Intuition: the new learning frontier

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Intuition: the new learning frontier

“When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion…”Yuval Noah Harai 

We’ve all heard how we live in a ‘Post-Truth’ world (a term coined in 2018 by Lee McIntyre). It is probably more correct to say that we live in the ‘Personal-Truth’ world, where what is ‘true’ is essentially up-to-you. That might sound self-evident, but it's actually very new... and it has ENORMOUS ramifications!

Power and Authority

From vaccines to fake news, 2020 made it undeniable for many of us, from whatever position on the political spectrum we sit that the traditional sources of guidance we have relied on to help us make life choices are no longer reliable. From newspapers and the TV to Politicians, the Reserve Bank and even Scientists and Doctors – we need to make up our own mind about everything!

I assert we’ve been struggling with, and resisting, this realisation for some time. We’ve known it is correct but we’ve wanted to hold onto at least some of the certainties of the past. Unfortunately for our alter-ego's, it's 'take responsibility for ALL our beliefs or for none of them'... there is no half-way-house (and that image of the perfect - white, monogamous, patriarchal - happy family is just soooo hard to let go of).

Intuition - the ultimate source of knowledge?

The process of resisting the ramifications of this realisation was hard and I assert came to a head in 2020, but once made, it has brought with it a newfound peace and confidence and a new power and authority (and direction) to our lives. By accepting that the only source of truth is inside and not outside us, we’ve opened a whole new world of learning and possibility.

The role of intuition is critical because it is THE source of internal knowledge about the world. Whether it is an agglomeration of external inputs we have processed subconsciously, revelation from external sources or something in-between, in the absence of truly credible external sources of guidance we are all going to have to learn what it is, how to access it and most importantly, how to train this faculty (which is largely dormant in most of us).

We don’t rate intuition very highly in the materialist western world but the concept actually has deep, well-founded roots in virtually ALL philosophical traditions both 'modern' and 'pre-modern' (including 'The West''). It certainly encompasses a great deal more than the amorphous ‘gut-feeling’ we often limit the concept to. Way back in the 1920's, Rudolf Steiner, leaning on Goethe's thinking, wrote that:

[Intuition] denotes a clear, pure mode of comprehension akin to a mathematical concept.
Now that's a different take from what I automatically imagine it to be!

If intuition really is anything like a "clear, pure model of comprehension" that we can consciously develop and train, that opens a whole new world of knowledge and guidance. I think that's the route we are all going down and I invite you to start exploring what intuition means to you and when you use it (because you do) and when you ignore it (because you do that too) and what it costs you!

We all know we need to look within and not without for certainty. That brings confidence and clarity but it is also confronting because it means YOU are the ultimate source of authority!
More on different conceptions of intuition and my own experience practising as I learn more to share :-) ... very open to input or thoughts from you!

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