Intuition... Intelligence or Deception?

Tomorrow morning, 12-4-13, at 9am MST,  we will be discussing Intuition on Casual Conversations on Consciousness at REALationshipRADIO.com The following is copied from kinfonet.org and is worth reviewing before the show. You can join us by calling 917-889-2275 and press 1 if you would like to join the conversation! The Einstein quote is a nice addition!

 Recently a poster stated that there was 'a set definition' for insight. He said that insight was instant. He said that insight was intuition and intuition was 'direct perception of Truth. I want first to make it clearer what K said about insight and intuition, so we get the terms of reference clear viz-a-viz the K teaching. Here is a passage from a talk given in 1952

'Question: What is the relationship between what the psychologists call intuition and what you call understanding?

Krishnamurti: Don't let us bother about what the psychologists say. What do you mean by intuition? We use that word, don't we? I have used the word understanding very often. Let us find out what it means.

What do we mean by intuition? Don't introduce what other people say. You use that word intuition. What is an intuitive feeling? Whether it is right or wrong, you have a feeling that it must be so or it must not be so. By intuitive feeling, we mean a feeling that is not rationalized, that is not very logically thought out, a feeling which you ascribe to beyond the mind, which you call a flash from higher consciousness. We are not seeing if there is intuition or not, but we want to find out the truth of it.

First of all, it is very easy to deceive oneself, is it not? I have an intuitive feeling that reincarnation is true. Don't you have it? Not because you have read about it, but you have a feeling about it; your intuition says so, and you grant it. I am only taking that as an example; we are not considering the truth of the matter whether there is or there is not continuity. Now, what is involved in the intuitive feeling? Your hope, your desire, continuity, fear, despair, feeling of emptiness, loneliness, all these are driving you; all these urge you to hold on to the idea of reincarnation. So, your own desire unconsciously projects that intuitive feeling. Without understanding this whole process of desire, you cannot depend on intuition which may be extraordinarily deceptive. In some cases, intuition is deceptive. Don't talk about scientists having intuitive perception of a problem; you are not scientists. We are just ordinary people with our everyday problems. The scientists work impersonally about a mathematical problem; they work at it, work at it, can't see an answer and then let it go. As they work, they suddenly see the answer, and that is their intuition. But we don't tackle our problems that way. We are too intimate with our problems; we are confined, limited by our own desires, and our own desires dictate, consciously or unconsciously, the attitude, the response, the reaction. We use the word intuition in this connection.

Understanding is the whole perception of the problem - which is understanding the desire and the ways it acts. When you understand, you will see there is no entity as the examiner who is looking at the examined problem. This understanding is not intuition. This understanding is the seeing of the process of how the desire works, entirely, not just at the superficial level; it is going completely into the thing, in which every possibility of deception is revealed.

Understanding is an integrated process whereas intuition, as we use it, is departmental. The latter operates occasionally; the rest of the time, we are all stupid. What is the good of having such intuition? One moment, you see things clearly, and for the rest of the time, you are just the old, stupid entity that you were. Understanding is an integrated process, functioning all the time, and that comes into being when we are aware of the total process of desire.