Intuition is best understood as a form of non-verbal computation, a way the whole organism integrates experience into rapid judgment. Most creatures navigate their lives this way—by embodied pattern recognition rather than deduction. Humans, however, are biased by their language structures and cultural unconscious to believe that everything must be reasoned out step by step, as if logic alone were the highest form of knowledge. We then elevate “the best and the brightest” precisely because of their verbal cleverness, even when they lack lived experience. Yet in the military it is often the sergeants, not the academy-trained officers, who know what to do in crisis; in other fields too, seasoned practitioners often outperform the theoretically gifted. Intuition is not mystical but practical: it is experience crystallized into tacit knowledge, stored not in words but in bodily and neural patterns. It is fast, pre-verbal, and deeply reliable in environments with stable feedback, though less so in novel or chaotic ones. For this reason, intuition must be disciplined and balanced—by reason as a slow check, and by science as a systemic corrective. Together, these three pillars—Reason, Intuition, and Science—form the RISE2 framework for a second Enlightenment.