Intuition and Justification

Instinct is not always accurate, which is a lot more obvious statement than its accompanying: justification isn’t accurate, either, because no matter how careful we are, that shit ends up being rationalization.

Reason is notoriously fickle. We twist reason around, often without knowing it, into all sorts of pretzels so that we can do what we want. Nothing makes you deaf to intuition faster than trying to rationalize (and justify) it to yourself or others. You actually don’t need to painstakingly document every link in a chain for it to be useful, and that sort of dry anxious probing is actually actively bad for you.

It’s also the product of fear, and no matter how meticulous we are, shit still doesn’t comply to our predictions.

I spent a little time talking to one of my god children to be this morning on the topic of instinct and ended up telling him to honor his intuition. If he’s wrong, he might look silly for a moment. If he’s right, he avoids a serious problem.

Instinct is trained and trainable. Accurate instinct requires clearing the ability to hear and perceive, which is a whole different and much larger topic than instinct. It also requires what I told him—a practice of listening and honoring the intuition. It gets ‘louder’ with practice.