INTUITION (Tery Pope, Cultural Day, 6 November 2005) About 100 years ago, when I had just turned

16, I woke up one morning knowing everything there was to know about being a boy and nothing whatsoever about being a man, and I was scared stiff. Apparently thats quite usual for boys who wake up and find they are 16, as I discovered much later. In any event it was around about that time there was a realization of a great love for words. It didnt much matter what they were saying so long as they were well picked and well pronounced. And there were two quotations that had the most enormous impact, and they are still there but, thank the Lord, they have lost their impact. The first was Voltaire who said that man is born free and is everywhere in chains. The other was an academic philosopher, A.N.Whitehead, who said ( Ask the rhetorical questions - you know what they are, the answer is built into them, you are told what the answer is before you get to the end of the question ) and it went: How far beneath the thin veneer of civilization does there lie satanic and barbaric man? In my ignorance, not to say innocence, I said, yes, thats the question. Its the only question. And I proceeded to read as much history as I could down the years and so far as I could tell it was one long catalogue of mans inhumanity to man which made me feel at best that the veneer of civilization had better be pretty thick where I was or I was going to get clobbered like an awful lot of other people that I kept hearing about or am subsequently hearing about on the television or reading about in newspapers and magazines.

This level of intuition is the rock-bottom level. It is extremely unhelpful, even though it is perfectly possible to discover all sorts of evidence to substantiate the apparent terror and evil of the world. We didnt have that legislation rushed through Parliament just the other day for nothing. So to realize only last Monday, as a matter of fact, that A.N. Whitehead, as impressive as he is, had it completely wrong was a wonderful revelation. And it came out of sheer intuition, trained by meditation and study. And now it is known that the real question to ask is: How far beneath the veneer of evil does there lie goodly and godly man? That is the question.

Now the fact of it being a rhetorical question is not very helpful if the conviction is nonetheless that human beings are basically a rotten lot. That means you and me. However well we might appear to cover it with what we take to be our veneer of civilization or decency or call it what you will, there are plenty of things about us to argue for the other side, as it were. This is one that is the blurb of a book that is quoted in the Cultural Day program about Intuition, at the end of which it says Even Sam Harris understands it. And I thought: that should get them. Whos Sam Harris? Hes a surprising young chap, a highly-trained scientist who has a way with words and is concerned about the whole of western civilization going straight down the tube very fast. Hence he produced this book called, wickedly enough, The End of Faith. Absolutely absurd title, although he does indicate what he means by it, if you do get around to reading the book. The subtitle is Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. I found it gripping, partly because he has a way with words and partly because he seemed to be substantiating that original terrible quotation about man being essentially evil. And he quotes all sorts of evidence for men and women making the mistake of taking scripture literally, of having the attitude that every single word of scripture is the inspired word of God and therefore absolutely true. This is what you do. Well, never mind the Koran, look at Deuteronomy and Leviticus in the Old Testament. Youll find some pretty violent directions there about what to do with people who dont believe properly. That is, they dont believe what you believe

therefore their existence in the world is a mistake and they should be eliminated forthwith.

Shakespeare has a brilliant line in the Merchant of Venice: The devil can cite scripture for his purpose. Scripture is extraordinarily rich and if you are highly selective about it youll find a piece of scripture somewhere to excuse any form of behaviour. And he quotes chapter and verse here - and especially from the Koran which does appear to be a particularly aggressive form of philosophy. However, to give Sam H his due - and this is very hard to do when all you have at your disposal is what you might call intellectual inference, logic if you like - he moves away from a study of the scriptures as indicated in translations and he looks at the so-called mystics. In fact theres nothing particularly mystical about their attitudes or their behaviour. Its just that they operate at a very high level of consciousness, much higher than ordinary sleeping man; that is, you and me. It was Sam Harris who put me onto the topic for today because if you have the patience to read to the end and I gave it to one colleague and hed had enough of it by one third of the way through, understandably but Harris begins to realize that all forms of intellectual inference or logical analysis in conclusion need to be thoroughly tempered by the fluidity and the spontaneity of intuition. And he makes every indication that our education system is decidedly poor inasmuch as it ignores that practically and totally, except for the intuition of any given teacher in any given classroom and God help him if he doesnt have some of that that our capacity to intuit is simply untrained. Its not just undisciplined, its just about non-existent. Except every now and then it can become quite insistent, loud in the head, as it were, and we do whatever the intuition says.

