Intuition: Knowing Beyond Logic (Osho Insights for a New Way of Living)

by Osho

Intellect is the functioning of the head, instinct is the functioning of your body, and intuition is the functioning of your heart. And behind these three is your being, whose only quality is witnessing.

Intellect has its use, but by some misfortune it has become the master of your whole being. That has created immense troubles in the world.

The intellect is fallible because it is new, a recent arrival. It is just groping in the dark, still trying to find out what it is and where it belongs. And because it does not have roots in experience, it substitutes experience with beliefs, philosophies, ideologies. They become the focus of intellect. But they are all fallible because they are all man-made, manufactured by some clever guy. And they are not applicable in every situation. They may be right in one situation, and in another situation they may not be right. But intellect is blind, it knows not how to deal with the new. It always brings the old answer to the new question.

Intellect lives through prejudices; it is never fair. By its very nature it cannot be, because it has no experience. Instinct is always fair and shows you exactly the natural way, the relaxed way, and the way that the universe follows. But strangely, instinct has been condemned by all religions, and intellect has been praised.

The whole existence must be laughing at man, at what has happened to human beings. If birds can live without religions and churches and mosques and temples, why can’t man? The birds never fight religious wars; neither do the animals nor the trees. But you are a Mohammedan and I am a Hindu and we cannot coexist—either you have to become converted to my religion or be ready; I will send you to heaven immediately!

Intuition opens its doors through meditation. Meditation is simply a knocking on the doors of intuition. Intuition is also completely ready. It does not grow; you have inherited that too from existence. Intuition is your consciousness, your being.

Intellect is not going to be your home. It is a small instrument, to be used only for passing from instinct to intuition. So only the person who uses his intellect to go beyond it can be called intelligent.

Intellect makes everything a problem and knows no solution at all. Instinct never creates any problem and does not need any solution; it simply functions naturally. Intuition is pure solution, it has no problems. Intellect is only problems, it has no solution.

Intuition brings meaning, splendor, joy, blessings. Intuition gives you the secrets of existence, brings a tremendous silence, serenity, which cannot be disturbed and which cannot be taken away from you.

Knowledge is a theory, knowing is an experience. Knowing means you open your eyes and you see; knowledge means somebody else has opened his eyes and he has seen and he talks about it, and you simply go on gathering that information.

Meditation is a state of not knowing. Meditation is pure space, undisturbed by knowledge. Yes, the biblical story is true—that man has fallen through knowledge, by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. No other scripture of the world surpasses that. That parable is the last word; no other parable has reached to that height and that insight.

A man who is absolutely logical—absolutely sane, always sane, never allows any illogic in his life—is a madman. Sanity needs to be balanced by insanity; logic needs to be balanced by illogic. The opposites meet and balance. A man who is just rational is unreasonable—he will miss much. In fact he will go on missing all that is beautiful and all that is true. He will collect trivia, his life will be a mundane life. He will be a worldly man.

That biblical parable has immense insight. Why has man fallen through knowledge? Because knowledge creates distance, because knowledge creates “I and thou,” because knowledge creates subject and object, the knower and the known, the observer and the observed. Knowledge is basically schizophrenic; it creates a split and then there is no way to bridge it.

That’s why the more man has become knowledgeable the less he is religious. The more educated a man, the less is the possibility for him to approach the whole. Jesus is right when he says, “Only children will be able to enter into my kingdom.”

J. Krishnamurti has said, “To negate is silence.” To negate what? To negate knowledge, to negate mind, to negate this constant occupation inside you … to create an unoccupied space. When you are unoccupied, you are in tune with the whole. When you are occupied, you have fallen out of tune. Hence, whenever it happens that you can attain a moment of silence, there is immense joy.

Knowledge has to be negated—but not because I am saying so, or because J. Krishnamurti says so, or because Gautam Buddha has said so. If you negate because I am saying so, then you will negate your knowledge and whatsoever I am saying will become your knowledge in its place; you will substitute it. Then whatsoever I say becomes your knowledge and you start clinging to it.

Then how to negate knowledge? Not with other knowledge. Just seeing that knowledge creates distance—just seeing into this fact intensely, totally—is enough. Not that you have to replace it with something else.

If some effort is needed, that simply shows you missed. If you come tomorrow and ask me, “I have understood that knowledge is a curse, that knowledge creates distance. Now, how to drop it?”—then you missed. If the question how arises, then you missed. The how cannot arise, because the how is asking for more knowledge. The how is asking for methods, techniques, what should be done.

When you see a rose, do you agree with it or disagree with it? When you see the sunrise, do you agree or do you disagree? When you see the moon in the night, you simply see it! Either you see it or you don’t see it, but there is no question of agreement or disagreement.

When I am saying knowledge is a curse, you can agree or disagree—and you have missed! You just listen to it, just see into it, go into the whole process of knowledge. You can see how knowledge creates distance, how knowledge becomes a barrier. How knowledge stands in between, how knowledge goes on increasing and the distance goes on increasing. How innocence is lost through knowledge, how wonder is destroyed, crippled, murdered through knowledge, how life becomes a dull and boring affair through knowledge. Mystery is lost.

Listen with insight, attention, totality. And in that very vision you will see something. And that seeing changes you—you don’t ask how. That is the meaning when Krishnamurti says, “To negate is silence.” Insight negates. And when something is negated and nothing is posited instead, something has been destroyed and nothing has been put in its place. There is silence, because there is space. There is silence because the old has been thrown out and the new has not been brought in. That silence Buddha calls shunyata. That silence is emptiness, nothingness. And only that nothingness can operate in the world of truth.

Have you observed one phenomenon?—that you cannot think about emptiness, you cannot make emptiness a thought. You cannot think about it, it is unthinkable. If you can think about it, it will not be emptiness at all. Thought has to go for emptiness to come; they never meet. Once emptiness has come, it can use all kinds of devices to express itself.

Insight is a state of nonthinking, no-thought. It is a gap, an interval in the process of thought, and in that gap is the glimpse, the truth.

These are the three states of the mind. The first is content and consciousness. You always have contents in the mind—a thought moving, a desire arising, anger, greed, ambition. You always have some content in the mind; the mind is never unoccupied. The traffic goes on, day in, day out. While you are awake, it is there; while you sleep, it is there.

The second state of the mind is consciousness without content; that’s what meditation is. You are fully alert, and there is a gap, an interval. No thought is encountered, there is no thought before you. You are not asleep, you are awake—but there is no thought. This is meditation. The first state is called mind, the second state is called meditation.

And then there is a third state. When the content has disappeared, the object has disappeared, the subject cannot remain for long—because they exist together. They produced each other. When the subject is alone, it can only hang around a little while more, just out of the momentum of the past. Without the content the consciousness cannot be there long; it will not be needed, because a consciousness is always a consciousness about something.

I am not absolutely against intellect. It has its uses—but they are limited, and you have to understand their limitations. If you are working as a scientist, you will have to use your intellect. It is a beautiful mechanism, but it is beautiful only if it remains a slave and does not become the master. If it becomes the master and overpowers you, then it is dangerous. Mind as a slave to consciousness is a beautiful servant; mind as a master of consciousness is a dangerous master.

I said, “Shankara and Bradley both are saying that God, Brahma, truth, is absolute. But the difference is that Bradley will change his standpoint if you make a logical argument against him and prove the flaws in his argument. Shankara will simply laugh and say, ‘You are right. My way of expressing it was wrong, and I knew that somebody who knows the truth will find that the expression is wrong. You are absolutely right, my expression is wrong.’ But Shankara will not concede that he is wrong. His position is that of experience, it is intuitive.”