The Precise Time

Rabbi Isadore was a wise teacher. A student asked, “How is one to know the precise time when night ends and day begins?”

One student volunteered, “It is when one can distinguish between a dog and a sheep in the far distance, that is when day begins.”

Another said, “It is when you can tell the difference between a fig tree and a date tree, then night is fully gone.”

“No, it is neither of those things,” said the Rabbi. “It is when you can see your brother or sister in the face of a stranger. Until then, night is still with us.”

Trust Your Intuition

Teacher Rabbi Isadore was teaching his student to go beyond the logic to know yourself. Logic is knowledge and going beyond logic or dropping logic is knowing, understanding, trusting oneself, intuition.

Intuition deals with the difference between the intellectual, logical mind and the more encompassing realm of spirit. Logic is how the mind knows reality, intuition is how the spirit experiences reality.

All people have a natural capacity for intuition, but often social conditioning and formal education work against it. People are taught to ignore their instincts rather than to understand and use them as a foundation for individual growth and development – and in the process they undermine the very roots of the innate wisdom that is meant to flower into intuition.

Intuition – Knowing Beyond Logic

Once you have known the art of how to listen to your intuition, you will be surprised: intellect can err, intuition never errs – it is infallible. It always directs you in the right course of action.

What is intuition? Is it something that some people are born with, and others can never hope to develop? Or is it something that can be taught in courses, according to a set of formulas that anybody with a little perseverance and determination can master?

Intuition is an inborn quality, available to all. But by the time most people reach adulthood, they have lost all contact with so many of their natural gifts – intuition among them – that they no longer even believe such gifts exist. Many things contribute to this loss of connection with our inborn gift of intuition – from the efforts of well-meaning parents to protect us from harm or ridicule, to attempts by our teachers to create classrooms full of orderly and obedient students. In the process we are taught to value safety more than exploration, to live within the confines of the logical mind at the expense of following the intuitive hunches that so often lead to true genius.

Intuition is the direct perception of reality, without interference from the prejudices and belief-systems of the mind. It is “knowing beyond logic” – and only those who are capable of going beyond the limitations of logic and analysis are able to respond creatively to the new and changing situations they encounter every day.

Learning from the story The Precise Time: Trust Your Intuition

Experience Learning

Three Steps to Heaven: Instinct, Intellect, and Intuition:

Intuition is the highest rung of the ladder, the ladder of consciousness. It can be divided into three divisions: the lowest and the first is instinct; the second, the middle one, is intellect; and the third, the highest one, is intuition.

The word “in” is used in all three. It is significant. It means these are qualities inborn. You cannot learn them, there is no way to grow them with any outside help.

Instinct is the world of the animals – everything is instinct. Even if sometimes you see indications of other things, it is your projection. For example, you can see love in animals – the mother looking after her kids very lovingly, caringly – and you can think that it is not just instinct, it is something higher, not just biological. But it is not higher, it is simply biological. The mother is doing it like a robot in the hands of nature. She is helpless – she has to do it. In many animals the father has no instinctive fatherliness; on the contrary, many will kill their own kids and eat them.

For example in crocodiles, the life of the kids is in immense danger. The mother is protective and fights for the kids’ life, but the father just wants to have a good breakfast. The father has no instinct; in fact the father is a human institution.

The mother crocodile has to keep the kids in her mouth to protect them from the father. She has a big mouth – all women have big mouths – she can manage to keep almost a dozen kids in her mouth. In the mother’s mouth, just beside her dangerous teeth the kids are perfectly safe. The more difficult thing is for the kids to figure out who is the mother and who is the father, because they both look alike. And sometimes the kids go close to the father, go into his mouth and are gone forever; then they will never see the light again. But the mother tries to fight, to protect.

Perhaps that’s why nature gives children in such abundance: the mother has one dozen each time, each year. If she can manage to save even two that keeps the population exactly the same, but she manages to protect almost half of the kids.

Anybody watching will feel that the father is really cruel, has no compassion, no love, and that the mother is really motherly. But you are just projecting your ideas. The mother is protecting, not for any conscious reason; it is in her hormones to protect them, and the father has nothing to do with those hormones. If he is injected with the same hormones then he will stop killing his own kids. So it is a question of chemistry, not of psychology or of anything higher than biochemistry.

Ninety percent of man’s life is still part of the animal world.

We live by instinct. You fall in love with a woman, or a woman falls in love with you, and you think it is something great. It is nothing great, it is simple instinctive infatuation: it is hormones being attracted by the opposite hormones. You are just a plaything in the hands of nature. No animal bothers about the delicacies and subtleties of love, but man feels that just to be instinctive is insulting, humiliating: your love is just biochemistry? Your love is poetry, your love is art, your love is philosophy – but biochemistry? It seems as if you are ashamed of your biology, of your chemistry, of your nature. But this is not the way of understanding. You have to understand exactly what is what.

Distinctions have to be clear, otherwise you will remain always confused. Your ego will go on making you project as high as possible things which have nothing to do with anything higher than the lowest strata. Your love is just an illusion created by your chemistry.

Instinct does not make you a man, it simply keeps you an animal, two-legged, but still you are an animal.