That fits: in priming the pump you pour water in, in order to get water out (it restores the needed water pressure). In economics, you spend money in order to stimulate money to flow on its own through the economy.
If I understand you, you say you pour intuition in, in order to get intuition out, which is metaphorically appropriate. Could you give an example of the kind of intuition you "pour in," so that you can get the intuition that arrives from "outside the conditioning"? I may just be experiencing a semantic disconnect.
http://www.wikihow.com/Prime-a-Water-Pump
If I'm confused and 'priming the pump' means something different to you, please explain your image.
Thanks for prodding me on this. It's always good to be nudged out of your comfort zone and to challenge long-held (but not cherished, I assure you) assumptions.
To dispense with technical matters, priming only applies to centrifugal pumps. They aren't designed to pump air, and will "cavitate" (think of it as a kind of "choking") and eventually seize or break if the pressure of the fluid on their suction side isn't what it needs to be. So a supply of water (or whatever you're pumping) is ensured - in hydraulic engineering its called a "keep-filled" line - to maintain the "prime." However, pumps designed to transfer high-purity water can't handle the service demands of, say, a sump pump. They will encounter pressure voids in the proceess medium (think "chunks") and still cavitate.
In cartomancy, let's say we are humming along with a reading and all of our past knowledge and experience are clicking beautifully. Then, we encounter a combination of cards in the spread that is seriously disjointed and mutually antagonistic (again, think indigestible "chunks"); we begin to grasp frantically for coherent meaning (in technical terms, we begin "cavitating"). Our instinct is to keep piling up keywords until the sheer weight of the edifice makes it topple in a particular direction (i.e. toward a particular interpretation), and that's what we fill the void with - a preponderance of the more likely suspects.
I stop before getting to that point, flex my metaphorical myth-making muscles, and begin to invite in other allusive associations that may have nothing to do with the narrative of the reading up to that point (they might be historical, cultural, literary, artisitc, anecdotal, whatever wells up from my imagination). The role of intuition, once they're lined up for consideration, is to home in on the one that will entrain most seamlessly with the "story-line" of the reading so far, to present to the querent. This I use to create a "side-story," often in allegorical terms, that sort of meanders around the roadblock and comes at the difficulty from a different angle. It's really just a different method of attack, fueled by an inspired reimagining of the conflicted combination. The key is that intuition is applied as a tool in the middle of the procees to support a concrete answer (call it a hybrid if you want) at the end that is still stongly informed by the more literal interpretation.
ETA: "Priming" can also be used to start a gas engine, which may be a better analogy than a pump. You squirt some gas in the spark plug hole, replace the plug, and crank it up (or, if you have some aerosol starting fluid you spray it in the air intake, with the same result. So intuition, in this model, would be used to "jump-start" a stalled reading as in the above scenario. Because it strikes me as more of a "right-brain" phenomenon than the "conditioned" response induced by study and practice (even though that whole psychological paradigm has apparently been debunked), it is "ouside" the core of accumulated imtellectual knowledge about the meaning of the cards.
) It just seems like the equivalent of "fast food" to me (aka "junk food" but I don't want to be quite that derogatory) when used as anything more central to a reading.