The Unmistakable and Unfakeable Voice of Intuition
It has yet to be determined where intuition lives in the human brain. Scientists generally agree that intuition exists and that intuition and instinct are not the same thing. Instinct is a survival mechanism. As such, it is part of the wiring of every living thing and is universally connected to self-preservation, reproductive drive, and resource-seeking. What it detects and how it processes and responds to information depends on species and conditions.
If you are like me and believe that we humans are spiritual beings, then intuition resides in our souls. It serves as our soul’s navigation system and is used to guide us (if we listen) in the crease between the material and mystical worlds.
“Intuition is seeing with the soul.”
– Dean Koontz
I am focusing on this topic because, like Love and Wisdom, intuition seems urgently important in the times we live in. Also like Love and Wisdom, intuition is universal, transcendent, and unaffected by human-made systems. And finally, like Love and Wisdom, it is misunderstood and under-utilized.
In many ways, instinct is failing the human species. As Jane Goodall once put it, we are “...the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?” But it goes beyond habitat destruction to Self (capital S intended) destruction. Almost every system we live in is human-made and each of these systems require a person to craft a hologram to function in these systems.
Church-run states, mass media, political parties, and the attention economy have made almost the entirety of the human experience a manufactured reality. As Elvis (paraphrasing Shakespeare) said, “All the world’s a stage and each must play a part.” These forces built the stage and essentially forced each of us to build our hologram to play our part. As such, we don’t get to use our instincts for their intended purposes.
Self-preservation becomes preservation of the hologram: status, power, image, entertainment.
Reproductive drive becomes fixation on release and control; sex as a coping mechanism or transaction instead of a creative act, literally and spiritually.
Resource-seeking becomes about extraction, consumption, individualistic and/or tribal greed.
I am not anti-AI, but AI is making all of this so much worse because it is designed to manufacture the exact realities and identities our ego-minds crave while enriching its overlords. It does this by engineering worlds where Love has been replaced by obedience and Wisdom has been usurped by “information”. Thus the urgency to rediscover intuition. Intuition can smell fake in microseconds.
Each of us is imbued with the gift of intuition but it is likely buried under acres of social conditioning, cognitive biases, and logical fallacies. As such, it becomes a moral responsibility to re-connect with intuition and see it, along with Love and Wisdom, as essential traits for transcending the bullshit. Not as a form of escapism but as an essential leadership trait.
The War on Intuition
Intuition is feminine. This is supported by multiple ancient lineages. The Greeks named her Sophia, the Hebrews named her Chokmah, and across Indigenous traditions the deep knowing was held by grandmothers and women elders, the ones who read the patterns of the earth. In the Amazon they still call the medicine Abuela, Grandmother. Every one of these traditions understood that intuition has always been a she.
Man-made systems prize instinct, the hard masculine wiring of dominance and survival. They disdain intuition and call empathy a defect. This makes it clear why patriarchy is terrified of intuition.
Frightened people are obedient people. Patriarchy knew this so it systematized instinct in the form of organized religion and industrialization. Then it used mass media and algorithms to manufacture one threat after another to make sure the animal stays scared. People kept in survival mode never hear their own intuition and eventually they will stop believing she exists.
Patriarchy knows it can not beat intuition in a fair fight, so it turns people against themselves. It hands them a righteous cause, reframes their exhaustion as devotion, and waits. When the ego attaches itself to a cause, it becomes a martyr and kills itself in the name of that cause, an unwitting participant in its own defeat. The system does none of the killing. It only has to stand back while the most devoted burn themselves out. Virginia wrote about this in her most recent article, “The Machine that Feeds on Martyrs”.
This is why listening to intuition is an act of defiance. Every system you live in runs on getting you to outsource your knowing to the expert, the metric, the manufactured fear. Each one needs you to believe you are too small to know your own life, that you require their permission and their information to know what is true. The moment you trust your intuition, you break that rule. You do not have to march or protest or burn anything down. You withdraw the one thing the system needs to run, which is your self-doubt.
Which means trusting intuition will feel wrong at first. Instinct is loud and certain and always demands you act now. Intuition is quiet and asks you to wait, and in a culture that mistakes urgency for virtue, her patience will feel like cowardice. It is the opposite. Choosing her over the reactive animal voice is the most difficult discipline to learn because we were conditioned to not learn it.
How to Recognize Intuition
The mind is easy to recognize. It is loud. It argues. It lies. It manipulates. It interrupts. It hands out business cards at a funeral. It talks you into and out of things. Intuition does none of those things, but because of the noise of the mind, she can still be hard to recognize. As such, here are some traits for identifying if intuition is present:
Intuition speaks in epiphanies, words, symbols, and signs.
Intuition doesn’t use justification, shame, temptations, or distractions.
Intuition never diminishes you; she takes nothing away except for untruths and illusions.
Intuition doesn’t treat your life like a P&L ledger with debits and credits, assets and liabilities.
Intuition doesn’t use pros and cons. It doesn’t know the word “maybe”. It speaks in “yes” or “no”. As such, intuition has no Plan B.
Intuition asks you to prioritize but doesn’t ask you to choose poverty over purpose nor reason over purpose. It intimately understands both the physical realm and the spiritual realm.