Ive been asking around: what part does intuition play in your activity, whatever it may be? I had a great answer the other morning from some flower arrangers - I respect and admire more than I can say that ladies usually can get such wonderful presentations of flowers in a relatively short space of time and I see there is a skill and a discipline there and I asked this lady: What part does intuition play? And she said, oh, 90 per cent plus. Then I spoke to a man who was an experienced potter and theres a lot of technique, discipline and practice needed to be a successful potter - and I asked him, well, what part does intuition play in pottery? And he said, oh, 50 per cent plus. Then I spoke to my middle step-son at home who is a landscape gardener who does rock-walling and I asked him whats the part that intuition plays in rock-walling, and he said that most of it was intuition - for him anyway. That was a good answer. This is the thing about intuition. Sure we all have some recognition of what it is and what part it plays but it can be at one and the same time not only totally truthful and accurate but also secret. I did feel sorry for that new chap who was appointed to look after industrial relations the other day Im not terribly accurate about current affairs but I do know a new chap was appointed He was asked by some reporter how he would make up his mind and I believe he said something like: Ill refer to God, or God will tell me. Then the media had a wonderful time. At best, as we all know or none of us would be here, that thats another name for Intuition. Jesus the Christ was insistent about the fact that the kingdom of heaven is not out there anywhere, its within you.

Some of us have just been listening to a talk about Erasmus and St Francis of Assisi and hearing what completely different men they were, although they were both men of great faith. The truth as they had accessed it is that if you read about Francis

youll find it was almost entirely intuitive. Erasmus was a scholar. Bad luck for scholars; if they get there, they get there the hard way. By the way, some do. Sam Harris was certainly there and by the time he gets to the end of the book he is not only talking about intuition hes talking about pure consciousness.

We are still faced however with this awful situation where the world would appear to be in the grip of a great network of terrorist cells biding their time to strike any capital city anywhere in the world, and perhaps for the first time in the history of the human race, Australia is not going to be exempt. It occurred to me yesterday that exactly 400years ago yesterday November 5 one of the most pernicious and large acts of terrorism was about to be perpetrated on the British House of Commons underneath which in a cellar was the most enormous pile of gunpowder ready to be set off and blow the whole Parliament sky high. You might blame a man called Guy Fawkes because some of us had a peculiar sort of upbringing whereby every year on 5 November we not only built a bonfire but we stuck on top of it an effigy of this man called Guy Fawkes, because he was the one who was going to strike the match. He was given the job of getting it done. But he was given the job by a handful of members of Parliament led by a chap called Haytesbury. He and his colleagues had endured what you might call a deal of religious persecution for so long they were convinced, because of their own level of intuition, that the other side who had a different form of the same religion, were not only wrong but should be eliminated because they were a danger to the world. Just as, let it be said, there are cogent arguments for the whole of western society being decadent and dangerous. All of this is to get stuck on the surface of things and has nothing to do with real intuition.

The other day I made the mistake of buying, because it was offered at a reduced rate, from National Geographic, this DVD, Holy War. I had read a bit about the Jihad, I suppose all of us have. The chief character in this program was just about the only western reporter who got to meet Osama bin Laden - theres a man of powerful intelligence and a man of complete conviction, too. The film makes very unhappy viewing. And I counted myself fortunate that a few years ago my tutor, who was addressing some of you this morning in this very place, brought into our group a commentary of the Bhagavad Gita. Some of you are starting to read it now. There are any number of translations, all from the Sanskrit, of course. The discovery is that ultimately this is the textbook of everything under the sun. I was at a conference several years ago when the head of the Economics Faculty of the School of Philosophy, which the School of Economic Science in London is called, showed us this Gita and said: This is the best economics textbook that has ever been written. He gave a most interesting talk which unfortunately we didnt have the wit to record.

