Printed in the Summer 2024 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Wyatt, Tim "Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition" Quest 112:3, pg 32-34
By Tim Wyatt
The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real. Let the Disciple slay the Slayer.
—The Voice of the Silence
We regard mind and intellect as the crowning achievements of human development—and in one sense this is true. It has been a long and torturous road turning humans into thinking beings. Let us not forget that in our distant past, it required extraterrestrial intervention to cement the mind principle in humanity. According to Theosophical teachings, during the Third Root Race, when the process of acquiring mind had stalled, the Lords of the Flame (the Solar Pitris or Agnishvattas) arrived from Venus to give struggling humanity a helping hand in the mental realms.
Over the past few centuries, the human intellect has undergone accelerated development. Until the fifteenth century, few ordinary people possessed individualized intellects. At that time, the bulk of humanity shared a group consciousness of the race, the nation, the tribe, the clan, or the family, often with a heavy overlay of religious dogma. Indeed this is still the case for many people. Look at mob violence, organizational groupthink, or behavior at large sports or music events.
Human intelligence has blossomed during the past 250 years of industrialization, urbanization, improved education, and the increasing use of technology, especially in communications. In England during Shakespeare’s time, the average peasant had a vocabulary of a mere 400 words. When the United States Army measured the IQs of recruits in World War II, it noted a significant increase in intelligence from the recruits of World War I less than a quarter of a century earlier. In that intervening period, radio, cinema, and enhanced transportation (or something else) had made farm boys from Iowa that much smarter.
In our digital world, communication is now instant and global. Some feel that this infrastructure is playing a key role in improving human mental abilities. Others disagree entirely. They feel that because this technology is so ubiquitous, it is harming rather than improving communication by polluting the planet with vast amounts of digital trash and low-grade information. There are also concerns that this technology may actually be stopping people from using their minds because so many people permit technology to do their thinking for them.
The onslaught of artificial intelligence (AI) is often cited as the biggest threat to humanity—ironically by the very people who promote its development, such as the tech billionaire Elon Musk. AI may serve as the guillotine of truth through mass manipulation of information or deepfake videos.
The transhumanist movement peddles the absurd notion that human evolution and ability can be enhanced by the imaginative addition of microcircuitry and/or exotic materials. But it is becoming abundantly clear that technology—cooked up by the human intellect—is fast becoming mankind’s jailer, especially when used for nefarious purposes such as war, social control, or surveillance.
Defining exactly what mind is has become one of the hottest yet most elusive topics in the burgeoning area of consciousness research. Materialist science (sometimes called the new religion of scientism) remains blinkered by confining mind solely to the physical brain and regarding consciousness purely as an epiphenomenon, or by-product, of electrochemical reactions in the cerebral cortex. This model can only define mind and consciousness in terms of physical infrastructure. Science insists that without a brain, there can be no mind.
Although the scientific world has been confronted by the weird world of quantum physics (which is itself based on nonmaterial worlds), superstring theory (based on numerous dimensions), and the mighty mysteries of dark energy and dark matter, only a few enlightened scientists are slowly beginning to divest themselves of the exclusively materialistic paradigm.
Occult science takes a diametrically opposite view. Theosophy generally divides mind (manas) into the lower mind of concrete, everyday, mundane thoughts and a higher mind, which is able to conceptualize and deal with higher abstract concepts. Above these two faculties is another, more sophisticated variety (latent in the vast majority of people): the sixth human principle of buddhi. Derived from the Sanskrit root budh-, which means to awaken or to perceive, it is often mistranslated as intuition (sometimes even as reason or intellect), but it has a far wider function. It is direct perception or awareness transcending rational thought, described as “divine instinct” by H.P. Blavatsky.
The Theosophical Encyclopaedia defines buddhi as the spiritual soul: the operating vehicle of our highest principle, atma, or spirit. It is “the faculty which manifests as spiritual intuition, insight, understanding, all of which is far deeper and higher and subtler than our reasoning faculty.”
Buddhi appears as the voice of conscience, the sense of right and wrong, as well as the ability to perceive and appreciate harmony, beauty. and truth. Reflected through the manas, it is wisdom offering “a synthesizing, unifying vision, as against the analytical, divisive faculty of the rational principle.”
Perhaps in its crudest, undeveloped form, buddhi appears as hunches or gut feelings, but in reality, it has a much deeper, synthesizing role. Although many people experience these feelings or other flashes of insight, they often tend to mistrust and dismiss them because they haven’t been filtered through the rational mind. This is a big mistake, because in many ways this is a purer form of perception than the rational mind.
When buddhi is dormant, the mind, manas, remains the acme of human achievement. When buddhi is awakened and operating in conjunction with manas, it becomes the divine Ego, or the soul of Theosophical teachings.
It is widely speculated that this sixth principle of wisdom-intuition is now unfolding in larger sections of humanity and will be further developed with the emergence of the sixth subrace of our present Fifth Root Race in the coming decades and centuries. (Small numbers of vanguard members of this new subrace are already in incarnation.) In the distant Sixth Root Race, buddhi will eventually become standard-issue and fully functional. It will be our permanent sixth sense, operating alongside our existing faculties of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell.
It is also widely observed that certain children coming into incarnation at the present time are showing more developed intuitive faculties in terms of empathy and compassion. Sometimes they are referred to as “indigo,” “rainbow,” or “star children.” Many seem resistant to mainly left-brained means of classroom learning. They do not perceive the world the way their parents or grandparents did. Some are (almost certainly wrongly) diagnosed as having mental disorders such as autism or attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Awakening, liberating, and utilizing the wisdom-intuition principle in humans will be a vital evolutionary leap forward, because it spells a major uplift in consciousness, operating beyond the limitations of the intellect. After all, it is the ordinary intellect that has created and reinforced the prevailing materialist mantra, adopted almost universally by science and the majority of people, that the physical world is the sole reality and that belief in subtle realms or mind beyond brain is either crude superstition or wishy-washy speculative nonsense.
Buddhi opens up entire new horizons of perception by energizing and enhancing the faculties of both imagination and inspiration. It revolutionizes consciousness and opens the doors to the soul. Over time, this principle will enable human beings to transcend the three-dimensional, five-sense physical world and form links to the spiritual and supersensible realms.
This development will ultimately produce a new way of transcendent spiritual thinking, described by the Austrian esotericist Rudolf Steiner as “active, loving, spiritual, and free.” He believed that spiritual thinking—employing imagination, inspiration, and intuition—was the central stimulus at the heart of all great advances in science, art, philosophy and religion. When we extend our consciousness in this way, we change the world.
However, there will be opposition to this new, nonmaterial, nonlinear way of thinking from a variety of vested interests, not least science. As is the case with all new ideas (and this has always been true throughout human history), they are resisted, mocked, derided, and dismissed by cynics. The exponents of these new ways of thinking are attacked, undermined, ridiculed, cancelled and sometimes even killed.
Nevertheless, the majority of humanity do not need to achieve buddhic consciousness for it to precipitate major change. A change in consciousness among a comparatively small number of people can have a disproportionate effect on the wider world when they are working in close, focused harmony together. Followers of Transcendental Meditation have detected immediate effects in a local area when they commenced their activities, even with only a few people involved. This included better health and lower rates of crime. In fact, they found that it took just the square root of 1 percent of a given population to achieve this effect.
The present world population stands at just over 8 billion people. One percent of this is 80 million. And the square root of that is a mere 9,000 people—the population of a small town—and far less than the worldwide membership of the Theosophical Society.
Tim Wyatt is an esoteric author, publisher, lecturer, and filmmaker based in Yorkshire, England. His books are available from www.firewheelbooks.co.uk