Intuition doesn’t think small. It is audacious in its nature. As such, intuition doesn’t placate the mind’s fears. Quite the opposite, actually.
Recognizing intuition is the first step. Learning to trust her through action is the next step. Take the low-stakes promptings first, the ones that don’t cost much if you are wrong, and follow them before the mind can talk you out of it. You will start to learn the particular texture of her yes and her no, how they feel in your body before the mind tries to intervene. That felt sense is your instrument, and it sharpens only with use. Once you know it in the small things, you will recognize it in the big things. None of this is the destination. Intuition is the voice of something deeper, and learning to trust her is how you finally meet the Self she speaks for.
“Cease trying to work everything out with your minds. It will get you nowhere. Live by intuition and inspiration and let your whole life be revelation.”
– Eileen Caddy
Trust Your Self
In my last essay, I wrote about I AM; that the death of identities connects to the most God-like parts of us. When we only identify as I AM, intuition is ultimately about trusting our Selves (again, the capital S is intentional). Using the framework of a lower self and a higher Self also reveals the roles of instincts vs intuition.
Instinct is an essential element of survival. In humans, this is the lower self. It is comprised of our reptilian and mammal brains as well as our neocortex. In the lower self, there is a direct correlation between available resources and level of morality. That is because instinct’s primary role is to keep you and your clan alive at almost any cost.
In that drive to survive is an interesting paradox. If you don’t listen to instincts, you could get killed. Yet humans talk themselves out of danger signals all of the time. In his fantastic book “The Gift of Fear”, Gavin de Becker shares that “Only human beings can look directly at something, have all the information they need to make an accurate prediction, perhaps even momentarily make the accurate prediction, and then say that it isn’t so.” Instinct is the animal wisdom that stabilizes the neocortex’s storytelling machine, which under stress or fear becomes delusional. This is why I often say that nature kills pretense.
Stress suppresses intuition and elevates instincts. The systems we live in are designed to keep us in animal brain mode. We are much easier to control through threat or placation if we are in a state of reactivity. The problem is that once the animal brain is activated, it doesn’t know how to discern between life-threatening stress and existential stress.
To connect with your intuition, you must connect with your Higher Self. To do that, you first must stop. Intuition does not compete with noise, so you must get to a place of silence and solitude. The best place to do this is in nature. Nature is the anti-AI. It can not be faked. And, as I said, it kills pretense. This idea is supported by a recent unattributed quote that I recently read:“The reason nature is peaceful is that it is only being itself.”
Quietness creates the space for clarity. Clarity creates the space for discernment. Discernment separates thoughts, sensations, and emotions. In the space between those things your Higher Self emerges, accompanied by intuition.
Intuition in Daily Life
In my experience, intuition doesn’t become depleted but the energy to access it does. It is worn down by uncertainty, unexpected disruptions, and the general soap opera that is Real Life. It would be great to get into nature every day just to make room for intuition to re-emerge. But once you learn how to do it, you can access intuition in almost every condition or situation. This makes intuition a very useful resource for:
Decision-making. Having options to make decisions is a kind of privilege, but it is also exhausting. Because of information overload, it is easy to slip into analysis paralysis and/or cognitive biases. Remember: the mind will choose the easiest decision based on what it perceives prior patterns or results to be. Intuition doesn’t do that. Intuition doesn’t suggest a stack-ranked list of options for a decision. She focuses on one question: What is the right thing to do? Or as a mentor once told me, most of life is determining the right thing to do, then doing it.
Prioritization of resources (time, attention, money). The mind prioritizes resources based on perceived scarcity, then it will nudge you towards the things that it will most benefit from. This is what makes attention-based activities like scrolling so addictive. Intuition understands the actual value of resources and will allocate them based on what best serves your purpose and calling.
How you treat others. How we interact with people we know is often transactional and filled with score-keeping, hidden motivations, and quid pro quo agreements, spoken or assumed. Unless they capture our attention for a particular reason, we tend to look past strangers. Multiple studies show that we ignore the travails of most strangers unless we know other people are watching us. This is often demonstrated in the videos of a young man on Instagram who says to strangers, “I’m having a bad day. May I have a hug?” Some quickly say yes and give him a hug. Some have cruel and often homophobic responses. But many initially say no, but then change their mind when they see the camera. Intuition does not see hierarchies, doesn’t pay attention to what-can-you-do-for-me dynamics, doesn’t look for cameras. Intuition sees souls. She sees their worth, their suffering, their potential and then prompts us to act from those perspectives. In that sense, intuition is the primary activator of kindness.
Final Thought
Like Love and Wisdom, intuition needs to be nurtured and protected. It exists with or without our participation, but she will not fight to insert herself. The best way to nurture and protect intuition is by play, laughter, creativity, and curiosity. Essentially, things that feel foolish to the mind, especially a mind under pressure. If you build systems that make room for play and delight, intuition will recognize and reward your efforts.
She wants to be free to explore, to guide, to lead. Create those conditions, and she will help you create a life that is free, awake, and unafraid.
Lots of great insights here. Thanks, Justin!
So true, we need it now more than ever.