And then I pause at the phrase, as one who stops before a door once thought invisible: “Intuition is an ancestral technology.”

I feel the dry, unexpected impact, this sharp paradox that cuts through the air. Technology, I say, and I think of circuits, of cold gears of a future that is already today and crushes our retina. But ancestral… ah, ancestral! There dwells the fine dust of time that precedes us and that, in some intimate and viscous way, we are.

Intuition. It is the name we give to the instant when the soul says yes or no without having to cross the slow and stony desert of reason. It is a pulse that cannot be learned in books, a vertical knowledge that bursts forth, sudden, like water piercing rock. It is perhaps the oldest machine, the only one that operates in the pure silence of substance. And if it operates, it needs no wires.

Its technology, mind you, is not in doing, but in being — it is the capacity to listen to what has no name yet in the darkness before the word. It is the inheritance of those who survived because they knew, in blind fright, which path to take in the forest of themselves. It is not advanced; it is primordially exact.

And I ask myself, with the tremor of one who touches the unspeakable: if intuition is this technology, this raw and precise gift that comes from a time when there were no clocks, then what are we doing, we who smother it with the noise of so much data? We are unlearning how to use our own most sophisticated hardware.

It is urgent, necessary, to deprogram ourselves from what has been learned in order to reconnect with what has always been there, in the core of the cell that knows and pulses. To feel the ancestral is, perhaps, the only authentic way of being future.

©️ Beatriz Esmer