55 QUESTION: I wonder if you can clarify to some extent the connection or the disassociation between the subconscious and intuition?
ANSWER: If you distinguish intuition from insight, we might say that it is the highest form. Intuition is never wrong. An instinct can be wrong. It can be harmful, it can come from the lower nature of the personality. Intuition comes from the superconscious, if you want to be technical about it. Intuition has the further distinction of being conscious.
The moment it is intuition, it must be conscious, while an instinct may remain unconscious. It may be an urge, an impulse that is not formulated and of which one is unaware. An intuition must be conscious, otherwise it would not be an intuition. It is a message from the superconscious into consciousness. Subconscious forces help to bring it about. The subconscious direction you are taking, as a whole, influences you to be able to have certain intuitions.
QA142 GUIDE COMMENT: I would like to speak a few words to all of you who are involved in this Pathwork that will prove very helpful for you. This is not easy to explain, but I think that most of my friends who are really so successful – if I may use this word – in their own self-discoveries, in their own growth, will be able to use what I say and try to put it through, and they will find it immensely beneficial.
There is a door to open the intuition that comes from your innermost self. We may perhaps call it an intellectual intuition, which I differentiate from an instinctual intuition.
An instinctual perception would be a sort of vague feeling. The person who is not yet aware and conscious of himself through such inner work would have a vague dark feeling about things, about himself, about others, about perceptions in his surroundings – and he may just blindly respond to these instinctual perceptions without knowing why and what he does, that he reacts in a certain way, and why he reacts in a certain way.
When he is already trained in self-awareness, he begins to know himself better, and the dark instinctual perception will become an instinctual intuition, which means that the dark instinctual perception is translated into concise meaning.
Now, as opposed to this, we have an intellectual intuition. This is a little more difficult and subtle to explain, and I will try to do it in the following way: when you give yourself permission to have the inner thought process think in you – through you – suddenly a thought will appear about yourself, to begin with – later on about other people or your relationships or situations – but to begin with about your own problem.
If you allow this thought to stand in there and look at it and take it, you may even find that you do not feel what this thought in you says. This thought may be like a mere association. It may appear as if out of nowhere. It may even appear like nonsense.
At times it may be inaccurate. But at times it may be true and genuine intellectual intuition from which you build the channel to the deepest wisdom of your innermost self. In order to give voice to this, a certain quality is required – and that is, my friends, courage. In that courage must also be contained a letting-go process, a committing yourself to the thought that springs up in you – the courage of committing yourself to a thought that springs up out of nowhere.
Usually, man does not have the courage. He cannot let go of these processes that suddenly make the thought spring up within the psyche. He hangs on in the spirit of, “Oh, I might be wrong,” in a lack of not trusting oneself, and in the fear, my friends, to be mistaken.
The only way you can cultivate this channel would be that you do not demand of this inner channel to manifest immediately at all times infallibly. Because naturally your faulty areas, your obstructions, your illusions, may at times send forth inaccurate thought or intuitive thought.
But you can only clear the channel by being willing to accept such mistaken contact or communications coming from within yourself, and by knowing you are cultivating a process. In order to learn to trust this process, you have to be, number one, willing to allow it to happen. Ask for it to happen and listen to the thought that springs up. In other words, you have to make room for it.
Number two, you have to have the willingness to accept that these intellectual intuitions are not at all times and immediately infallible. As you learn and grow to handle them, you will clear them more and more, and you will learn to trust them more and more.
Number three, you will have to have a courage to let them happen. And you have to be willing to commit yourself in courage and to let go so that it happens. In this way, my dearest ones, you will indeed encourage and help the process of self-realization that you all work toward on this Path.
Perhaps in the coming months you can try it. Sometimes – each individual reacts differently – this is better done in the thought processes. With others, the writing down and letting it flow is an easier way. Let it flow and layers will come. In that way, you must first admit the layers of irrational and false, obviously illusory, thinking and feeling.
To the extent you let them manifest, you also will then get to the layer where these valid, intuitive thoughts will spring up – or intellectual intuition will manifest in you – that will first be disconnected from your emotional experience, and you will say, “Well, I do not expect that I feel that, but I do not feel that.”
But eventually, when your own thought says that, you will make room and remove the block that will make the feeling open. Often you will come to the feeling faster through the permission for these intellectual intuitions. At other times, the emotional manifestation leads to the intuition. You have to work it like from a tunnel – from both ways, both sides.