292. Intuitive Sense

When you hear someone speak, you don’t just understand their words, you feel them too. Beyond the semantic content that is processed cognitively, there is also an emotional payload that arrives just as immediately as any rational meaning.

Sometimes the feeling of the words arrives in advance of the meaning. This is often what happens when someone tells you horrible news. The words you’re hearing feel awful and the intensity of the feeling impedes your ability to understand. This is when we might say that the meaning takes time to “sink in”, as though some part of you were a sponge that has not yet fully absorbed the liquid of meaning.

The emotions that arise from our encounters with language are a kind of intuitive response that we are familiar with. They supply us with a sense of the words long before we could provide an explanation of what exactly has been said or what it fully means. All intuitions operate like this. They give us a sense of our experience that is of a different kind from our rational understanding.

Of course, it’s always possible for an intuition to be wrong. This is what sometimes happens when we hear criticism directed towards us and we feel we haven’t done anything wrong. Our intuitive response might lean towards outrage or at least rebuke, and it is only corrected with subsequent information telling us that there was no intention to criticize. While we need to remember that our intuitions can be wrong, we also cannot ignore the signals they supply. These signals arise directly from the totality of our experience and often show us what actions are most needed and necessary.

As we have more nuanced and varied experiences, our awareness expands and our intuitions become more powerful. We begin to get an intuitive sense not just of words, but of everything we encounter, without having to laboriously reflect and analyze. This doesn’t mean that we stop thinking, but rather that we become capable of responding more immediately to the circumstances of the present moment. It is in this state of highly-sensitive responsiveness that we are most free from attachment and most able to act from compassion and towards joy.