Intuition – real/unreal, helpful/risky?

“Back and forth, we must switch between intellect and intuition, between rational, objective knowledge and embodied paradox.”

That quote is from the book Radical Nature: Rediscovering the Soul of Matter, by Christian De Quincey, PhD. – in my post Intuition: powers and perils in which I also quote from the article Intuition or Intellect, by social psychologist David G. Myers, who warns, “Intuition is important, but we often underestimate its perils.”

As someone who has made my way through life by predominantly attending to my intellect, I have tended to discount or simply ignored intuition, though no doubt many of my choices and decisions have been based on some degree of intuition, whether I acknowledged it or not.

A number of personal development and high ability authors explain how intuition works and how to develop and use it.

An inner library

In her article Spark Your Creativity Via Your Intuitions, career/creativity coach and writer Gail McMeekin writes about it as a personal asset:

“Worried that you’re not creative? You are, but you may be out of touch with it. Your intuition can lead you into a world of novel ideas, experimentation, and brainstorming that will perk up your work life and stimulate innovation and problem-solving.

“Intuition training is not just for New Agers. Many executives, business owners, and research and development professionals attribute their successes to following intuitive clues.

“Intuition is your internal information and feeling source. It is an inner library of physical and emotional cues that can direct you onto the right avenue.

“It is the composite of ‘gut feelings’ and perceptions unique to you. It is an inner way of knowing. Too often, we are trained to discount or repress that knowledge and therefore purposely neglect it, devalue it, or refuse to recognize its message.”

The intuitive Jungian personality type

In her Editorial for the issue of Advanced Development Journal on Exploring Intuition (Volume 10, 2006), Elizabeth Maxwell, M.A. refers to the popular personality type inventory: the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

She writes, “When I first began teaching in a private school for gifted children, all parents, teachers, and older students took the MBTI to learn their types; teachers observed and analyzed younger children.

“Surprising results emerged: the more exotic types, such as the ENFP (Extroverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiver) and the INTP (Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiver—Einstein was one) were far more common among the gifted.

“Even more interestingly, while the Intuitive Factor was more rare in the common populace, 75 percent of the students at the gifted school were strong in intuition. So were many parents. So were many of the teachers.

“Rather than having a preference for the practical and factual, like the more generally numerous sensers, intuitives enjoy hypotheses and abstractions, love to play with ‘what-if’s’ and pay scant attention to mundane details. The first connection is that intuition plays a large part in the lives of a majority of gifted people.”

Also see quotes by Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D. from this journal in the post Gifted adults: Wrestling with our intuition. One of her comments: “Higher education indoctrinates students to think logically and skeptically and to dismiss intuitive information.”

But is it real?

In her chapter of the same journal, Imagination to Intuition: The Journey of a Rationalist into Realms of Magic and Spirit, author and giftedness consultant Stephanie S. Tolan writes:

“In spite of our cultural passion for ‘reality,’ judging the products of imagination as real or unreal may be a waste of time and mental effort. What is far more important is whether they ‘work,’ whether they are useful, whether they have an impact on lives or on the world.

“Those who teach others how to access and use their innate intuitive capacities say that the way to increase the accuracy or the usefulness of one’s intuition is to open up to it, trust it, and act on it.

“In other words, to assume for the moment that the intuitive information one gets is not imaginary but real. The more one does this, the more accurate and useful one’s intuitive knowledge becomes.”

Intuition articles

Image from book: Art from Intuition: Overcoming Your Fears and Obstacles to Making Art, by Dean Nimmer

A couple of other titles related to intuition:

Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally, by Robyn Dawes

Intuition: Knowing Beyond Logic, by Osho

Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making, by Gary Klein

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell

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