People speak a lot about using their intuition, an innate and automatic assessment of truth within themselves, which they tap into to make a decision or decide a course of action. Most people place a high degree of trust and faith in their intuitive thoughts and actions. “It just came to me.” “It was automatic.” “It seemed the most natural thing in the world.” These are comments made when people rely on their intuition or immediate perception. They assume intuition is not only to be trusted but is infallible. Intuition does not involve conscious thought at all. Instead, intuition relies on unconscious, emotionally conditioned parts of a person’s experience, especially where evaluation of other people, oneself and relationships are concerned. For example, a young man becomes rapidly smitten with a young woman. When he is asked how this happened so fast, he replied, it just “felt natural” to him. This is the intuitive portion of his emotional iceberg, most of which is unfathomable to him and which lies hidden below conscious awareness. It turns out the young woman is quite manipulative and exploitative of him, even early in the relationship. In spite of her abusiveness, he grows fonder of her. Conscious decision-making would say she is harmful to him and he should end the relationship. But intuitive notions hold sway over him. Why is this so?
On closer look at the young man’s personal history, the answer becomes clear. This man has grown up with a very abusive and exploitative father. He has been emotionally conditioned to be involved with and even attracted to such a person. He misinterprets this as an attraction and as love for his girlfriend. He believes he has great intuition about how wonderful his life would be with this young woman. His intuition is inaccurate but he cannot appreciate it or examine further with deliberate, conscious reasoning. His intuition has tapped into his emotional conditioning which, being unconscious, has tremendous power over his life. Thus, we can see that intuition is most often full of errors. It cannot be trusted to guide us to beneficial decision-making.