To revert, our tutor brought in for us Paramahansa Yoganandas translation of and commentary on the Gita, and he told us we should all have a look at it, and I did and I thought: my God, this is too rich for me, I am not ready for this yet. I ll postpone it indefinitely. Except a good friend of mine in the same group turned up a year ago on my birthday and said, Guess what Ive got for your present? Its heavy, its in two volumes. It was Yoganandas commentary. I took that as an indication that I should read it. After Ive filled the blackboard with some Sanskrit names, Ill read to you what he has to say because he is one of the foremost authorities on the Gita and on what intuition is and how it works. This is from the very end, Chapter 18, the longest

chapter in the Gita which goes on for 70 verses altogether. He has this wonderful mode of expanding his initial translation into all sorts of spiritual, psychological repercussions. This is what he makes of the original Sanskrit - and I remind you that the Gita is just one book out of a magnificent epic tale called The Mahabharata, it is easily comparable with Homers Iliad and the Odyssey, and it means a great deal to Indian culture. It is all about a battle called the Battle of Kurukshetra and you could be forgiven for assuming that the battle is an actual physical battle between armies composed not only of men but men who have known each other very well in the past, relatives fighting against each other, teachers fighting against students and students against teachers. All very awkward, so awkward in fact that at the beginning of the Gita we have this fine warrior called Arjuna who sees that some of the men who have given him most in his life, both relatives and teachers, are ranged on the other side. That is, he is expected to go in and fight and kill them and he says to his driver of his chariot, who is the Lord Krishna himself - what you might call the Hindu equivalent of Jesus Christ - I cannot do this, I cannot go in and fight, I cannot go in and kill those people. And the Gita is the account of how it is that Krishna indicates to Arjuna that he must do his duty, and having been slumped on the floor of the chariot at the beginning of the conversation, by the end of it he is up and ready to go.

As to any other item of scripture, you could be forgiven for taking that all to be literal and physical. All of the evidence however indicates that scripture is about the battle that goes on within the human mind all of the time. Your so-called mind, the universal mind call it what you like. And it can be proven easily. All you have to do is make any resolution about anything at all and I guarantee in nanoseconds a doubt will present itself, and there is a battle inside the human mind. And that is really what the battle of Kurukshetra is all about. You can read a man like Eknath Easwaran, a lovely man, an Indian from Kerala who, despite the fact that he became a prominent professor of English literature in the Indian university system, was taught most by his illiterate grandmother to whom he refers frequently. That is not an exaggeration, he refers to her very frequently. She was illiterate but very much in touch with herself. What the psychologists used to call integrated, I dont know what they call it now. Here is Arjuna having had this long tussle with Krishna about whether he should fight, and the indication is, yes, that is the state of the human mind. Dont pretend that youve ever arrived anywhere because nobody has. Dont pretend that you can ever get a handle on anything at all, because there arent any handles. But we need them for security, so we come up with something called dogma, some religious, psychological or philosophical dogma of some kind or another, and we say with Martin Luther: Here I stand, I can do no other. But we can do other, as youll hear.

Krishna has reached the end, hes taught Arjuna everything he knows and everything he needs to know, and Arjuna, who is totally despondent to begin with, is now completely inspired. The verse reads: Thus hath wisdoms most secret of all secrets been given to thee by me. After exhaustively reflecting about it, act as thou desirest. Augustine said the same thing but he put it rather differently: Love God and do what you like. This is Yogananda expanding on this: ( Krishna talking to Arjuna) I have narrated to you the most secret wisdom, bestowing on your receptive consciousness the full perception of truth concerning the attainment of liberation. From what? The battle, the daily battle inside the mind. How? Only by intuitive realization can one wholly grasp such wisdom. No matter what we may assume, human actions are all subtly influenced by three things. The first is: divine decree - all the great Greek

writings are about divine decree but that bit was cut out in the film Troy . The second is cosmic nature and the third is human karma.

Hold on continuously to this conception, Krishna says, for if instead you keep your heart identified with the distorting likes and dislikes of the physical ego, you will never understand the mystery of human life and actions. By first perceiving God you will know how the cosmic delusion and all creatures and their complex activities evolved from it. From this divine insight you will understand that so long as you remain identified with nature, with all creation and with ego-guided human actions and desires, you will be bound. But when you withdraw your consciousness, which by natures influence flows toward external objects, and you make it flow back toward God, you will find liberation. This secret wisdom about the law of action, the law governing man and the universe and their destinies, can only be experienced by intuitional development. Otherwise it will always remain hidden from you. It is up to you whether, by the free choice of your mind, you will start experiencing the truths related by me and liberate yourself, or whether you will act contrarily and remain impoverished. Thats laying it down.

