Haanel on Intuition in The Master Key System

Charles Haanel taught that intuition is a way of knowing that works without reasoning, experience or memory. In The Master Key System he links it to the subconscious mind, says it is the fruit of deep concentration, and claims it often solves problems that reason cannot. He also teaches that it can be cultivated, and that it comes most often in the Silence. The subject is not spread evenly across the course. It appears briefly in Part Two, at length in Part Seventeen, and in related passages on insight and inspiration.

Intuition in the Course's Own Description

Intuition is named in the course's description of itself. The 1919 St. Louis edition, describing the course, says it "teaches the cultivation and best uses of imagination, desire, the emotions and the intuitional faculty." So from the start Haanel presents intuition as something a student can train, in the same list as imagination and desire.

The same edition offers his most compact definition. Among the aims of mental training it lists "the symmetrical unfoldment of the intuitive faculty, which without being able to give a reason frequently impels or prohibits choice." This is a practical description: intuition is the sense that pushes you toward a choice or holds you back from it, before you can explain why.

A passage on the qualities that bring success in business makes a related point about tact: "It is very similar to intuition. To possess tact one must have a fine feeling, must instinctively know what to say or what to do."

Part Two: How the Subconscious Perceives

The first passage on intuition in the 24 parts comes in Part Two, Haanel's lesson on the conscious and subconscious mind. He writes:

"The subconscious mind perceives by intuition. Hence, its processes are rapid. It does not wait for the slow methods of conscious reasoning. In fact, it cannot employ them."

Here intuition is the subconscious mind's way of knowing, set against the step-by-step reasoning of the conscious mind. Earlier in the same part he notes that we find ourselves "endowed with tact, instinct, sense of the beautiful in art, music, etc., of whose origin or dwelling place we are wholly unconscious." The point is the same: some of our best faculties work below awareness, and we do not see where they come from.

Part Seventeen: Intuition as the Fruit of Concentration

Part Seventeen holds Haanel's main teaching on intuition, and it comes inside his main lesson on concentration. He first describes true concentration as absorption, like an actor who forgets himself in a role, and then says: "Such concentration leads to intuitive perception and immediate insight into the nature of the object concentrated upon."

Later in the same part he connects concentration and intuition directly: "If you concentrate on some matter of importance, the intuitive power will be set in operation and help will come in the nature of information which will lead to success."

Then comes his fullest description:

"Intuition arrives at conclusions without the aid of experience or memory. Intuition often solves problems that are beyond the grasp of the reasoning power. Intuition often comes with a suddenness that is startling; it reveals the truth for which we are searching, so directly that it seems to come from a higher power."

A summary of Part Seventeen printed in the 1919 edition says the part "tells how the intuitive power is set in operation and how this inevitably leads to success." That summary matches the text. In Haanel's scheme, concentration is the cause and intuition is one of its results.

The Intuitive Visitor

Haanel's most memorable image comes in the same passage. Intuition, he says, "can be cultivated and developed," and the way to do it is to welcome it:

"if the intuitive visitor is given a royal welcome when he comes, he will come again; the more cordial the welcome the more frequent his visits will become, but if he is ignored or neglected he will make his visits few and far apart."

This is the most practical thing he says on the subject. He offers no special technique for producing intuition. He asks the student to notice it, value it and act on it. A reader could apply this simply, by writing down sudden ideas when they come and checking later which ones proved useful.

Intuition and the Silence

Haanel then says where intuition tends to appear: "Intuition usually comes in the Silence; great minds seek solitude frequently; it is here that all the larger problems of life are worked out." He adds that every business man who can afford one keeps a private office where he will not be disturbed, and that anyone can at least find a place to be alone a few minutes each day.

This links intuition to the practice that opens the course. The sitting exercise of Part One, sitting still in a quiet room, is practice in this kind of stillness. In Part Four Haanel defines the Silence in the study questions as "A physical stillness." By Part Seventeen that stillness has a further purpose: it is the setting in which intuition can arrive.

The Study Questions

The study questions at the end of Part Seventeen sum up the teaching in two answers. To "How does concentration operate?" Haanel answers: "By the development of the powers of perception, wisdom, intuition, and sagacity." The next question is direct: "Why is intuition superior to reason?" His answer begins: "Because it does not depend upon experience or memory." It goes on to say that intuition often solves our problems by methods we know nothing about.

Related Ideas: Insight and Inspiration

Two other faculties in the course sit close to intuition. In Part Fifteen Haanel describes insight as "a kind of human telescope" that lets us see the difficulties and possibilities of an undertaking, and says, "Insight is a product of the world within and is developed in the Silence." In Part Twelve the study questions say that wisdom is secured "By concentration; it is an unfoldment; it comes from within."

In Part Twenty he turns to inspiration, with words close to his account of intuition: "Inspiration is from within. The Silence is necessary, the senses must be stilled, the muscles relaxed, repose cultivated." He also draws a firm line: "Do not confuse these methods with those of the clairvoyant; they have nothing in common." For Haanel, intuition and inspiration are normal powers of the mind, developed by stillness and concentration, and he keeps them apart from fortune-telling.

Reading Haanel on Intuition Today

Some of Haanel's description will sound familiar to modern readers. Most people know the experience of an answer arriving suddenly after they stop working on a problem, and the idea that the mind processes more than we are aware of is now common ground. His remark that intuition seems to come from a higher power is a different matter, and so is his wider teaching that the subconscious links each person to the Universal Mind. Those are New Thought beliefs, not research findings. Read this way, his advice is modest and easy to test: train attention, spend some time each day in quiet, and take note of the ideas that come.