IN PRAISE OF A NEW INTELLIGENCE
Think of the word “intelligence,” and the associations most likely to spring to mind are a book, a scholarly lecture, a research paper, a graph, a chart, a diagram, an IQ score, or perhaps ChatGPT, a software engineered to alchemize all of the above into its own original Frankenstein’s monster.

In much of the contemporary world, intelligence has become equated with some kind of clearly quantifiable aptitude, and whatever is quantifiable, traceable, or predictable pertains to the realm of rationality—for instance, a certain SAT score will be required in order to gain access to a prestigious university, which will in turn be fructified by high exam scores. The higher the GPA, the higher the odds of securing a lucrative job and its accompanying social capital fit to mirror the prestige of the student’s compliance with the narrow academic rulebook and grading system.

Even prior to higher education, children are taught to view knowledge as strictly objective, theoretical, ruled over by an academic corpus (the school system), and appraised by its metrics alone. Without an institutional seal of approval, any expression of a self-professed intelligence is likely to become invalid, and thus deemed invaluable to society at large.

Fields of study with supposedly transcendental ambitions, such as literature, fine art, or philosophy, are themselves, across the West, enslaved to the grid of rationality. Take analytic philosophy— the philosophical style prevalent across the Anglosphere and revered in North American curricula. Where, for instance, Ancient Greek or Indian philosophy often spoke in metaphor and was imbued with a spiritual quality reflective of the depth of its inquiries, analytic methodologies, such as those of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, or Alvin Plantinga, aim to tackle questions surrounding topics as profoundly existential as language, truth, meaning, and even the existence of god by means of mathematical logic. This philosophical tradition attempts to quash the relevance of any form of conjecture that might be qualified as illogical, irrational, and thus, invalid.

Thankfully, there have always been rebels defying even the most entrenched of doctrines. “Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always darker, emptier, simpler,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, one of continental philosophy’s most lyrical, and, I’d argue, post-logical voices, in his opus The Gay Science. Analytic philosophy has been quick to dismiss Nietzsche (and much of his continental kin) as a “non-philosopher,” precisely because he lacked the mathematical rigor of his Anglo-Saxon coevals. Much has also been made of his mental health and reclusive tendencies—but when genius sings from the horn of madness, one might begin to wonder whether the very construct of “sanity,” as our rational world has come to define it, is not just another word for the frustrated genius of a different, more far-reaching type of intelligence.

How many times have you heard someone say that for a god to be real, for there to be an afterlife, or for any alien civilizations to exist, there would have to be “proof”—by which is usually meant logical, rationally intelligible proof? Well, what if the proof we’re looking for and the answers to the questions we’re asking were there all along—and we were just looking at them through the wrong lens?

What if, for all of its practical uses, rational intelligence had its limits—and insisting on claiming otherwise were mere proof of anthropocentric arrogance?

What if there were a higher, wiser, more trustworthy form of intelligence—a technology of truth-seeking as wide-spanning, open-source, and accessible as the internet: a pre-rational, pre-human method of inquiry, that we can choose to plug into at any time?

The juiciest questions surrounding the purpose, origin, and worth—and thus, possibilities—of the human race, with which all Western science and certainly analytic philosophy are concerned, far surpass the faculties of human logos and require tools superior to its limited computing capacity in order for us to even graze their surface. Rationality is useful—it has and will continue to serve our species greatly—but when totally self-sufficient and devoid of a higher principle, it becomes lost and aimless, like a confused child chasing their own shadow.

Therein lies, unacknowledged, the downfall of our long-forsaken, alternative, and universally accessible form of intelligence: intuition.

TO KNOW IS TO FEEL
A disclaimer: definition cages intuition. The cold grip of grammar bleeds it dry of its vitality. Hard as I try to etch it into syntax, it won’t sit still.

It wants to move. To breathe. To generate.

Most of all, it yearns to be felt. To know intuition isn’t to theorize it but to let it swirl through your tissues, and to trust it blindly, as if you were to let god take the wheel of your motor functions.

It won’t force its way in—you’ll have to befriend it. You’ll care for it, soften into it. The more you feel it, the more you’ll know it.

Writing amputates feeling from the infinity of potentialities it harnesses.

So can these words move with me, disperse and reform, and loosen the grip of their semantic certainty to touch something their energetic matrix alone is known to grab at—organic intelligence, or, as many call it, intuition?

