FAITH AND INTUITION

In this post, I consider faith and intuition.  In my previous post, I observed, "that there is interplay between (belief, faith, intellect, and intuition) as in intuition informing intellect and faith informing what we believe."  This seems accurate because all knowledge is derived from what we learn as experience, and faith and intuition are experiential activities. As a result, this avenue of information is largely a one way street; in that, belief does not cause one to have faith and intellect does cause one to have intuition, neither does belief produce intuition, nor does intellect result in acts of faith.

It can be said that one's beliefs and intellect  gives definition to one's acts of faith. The same could be said regarding intuition.   Nevertheless, one's beliefs and intellect do not produce faith or intuition.  Faith and intuition are not a product of one's ideologies or dependent on a certain level of intellect in order to occur.  Faith and intuition are, strictly speaking, experiential events.  A common reaction to such experiences is that the person engaged in an act of faith or intuition rarely recognizes it as such and generally is unable to indicate a direct reason or motive for what compelled one's actions or experience at the time. 

The best illustration is the person who does a random heroic deed carried out in the split moment.  Heroes of the immediate-take-action kind are not known to take action because of an ideological belief or intellect that is capable of weighing all the contingencies that one's actions can result in. Such individuals simply act, without a sense of self-regard to what could have, might have, or should have happened. Whether they admit it or even realize what they experienced at the time of their heroism, there is detected in such actions a level of faith and intuition that surpasses what they and others would do if solely based one what they believe and know. 

Something far more powerful and swift came into play and that something I would identify as faith and intuition.  People who act from faith often credit God with such occurrences, and I won't argue that assessment because that too proceeds from a person's experience with faith and intuition.

What is observed in such instances is what I described in earlier posts as the Impulse of Religion that evolved from seeing a need for the other as seeing in the need of the other one's own need.  I believe that the Impulse of Religion is a primal response that has evolved in the human psyche before the dawn of human history.  Faith and intuition proceed from an untraceable, deeper sense of being than one's intellect and ideologies.

There are, of course, other types of heroes; people who are highly intellectual and possess strong ideological beliefs, whose heroism is not of the immediate-take-action type.  Such individuals represent a heroism that is of the deliberate-steady-action type who demonstrate faith in what they are doing and possess a sense of intuition beyond knowing, who feel that what they are engaging is the right thing to do without the aid of knowing for sure, who are willing to risk an investment in hope.   Such heroes can go unrecognized in their life-times, but who have changed the course of human history, who may have averted disasters, found cures, prevented wars or gave rise to new ideas and broadened our sense of knowledge at the risk of losing life - people like Galileo, Thomas Payne, Susan B. Anthony, Charles Darwin, Mahatma Gandhi, Madame Curie, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr. to name a few. 

Such heroic individuals were frequently dealing with the dangerous occupation of speaking truth to power or who had to overcome their personal inclination for playing it safe.  Again, such faith and intuitive activities I would posit as being motivated by the primal Impulse of Religion.

Faith and intuition are more operative in a person's life than most think or would credit.  The simplest, most mundane expression of faith is getting out of bed each morning.  It takes faith to face each new day as a human.  Possessing beliefs derived from negative experience and a reasoning ability based on both one's negatives experience and beliefs derived from it can possess one to the point of immobility.  Apart from clinical depression, that is frequently the result of brain chemistry, depression as mood is frequently connected to intellectual perception and processing, occasionally associated with ideologically induced dissatisfaction.  Getting out of bed and moving on with one's day, in spite of them is an act of faith. 

Intuition is perhaps harder to detect, but at its simplest level it come as that gut reaction, that quick feeling one gets to do or to refrain from doing something at a moment's notice. Intuition is that sense which defies rational explanation because it does not require it, but seems rational after we acted on it; particularly, if the intuition is correct.  One can also experience intuition as a persistent sense of alertness to undefined events that are taking place and are beyond one's control; that cause one to be vigilant about events that resonate or give definition to this intuitive feeling.

Faith and intuition are largely processed intellectually after the fact of an identifiable occurrence.  It is only after the fact that one's ideological beliefs come into play as way to define and identify such occurrences.  There is, as I have posited, interplay between these functions.  Faith and intuition are more likely to occur at a subliminal level than at a fully conscious level.

My reason for bringing this and my last post to light is because we are not functioning, as a whole, in a faithful and intuitive way.  We are prone to being numb to intuitive sensations regarding nature and human relationships.  Many are choosing to turn a blind eye to the earth and to the moral responsibilities we humans have towards it; that such responsibilities transcend our mere ideological viewpoints and subjective values. 

We are not acting in faith to address problems, to fix what is wrong  nor are we listening to the inner impulses that connect us to the pulse of the natural earth and humus of our nature; to the primal Impulse of Religion that I believe resides at the core of the human psyche.

Our intellectual abilities can override intuition.  Our ideological beliefs can become a substitute for faith; that when combined can lead one to ignore the inner impulses that alert us to what our intellectual faculties fail to register.   If there was ever a time in which to take a giant step back and examine one's beliefs and embrace the limits of our collective intellect and be alert to our intuitive senses that proceed from a primal need for the other as meeting our own needs and to act from faith as an investment in hope, now is that time.

Until next time, stay faithful.

Norm