This tends to be the mantra used by people who don’t want to go to school to learn the “hard stuff”: all of the formulas and methods required in authentic feng shui.

“Intuitive,” lest we forget, is synonymous with instinctive — that is, the inherent disposition of a living organism toward “routine movements that appear to be automatic,” in the words of one student.

Instincts are biologically determined, and typically have no relation to environmental influences or conditioning (classical, operant, or hair).

Humans have instincts, but human instincts do not compel people to put red dots on their walls to fix “energy” problems. Humans do not reflexively announce that their lives are bogged down due to “clutter and stagnant negative energy.”

Humans do have three strong instincts noted by researchers:

• Self-preservation through evolution and strategy
• Sex
• Greed

The scientific study of innate behaviors in humans shows that our “intuitive” greed and a bit of “intuitive” strategy can help us make a comfortable living off fellow humans — just by saying we are practitioners of “intuitive” feng shui.

Real feng shui is a product of intelligence, which can override instinct. It is a product of intelligence because it originated in astronomy. Astronomy requires powers of observation and record-keeping, not reflexes.

Allegedly “intuitive thinking” is what separates us from Neandertals:

Until we stop thinking of Neandertals as a bush-league version of ourselves, thinking of them as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, we’ll never dignify them in an appropriate way as an evolutionary entity in their own right, with their own evolutionary history. Neandertals did very well for hundreds of thousands of years, and were very adaptable. They probably did the maximum that could be done with intuitive thinking. I just don’t think they had the ability to think symbolically.
— Ian Tattersal