I can almost hear it rustle in disapproval.

I resent this page. I resent its placid void, and the permanence it asks of me, a streaming electroshock of consciousness fleeting with life as a billowing wave, agile as a gust of wind. This page begs that my verve be ossified, that the arc of my ever-morphing selves be frozen into the concrete of cohesion. There is so little that this page can do beyond trying in vain to fathom me, to essentialize the infinity sewn into my limber cells.

For the purposes of this essay, intuition braved the path of reason—hoping that you’ll meet her on the other side.

INTERCEPTED GNOSIS
Intuitive intelligence is a non-rational form of accessing knowledge. Not knowledge in the theoretical sense, but knowledge as in what the Ancient Greeks called gnosis or the Sufis called ma‘rifa—the knowledge that experiences itself. Mystical traditions refer to it as spiritual knowledge; I call it energetic knowledge. Experience is made possible by feeling. And feeling is enabled by the body. So, in essence, intuition is the knowledge channeled, received, experienced, and embodied through the flesh. It’s that somatic voice that prompts us to question, preempt, resist, doubt, love, fear, open, or shut off in various life situations, often in ways we can’t explain, much less control—and thus, have taught ourselves to dismiss. It’s being oddly certain of something, even before knowing the “facts”—the strange, unsettling prescience following an encounter, or that deep, inexplicable call to pursue an action, thought or idea even though it “makes no sense.” A rational conclusion can always be traced back to its logical root, but an intuitive one can’t.

Contrary to psychological patterns of behavior—which are shaped by and dependent on external factors such as environment or societal conditioning, making them reactive—intuition is self-contained and entirely self-sourced. It often operates in spite of, rather than because of, a specific set of externalities. Intuition is the force that might prompt one to question well-established dogmas, be they religious or political, thus taking the (otherwise irrational) risk of potential alienation from a community, or a set of socio-cultural beliefs one may have come to identify with. For instance, intuition is the inexplicable clarity of knowing that might underpin the otherwise “irrational” decision of a queer teenager living in the Deep South to come out, putting their familial bonds, friendships, and potentially their shelter at risk in order to heed a deeper knowing that seems to contradict even the most primal need for tribal belonging—with blind trust that whatever may come next, however unpredictable, however terrifying, will be better.

This isn’t to say the road ahead would be easy. In fact, it’s likely storm clouds would form before a new dawn rises—but for those who choose to see it through and trust the wisdom of their pre-rational intelligence, the end result is likely to be worth the risks. Of course, a contract with intuition can be made and then rescinded—take, for instance, a self-professed “former” queer turned Evangelical advocate for gay conversion therapy. But for every person who may rescind this contract, there are far more examples to be heard of the positive outcomes of trusting intuition. So, if regret does set in, it can only be out of skepticism toward the encrypted plan of intuitive intelligence—the superhuman plan which trust alone can manifest.

What would it mean for the future of technology, collective practices, and ideologies to be born out of the fertile soil of intuitive, rather than rational, decision-making?

DO NOT AS YOU’RE TOLD
To better understand the importance of intuition, it’s essential to highlight the political potency of intuitive intelligence and the threat it poses to current (and past) systems of power. If intuition is the intelligence available to us through the mere fact of being alive and conscious, then intuitive intelligence is an inalienable birthright. It’s not something that can be taught, nor owned by a religious, political, or academic body. What can’t be taught nor owned can’t be controlled, tracked, or predicted. This is why, over the past centuries, the Western world has gone to great lengths to posit rationality as the only reliable form of intelligence—because a world powered by intuitively guided people and collectives, a world subordinate to an intelligence superior to that of any one human, nation, or establishment, would pose a lethal threat to any kind of ruler with despotic aspirations.

If people plugged into their intuitive intelligence, they would realize that they hold the power. A world of individuals and collectives indebted to their intuition before all else would be a world that can’t be brainwashed, manipulated, or talked into destroying itself. If people learned to trust and revere the superior intelligence that runs through them before delegating their trust and power to human-built institutions, they would be able to trust themselves enough to, essentially, lead themselves—or choose their leaders with full awareness, rather than a disempowered and apathetic settling for the “lesser evil.” As our planet plummets into genocidal self-annihilation under the banner of science and progress, picture a world where the “masses” would realize they don’t actually have to do as they’re told, and that they instead have their own internal compass of intelligent discernment to listen to. If people across oppressed nations, and racialized, queer, or femme beings, awakened to the intelligence within, the colonial, patriarchal West would quite literally cease to be.

