When we talk about common sense today we often think of it as a kind of practical knowledge, in fact the often-heard phrase, “It’s just common sense”, suggests that it is in some ways a very ordinary thing, and that those who lack this ephemeral quality are somehow backward. But if you were to go back hundreds of years in to mankind’s past you might be surprised to know that this term once had a very different meaning. Common sense was the sense (not unlike sight, sound, smell, and touch), that was common to all human beings. Perhaps a more romanticized way to think about this is to examine the way in which aboriginal peoples, or those who live on the land and in relationship to it, seem to have a deeper understanding of how the natural world operates and their place in it. Once all men possessed this knowledge but our separation from the source—the natural world around us appears to have diminished it and our legacy as a knowing people.
The vestigial form of common sense lives on, however, in the form of something we call intuition. Have you ever wondered from what source our ability to intuit things comes from? It’s a mysterious ability we possess to know something without knowing exactly how we know it. I’m sure scientists could explain this away as a form of pre-cognitive cognition—knowledge that we possess through some osmotic process but have not brought to the foreground of our conscious minds. As far as it goes perhaps that is a valid explanation, but it fails to explain how we can sometimes know things that are outside our experience.
In my Valentine’s day post I talked about our ability to know right from wrong and the source of that knowledge. Let me expand on that a bit in the context of this mysterious phenomenon we call intuition. Our human senses know the world experientially through our senses, mediated by our knowledge or intellect. In contrast intuition tells us things about the world around us through an internal dialog. That inner voice that whispers to us, tells us things we cannot access through intellect alone. It is easy to ignore that voice, to doubt it, because we are taught to ignore what our intellect cannot validate. But it is precisely because this beyond natural, or if you will super natural agent we call intuition knows what our minds cannot or will not accept as reality that it is so very important to pay attention to its message.
In my earlier post, I posited that the source of what is arguably the greatest of human expressions, Love, finds its source in that higher being I call God. And Love, I went on to say is the source that Shakespeare and Paul both cite as the inspiration of our knowledge of right and wrong, our conscience. I want to take that one step further today and say that our intuition, our common sense which instructs us in things about which we have no first hand experiential direction comes from this very same source. There is a reason that humans which have not been exposed to advanced technologies, modern science or philosophy seem more attuned to the world in which they live—the very same world we inhabit. They believe in what their intuition tells them—in fact they can hear it far more plainly than we can, because we have become deadened to the experience.
These beings are closer to the natural world, not just students of it but in tune with it in ways we once knew but have forgotten. When they describe the spirit, it is an animate and present thing, not an abstraction. Whatever they call the greatest of these spirits in their language, they intuit, its presence. It isn’t something they get to out of a philosophical or religious knowledge. When I read holy texts, including the bible, I am struck that prophets are not extraordinary people, but often very simple creatures who hear God’s word through a mechanism that others cannot access. They intuit God’s voice and act on it obediently because they accept that the world is not limited solely to what they see, taste, smell and see. The words spoken to them are as if not more real than the natural world around them.
If we wish to have this gift, perhaps not the gift of prophecy but the gift of hearing the voice of God and acting on his gentle guidance, the power to do so exists within us. All we need to do is listen.