, that is, strange outbursts of activity of the unconscious. This is very similar to what, 15 centuries after Plato, will be called "insight." Such an ability to capture archetypes, primordial ideas, to go beyond the visible material world into the ideal world and exist in it for at least one moment has become the main instrument of intuitive knowledge of the world since Plato's time. A holistic, syncretic (undivided) perception of the world today is hammered in a person by rationalism and pragmatism, but it is possible to develop it.
Plato's understanding of intuition was the first and for a long time the only mystical explanation of intuition. Aristotle, as you know, did not share the views of his teacher. He is the founder of rationalism, and therefore of the entire modern civilization. Probably, it is Aristotle that we should say "thank you" for the fact that intuition has been recognized as quackery for so long and excluded from the apparatus of science. Hellenistic Rome, and even more so the Middle Ages, was not interested in intuition as such and its possibilities.
It was only the later Renaissance that restored the reputation of intuition. The man who began to study intuition from the point of view of science and generally gave it the status of a philosophical and psychological category was the great mathematician and philosopher of the 17th century, Rene Descartes. It is thanks to his works that pundits turn to the problem of intuition, argue, write treatises … This says only one thing: intuitio est (intuition exists)! From that moment on, they began to analyze it, put it on the shelves, give explanations …
The "father" of intuition also set the direction of these searches: intuition is a single knowledge, but it has nothing to do with insight and is, above all, of an intellectual nature. Descartes introduced the concept of intellectual intuition that still exists today. Intellectual intuition embraces scientific knowledge, because its basis is the accumulation of material and scientific analysis.
Unaware of this himself, Descartes posed another important problem that has not been resolved even today: is intuition an innate gift that only a select few possess, or is it a property inherent in every person? Each philosopher answered this in his own way. The answer to the question depends on how a person answers the main question of philosophy: which is primary - spirit or matter? Until the end of the 19th century, intuition was interpreted as the highest form of rational knowledge, but first Arthur Schopenhauer, and then Henri Bergson, turned the idea of intuition over. Henri Bergson can rightfully be considered the “father of insight”. It was he who, in his philosophy of life, substantiated the need for illumination, a kind of spiritual ecstasy for the attainment of truth.
In addition, with the help of insight, not only great ideas are comprehended, but the most primitive, everyday situations. The works of the French philosopher unambiguously showed that intuition is not the highest level of intelligence, it is simply outside the intellect, it is a different way of comprehending the world. It is probably very symbolic that the French philosophers “discovered” and “closed” the philosophical problem of intuition. After Bergson, the problem of intuition moved into the field of psychology.
The psychologists of our time have a poor idea of how intuition works, but the situation is even worse with its study, and therefore with terminology. In psychology, the term "insight" is used more often than others (from the English insight - "comprehension", "insight", "insight") - insight, penetration. As a rule, this is a state of insight, when a brilliant idea comes to mind, previously unknown knowledge is revealed. Such a state can also be called "aha-reaction", that is, we mean those involuntary exclamations that break out from a person in a moment of insight. A classic, well-known example of "aha-reaction" is Archimedes' exclamation "Eureka!" For ease of understanding, you can introduce the definition of intuition belonging to the practicing intuition Laura Day: "Intuition is a non-linear, non-empirical process of collecting and interpreting information in response to questions."
All the main points of the modern understanding of intuition are given here, therefore we will consider each of them in more detail.
1. What does the concept "intuition - a nonlinear process" mean? This means that, at its core, it does not need causal evidence. If the mind draws conclusions from the standpoint of formal logic, then intuition ignores these rules. Intuitively comprehending the essence of a particular situation, we do not build a logical chain on the basis of reasoning - we simply know this and that. Intuition, as already mentioned, comprehends the world integrally. This feeling with the speed of a meteor flies through all the successive steps that the mind takes, and is the first to come to the desired finish. It is possible to imagine the work of intuition in the form of a camera that takes snapshots, but only the end result appears in the form of symbols and metaphors. It is this metaphorical snapshot of reality that logical thinking must interpret.
2. Now consider the "non-empirical process." You should get used to the fact that the terminology of intuition is poorly developed, so we will make do with what we have. Empirical means are means obtained in the course of an experiment, experience. They are unconditional and rely only on real events. Intuition is already from the realm of guesses, at the same time sometimes rather daring, because with the help of intuition you can guess what you do not know.
