The Fourfold Power of Intuition and Its Action In the Human Instruments of Mind, Life and Body

A major concern for those who are desirous of shifting from the mental to the intuitional consciousness definitely lies in the transition, how that is going to work, what the role of the mind, if any, is in this transition and how the consciousness will function as it shifts to reliance on the intuitional capacities. There is a definite anxiety about discontinuing reliance on the mental power which has built up and carried the individual through their development. In the beginning then, it is not uncommon to see something of a hybrid approach where the intuition begins to flow, but gets commandeered, modified by and adjusted to fit into the forms of mental consciousness and exercise of the mental will. If the seeker is able to move beyond this interim approach and begin to rely more completely on the intuition, he may find, as Sri Aurobindo describes, that the intuitional power can actually replicate, but at an advanced and more powerful level, the mental functionality.

In fairness, it is a totally different type of activity that the seeker must become accustomed to, by quieting the mind, receiving the intuitive understanding and not garbling or watering it down. All this, without creating distortions or misinterpretations through the mental translation that can dramatically change what is being received. The intuition itself, also as Sri Aurobindo notes, is capable of this type of discrimination and understanding, so it can be a self-correcting mechanism once it becomes operative.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “Intuition has a fourfold power. A power of revelatory truth-seeing, a power of inspiration or truth-hearing, a power of truth-touch or immediate seizing of significance, which is akin to the ordinary nature of its intervention in our mental intelligence, a power of true and automatic discrimination of the orderly and exact relation of truth to truth, — these are the fourfold potencies of Intuition. Intuition can therefore perform all the action of reason, — including the function of logical intelligence, which is to work out the right relation of things and the right relation of idea with idea, — but by its own superior process and with steps that do not fail or falter. It takes up also and transforms into its own substance not only the mind of thought, but the heart and life and the sense and physical consciousness: already all these have their own peculiar powers of intuition derivative from the hidden Light; the pure power descending from above can assume them all into itself and impart to these deeper heart-perceptions and life-perceptions and the divinations of the body a greater integrality and perfection. It can thus change the whole consciousness into the stuff of Intuition; for it brings its own greater radiant movement into the will, into the feelings and emotions, the life-impulses, the action of sense and sensation, the very workings of the body-consciousness; it recasts them into the light and power of truth and illumines their knowledge and their ignorance.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter XXI Intuition, pg. 162