A great deal of the following comes from this book which is unfortunately only be available through Stanford University Press. The first written records of intuitive processes come through the work of seers, oracles, medicine people, or diviners in Aztec, Babylonian, Greek, Hebraic, and Chinese cultures. Also known in Hindu and Buddhist thought, intuition was associated with high spiritual states and achieved through meditation and/or discipline of the mind.

  In ancient Western traditions, the topic occupied the thoughts of Pythagorus (numbers existed in intuitive realms), Plato (school of idealism rests on intuitive knowledge), Aristotle (knowledge exists without proof), and Plotinus (knowledge can come from mystical union with the object you desire to know.) Although intuitive knowledge was reduced in importance during the growth of Christianity (seers were no longer the only ones able to communion with God, Christ was an intercessor who allowed direct communication), it wasn’t until the triumph of science that intuition was in disrepute. In spite of that, both Augustine and Aquinas talked about knowledge obtained without rational processes.

  In the late 18th century, Immanuel Kant, who believed that intuition was the nonrational recognition of an object, brought intuition into the philosophical foreground and set the stage for Schopenhauer’s 19th century contribution that intuition goes beyond appearances (the area the intellect works in) and is directed by will. Henri Bergson followed that line of thought suggesting that the intellect can analyze a person, event, or situation, but can never completely know it. Complete knowledge, he suggested, can only be obtained through intuition.

In the 20th century, Carl Jung proposed that intuition is one of four ways human beings process the world. Eric Berne, a psychiatrist as was Jung, made the interesting observation that sometimes the intuiter may be not only be unaware of how he/she knows something, but also what he/she knows. Futurist Buckminister Fuller believed intuition was a core skill for human evolution, being central to major breakthroughs in science, art, industry, and all human endeavors. His belief that intuition is a vital tool for our individual and collective positive evolution is close to mine.

  The range of philosophical debate about whether intuition is a prior knowledge, part of the emotional or feeling tone world, in the abstract world alone, simply instinct (as Gregory Bateson pointed out, however, we use the word instinct without knowing what it is), or part of a religious or spiritual context is dissolved if we accept that intuition is all those things. The differences represent a variety of ways that human consciousness can access information without the use of a traditional analytic process. The argument that most of these phenomena come from the unconscious or intrinsic knowing does not address the accuracy of many precognitions. I confess to a bias toward spiritual awareness as a key ingredient in experiencing, developing, and actualizing the higher values associated with intuition. I believe that these higher forms of intuition-those associated with knowing global identity, universality, Oneness, meaning, and collective wisdom-are essential for the next step of our evolution. Just as intellect added to and surpassed human-world interactions primarily based on instinct, I believe that intuition will add to and surpass interacting with the world primarily through intellect and instinct.

  A recent book which focuses on the organization of experience and the embodiment of intuition as clusters or fields which allow us to know is Networks of Meaning available from Praeger Books. The above greatly condensed description omits important content from other cultural and ethnic understanding.