Let me share a story with you:
About four years ago my cousin had this great idea to set me up on a date with one of his friends. I had a bad feeling about this from the start, because I tend to be on the shy side in general, but I decided to go along with the whole charade just to humor all parties involved. Anyways, to get to know a little bit about this person, he (my cousin) gave me this guy’s e mail address. I figured, what’s the harm in exchanging e mails, I guess it’s better to do this than go in completely blind. Well, I exchanged e mails with him and our interests were like oil and water. I liked to go to music concerts; he liked to go to tractor pulls. Needless to say when we met, I just knew it wasn’t going to work out.
What was that sneaking suspicion? Why did I “just know”?
Intuition can be defined as the act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of rational processes. In other terms this can be described is having a sneaky suspicion about something or someone or just having a feeling of knowledge when you know nothing on the intended subject matter.
According to Susanne Langer, this does not completely define intuition. Langer believes that intuition is derived from knowledge of past experiences. Using my example, I now know that I would never want to be set up with someone due to my past experience with a set up date.
To me, deriving knowledge from past experiences so you don’t make the same mistakes makes sense, but I do not believe that it completely defines intuition. I mean, according to the hard-fact-verbatim definition of intuition, intuition is a sense or a feeling; it’s not a recollection of factual knowledge. To me, it’s almost like Langer is boiling down the excitement of feeling with the cold facts.
Just live a little…let it happen. According to the pop star Jewel, intuition will “Lead you in the right direction”.
(But then again, is she really a reliable source?)