What does INTUITION mean?
The responses to my original posting about intuition (#50) have been most interesting. One thing they do tell me is that we are using the word "intuition" in several ways. I would like to tell you what I originally meant by it, and then to lay out the different attitudes to intuition the subsequent postings seem to be getting at. Can I assume that we all agree that to deny that men possess intuition (whatever it means) is wrong? (I ask this assuming the conclusion Farzon (#57) comes to is meant to be ironic.)
What I originally had in mind was this kind of process: The reader contemplates the spread, consciously noticing the meanings traditionally (and personally) attached to the cards and their placement within the spread. This information is fed into the unconscious which takes it into account, adds information hidden from consciousness, and itself notices relations between cards, and other hidden material. This activity inside the unconscious forms the story the reader will eventually tell. This unconscious part is what I meant by intuition. I see it as what I think closrapexa meant by "informed intuition" in posting #51.
Postings here suggest that readings can range from entirely intuitive i.e., "look at the pretty pictures and make up a story" through to the assumption that everything learned in books, previous readings, and such can be entirely accessed by the unconscious without resort to the conscious, on to "informed intuition" and finally to the other end of the spectrum--virtually no intuition, the approach many of us used when first learning Tarot of basically laying out the cards, then looking them up in a book, and trying to create a coherent story from the book definitions. This last approach is very mechanical and pretty well rules out insights into natural pairs and other such subtleties.
I got away from "look it up in the book, even write it down" approach as soon as I could. On the other hand, I was really turned off by the intuitive as "pretty picture/tell a story" approach when I was working near a mining town in a wild and wooly part of northern Canada. I was drinking beer in a hotel pub with friends when I learned there was a Tarot reader working out of the hotel. She was an older French-Canadian grandmother type. I told her only that I was wondering about a relationship. As regards the nature of my romantic interests, I decided that if she didn't ask I wouldn't tell. The spread was one I did not recognize, but when the KnSw (me at the time), the KnCu, Lovers, and 9Cu showed up, I certainly had an idea of where the reading was going, and was quite pleased. She, however, spun a tale that did not take into account the traditional meanings attached to the cards at all. She was going entirely on her grandmotherly intuition, and probably what she thought I wanted to hear. Her story had nothing to do with me at all, except that she could not ignore Lovers and promised I would be meeting that special girl soon. I could only smile at this, and my buddies also smiled when I returned to the pub. Since then I have always done my own personal readings. You might be wondering if the grandmother was using intuition or was just a charlatan. She DID seem to be trying, but her intuition was not grounded in anything like reality.
Have I at least roughly captured the range of what intuition can mean here? Have I misread anyone? Is it even possible to agree on a unified meaning for the word, so that we re all talking about the same thing?
I want to end by suggesting that attempts to impose stereotypes by relating logic and reason to men, and empathy and intuition to women is part of the battle for women's rights, and by extension, to LGBT rights as well, in ways there is no need to detail here. But I do insist that "cultural biases" of gender and orientation stereotyping have no place in Tarot. They are, and often must be, changed.