Evolution of Love 2

The Role of INTUITION

The Role of INTUITION: Your Secret 'Superpower'!

"Intuition is Knowing without Knowing"

We have to pass beyond thought, beyond the clash of oppositions, beyond the antinomies that confront us when we work with the limited categories of abstract thinking, if we are to reach the real where man's existence and divine being coincide. It is when thought becomes perfected in intuition that we catch the vision of the real.

The mystics the world over have emphasized this fact . . . According to the Upanishads there is a higher power which enables us to grasp this central spiritual reality. Spiritual things require to be spiritually discerned. The Yoga method is a practical discipline pointing out the road to this realization. Man has the faculty of divine insight or mystic intuition, by which he transcends the distinctions of intellect and solves the riddles of reason. The chosen spirits scale the highest peak of thought and intuit the reality.

Intuition is transcendent wisdom and is to be distinguished from intellectual understanding, from which it differs entirely. In religious intuition, spiritual idealism is fully realized. Intellect, emotion and will are but the fragmentary aspects of intuition, which is their totality. It is purity of mind that gives us the intuitive faculty.

“We discover by intuition and explain by logic.”

The intuitive knowledge we find in the direct revelation of Truth gives us delight in our immediate union with the thing itself. Intuitive knowledge is Reality. Enlightenment and peace of mind become possible only through intuitive knowledge.

That is why Indian culture gives tremendous emphasis to intuitive knowledge without denouncing the role of reason in the quest of Truth. Even Scientists, generally, accept the role of intuition. Heinz R. Pagels wrote:

Einstein moved away from the position of strict positivism . . . It was as much Einstein's own success with the general theory of relativity and the method of thought he used to arrive at it that convinced him of the limitations of the strict positivist method. If Einstein had remained a positivist, I doubt that he would have discovered general relativity . . . A great deal of creative work in physics proceeds by this method, which places intuition at the very first step, a non-rational but verifiable aspect of scientific creativity.

Einstein wrote that “every attempt at a logical deduction of the basic concepts and postulates of mechanics, from elementary experience is doomed to failure,” adding that “the supreme task of the physical science is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction.” He also wrote, “Here is no logical path to these laws; only intuition resting on sympathetic understanding of experience can reach them.”

Japan’s Nobel laureate in physics, Hideki Yukawa, discussed the superior role of intuition over logic or experiments: “It seems as if present-day physicists have lost the gift of foresight inherited from their forerunners. . . . abstraction cannot work by itself, but has to be accompanied by intuition.” As Yukawa explains:

A thorough-going rationalism eludes them (the Oriental and the Chinese) . . . In particular, the development of physics since the beginning of the twentieth century has taken this kind of course. In this kind of course nothing can be done by logic alone. The only course is to perceive the whole intuitively and see through what is correct . . . the fact remains that in order to synthesize contradictions it is necessary first to survey the whole with intuition . . . In short, by supplementing what he (the scientist) already has with his imagination, he produces an integral whole. If he succeeds in the attempt, the contradictions will be resolved . . . for us the scientists, the power of imagination is an important ingredient.

Swami Vivekananda summarized the role of intuition, the basic methodology of Yoga :

Religion is above reason, supernatural. Faith is not belief, it is the grasp on the ultimate, an illumination . . . Stick to your reason until you reach something higher; and you will know it to be higher, because it will not jar with reason . . . All religion is going beyond reason, but reason is the only guide to get there. Instinct is like ice, reason is the water, and inspiration is the subtlest form of vapor, one follows the other.

Higher spiritual truths can be obtained only through meditation and by raising our human consciousness to higher and higher levels until it loses itself in spirit. Speaking on the preparation for the higher life, Swami Vivekananda said, “The greatest thing is meditation. It is the nearest approach to spiritual life— the mind meditating. It is the one moment in our daily life that we are not material— the Soul thinking of Itself, free from all matter—this marvelous touch of the Soul.”

Deep meditation enables us to see the Light within through intuition. This Light within the heart is not a physical radiance but a fraction of the effulgent light of Pure Consciousness: “the Light of all lights, the Light by which the whole universe is lighted.” It is beautifully expressed in the Gospel of St. John as :

“The true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”

Like Einstein, the Eastern mystics consider this underlying entity as the only reality: all its phenomenal manifestations are seen as transitory and illusory. This reality of the Eastern mystic cannot be identified with the quantum field of the physicist, because it is seen as the essence of all phenomena in this world and, consequently, is beyond all concepts and ideas. The quantum field, on the other hand, is a well defined concept which only accounts for some of the physical phenomena. Nevertheless, the intuition behind the physicist's interpretation of the subatomic world in terms of the quantum field is closely paralleled by that of the Eastern mystic who interprets his or her experience of the world in terms of an ultimate underlying reality.

Subsequent to the emergence of the field concept, physicists have attempted to unify the various fields into a single fundamental field, which would incorporate all physical phenomena. Einstein, in particular, spent the last years of his life searching for such a unified field. The Brahman of the Hindus, like the Dharmakaya of the Buddhists and the Tao of the Taoists, can be seen, perhaps, as the ultimate unified field from which spring not only the phenomena studied in physics, but all other phenomena as well.