Perhaps emphasizing its importance, Mary Baker Eddy lists intuition first in a series of elements necessary for a perception of real being. "Spiritual sense, contradicting the material senses, involves intuition, hope, faith, understanding, fruition, reality," Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 298; she writes. Intuition—as the ability to sense good—is a spiritual faculty. To progress, to heal and bless others, we need to cultivate, develop, use it.
Intuition lets us look at what is true of divine Life and creation, and by contrast it takes the covers off what is not true of real being for the purpose of healing those discrepancies. In this way intuition consummates the longing to aid others and ourselves. It's a special faculty that transcends the five personal senses, for the more spiritually metaphysical outlook it gives us is the basis for purification and growth.
The corporeal senses tell us of an ever-changing mixture of good and bad, sometimes one in the ascendant, sometimes the other. Intuition gives us the conviction that good and bad are opposites which never walk hand in hand, for the former is the only real, the latter always unreal and invalid.
When our intuition is sufficiently luminous and pure, we can know with tremendous authority when beliefs of sin or sickness have yielded in individual human thought to the power of divine Truth. Sense evidence may be whispering or shouting that some particular problem is still real and aggressive, but spiritually cultivated intuition tells us otherwise. And the intuitive realization of what is actually taking place—only God, good, and His expression of goodness—tells us of the end of the problem even though the common judgment may be that the problem is still intensifying.
Mrs. Eddy, highly intuitive, relates: "Whenever an aggravation of symptoms has occurred through mental chemicalization, I have seen the mental signs, assuring me that danger was over, before the patient felt the change; and I have said to the patient, 'You are healed,'—sometimes to his discomfiture, when he was incredulous. But it always came about as I had foretold." ibid., p. 169;
Intuition always accompanies spiritual maturity. It is related to spiritual innocence, which is the opposite of both material naivete and sophistication. Intuition is an element of spiritual culture, presupposing and demonstrating the immaculateness of man and the purity of all creation. It sees reality as the outcome of divine Truth, and it unsees—that is, it heals—what is merely the outcome of material sense. Hence intuition is not foolishness. It is not impractical, abstruse, and transcendental. It is authentic and provable. It is an essential instrument in the kit of the metaphysical healer.
With only scratch-deep understanding, we may drift into thinking we have some obligation to put others in a test tube or under a microscope in our little laboratory of personal sense—to check up on their ethical standards, to evaluate their ways of living and their relationships according to our own personal criteria. We might believe, even with great sincerity, that all others should be going just the way we're going. To do so would indicate a lapse in our intuition, or its immaturity. To get into the habit of reasoning in this personally judgmental way would be to entirely miss the scientific conception of man as Mind's infinitely spiritual and richly individual idea. It would be to lose the healing ability and deep contentment that go along with this view. Intuition, however, doesn't trap us into glossing over and ignoring the wrong.
Drab, busybody thinking can breed suspicion. It excludes intuition. Its reptilian suggestions may wind us into frequently questioning the motives and activities of our relatives and associates. It could suggest that our own motives and quality of thinking are suspect. Mortal curiosity about others, and suspicion of them, fight intuition. Mulling over personalities, and the sniping criticism so often linked with it, are induced by animal magnetism, the belief that all knowledge and truth are sensual.
Though suspicion can often seem inconsequential, it can sometimes be profoundly sinister. Intuition implies healing; suspicion implies a willingness to condemn people. Intuition indicates compassion and intelligence; suspicion, self-righteousness and meanness. In The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany by Mrs. Eddy we read, "Animal magnetism fosters suspicious distrust where honor is due, fear where courage should be strongest, reliance where there should be avoidance, a belief in safety where there is most danger." Miscellany, p. 211; Intuition, derived from God, has divine power to disclose and negate the workings of animal magnetism. Unlike suspicion, intuition, as well as revealing claims of wrong, simultaneously illuminates what is divinely right.
The potential of intuition for helping humanity is enormous. It can lessen the need for dependence on fallible material information and make for more creative and less rigid thinking. It's as valuable in business and government and the world of the arts as in church work. Intuition makes us wise, perceptive, insightful, for the purpose of assisting mankind. It defends us against divisive suspicion and against impositions and hoaxes. Learning of intuition through the teachings of Christian Science, we're able to better respond to Christ Jesus' admonition that we be "wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." Matt. 10:16.
How, then, can we cultivate intuition? By pondering truths along these lines: God enjoys spontaneous cognition of all reality and identity; He is the source of all perception, the all-knowing and all-seeing Principle of the universe; God is Soul, the origin of all true feeling and individuality, for Soul is the substance of all. Pondering the endless and potent spiritual ideas that these statements imply, we will not only be cultivating intuition but evidencing its healing presence and action right now.
