The Gospel According to Dixon #9: The Role of Intuition

[Dixon]

by Dixon Wragg

WaccoBB.net

I believe in intuition and inspiration.

--Albert Einstein

You’re hiking and reach a fork in the path. You start down the right-hand path, then unaccountably change your mind and go down the other one. By making that decision, you’ve avoided a nasty encounter with a grizzly bear.

You meet someone who, to all outward appearances, seems nice, but you have a bad feeling about this person. He would, in fact, given the opportunity, do you harm.

You’re a scientist or philosopher or artist or writer who’s been working on a problem for some time. Suddenly, in an unaccountable flash of insight, you make a connection you hadn’t seen before, solving the problem.

All of us have had experiences like these. What do they have in common? They all involve a sort of information processing, a kind of thinking which is very different from what we usually think of as thinking, in that it occurs beneath the threshold of our conscious attention. If we notice it at all, it’s not until the conclusion occurs to us, apparently out of thin air. Sometimes it seems downright miraculous.

We’re unconsciously processing information which was picked up by our senses, though not necessarily consciously noticed. In the hiking scenario, your eyes, ears or nostrils may have picked up very subtle sensory cues that indicated the possible presence of a big predator down the right-hand path. A primitive part of your mind redirected your feet accordingly, “eliminating the middle man” (your conscious understanding) in the process.

In the new acquaintance scenario, you’re responding to nonverbal sensory cues that are so subtle that they convey information about the person’s honesty or intentions without either his or your conscious awareness.

In the scientist scenario, various ideas you’ve been exposed to before are floating around in the netherworld of your unconscious, more or less randomly bouncing off one another, until a meaningful connection cues your conscious mind to pay attention. A simple answer to the question so commonly asked of creative people, “Where do you get your ideas?”, could be “Intuition!”

Yes, all of these are slightly different examples of what we call “intuition”. My dictionary defines it as “the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning” and “a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning”¹.

Surely intuition has evolved because it’s advantageous. Used properly, it's another source of useful information. Individuals who use intuition more effectively—putting neither too little nor too much faith in it--have a survival advantage over others.

Notice that I mentioned the possibility of putting too much faith in intuition. This is because it can go badly wrong in several ways. (And this is true even if we assume that some intuition is psychic in nature—i.e., that we receive the information extrasensorily rather than empirically.)

For one thing, intuition, like any way of thinking, sometimes yields mistaken conclusions even when used correctly. Like all human efforts, it’s fallible, so often we must verify by other means, or at least hold our conclusions very tentatively.

Also, there are many things that may seem like intuition, but aren’t. For instance, our prejudices, fears, desires, associations and projections are often indistinguishable from real intuition. Your bad feeling about someone you’ve just met could be a valid intuition, or it could be due to your unconscious racial, class, ethnic or gender bigotry, or to the fact that something about the person reminds you of someone who hurt you when you were a child, or to your feeling a bit paranoid at the moment, or to your projecting your own darkness onto the other person.

For that reason, I do not consider vague negative feelings about others as real evidence for anything, and would never accuse someone of something bad on that basis. Some years ago, my friend Gretchen was accused of something she hadn’t done. Her friend Marge affirmed that Gretchen had indeed done this. When Gretchen, incredulous, asked why she claimed that, Marge said her intuition told her it was true. This is an example of a hurtful misuse of the concept of intuition.

Conversely, we can have “intuitive” good feelings about someone, only to find out painfully that they didn’t deserve our trust. Politicians, salespeople and other con artists are adept at subtly influencing our perceptions in positive ways, pushing buttons that evoke good feelings which we cannot distinguish from real intuitions except in hindsight.

Another problem is that our understanding of intuition tends to be so vague that any notion someone wants to believe can conveniently be dignified as “intuition”. Few of us want to think of ourselves as so unreasonable, so undisciplined in our thinking, that we’ll believe whatever feels good to us. But many people have no problem doing just that, as long as they tell themselves that the desired belief is more than just wishful thinking—it’s an intuition! This confers a phony validity onto the belief. The basic position is something like “Don’t tell me I shouldn’t believe in such-and-such just because I can’t adduce any good evidence or arguments for it; I have it from intuition!” And to be fair, let us affirm that the seeming numinosity of a belief that meets our emotional needs can indeed render it indistinguishable from a real intuition. This is why verification by non-intuitive evidence is so often important.