Industries would go bankrupt. Heads would roll. Empires would crumble.

COSMIC LANGUAGE/BLUEPRINT FOR UTOPIA
In spite of its elusive nature, intelligent feeling, or intuition, is also a language, a language incarnate—an agent of its own cellular unfurling, impermeable to the predictability our brains so cherish and immune to shaping, malleable only by its own volition. Therein lies the risk—but also the thrill and possibilities—of heeding its call to surrender.

In 12th century Germany, Hildegard von Bingen, while still a child with “bones, nerves, and veins” not yet fully formed, according to a letter written more than seven decades later, experienced her first download of what was to become a life’s work of devotion to mysticism—intuition on acid, if you will.

Like many a medieval woman of modest origin, Hildegard was uneducated and offered into nunhood at the (disputed) age of eight. By then, she’d already received her first glimpse of articulated transcendence, which she described as “umbra viventis lucis” or “the reflection of the living light.” From Hildegard’s long and fertile life would sprout several encounters with this living light, many of which are recounted in her book, Scivias, and are striking for the viscerality of the transmissions that seem to have flowed from it.

One such transmission was, in fact, a fully articulated language. Aptly named Lingua Ignota or “Unknown Language,” it comprised a lexicon of around 1,000 words and endures today in the form of two manuscripts, which, judging by their zoological, medicinal, and botanical illustrations, appear to be scientific treatises. Hildegard also wrote several such treatises in Latin, most notably Physica, a nine-volume body of work establishing the consanguinity of mankind and the natural world through an intricate observation of their shared elemental composition (earth, air, fire, and water) as well as the shared qualities of heat, cold, dryness, and humidity.

Hildegard produced all of her scientific work under the guidance of the “living light.” While most would link intuitive creation to an artistic gesture, Hildegard’s intuition was medicinal, botanical— she is considered by many as a pioneer of natural medicine and scientific natural history—but also political; in her illustrations from Scivias, she likens the cosmos to a vulva, and her writings detail, with disconcerting audacity for her time (and, frankly, ours), the creative and destructive potential of feminine energy, which she viewed as a sacred and primordial principle of universal life. She also repeatedly and publicly criticized the church for suppressing this energy at a time when such opposition, particularly from a lower-class woman, would have served as grounds for immediate execution. (It is worth noting that in order to stand firm in her beliefs without risking her life, Hildegard instrumentalized the ontological disdain for her gender by savvily emphasizing that her genius was the sheer result of intuitive, divine intelligence, for which she merely acted as a portal, and over which she claimed no ownership; proof of this creative synergy was abundant in her work. And while she, a self-described “feeble woman,” could have easily had her limbs torn off for her incendiary claims, the superior intelligence coursing through her remained untouchable.)

In Hildegard’s creative prowess, intuitive intelligence found a prism through which to express its countless shades: some lyrical and prophetic, others enciphered and methodic. The enigma of Hildegard’s Lingua Ignota, its symbolism, still-encrypted sapience, and linguistic methodology echo those of the perplexing Voynich manuscript—a mysterious 240-page codex written in a constructed language during the Italian Renaissance, discovered by a Polish book dealer in 1912, and today owned by Yale University. For decades, codebreakers, linguists, and cryptographers tried to crack it, in vain. It appears that logocentric research can’t do much to hack the languages and possibilities of intuitive intelligence.

In fact, I’d argue, intuition alone can hack its own mystery.

So then, allow me to return to my original question: What if the “proof” and answers we are seeking have been there all along— and we just observed them through the wrong lens?

Intuitive intelligence endows us with a capacity to retrieve our collective and individual purpose and bend our own destiny, the tender ooze of life and death, pleasure and pain, birth and destruction, into an energetic canvas of utopic firmament. Utopic needn’t mean “bucolic” nor “ideal” here, but simply true to the life-affirming potential of our biological and spiritual blueprint.

The force of intuition is precious because it supersedes us while revealing the generative magic nestled in our hearts and tissues. A willful, if humble, reclamation of its hidden wealth and the miracles it promises may well help revive our imaginative engines—and, perhaps, spare us an apocalyptic dawn.