Intuition

Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning, or without understanding how the knowledge was acquired. Different writers give the word "intuition" a great variety of different meanings, ranging from direct access to unconscious knowledge, unconscious cognition, inner sensing, inner insight to unconscious pattern-recognition and the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.There are philosophers who contend that the word "intuition" is often misunderstood or misused to mean instinct, truth, belief, meaning, and other subjects, whereas others contend that faculties such as instinct, belief and intuition are factually related.

The word "intuition" comes from the Latin verb intueri translated as consider or from late middle English word intuit, "to contemplate".

Both Eastern and Western philosophers have studied the concept in great detail. Philosophy of mind deals with the concept of intuition. There are philosophers who contend that this concept is often confused with other concepts such as truth, belief, and meaning in philosophical discussion.

In the East intuition is mostly intertwined with religion and spirituality, and various meanings exist from different religious texts.

In Hinduism various attempts have been made to interpret the Vedic and other esoteric texts.

For Sri Aurobindo intuition comes under the realms of knowledge by identity, he describes the psychological plane in human (often referred to as mana in sanskrit) has two arbitrary nature, the first being imprinting of psychological experiences which is constructed through sensory information (mind seeking to become aware of external world). The second nature being the action when it seeks to be aware of itself, resulting in humans being aware of their existence or aware of being angry & aware of other emotions, he terms this second nature is knowledge by identity. He finds that at present as the result of evolution the mind has accustomed itself to depend upon certain physiological functioning and their reactions as its normal means of entering into relation with outer material world, as a result when we seek to know about external world the dominant habit is through arriving at truth about things via as much as senses convey to us. However with knowledge by identity which we currently only gives the awareness of human beings existence can be extended further to outside of ourselves resulting in intuitive knowledge.

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