The Art of Intuition, Intellect, and Instinct

Reflection #61: Intuition is The Muse, Instinct is The Shadow

Art is the product of inspiration received through intuition and executed through instinct.  When creating true art, the intellect, the egoic mind, disappears.  

Instinct is our raw power: Our eros.  And, as the source of our power, it is what keeps us alive.  Your heart, lungs, mitochondria and your entire body work on instinct, which enlivens you continuously even if you don’t have a single intellectual thought.  Life is smart enough not to leave the workings of any of your body’s mission critical system to your intellect.

Intellect is how we integrate new skills, knowledge and information into our  deepest selves.  It is necessary in the process of Mastery.  It is the bridge between intuition and instinct.

And intuition is the wellspring of inspiration, insight, and  higher ideas.  We might think of this holy trinity as the spiritual (intuition), the human (intellect) and the animal (instinct).

Intuition is another word for your Muse, intellect is another word for your Ego, and instinct is another word for your Shadow. 

The process of Mastery is the process of utilizing one's intellect to train new instincts into the body.  

When practicing any Art, we first learn, through knowledge, what to do.  But knowledge is simply a recipe.  Reading about oil painting is not the same as painting one, just as reading a recipe card is not the same as cooking and experiencing a beautiful meal.  

The brilliant Sir Issac Newton wrote at length about the mathematics surrounding classical movement and momentum.  But, Michael Jordan turned the physics of basketball, through trained instinct, into an Art.  Which of the two understood those physical laws better?  Newton understood better than anyone on the intellectual level, but Jordan understood them in his very being on the instinctual level.  

The process of mastery, then, looks something like this:  We add a high level physical skill to our bodies, through practice and repetition, by taking the skills we learn from the intellect, and performing them over and over until they become a new instinct that pervades our entire body.  An untrained person's instincts will react very differently in a street fight than a professional boxer's.  

Indeed, intellect is certainly utilized during practice, through repetition and learning, to train and hone your instinct.  That is why masters practice regularly for years, over and over, until the technique becomes part of their very being.  

When one accidentally touches a hot stove, one needs no intellect.  And indeed, your instinct will cause your hand to pull away faster than your brain can intellectually reason about the situation.  Your hand pulls away by instinct via the reflex action. 

 Your instincts can not and do not rely on our intellect, otherwise your body would die.  You’d be overwhelmed if you had to rationally think about every single process happening in your body at this moment.

So, what Masters do is practice a technique until it becomes part of their reflexes.  At that point, thinking is no longer necessary (when performing their Art).  

This training process of mastery explains how martial artists are able to respond faster than the mind can process a situation.  This process of mastery is what allowed Bruce Lee to “be like water” when he fought.

Once our instincts have been honed in the white hot forge of practice, the instrument – our body – is ready to be played.  

But only intuition can properly play this creative  instrument.  

The intellect will play it poorly, slowly and out of tune (this partially explains why I am a poor dancer, which I can only attempt via intellect, lol).

That is why the best performances, artworks, or books are described by the creator as almost an “out of body” experience.  Artists quite often say, "I didn't paint that, I simply watched it being painted through me."  

When that experience happens, it due to intuition receiving guidance and then channeling it directly to the body, which acts instantly upon instinct.  When one is performing an Art on instinct, there is no delay.  The intuition directly flows to the muscles through reflex.  But, when performing through the intellect there is a lag time of hundreds of milliseconds.  You have to stop to think about what you are doing.  

Granted, intellect is quite fast, and your thinking takes less than a second, but at the highest levels, milliseconds matter.  

The state of flow, with which most artists are familiar, happens when your intuition is flowing directly to your body’s muscles, and this flow can be felt as a sort of “effortless effort,” as if you are just flowing with the current which, in fact, you are -- you are flowing with the current moment.  

In flow, the egoistic intellect hibernates and, since it is temporarily dormant, you enter a joyful state of temporary enlightenment.  In fact, flow is the most powerful state because the energy that is usually reserved for maintaining your intellect and your sense of identity (your ego)  is, instead, unlocked and freed to be employed by your intuition and instinct.  

Maintaining the flow state is particularly tricky for writers because when working in the medium of language, it is incredibly easy to slip out of intuition and back into the intellect which tends to think in words.  That is why nearly all writers advise to never edit at the same time you are drafting new material. Editing is almost always an intellectual activity.

Flow is the inflection point which martial artists train to achieve.  Call it whatever you want: flow, wu wei, effortless action, being like water, or non-doing.  

Whatever you call it, "you" (your intellect) are no longer “doing” anything: You are simply being. And yet, your body, guided by intuition, is performing at the highest level – the level at which humans are meant to perform.  When you enter flow, you join the one consciousness, and the master can play the instrument of your body directly, and then you begin to understand why the only way to create a Masterpiece, the "Master's piece", is to allow your self, you intellect, to completely disappear. And, in that state, you are dancing with universal creation itself as its co-creator and birthing something new into The Cosmos - Art.

“Knowledge is fixed in time, whereas, knowing is continual. Knowledge comes from a source, from an accumulation, from a conclusion, while knowing is a movement.” — Bruce Lee