Then he goes on to talk about how we should realize the truth in scriptures. This is not insignificant because they need to be read as they were meant to be read. They need to be related always to what is going on inside the being. It needs to be realized that they are not directions of what to do outside, out there, about other people. No, they speak to the reader where the reader is, and he may not divert that tuition against other people and turn it into a weapon or a bomb. So this is what he says: Any ordinary person reading or hearing scriptural truths interprets his visual or auditory sensations and impressions of them according to the limitations of his senses and understanding. A man of spiritual acuity studies the scriptures and then tries to perceive their meaning with his developed intuition. It is better still when a man with a potential realization, first reads or hears truth as interpreted through the fully awake realization of a great master or a guru ( which is what Yogananda is by the way, there are still gurus working in the world ) and then meditates on that realization until he likewise sees that wisdom as his own.

Hows that? However, diverse commentaries on great scriptures such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Dhammapada should not be collected and read indiscriminately. Nor should scripture be ingested voraciously by one possessing an undeveloped state of mind. After deep meditation only a small portion of the scripture should be read at a time, then internally dwelt upon to feel the truth therein through the souls intuition. No-one should try to interpret spiritual truths equipped only with reason, emotion and imagination. To perceive the truth behind the language of scripture as intended by the prophets, the requisite faculty is intuitive calmness gained by deep meditation. perception is not through the intellect, perception is through the direct experience of the soul. We should therefore exhort the devotee to meditate on truth and to take up dutifully those actions that bring intuitive enlightenment. It finishes up with yet another extension of that same verse that I read. Disinvolve yourself from creations illusions. Remember that you are an independent agent, free to act according to this profound advice to achieve liberation or to remain bound by submission to the influence of the ego and the fatal consciousness of the body. Arjuna, use not your power of free choice, determine to

increase the power of intuition by which alone you can perceive deep wisdom. Use your freewill to meditate again and again upon the soul, that you may realize through your awakened intuition all the secret truths that I have revealed.

Now let me introduce you to a few characters. The battle of Kurukshetra is set to begin. This character is involved in the battle. His name is DRONA and hes on both sides! ( Does it remind you of anything? We get our word drone from that. Its amazing how many words in how many languages derive from the Sanskrit which, even according to the linguists, is regarded as the original and purelanguage.) DRONA (teacher) English version: HABITS DRONA English version: HABITS

How you may ask can it be, this one man fighting against himself? They are all aspects of the mind, aspects of what goes on inside the psyche all the time, and I suppose if you want an English version of this you would use the word habits. The reckoning is that most of our responses to most of what happens to us most of the time are habitual. This is why young people, our children, get fed up with us so early because they can see it happening right in front of their eyes, and we cant because we have developed these habits that look after our identity That is who I am and who cares about the rest of the world. Some of our habits are good and have useful, civilizing and civilized effects; some of them are not so good; and some of them are downright naughty, wicked, evil even, whether or not we are conscious of it. I suppose you could say that these habits all get laid down at a time when we are not in the least conscious of anything. You have to be taught to hate. You have to be taught racial hatred. In any particular religious organization, the saying is, Give me a child up till the age of seven and I will make him one of ours for life. A lot gets sucked up in the mothers milk. And that is to say nothing of what some people say is the package we get born with in the first place, that comes even before the mothers milk.

You could say that scriptural names all indicate a great conglomerate of habits. When the struggle goes on in the mind, DRONA is on both sides. By the way, these are all characters in Chapter 1 of the Gita. I shall only give you a few of these strange names. DRUPADA King of Dispassion King of Detachment (learnt from DRONA the habit of meditation) DURYODANA King of Material Desire

Duryodana is the king of material desire. Desire is another thing that goes into our compound, one great big whopping conglomeration of desires of one kind or another and theres another battle for you because very often these desires conflict with each other. How do you get out of it? No wonder some people go insane. It is interesting to watch material desire working. We will see something which is in the first instance attractive, beautiful, nice, whatever - positive anyway. Hard upon that instant there comes I want it, I want it for my own, I want to take it home with me, I want to see it every day, I want it to be MINE. True or false?

