Intellect and Intuition-1FINAL.mp4

In day-to-day life, intellect guides us and intuition — if we pay attention to it at all — serves a secondary, advisory role.

By intellect, I mean a pretty wide usage of the word: the conscious mind, attentive ideation, the way that we think and plan and move through waking life.

By intuition, I'm pointing at something preverbal, a sensing apparatus that shows up to us as gut feelings, stray thoughts, or a vague sense that some thing should be some way.

Intellect is what carries most of us through the day. We prioritize tasks, plan dinner, gauge whether we have time for the gym, pay bills.

Intuition plays a support role, with its support cross-checked by the intellect. I get a feeling I should call my brother — then decide not to, since I have a meeting in 5 minutes. I get a sense of unease, like I should go somewhere dark and lie down — and because it's the weekend and I'm alone at home, I do so. I get a brief flash of an image where I'm hit by a car crossing the street — so I'm extra careful at crosswalks on the way home.

Whatever quibbles we may have here and there, this balance works pretty well for our waking lives. It's gotten us this far.

In dream work, the balance needs to be exactly reversed.

When we drop into an image, intuition is the primary guide. If something feels off about going left, don't go left. If it strikes you as pleasant to pet the deer, pet the deer. If there's an inchoate sense that something is waiting for you in the cave, head into the cave.

It tends to be fruitful when we go intuition-first in imaginal work, and it tends to go awry when intellect comes to the fore. I'll give an example:

A couple months ago, I had a dream that was sticky to work with for this exact reason. The dream involved some symbolism that I've learned about from intellectual and academic perspectives, so that part of my mind kept waking up and interfering. Specifically, the dream involved the holy grail; repetitions of the numbers 3, 7, and 12; and energy centers in the body.

When I tried to work through the dream intuitively, my intellect kept engaging, over and over again:

3! That's the trinity, the hidden fourth, where's the hidden forth? 7, completion, 7 classical planets, 7 bowls of wrath, 7 factors of awakening!" "Energy centers? How many, was it a chakra system or the dan tiens? Where was the focus, gut? Solar plexus? That might mean..." On and on and on.

This dream took several sessions over several days to process, specifically because the intellect kept thinking it had the answers. It kept treating the dream like a sudoku puzzle to be solved, and there's not a dream in existence that can be solved that way, no matter what some WikiHow list or Dream Symbol Dictionary might tell you.

So how to find the right balance in imaginal work, where intuition is primary and intellect takes up a background advisory role? Let's look at one more example:

Working with the same dream as above, I managed to get into a good intuitive trance, and follow some of the images. While I was following the image of a blue-purple vortex in my upper chest, a wisp of intellect rose up along the lines of "throat chakra is blue, right?"

Rather than latching onto that thought, or shooing it away, I lightly placed my intuition on it, and felt yeah, that's helpful; feels connected and folded that information into my approached with the image.

Notice how this pretty precisely mirrors the relationship between intellect and intuition in waking life (or at least it does if you have a similar approach to me): an intuition might come up during the day; you don't shoo it away, don't latch onto it and let it rule your day — you examine it briefly with your intellect, and if it seems prescient, you include it in what you're doing. If it doesn't, you shelf it.

This is the best balance for imaginal work: let your intuition guide you — which includes letting it guide you towards any helpful bits and pieces that bubble up from the intellect.