We have 2 main types of thinking:
Intuition definition:
“the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.”
No conscious reasoning – so kick verbal thinking into the long grass.
What you are left with are the silent mind and pictorial thinking. Intuition is part of this mind space. It is part of the silent mind. So you have the problem of distinguishing between pictorial thinking and Intuition.
Could we look at some brain frequencies of the silent mind:
So you know the mind needs to be silent for the intuitive process to be observed. Perhaps 8 Hz brain frequency and less.
So what is intuition – you know it is not verbal thinking, a noisy and chaotic frontline thinking mind where one has to verbalise what one wants to think for one to have to think at all. A very busy occupied mind with lots of psychological thinking in it. Ideas are spun up in the mind. Mental constructs creating opinions and biases and the personality.
Pictorial thinking is image-making in the mind. You observe and the mind sees images and you know what you are seeing. Your memory can trigger images or thoughts in your silent mind and they show up as a string of images in the mind. When your mind is silent your subconscious mind can rise, hidden away when the mind is busy and rises to the surface when the mind is silent. You know this is not intuition.
Intuition is different – it has no images but rather it is like a “sense of knowing” in you. It is more of a feeling that something is right or wrong. But more important intuition is part of an integration process in the mind. It puts information together in the mind and then you get this “sense of knowing” of what the solution is to a problem. It is a feeling of something being correct. It is almost a kind of the third eye, “sense of knowing”. A telepathic knowing can feel like intuition. They all come under the same process but intuition is more specific and a local problem solving, “sense of knowing” rather than a third eye, sense of knowing” of what the future might turn out to be. One has information and data to process and give you an intuitive solution and yet the third eye intuitive process is projecting into the future and “seeing” the unseen and the unknown ahead of you into the future, of something about to happen because it has already been created ahead of you and you/we are all about to walk into the future, kind of intuitive feeling in the body-mind.
There is a difference between processing information in the frontline verbal thinking mind and integrating information in the silent mind. When you integrate information in the frontline verbal thinking mind, you include all your biases and opinions into the solution, but with intuition, the solution is integrated without these frontline biases. Also notice both processes are very important to have in us, as an idea can only be spun together in the verbal thinking mind and you find a solution from working a problem out in the frontline thinking mind and then you get a 2nd opinion/solution in the silent mind with using the intuitive process which integrates all the information without the biases and the opinions in mind. Intuition or the silent mind is only an observational mind – it is not a spinner of ideas. It cannot spin an observation into an idea. It is only quietly silent and self-aware of things and intuition is also so, it just brings in all the information from the frontline thinking mind, and then gives you a 2nd possible opinion/solution.
If you see your mind spaces separately, knowing they all work together when needed, and yet can be separated and experienced separately. Meditation will separate the mind spaces for you. It can even take you to the ends of your mind where it disappears altogether and returns with no memory of where it has been. You can even stop thinking completely and remain silent in mind and just sense that space in mind with just consciousness and self-awareness with nothing else in mind. No image-making, no frontline verbal thinking with just “choiceless observation” in mind – Sunyata.
sunyata
/ˈʃuːnjətɑː/
noun
- 1.the doctrine that phenomena are devoid of an immutable or determinate intrinsic nature. It is often regarded as a means of gaining an intuition of ultimate reality.
What you want?