So, invoking intuition as support for philosophical positions regarding the nature of objective reality is more likely a path to illusion than truth. An “intuition” that, for instance, some god is real, or that there is an afterlife, or that the universe is intelligent, is not likely to be a real intuition at all, unless one can eventually identify and articulate some verifying evidence/argument. Lacking that, it’s most likely nothing more than a wishful-thinking belief, tarted up in intuition’s clothing to create the illusion of credibility.

Albert Einstein is one of the renowned thinkers who have sung the praises of intuition. Indeed, intuition was essential to his breakthroughs as it is in most if not all leaps of understanding. But it’s important to note that his intuitions yielded testable hypotheses, and the validation of his intuitions was complete (to the extent that the quest for truth can ever be deemed complete) only when they were verified by empirical observation, such as measurements of the predicted gravitational lensing around massive objects like the sun. This shows the proper role of intuition in the search for truth—not as a source of self-validating certainty, but as a source of hypotheses to be tested. Only after passing such testing can an intuition be said to have given us trustworthy information about the nature of reality.

This is a bitter pill for some of my New Agey friends, who have become frustrated with me when I’ve challenged their misuse of the concept of intuition. Real intuition is not a magical leap to instant truth that conveniently just happens to be what we wanted to believe, a “Get out of logic free” card that enables us to enshrine an unsupported idea as truth by labeling it an intuition. It is, again, a marvelous source of hypotheses to be tested. As such, it is a beautiful and quite indispensable part of the reasoning process—not an alternative to reasoning.


1. The New Oxford American Dictionary, 2^nd edition, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) 885.

About Dixon: I'm a hopeful monster, committed to laughter, love, and the Golden Rule. I see reason, applied with empathy, as the most important key to making a better world. I'm a lazy slob and a weirdo. I love cats, kids, quilts, fossils, tornadoes, comic books, unusual music, and too much else to mention. I’m a former conservative Christian, then New Ager, now a rationalist, skeptic and atheist. Lately I’m a Contributing Editor at the Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form (That’s right!), and have been getting my humor published in the Washington Post and Fantasy and Science Fiction. I’m job-hunting too, mostly in the Human Services realm. Passions: Too many -- Reading, writing, critical thinking, public speaking, human rights and justice, sex and sensuality, most arts and sciences, nature. Oh, and ladies, I’m single ;^D

[Barry]

[This was originally posted bypeggykarp. It was reposted by Moderator due to system difficulties. Click for more info.]

Enjoyed this post. Interested to read about Dixon's past lives. The urge to proselytize has deep roots...

I'm always struck by the tyranny of any ideology, be it religious, political, or philosophical. Just as fundamentalists of any faith bend everything to fit their dogma, so too do rationalists.

Or, to take another good example, anti-conspiracy theorists. I'm thinking of the JFK assassination, where there was an overwhelming body of evidence of conspiracy, but those who had a big stake for whatever reason in denying a conspiracy made a religion out of such denial, based not on fact but on conviction.

So too do rationalists when they set out to show how everything has a material base. The most important difference between a rationalist zealot and a religious one is the harm such beliefs do or don't do. I don't think atheists have blood on their hands--just a belief system that they sometimes have to twist themselves into pretzels to justify.

[Barry]

[This was originally posted bypodfish. It was reposted by Moderator due to system difficulties. Click for more info.]

you're hiking and reach a fork in the path. You start down the right-hand path, then unaccountably change your mind and go down the other one. By making that decision, you’ve avoided a nasty encounter with a grizzly bear. involve a sort of information processing, a kind of thinking which is very different from what we usually think of as thinking, in that it occurs beneath the threshold of our conscious attention. <... SNIP....>
In the scientist scenario, various ideas you’ve been exposed to before are floating around in the netherworld of your unconscious, more or less randomly bouncing off one another,

Of course, if there wasn't a bear on the first path, and you're eaten by one on the left-handed path, you'd draw a different conclusion about the driving force behind your choice. And it's a big stretch to claim that there's anything at all random about the scientist's thought processes.
It's true that a tremendous amount of information processing happens in a way that we can't be consciously aware of. It's possible that pretty much all of it happens that way, and all we do is create plausible explanations of our internal processes when called upon to do so. I'm not convinced that trying to pin down certain mental processes as a coherent set known as "intuition" has any scientific validity, especially when you start trying to refine it so it doesn't include "prejudices, fears, desires, associations and projections".

