"Instinct, Intellect, Intuition" - The Three Ways of Knowing with Diana Lang & Joseph Carenza

How do you know what you know? Most of us have been confusing three fundamentally different forms of knowing our entire lives: instinct (the body's survival mechanism), intellect (the mind's analytical tool), and intuition (direct knowing that bypasses thought). Understanding the difference isn't just philosophical, it has immediate implications for every decision you make, from choosing a career path to knowing when to trust someone.

On this week's episode of Musings From The Mount, Diana Lang joins the conversation and begins the discussions with an exploration about instinct, that primal gut-level response designed to keep us alive in the face of immediate physical danger and one problem becomes immediately apparent, our instincts haven't evolved as fast as our environment. Our bodies trigger the same fight-or-flight response for a difficult conversation that it would for a predator, which can then lead to chronic stress and reactive decisions. Learning when instinct serves you versus when it hijacks you has become an essential tool for navigating modern life without being ruled by ancient survival programming.

We also examine the intellect, a powerful but limited tool. It can analyze, categorize, and problem-solve brilliantly, but it can only rearrange information it already has. The thinking mind is like a computer working with existing data; it cannot access anything genuinely new, so we explore how intellect can itself become a defense mechanism, keeping us in our heads to avoid feeling what is actually happening in our bodies or hearts. This is why breakthrough insights never come from more thinking, they arrive through intuition.

This episode offers practical ways to recognize real intuition: it has a quality of quiet certainty, doesn't require justification or mental gymnastics, and often surprises the thinking mind with information it couldn't have logically derived. Intuition is framed as "a download of complete knowing" that arrives whole rather than being built piece by piece and we discuss the key challenge? You can't hear intuition's whisper when you're constantly in motion or consumed by mental chatter. This is an invitation to examine your own decision-making and discover which form of knowing you're actually using and whether it's the right one for the situation at hand.

Meditation Mount and HeartLight Productions are pleased to present Musings from the Mount – a weekly podcast with host Joseph Carenza and guests in conversation exploring a range of topics drawn from the Ageless Wisdom teachings. New episodes every Monday.

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