The descent of peace brings up a new quality of Essence, with all of its properties and capacities to support our inquiry, but it also activates the subtle centers, the subtle capacities of perception. The primary perceptual center is the Black latifa, at the center of the forehead. It is also the center of the operation of the Diamond Guidance itself. During inquiry, the Guidance tends to operate as a presence at the center of the forehead. That is why you get clear and crisp in your head when you understand something. When these subtle perceptions are first activated, intuition means that the experience of knowledge is coming through a quiet mind, which indicates that the Black center is open. You become receptive to insights, ideas, and truths, but you don’t know exactly where they are coming from. You become more intuitive in the usual meaning of the word—that is, you are open to knowledge in a way that you do not understand or directly perceive. What this means, however, is that although you are receiving knowledge as insights from a true inner source of discrimination—what we call the Diamond Guidance—this source is not yet present in your direct experience. Its center and its channel are open, but you receive messages or insights indirectly.

The Diamond Guidance may appear as a source of intuition and insight—not the intuition or insight itself but its source. As the source, it is the clarity, the light, and the presence that touches our experience and ignites sparks and flashes that we recognize as intuitions and insights. Thus, the Diamond Guidance is the magic source of knowing. When it comes into our experience, it illuminates it. Its illumination comes from itself, not from outside itself; it is inherent, intrinsic illumination. The Diamond Guidance functions as a source of pure and real knowledge, new basic knowledge, completely fresh discrimination. Because it is made up of elements that are each gnostic, or direct, knowledge about an essential aspect, the Diamond Guidance becomes a source of knowledge about anything it touches in our experience. Real knowledge is not only basic knowledge, but basic knowledge that is free from ordinary knowledge and that originates in reality. The Diamond Guidance also functions as a capacity for true discrimination. Because each aspect is now discriminated objectively and precisely, the Guidance, which is the vehicle formed of these aspects, has a profound and precise capacity for discrimination. It can discriminate the false from the true, and it can distinguish various shades of truth as well.

However, when Essence is present in the conscious experience of the individual, then there is no intuition and no mystery. There is just direct perception and direct knowing - direct knowing of Essence because there is consciousness of it, direct perception of oneself and others because Essence has the capacities that transcend the boundaries of time and space.

Now let us look at intuition. The word intuition is used to describe many different kinds of perception, of varying depth, profoundness, and accuracy. Sometimes intuition can mean a suspicion of a certain truth, a slight glimpse without certainty or clarity. Sometimes intuition can mean a feeling, more or less vague, about something. If we listen to such a feeling, it can lead us to understanding. Sometimes intuition is a hunch, something like a guess but with more of a feeling of certainty or weight to it. These are some of the things we call intuition. There are deeper aspects of intuition: for example, when we somehow know something, sometimes with a feeling of certainty, but don't know how we got the knowledge; we cannot explain to ourselves how we know. Sometimes we know something totally new, but we don't know where it came from, so we say we have an intuition. An intuition sometimes feels like a direct apprehension of a certain truth, but we can't explain how this apprehension occurred. So intuition is usually considered a mysterious process. Like insight, intuition can be about anything—the mind, other people's personalities, relationships, and even our true nature, our essence. However, intuition itself is not essence. It can help us to know essence, but it is a process or a capacity, not an ontological existence.

Essence has many capacities, some of which are called the subtle organs of perception, which transcend the physical senses. These capacities, which transcend time and space and therefore the limitations of the physical senses, are in the unconscious. This explains how the unconscious knows about other people. So we see that intuition is not essence itself but can come from essence and can be used for the understanding of essence. However, when essence is present in the conscious experience of the individual, then there is no intuition and no mystery. There is just direct perception and direct knowing—direct knowing of essence because there is consciousness of it, direct perception of oneself and others because essence has the capacities that transcend the boundaries of time and space. You don't need to wait for intuition, you just look, just pay attention. You see, you perceive, you know. You know how you know. You understand the mechanism and the process. You can turn it on or off whenever you like. You can direct it wherever you want.

There is a deeper form of intuition that is the function of a certain aspect of essence. We referred to this aspect earlier as objective consciousness or the diamond body. We also called it the body of knowledge. This aspect has the capacity to take facts and data, all of the different kinds of understanding about a particular object or situation, and consider them all together, simultaneously and instantly. The reasoning mind is linear; it cannot consider too many facts at the same time to find a solution. It is limited in its capacity to hold information simultaneously. This is why computers are so valuable. They can consider a whole array of facts, all at the same time. This aspect of essence can do just that, not in a thought form but in a more lived and felt way. Its capacity for considering many facts and many dimensions is limitless. Everything in the situation is considered, and the result is a certain perception that integrates all the facts, on the various levels of understanding. If this part of us is unconscious, then we will experience its perception as an intuition. If it comes in a flash, we think of it as an insight. If this aspect of essence is present in our consciousness, we experience the perception as a direct knowing. This is real intuition.