Jean-Paul Sartre in one of his stories described such a situation during the Second World War. The hero of the story - a member of the French Resistance - tells how he was captured by the Germans. They seized him and began to torture him so that he would betray where his associates were. The torture lasted for a week, but the narrator did not know where his comrades were. He heroically endured the pain and did not say anything, but the pain was so strong that he decided to bring his death closer.
He once said that he knew where the members of the Resistance were (you remember that he did not know this). “They are in the basement of the old church,” he said, being sure that the Germans would come there and not find anyone.
The narrator was awaiting execution, but was released the next day. As it turned out, he showed the place correctly.
But the lines between intuitive and empirical knowledge are blurred. Was the exact hit of the narrator from Sartre's work an intuition or empirical evidence? Or, for example, what forecast of the weather is more accurate: what is done by meteorologists on the basis of observing the air masses, or what is based on popular beliefs? But what about the fact that people with arthritis begin to ache in their joints before the rain? These are all different ways of obtaining information and different ways of processing it.
Our ancestors in ancient times used their intuition much more often and more successfully than we do. This helped them build their relationships with the outside world. Intuitive perception is not empirical knowledge, because information in this case is not transmitted through the senses. It's not for nothing that intuition is called the sixth sense - it seems to replace all five basic ones. However, an intuitive impression turns into an empirical one when you draw some conclusions on its basis.
Your mind uses the resulting inference just like any other.
3. What does intuition interpret information mean? At the level of intuition, data processing also occurs. This is inevitable, because the information must be used, it must be useful. You remember that intuition communicates with us in the language of symbols, therefore the message must be deciphered. By the way, this is one of the reasons why many people do not trust the subconscious feeling: they would like the “speech” of intuition to be understandable, logically structured, clear. In our time, it is difficult for a person to understand parables and metaphors - he is used to the scientific language of evidence. If you want to understand your foresight ability, then you will need to practice figuring out her messages.
Symbols are a complex form of presentation because there are so many aspects involved. By the way, if you want to practice, then I advise you to take a real Chinese Book of Changes (a version not adapted for Western thinking), read some fortune-telling text and try to understand what is at stake. I assure you that this is quite an exciting experience!
4. Finally, the most basic element of intuition is answering questions. It is inherent in a person to strive for knowledge, and therefore he is rather curious. We all constantly ask questions about anything: about our health, about the future, about our family, about which team will win the World Cup, about what is best to wear on a date, etc. action is an intuitive mechanism. The question forces our intuition to focus on an event, fact and tells us what signals from the outside world to pay attention to.
The genius physicist of the twentieth century A. Einstein attached great importance to intuition, insight, supersensible comprehension of life. He assured that without such things, not only great discoveries are impossible, but simply answers to difficult questions. He once said that if it was about his life and death and he had only one hour to find a way to be saved, he would spend 55 minutes on correctly formulating the question. "To find the answer," Einstein said, "just 5 minutes is enough." Einstein described the essence of the problem: very often we ourselves do not know what we want, we formulate our goals incorrectly, because our intuition, and with it our unconscious, is not able to help us.
The ability to ask the right question correctly comes with experience, but you also need to understand the answer correctly. We live in the world of information, even a modern society is called informational. Every minute millions of questions are falling on us, and therefore, we must find millions of answers. Our entire body is tuned in to receive useful information, it works so continuously.
The mind is constantly trying to interpret the information received, and in this matter its main assistant is intuition. We can say that intuition is a powerful weapon that hits right on target. After all, she answers even those questions that are not spoken out loud, which exist in the form of vague yearnings and vague desires. Moreover, intuition is the first stage of divination and clairvoyance. Very often, especially in dreams, intuition tells us what will happen in the future. Intuition can show people with whom fate will bring us in the future, places in which we may find ourselves, etc. It all depends on your ability to recognize these signals. As you begin to develop your gift of foreboding, you will experience a special intuitive state of anticipation. Your whole body will be tuned in to receive information: this is not a hope for an answer, but a patient one (!) waiting for an answer.
E. Razumovskaya