(Central Park)
In my extensive reading over six decades, I've been struck by how often intuition is mentioned. The Transcendentalist movement of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau emphasized intuition above all else. Hindu sages like Paramahansa Yogananda have emphasized the important role of intuition. Steve Jobs described intuition as "more powerful than intellect." Nobel laureate scientists have emphasized the importance of intuition to their scientific breakthroughs. Once I started noticing this, references to intuition seemed to pop up everywhere.
Albert Einstein is widely quoted as saying, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.” The quote is profound but probably bogus. However, Einstein did say lots of other things about the importance of intuition: Intuition, Imagination & Insight. What Did Einstein Say About It?.
Everyone emphasizes that intuition is not some spooky faculty ("women's intuition") but a different form of knowledge. It's a way of "knowing" that transcends ordinary reasoning. Yogananda – a Hindu, but one who emphasized Jesus and the Bible in his teaching – described intuition as the faculty by which we must approach the divine.
Ordinary rational thinking is analytical and dualistic. It deals in contrasts – this or that? It's invaluable in making the many decisions we must make every day. Intuition is more holistic – it sees the whole, all at once. It transcends dualistic thinking.
But how does it work? How do we tap into it?
I think intuition is closely related to inspiration. Before I went to law school, I spent seven years in advertising. I discovered a famous little book written by an advertising executive called A Technique for Producing Ideas: A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young. It has sold over 15 million copies and been translated into more than 50 languages. It works.
The basic notion is to wrestle with a problem until your analytical, dualistic, this-or-that mind is completely exhausted. Then forget about it. Let it go. Soon, perhaps upon waking the next morning or while washing the car the day after that, the solution will simply reveal itself to you in a "Eureka!" moment of insight. I've experienced this, both in advertising and in my legal career. Even hardcore scientists have experienced it.
Where does the solution come from? Does it come from outside ourselves or is it generated by the intuitive faculty we all have? I believe the latter. When the rational mind shuts down, intuition can operate.
Or take the Muses. They were the goddesses of ancient Greece who were thought to inspire literature, art and the sciences. Even back then, folks realized there was something mysterious about the creative process.
I experienced the Muses many times in my legal career. The most vivid example, however, involved a short story.
One afternoon in 1983, as an in-house attorney for a huge corporation, I was flat-out bored. I started writing a humorous short story. It all came so fast and furious I could barely keep up. It almost seemed as though I were in a trance or dissociative state. When I was done, three or four hours later, I was agog. Where on earth did that come from?
I knew it was somehow "inspired." It was completely wacky, but it also anticipated many of the specific details of the "alien abduction" phenomenon that would start making headlines several years later. I laughed my head off every time I read it, as though someone else had written it.
More than ten years later, I submitted it in a fiction contest. I didn't hope it would win. I knew it would, because it was inspired. And win it did. ("I always wondered what was really going on inside lawyers' heads," the editor said.)
Where did it come from? Aliens implanting things in my brain? Nah, just the Muses – my higher self where inspiration and intuition can operate when you're flat-out bored.
As A Technique for Producing Ideas suggests, I think we tap into inspiration and intuition by letting go. We turn off the analytical mind – easier said than done! – and allow our intuitive faculty to do its thing.
Interestingly, this is precisely the technique for communion with God described by the anonymous author of the medieval classic, The Cloud of Unknowing. Forget everything, he says. Hide it all beneath a "cloud of forgetting." Then, without any thoughts or notions of God's attributes or anything else, enter a silent "cloud of unknowing" where God can speak.
Ah, but if God is speaking this wouldn't be mere intuition, would it? It would be revelation.
What's the difference – or is there any?
Christians refer to the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit in our lives. When we read the Bible, we believe the Spirit is guiding and informing our reading. Is there any reality to this, or is it all just us?
As Christians, we can't believe it's all just us.
As The Cloud of Unknowing suggests, I believe it's a two-party process of our intuitive mind being receptive to the divine revelation. It's our intuitive mind, not our analytical one, that is most able to receive and grasp divine revelation. As it often tends to do, the analytical mind just gets in the way.
This is surely true in every aspect of the Christian walk, not just communion and Bible-reading. The more we can switch off the analytical mind, the more clearly the Holy Spirit can speak.
In my internet persona of O'Darby, and even in my real life, I'm prone to over-analyzing and over-thinking everything, including my Christianity. My wife always says, with some exasperation, "Just believe!" What she's really saying, I think, is "Let go. Let your intuition operate and the Holy Spirit speak. Let yourself grasp the Truth in a holistic way, without agonizing over whether it all makes rational sense or fits together in a tidy, connect-the-dots sort of way."
Easier said than done for someone like me, but this is why – as I indicated in an earlier entry – I've been trying to focus more on communion than on theology, apologetics and all the other analytical aspects of belief. I think I finally reached the point of analytical overload.
The Role of Communion in My Christian Practice
Entering into a "cloud of unknowing" can deepen communion with God.
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