Intuition

Article By Delia Steinberg Guzmán

posted by Kurush Dordi, July 31, 2026

In addition to rational thought, which works with ideas and shapes the mind, as we have said, there is in the human being another more subtle form of thought, which is intuition. The first form weaves threads in order to know: it is the reasoning faculty; the second grasps directly: it is intuition. We relate this second possibility of knowledge directly to intelligence.

Once again, Maya has changed the threads in her game and makes us believe that intelligence is a certain ability and skill that goes from the physical to the spiritual. To be “intelligent” is to be “smart”, clever,

with quick reactions, and in this way human beings eagerly work to develop intelligence as if it were a mental athletic competition.

Intelligence, however, is a gift that goes much deeper; it is more than thinking and reasoning; it is much more than responding rapidly to stimuli; it is to be able to understand life beyond the superficiality with which it presents itself to us. It is to recognize facts and make discerning judgements about them. Intelligence is to know how to choose and, even more importantly: to select one out of many other opportunities, to separate the good from the bad, the useful from the useless. All of that is intelligence, all of that is to work with intuition.

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Intuition is to win the race against time. Old Chronos has been dominating us for many centuries, and has always imposed his condition: we human beings must develop ourselves on his terrain, and things must cost us… time. Acting takes time; feeling consumes our life; thinking uses up many hours; but by using our intuition… we break that barrier and grasp the essence of things in time, but without wasting time. Intuition is immediate understanding, which also contains the selective and decision-making capacity. What is understood – is it positive or negative? Will we be able to retain what we have understood or not? And if we can retain it, how will we use it to act? What do we choose to do and what do we do?

Someone who can use their intuition knows what they have, the value that is contained in what they have acquired, the possibilities of application this implies and the immediate way in which they will put it to use. In intuition there are no doubts, no unnecessary circumlocution: it is a race won against Chronos, beyond the veils with which Maya has attempted to cover up this reality.

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Those who have never won this race against the discursive mind may believe that intuition is something like imagination. They may believe that what is “grasped” is actually “imagined”. But – since it concerns the higher mind – if we spin a little more finely, we will be able to note that intuition is not to grasp what we want, or what we believe, or what we believe we are grasping; it is to grasp what Is.

Certainly, fantasy imagines things that don’t exist, it goes into raptures in absurd games which not even Maya could make use of. But fantasy is totally different from intuition, because its images are sterile, they have no power to become real in the world of action.

Intuition, on the other hand, grasps realities, the few realities that the game of Maya allows us to glimpse; it treasures them and then converts them into successive descents which touch each of the planes of human expression in turn. And intuition can reach the mind in the form of an idea which, coloured with feelings and suitably vitalized, results in action. Intuition always results in appropriate action.

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Intuition is to see with the eyes of the soul, but to act with the hands of the body. That is why we speak of intelligence: it is to know how to see and to know how to do. If it were just about seeing with the eyes of the body, those eyes would not see further than what our hands can do; that is why ability and skill are not the same as intelligence.

While the ordinary mind grasps things in a reduced and partial way, adapted to the thousand and one divisions of the interests of Maya; and while this mind can work quickly with the small parts that it cuts out of reality, the intuition enables us to have “sudden insights” that are less divided. Through the effects of intuition, it is possible to come a little closer to the elusive reality, to the amazing unity that hides behind the veils of Maya. We are no longer satisfied with the brief extracts that ordinary thought can digest, but we act through an organ that has the power to absorb more quantity, more wholeness. It is a step towards the unification of the forms of life, which is why we can speak about intuition as intelligence.

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Maya prefers us to think, to waste our time bumbling along with our ideas while we play at living. Maya does not want us to discover her secret, her trap to force us to remain in the world. That is why she plays and makes us play, while at the same time leading us slowly away from the possibility of intuiting and grasping her truth.

Nevertheless, by watching Maya at play, by detaching ourselves a little and seeing ourselves participating unconsciously in that game of chess, a ray of intuition awakens. If we observe slowly the things around us and how our behaviour is affected by these things, a faint clarity begins to appear in the midst of our confusion and suddenly we understand a thousand reasons which mere reason cannot express.

Through her games, we are beginning to intuit the presence of Maya.

An excerpt from the book by the author, The Games of Maya, available from New Acropolis.

Image Credits: By Jonathan Borba | Unsplash CC BY PD

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