Insight and Intuition...

Anthony Damiani from Living Wisdom

VM: Is it a lapsing of the I AM into its own self-knowing phase?

ANTHONY: I wouldn't say it's a lapsing. That is what you mean by the I AM. How could the I AM lapse? It has two aspects: One is self-knowing and the other is other-knowing. Knowing-knowing and knowing-the-other.

So the two faculties that we need in order to realize the attributes of the World-Mind within us are insight and intuition. Insight is the nature, the perception, of reality. When you attain insight, you know that the underlying reality of that object is consciousness, or Mind, the same way that you know that it is your reality, and there is no distinction between them because there is no relationship here. So to take an analogy, when you recognize—or know—that the waves and the ocean are water, that's nondual. There are no two things. There's only water. That's insight.

Now intuition is the reasoning employed on any object in manifestation. You employ the reasoning—and you can call it intuition; PB calls it intuition, but I'm trying to expand it because if feeling is developed to the utmost, and willing and knowing, it is intuitive. It doesn't operate like we know it in the separative intellect. Now, with that faculty of intuition, you can intuit what the reason principle is that underlies this particular object, and at the same time you have insight and recognize that consciousness is the substratum of all objects.

If you work with only insight, then there isn't knowing of anything. There's nothing to know anything about. But that's not the situation. The situation is the same for the sage as for us, in the sense that there's not only a substratum of reality that underlies the appearance, but there's also the appearance which will persist. Now you want to know something about that appearance, so you have to employ the reason.

The soul has these two faculties. When it wants to know or at least understand something about the World-Idea which is within it, then it has to use these two faculties.

Insight is the mind perceiving itself. Intuition is always of something.