Intuition, I'll tell you a story about intuition. There was a person at the end of one retreat at Wat Kow Tahm who was super-thrilled about our practice, super-excited, I think they bought about 3 or 4 books, just really loved it. After the retreat they wanted to talk to me special, and I had an extra little interview with them. They were very excited about the whole practice, thanking me very much and everything. Then they said that they had a feeling of intuition that they just had to go back to Dharamsala in India, where the Dalai Lama lives close by. They had visited there before coming to our retreat, and they felt that they had to go back, to Dharamsala. They felt this with their intuition, they used that word specifically, that they had to go back and find what it was. They felt that they knew now it wasn't Tibetan Buddhism, that they didn't want that because they liked our practice so much, but they kept saying that their intuition made them feel that there was something in Dharamsala that was so important for them that they had to go back and find. Now I remembered what they had written on their registration form, and on our form it asks, "How did you find out about coming to our retreat here?" I simply said to them, "Wasn't it in Dharamsala that you saw a flyer for our retreat?" And it was! They burst out laughing and so did I. Why go back because of their intuition to find something, they'd already found? So instead of going back they stayed and did the next retreat.
Intuition can be stupid. What some people thing is intuition can be just a feeling, a Vedana, often a pleasant feeling that kind of pushes us in a certain direction and has no wisdom to it at all. When we think of the big wisdom, we want it to be clear, we want it to be precise, we want to see things for what they are. We don't want to get carried away with feelings. If you have a type of intuition that you feel may be very real, check it out, but check it out carefully, don't just go with it.
Now this is not to say intuition doesn't work for some people. I was stuck in the middle of a creek up near Gladstone, in Queensland, with my motorcycle, and the water was up over my knees, raging current, and I couldn't get anywhere, the bike had slid off the concrete and was stuck in a tree, and I'm standing there, thinking, "At least it's not raining, the water's going to go down, not up." It was morning, I was trying to go to work. So I'm stuck there and I'm also thinking to myself, maybe my workmates will come and look for me, but no, they probably won't because they'll think I won't come in, it's flooded that day, whatever. I'm about 2 kilometers from our home, Rosemary's at the home. So I'm just stuck there, and as far as Rosemary was concerned I just went to work. Goodbye, I'm not supposed to be home until 5:30 or whatever. After 20 minutes standing there in the water Rosemary shows up, she had a feeling that there was something wrong, Steve needed her help.
Interesting, intuition, it works sometimes. Some people get it, Rosemary's had it work more than once. If she didn't have another one she would have walked in on two brown snakes mating, but she had an intuition something was wrong. She sat down, stared into the laundry instead of walking down and going into it. She sat down, and she doesn't normally sit down on that ramp, intuition. Some people have it and it works, but some people have it, and it's just a feeling and it's not going to work.
So you do want to be careful about it, whether you flow with it easily and quickly, or whether you stop and think about it first. For Rosemary to sit down and not go into the laundry was really weird. For her to come and find me, well, considering that she didn't have much else to do that was more important, it was a pleasant outing, she had a short motorcycle ride. If I didn't need help, no big deal but if I did it, it may be very important - as it turned out to be. She helped me pull the motorcycle out of the creek. So to a certain extent she wouldn't lose much by following that intuition. The fellow that wanted to go back to India though, was possibly going to spend several hundred dollars, maybe a thousand dollars, and put in time and effort, maybe never find anything there he really wanted, and feel frustrated that he missed the opportunity to do another retreat. So he could have lost much more.