Understanding creative intuition

The creative process (whether it is in the arts, business or the sciences) involves both intellectual, conscious processes of thinking, as well as less conscious intuitive processes of knowing and discovering. Although Jungian psychology provides insight into the nature of intuition as a psychological function, intuition is not well understood by creative individuals and creative arts educators, even though they may be familiar with the intuitive experience itself. This article aims to demystify the role that intuition plays during the creative process. Drawing from the fields of psychology as well as Eastern and Western philosophy, four inter-related principles underlying creative intuition are examined and explained, in order to contribute to a more coherent understanding of creative intuition.

For the purposes of this article, each principle is discussed separately, although they occur simultaneously and non-hierarchically during the experience of creative intuition. What emerges from this discussion is an understanding that intuition that cannot co-exist temporally with rational, intellectual functioning. Therefore other (more unusual) ways of being in the world, which involve solitude and a surrender of the ego, are required for intuition to flourish. These will be the subject of a future article.