On Intuition

Learning to distinguish true intuition from the ego’s BS is an incredibly nuanced skill that the vast majority don’t have. It’s a Master’s level discipline.

Among the masses, the vast majority of those claiming to rely on “intuition” or “the heart” are simply engaging in emotional confirmation bias—clinging to certain facts and evidence because it pleases their egos and dismissing other facts and evidence because it offends their egoic sensibilities, both without sufficient rational justification, and all with the smug confidence that they are properly “intuiting” the truth.

But true intuition rarely conflicts with reason. When both intuition and reason are in agreement, one can proceed confidently. When they are in conflict, alarm bells should ring because active discernment is required.

While a Master who has sufficiently cleansed his lens of perception of most egoic distortions may be capable of discerning truth via intuition alone and despite any conflict with reason, the vast majority of people can’t. For them, relying upon reason when it conflicts with intuition offers them at least the possibility of some independent, external check upon their habitual egoic self-deception.

There’s a grave misconception among many in the yoga and new age communities that “intuition” anchored in positive emotions (like love, or the heart chakra) can never mislead. While this may be technically true if we define and experience “love” as yogic masters do, it’s absolutely untrue for the overwhelmingly majority of us who have quite a different conception of love. Urges and inclinations based in a more traditional and conventional understanding of the word “love” can be just as misleading (actually even more misleading) than than those based in negative emotions.

I guess what I’m suggesting is that reason is a very effective check upon cognitive biases of all types, and especially confirmation bias, that most ANYONE can use while intuition is often only effective at checking such biases for the MASTER discriminator.