Then there is a wonderful chap called DRUPADA. He is not a very popular king and he dwells inside every human being but we do tend to turn a blind eye to him if we ever acknowledge him at all. What he is king of is dispassion, detachment not immediately attractive. Who wants to be dispassionate about anything? From our culture we get the impression that the thing is to get passionately involved in everything, otherwise youre not alive. Theres some controversy in the school about the place of passion. A man can be passionate in his desire for the truth and he can go right over the top or it can be caressed with the dispassionate side of his nature. The whole point about Drupada is that he has learnt from DRONA the habit of meditation. This is a habit that gets cultivated. Im not quite sure that that really permits us to sit on a chair and be still for two minutes, except the more we pause the more something happens to our perception of things and that internal struggle which is universally common, seems to settle down when we pause. In fact sometimes this exercise can be so powerful that any particular problem that we are tending to cope with at the moment disappears. So then we get a taste of this marvellous universal stillness and that is enough for us to continue pausing - even voluntarily, on our own, without being told by our tutor, Sit up straight and pause. We are actually, during the course of our heavy daily activity, deciding to pause. It can happen surreptitiously during a conversation which is being found to be difficult. So inwardly we will have a little pause while the other person is rattling on, then we remember, as we said last Saturday, oh, were supposed to listen to the sound of the voice, so lets connect with that. Then the most uninteresting person in the world can suddenly become inordinately interesting. One can feel an affiliation and affection, a connection with that person that wasnt present before. So it would come as no surprise to you that the character that we need to look at today comes out of a union between Drupada and meditation. DHRISTA (first part of the name) (the offspring of Drupada and Meditation) BOLD, DARING, AUDACIOUS, CONFIDENT DHRISTA DYUMNA (second part of the name) GLORY, STRENGTH, SPLENDOUR Who needs to see Superman? What do you want Batman for? Its all inside the human being. Cutting a very long story short here, something happens at the end of the battle. General Drona is just about undefeatable and , were it not for the offspring of Drupada and Meditation, he would have remained undefeatable. But Dhrista Drumna has to seek out General Drona on the battlefield and kill him. This is what highly-developed intuition must do to habitual behaviour, to mechanical responses, to automatic reactions, to everything. They have to be killed. It might sound very nice, positive and even wise, sitting here where we are on Cultural Day this is THE day of the year, full of inspiration but when we get home tonight and we walk through our front door, indeed before that, how about when we get into the car and set off, what happens to the mind then? It reverts. Because old habits die hard. If I am not going to kill my inappropriate habits and I have a list youre not going to. I cant come up to you and ask you to kill my bad habits. You do try to make other people over. Its so easy. You can see it in other people. We are so blinded by our own habits, we dont know theyre there. We dont know what convictions we have. We dont know how much our convictions need to be made over, made more positive, more realistic, spontaneous, more lively. It takes a lot of work. It means for instance getting up when you wake up. After youve had your shower, read the Gita. Dont attempt to understand it, just read it. It goes much deeper than mere intellectual understanding. Then you should pause at the beginning of the day.

The teacher who taught our founder says, The unit of work, the real work, is one day. It doesnt matter about yesterday or last week or all the innumerable mistakes weve all been making down the years. So you begin each day fresh in the way small children do when they wake up. They sit up straight its wonderful to see. Instead of imagining you know what is going to happen today you do not, none of us know, none of us have any guarantee when we get out of our bed in the morning that well get back into that same bed that night.

Develop intuition. Its the hope of the world. If we go for the garbage that we continually get presented on television, on the radio, in newspapers and magazines of one kind or another, regardless of how delectable it is, well get stuck back with DRONA. If Drona is going to live forever, the world is in bad trouble. The School is in existence in order that we should wake up and we will wake up by fostering that part of our being which we know out of fulsome intuition to be permanent. It is not born, and it does not die. --------------------