Intuition will not mislead you but your conscious mentality, which is its receiving agent, may do so. For your consciousness may partially deviate from its message, or even wholly pervert it, in giving deliverance to exaggerations or extravagances, impossibilities or delusions, thus filling you with useless hopes or groundless fears. Consequently, at the very time when you suppose that you are being infallibly guided by intuition you may in fact be strongly guided by pseudo-intuition--which is something quite different. You may believe that you are honouring higher guidance when in actuality you are dishonouring it. The situation is therefore much less simple and much more complex than most people know. To get intuitive direction when, for example, two or more conflicting courses of action confront you is not so easy as it seems and less easy still during a time of trouble. For during such a time you will naturally catch at anything already unknowingly or knowingly pre-determined by some complex to be the best way out of it. The very desire for a particular thing, event, or action may put a pseudo-intuition into your mind. If you want to be wary of this you should seek corroboration from other sources and especially from right reason. Again, the first thought which enters your consciousness after you have decided to seek such direction and have committed your affair to the deeper mind, is not necessarily an authentic intuition. Nor is the second thought such a one, nor the third, and so on. If the impression is to be rightly received, it must be patiently received, and that quite often means that you must sleep on it, and sleep on it perhaps for several days, sometimes weeks. The trustworthy intuition is really there during all this time but the obstacles to knowing it are also there in yourself. Do not, therefore, lose the inner direction through haste nor set up a stone image to be worshipped by mistake in its place. Nor is it enough to say that intuitive truths are self-evident ones. What appeared to be self-evident to you twenty years ago may now appear self-delusive to you. Edit your intuitions with your reason.
-- Notebooks Category 22: Inspiration and the Overself > Chapter 1 : Intuition the Beginning > # 193