[Barry]

[This was originally posted by Dixon. It was reposted by Moderator due to system difficulties. Click for more info.]

Enjoyed this post.

Interested to read about Dixon's past lives. The urge to proselytize has deep roots...

As I've often said, you can take the boy out of Calvary Bible Church, but you can't take the preacher out of the boy!

I'm always struck by the tyranny of any ideology, be it religious, political, or philosophical. Just as fundamentalists of any faith bend everything to fit their dogma, so too do rationalists.

I agree that these tendencies are universal, even in the rationalist community. We'll never be totally purged of these very human foibles. But, speaking as one who has been deeply immersed for years in both the fundamentalist community and the rationalist community, I'll say this: it's been my experience that the amount of "bending everything to fit dogma" within the rationalist community is waaaay less than in the fundie community. After all, many of the beliefs that define the fundie community are so poorly supported by any good evidence and so easily debunked, that just to be a fundie requires herculean feats of "bending". This is not so often the case in the rationalist community. Not that our rationalism is perfect, but at least we're committed to trying to be rational, and have a pretty good idea of what that means, which is emphatically not the case for most human communities, notably religious and dogmatic secular philosophies.

Or, to take another good example, anti-conspiracy theorists. I'm thinking of the JFK assassination, where there was an overwhelming body of evidence of conspiracy, but those who had a big stake for whatever reason in denying a conspiracy made a religion out of such denial, based not on fact but on conviction.

Agreed! I myself have found that in the skeptical community, there are many who equate conspiracy theory with crackpotism, as if claiming a conspiracy were some sort of paranormal claim. Of course, many (probably most) conspiracy theories are wrong, but there are important ones like the one you cite that are closedmindedly pooh-poohed by many skeptics. This shows the limits of their rationality, and is a source of frustration for me.

So too do rationalists when they set out to show how everything has a material base. The most important difference between a rationalist zealot and a religious one is the harm such beliefs do or don't do. I don't think atheists have blood on their hands--just a belief system that they sometimes have to twist themselves into pretzels to justify.

Hmmm...if you think atheism is a belief system that requires twisting oneself into a pretzel to justify, you must be a theist. Allow me to remind you that the burden of proof is on the claimant; if you can't adduce a compelling argument for the existence of some god, you don't get to criticize atheists for not believing in it. On the other hand, if you can make a case for some god, fire away; I'm all ears! Also, if you can actually cite some argument from an atheist which you consider twisted (and you ought to be able to, given what you said about atheists), I'd be interested in hearing that, too.

[Barry]

[This was originally posted by Dixon. It was reposted by Moderator due to system difficulties. Click for more info.]

Hi, Podster!

It's true that a tremendous amount of information processing happens in a way that we can't be consciously aware of. It's possible that pretty much all of it happens that way, and all we do is create plausible explanations of our internal processes when called upon to do so.

Sometimes I have intuitions, which seem to be a pretty much universal human phenomenon, regardless of whether we may differ somewhat on demarcation issues (i.e., exactly how we define the term). Other times, I quite clearly experience myself as consciously constructing a line of reasoning, which is different from intuition by definition.

I'm not convinced that trying to pin down certain mental processes as a coherent set known as "intuition" has any scientific validity...

It's simply a matter of defining our terms as precisely as possible so as to be able to reason clearly. If you feel my consideration of the topic lacks precision, okay, guilty as charged; a relative lack of precision pretty much comes with the territory when intuition, as opposed to, e.g., chemicals or starlight, is the topic. Note that I didn't claim to be presenting a scientific analysis of intuition, just a rational one.

