How important is intuition?

प्रभ कै सिमरनि सहजि समानी ॥ Parabẖ kai simran sahj samānī.

Remembering God, one is absorbed into the state of intuitive ease.

~Sukhmani Sahib

(Guru Granth Sahib, Page: 263)

Questioner: Pranaam Acharya Ji, What does ‘intuitive ease’ mean? Is it in some way related to the intuitions that we have? What is the place of ‘intuitions’ is one’s life?

When I act spontaneously in certain situations I feel that my intuitions take care of those situations. I feel more at ease when my actions are spontaneous and driven by intuitions rather than conscious though-based responses.

Acharya Prashant: The word ‘intuitive’ here in this verse is just figurative. It does not really mean that God has something to do with your intuition.

What is ‘intuition’?

Intuition is the knowledge contained in the subconscious mind, even a child has intuition. The child has no knowledge, knowledge resides in the conscious mind. Intuition is knowledge bestowed upon you by long journey that you have had in prakriti (nature).

In general when you have experiences as a living, conscious being, those experiences turn into some kind of knowledge. Don’t they? But even before you are born from a human womb you have had a trillion experiences, your DNA contains those experiences. You are not suddenly born, you are not stardust. You are coming from an evolutionary process that stretches over millions and billions of years. Consciousness has been making that journey.

So all those experiences are contained in your body, they are not specific experiences. They are experiences of entire consciousness, they are experiences of sentience in general. You could say that they are experiences of all mankind. They are not even experiences of all mankind, they are experiences of every sentient being, even a blade of grass.

So you know all those things and they are contained in your body, but you do not consciously know of those things. You just know of those things.

The baby rabbit may have had no experience of a dog in it’s lifetime of six months, but the moment it sees a dog, it runs away. Who told it that the dog is dangerous? It’s intuition. It’s…