Advice from a Pastor Online
Common Sense Christianity
Intuition: our closest link to God
All humans share something in common: an ability to discern truth from falsity. If someone says to you that one plus one equals three, you can perceive that it is false. If someone says that one plus one equals two, you can see that it is true. Just because people can memorize things, does not diminish the fact that humans have the ability to see basic truths or principles for themselves. This seeing is wordless and nonverbal. It is a knowing. This wordless knowing is a higher form of knowing than intellectualization.
We can call this knowing “intuition.” I just know, for example, that it is wrong to be cruel to a child. I know wordlessly that it is wrong; and no one can convince me otherwise. I can see that it is foolish to waste money; no one has to teach me that fact. I just see it. We tend to dismiss or doubt this form of knowing.
Little children have this ability to see things. A little child knows when someone is being unfair—such as treating one child nicer than another. No one has to teach the little child about injustice. She knows it when she sees it.
I maintain that in the same way that we can know that one plus one equals two, we can also realize much more profound principles. We can realize religion, and we can realize the Presence of God and the process by which He makes His Truth known to the seeking soul. You should not need a middleman to spoon feed you truth or to come between you and your Creator.
Mostly what we need from the outside is the rebuke of words of truth to awaken us to realize Truth for ourselves. About the best others can do for us is remind us of what we forgot or point out error in a timely way to restore us to a right relationship with our inner ground of being.
When someone gets a joke, they laugh and say “Oh, I get it.” When someone realizes the solution to a math problem, they exclaim, “Now I see.” Learning should be a discovery process, resulting in the “aha experience” and leading us to stand in awe and wonder of the Creator of all truth, beauty and science.
When we are young we were given good advice by parents. But we dismissed what they said because we resented being told and we wanted to do things on our own. Years later, suffering awakens us to see our error. Then we say: Now I see what my parents were trying to tell me.”
We must see what it is we are doing wrong
Really recovering from addictions and emotional problems often involves seeing-- really seeing--our error. When the person cannot duck or sidestep the truth, they have at that moment an opportunity to admit the truth and be sorry. The reason we erred in the first place is because we didn’t pay attention to our intuition.
Intuition is also foresight, where we are wordlessly warned or restrained from some error. When it comes to our everyday existence, this seeing is at first not so much perceiving deep truths as it is noticing something not quite right about something. The intuition of which I speak is like a light that shines on error, exposing the error. Once the error is exposed, there is little more that is needed. . . . . . . . . . . Read More