...especially when you start trying to refine it so it doesn't include "prejudices, fears, desires, associations and projections".

Again, that's a matter of definition. I was distinguishing real intuition from things that often masquerade as intuition. I feel that such a distinction is important if we are to use intuition constructively with a minimum of needless problems. If you feel that the definition of intuition appropriately includes "prejudices, fears, desires, associations and projections", you and I differ on that, and I think you lose the benefits of making those important distinctions.

[Barry]

[This was originally posted by claire ossenbeck. It was reposted by Moderator due to system difficulties. Click for more info.]

I'm not convinced that trying to pin down certain mental processes as a coherent set known as "intuition" has any scientific validity, especially when you start trying to refine it so it doesn't include "prejudices, fears, desires, associations and projections".

I knew you were going to say that!

[Barry]

[This was originally posted by Dixon. It was reposted by Moderator due to system difficulties. Click for more info.]

Stop, Claire, you're killin' me!

[podfish]

Dixon][/SIZE]Sometimes I have intuitions, which seem to be a pretty much universal human phenomenon, regardless of whether we may differ somewhat on demarcation issues (i.e., exactly how we define the term). Other times, I quite clearly experience myself as consciously constructing a line of reasoning, which is different from intuition by definition..

I guess the part I'd take issue with (for sake of argument) is that "constructing a line of reasoning" is a fundamentally different way of reaching understanding than is intuition. Some mental activities benefit from conscious attention - like accessing or creating specific memories, though random memory access (daydreaming) happens all the time too; or engaging in complex sequential activities. You certainly have more control over the timing and quality of your ideas when you focus attention on something - but I still make the claim that there's not really any difference between the process of intuition and the process of conscious rational thought, outside the fact that you don't know how much time your brain has spent on a problem in the first case. And time matters...

[neil]

Dixon,

Like great thinkers before you, you put sensory perception first, as the primary way an organism can have “information” or “knowing” “about” its environment. This assumption rests on an even more basic assumption: that the organism is one thing and that “its environment” is another.

Microbes and plants do not have sensory perception, yet we find that their living is highly responsive to novel changes in environment. In some very basic way, their bodies and their environments may not be separate things and processes at all. Ditto for us!

All this has been hard to think clearly about because our usual thinking assumes separate things which then interact, fixed entities which enter into and last across change events, linear cause and effect as a fundamental given.

You rightly observe that our organism precisely processes a great deal of “information” without explicit thinking. How can we understand how it does this?

First, it is an assumption to think that what is processed is discrete "information"s. We find (we observe) only the result; we do not observe the processing itself, we do not observe "what" is processed, that is to say, we do not observe "what" goes into and makes up the processing event. Only retroactively can we reflect back upon "it" and say something about "what it was," but this "looking back and saying" is itself a further process and not the one in question. This further step is what makes the "what" and "it" and "was" which we then "know."

Second, I want to differentiate within what you lump together as “intuition”:

1. precision bodily behavior without forethought
2. habit
3. flash of insight, knowing or understanding about something
4. quick in-the-moment feeling about something
5. felt sense: a bodily sense of (about) a whole situation or question, which can function as the source of new meanings with broad relevance.

These terms need a lot of unpacking if we are to think clearly about them, and with them. The last one, #5, applies to Einstein’s experience in formulating his theory of general relativity. He said that for 15 years he had a “feeling” about what the solution would be.

Perhaps Einstein thought of this as “intuition” because neither he nor his culture at the time had the distinction “bodily felt sense” as a functional process. Certainly his was not simply a case of extant ideas “more or less randomly bouncing off one another until a meaningful connection” happened, as you suggest.

Rather, this “feeling” Einstein had for 15 years guided his work toward a solution by “talking back” to him as he worked logically. His logical moves toward a solution were each one some change in this “feeling, so that the process was like an ongoing zig-zagging interaction between the extant “feeling” and his specific attempts to solve the nagging problems of the physics of his day. Today there have been more than 80 studies on this kind of process: https://www.focusing.org/research.html

Only my #3 above (the flash of insight) and #4 (the in-the-moment feeling about something) would I maybe (and maybe not) call “intuition.” Much more needs to be carefully laid out about how the body can function in these ways. Having a term, like “intuition,” shouldn’t be the end of thinking. The term alone explains nothing, but only points to some function or process.

