Every aspect of human life from the very start has been shaped by our ability to draw upon two different kinds of knowledge, each with its own distinct purposes and sources.

This duality is easily overlooked by anyone who subscribes to the modern Western worldview. The prevailing belief today is that genuine knowledge is all of a single kind: fact-based, rational, and subject to objective demonstration. And yet there are intuitive and imaginative paths to knowledge that are not only as valid as the path of fact but ultimately more crucial to our growth as individuals and our collective evolution.

Ordinary knowledge—the only sort that Western civilization accepts as real—begins for each of us with the observation of recurring events. By identifying underlying similarities among those events, we construct a picture of the world in terms of categories, rules, and causal connections. And by combining our own assessments with those of our friends and neighbors, we arrive at a collective model of reality that enables us to interact with situations in standardized ways and obtain predictable results

This process of collaborative model-building is routinely carried out on a variety of levels, from networks of acquaintances to local communities and even entire nations. The objective in every case is to give us confidence that the systems which govern our lives, whether social norms, legal codes, or scientific theories, are rooted in reproducible data and logical assumptions.

The resulting uniformity of beliefs has obvious benefits. It stabilizes society by reducing interpersonal conflict. It provides a foundation for enduring cultural institutions, such as universities, libraries, and museums. It frequently enables us to combine our efforts in massive collective undertakings. But it can also have serious downsides, ranging from the discouragement of further intellectual inquiry to the active suppression of political dissent.

In contrast, higher knowledge is not grounded in social consensus or shared experience but in spontaneous flashes of inspiration that typically take on the form of sudden recognitions— complete wholes that cannot be pried apart and analyzed but present us with a sense of inner certainty. This makes them fresher and more original than the truisms of ordinary knowledge but also more vulnerable to doubt.

Our spontaneous intuitions can take on a variety of forms . They may be revealed dramatically in dreams and visions, arise through artistic inspiration, or merely strike us as vague hunches. But in every case, they appear seemingly out of nowhere and without any identifiable source.

Unlike the well-established opinions that make up the bulk of ordinary knowledge, our lightning flashes of higher knowledge tend to be uniquely original and creative. As such, they are the wellspring of all cultural change and often pose a direct challenge to the existing order of things. This can make them appear dangerous to anyone who is attached to the known and familiar, so that insisting on the truth of higher knowledge may set us at odds with society.

The seemingly heretical nature of higher knowledge is augmented by its lack of external validation. Our private insights are rarely capable of being proven or disproven logically but have to be taken on faith. Moreover, because each arrives as a unique whole, they cannot readily be combined or pasted into existing systems of belief. This means they remain permanently outside the fabric of the everyday world and so may appear strange or uncanny.

Although higher knowledge is a universal human capacity that we all employ on occasion, we typically feel more at home with ordinary knowledge. We trust it in a way we never quite trust higher knowledge, and given a problem to solve we will look to ordinary knowledge first and resort to higher knowledge only if ordinary knowledge comes up short.

It’s reasonable that we should feel this way, because ordinary knowledge is on the face of it more dependable. Its facts and procedures are well known, have stood the test of time and collective scrutiny, and are endorsed by respected members of our community. They hang together in a model of reality so solid and self-consistent that there might seem to be no need to ever look beyond it.

Higher knowledge, in contrast, is always novel and untested. It is not backed up by logic or existing consensus and may directly contradict the accepted truths of ordinary knowledge. It often pushes us to do things that have never been done before and which cannot be guaranteed to succeed.

If we follow the promptings of higher knowledge, we do so solely on the basis of personal conviction—and that conviction may be sorely tested. We may encounter organized opposition or ridicule. We may be forced to choose between the reliable solidity of consensus reality and our own inner compass. And if we go with the latter, the world may become a chancier place than we find altogether comfortable.