The Scope and Limits of Intuition

 

Intuition can manifest in relation to persons. For instance, the eyes, the quality of the voice, and the way a person moves, express their inner nature. Intuition penetrates to the combined meaning of these expressions. As R. W. Emerson said, ”Wise men read very sharply all of your private history in your look and gait and behavior.”

We can also see ourselves by intuition. Spiritual intuition progressively reveals our own nature as well as the ambient one. This is logically correct because intuition is unification and embraces both the center and the periphery of everything.

There is no phenomena where intuition would fail to function, because intuition derives from the unified field of meaning that underlies all things. In this sense, intuition is unlimited. Yet in practice, intuition does function unevenly in us according to our temperament and affinities, and its precipitation in a given field is dependent on a period of mental or meditative focus in that field. For instance, if we are not born a scientist or do not deliberately develop ourselves along that line, we would not expect to be the vehicle for revelation of the mysteries of nature in the scientific sense.

The Door of Everything

Sound, light, color, and motion can be a portal to intuitive perception. So physical phenomena may trigger intuitive light. Everything is doorway. Everything and everyone is the symbol and gate of reality. Everything serves as window to the spiritual. Every point in space, rightly apprehended, is education, initiation. And though all things serve in this manner, yet the phenomena that triggers revelation is individual, according to temperament and affinity.

“The process of shifting levels from the letter to the inner meaning in the matter of spiritual attitudes can be clearly set forth by one single proposition. It consists in ‘seeing through’ the phenomenon. Every living phenomenon is, first and last, a symbol; for the essence of life is meaning. But every symbol which is the ultimate expression of a state of consciousness is in itself transparent for another deeper one, and so on into eternity; for all things in the sense-connection of life are inwardly connected, and their depths have their roots in God.”

— Hermann Keyserling