A Basic Form of Intuition

We frequently hear people say that they had a “gut feeling” that something was not right when they went to a certain place. In fact, most of us have had similar feelings from time to time. We don’t have any externally perceptible facts to base this feeling on. It just ‘is’. The same thing happens when we get into certain situations or interact with certain people. We just ‘know’ there is something there to take care about. Of course, this feeling can also work in the positive direction and give us a feeling of wellbeing in certain situations, or a sense that an individual we are interacting with is going to be a positive force in our lives. For the most part, we don’t think any more about this, how it happens, what the process is, and what it means. We simply experience the sense or feeling and acknowledge it to ourselves. This is perhaps one of the most basic, primal forms of intuition, more or less an instinctive response to some energy pattern that we feel. There may be primeval trained responses embedded in the human psyche, or we may be experiencing an intuitive knowledge not based on the senses and the mind, but on some other sensing organ in the being.

A disciple asks: “Mother, how can the faculty of intuition be developed?”

The Mother responds: “There are different kinds of intuition, and we carry these capacities within us. They are always active to some extent but we don’t notice them because we don’t pay enough attention to what is going on in us.”

“Behind the emotions, deep within the being, in a consciousness seated somewhere near the level of the solar plexus, there is a sort of prescience, a kind of capacity for foresight, but not in the form of ideas: rather in the form of feelings, almost a perception of sensations. For instance, when one is going to decide to do something, there is sometimes a kind of uneasiness or inner refusal, and usually, if one listens to this deeper indication, one realises that it was justified.”

In other cases there is something that urges, indicates, insists — I am not speaking of impulses, you understand, of all the movements which come from the vital and much lower still — indications which are behind the feelings, which come from the affective part of the being; there too one can receive a fairly sure indication of the thing to be done. These are forms of intuition or of a higher instinct which can be cultivated by observation and also by studying the results. Naturally, it must be done very sincerely, objectively, without prejudice. If one wants to see things in a particular way and at the same time practice this observation, it is all useless. One must do it as if one were looking at what is happening from outside oneself, in someone else.”

“It is one form of intuition and perhaps the first one that usually manifests.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter XXI Intuition, pp. 158-159