Intuition: Gift of the Universe

When I was young, back before the dinosaurs (in the 1950s), I often heard the term intuition used but only in a demeaning way. The phrase was “women’s intuition,” a viciously elegant double slur. Women were deemed irrational, unreliable and intuition even more so. Hence the elegance: put down intuition by labeling it as women’s domain and put down women as inferior thinkers for using it, whatever it was.

Over the decades since, I have come to understand intuition very differently. I’ve embraced the wisdom of quantum theory, the holographic nature of reality and fractal geometry as the mathematics of the natural world – here on Earth and throughout the universe. All of those innovations in thought lead us in the same direction: Oneness.

All of the chemistry underpinning matter has been cooked up in exploding stars that began with what we call the Big Bang and its aftermath. All of life’s spectacular variety arises from the simple elegance of four genetic bases (adenine and thymine, cytosine and guanine) forming seemingly infinite plant, animal, fungal, and bacterial life. And, ordering it all is the math of chaos balanced with order we call fractal geometry.

When Benoit Mandelbrot discovered fractal math (he insisted it was discovered not invented), he brought together the chaotic genius work he had been flitting about doing for decades. He had studied word distributions in texts, turbulence in fluids and jet streams, the dynamics of price fluctuations and the stock market , the distribution of galaxies, patterns in Islamic art, thermodynamics, linguistics, Nile River flow patterns and errors in electronic telephone transmissions. All of these had in common what he would come to call fractal forms.

Like nature and like human action, fractal math has these qualities in common: self-similarity at all scales of magnitude, not a thing but a process, small initial conditions leading to unexpected complexity, and order in balance with chaos.

We humans use our fractally-ordered brains to investigate the fractally-ordered universe. Our biochemistry was cooked in stars. We are one with the Earth. We are children of this universe, of the Big Bang. We are part of this one magnificent process, iterations of the quantum foam.

How does this relate to intuition? Intuition is the mental expression of oneness with this universe, the ah-ha flash attuned to quantum entanglement, awareness beyond mere rationality.

I see our universe as both intelligent and creative as its core, not a thinking entity, no, but built of expansive processes that happen to have the innate properties of elegance, fractal complexity and beauty. And we are part of all that. Our intuitive ability is natural, the built-in capacity to make conscious the synchronicity amid chaos of this one, flowing, expanding complexity we call home.