If we call #1 (precision behavior without forethought) “intuition,” then wouldn’t that mean that all animals live intuitively? And again, what does that really mean?

The function which we call “habit” applies across different kinds or levels of process, I think. But again, saying only “habit” does not explain what the process or functioning (which we call "habit") is.

You disparage reading philosophies, but real philosophy is the practice of cutting into and shifting the underlying assumptions so that thinking can do what it could never before do. It can be a blast!

Reading a powerful philosophy might just unstick the stuck tracking arm of your phonograph, Dixon. Let me suggest one: Eugene Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit, which I have been studying for nine years.

His main philosophical work, A Process Model (free download at https://www.focusing.org/process.html or hard copy purchase), profoundly shifts the ground of thinking (he says), or makes a new ground (I say, not to quibble).

Here are some of the basic requirements in this model (I’m quoting from page 38):

“Interaction first. The interactional event determines the individual entities (or the ‘slots’ for individual entities). Each functions ‘not as itself but as already affected by.’

"A model of time in which a past and an implying function in the present.

"Process events

"A nonlaplacian sequence [a process implies its own changing—ND]

"Many factors shaping one event.

"Units emerge, and can re-emerge differently.”


These are but a teeniest taste of the early chapters, which lay out basic terms and relations which apply throughout. This model can think clearly about what has always been the most difficult to think about—including the “intuitive” functions to which you referred, and, in evolution, the origin of novelty which natural selection then acts upon. (To hold that such novelty is random is poor thinking and only gives the creationists fuel for their crusade to further dumb down society.)

The later chapters derive behavior, feeling, perception, consciousness, self-consciousness, language and much more—as we’ve never before been able to think-into these capacities. It is careful, exquisite, intricate thinking, with enough logical reasoning for even you, I suspect.

In Chapter VII, Gendlin’s concepts for the evolution of language as a bodily development are a great advance—we gain a profound new way to think about what language-use is, how universals and instances form, what our human world is, and more.

Chapter VIII is a rich explication of the kind of process Einstein engaged in. (See above.)

Gendlin’s A Process Model is wider than (inclusive of) science. Among many things it does, it gives researchers and theorists new ways to approach the tough problems in their fields. The model makes-possible whole new lines of thinking and living, while taking away nothing. It is the first alternative model on such a basic level. The fundamental assumptions and relations are new in kind.

Having acquired some relative fluency, I’ve begun helping others to bite into Gendlin’s thinking. A new Skype/phone study group is forming. Interested Dixon? You can try it and see. Same goes for anyone. We are starting in Chapter I right now--going right down the throat of thinking.

Neil

[Dixon]

I guess the part I'd take issue with (for sake of argument) is that "constructing a line of reasoning" is a fundamentally different way of reaching understanding than is intuition. ...I still make the claim that there's not really any difference between the process of intuition and the process of conscious rational thought, outside the fact that you don't know how much time your brain has spent on a problem in the first case. And time matters...

Well, podster, we differ on that. The important difference between intuition and "constructing a line of reasoning" is this: when we've consciously constructed a line of reasoning, we have some pretty good idea of whether it makes sense, thus whether it's true. When we get an "intuition", it comes to us fully formed, with no apparent provenance, no support, so we don't immediately have a good idea as to whether it's true or false, or even whether it's a real intuition at all instead of one of those things (prejudices, fears, desires, associations and projections) that commonly masquerade as intuition. To affirm an apparent intuition as actually true requires that we do some conscious reasoning about it, constructing a line of reasoning that supports it, or else finding that we can't do so, and thus concluding that the intuition or whatever it was is probably false.

Of course, here I'm not talking about the sort of intuition we use when "unconsciously" driving or walking. I'm talking about the role of intuition in discovering philosophical or descriptive truths about the objective universe. In this context, setting intuition and "constructing a line of reasoning" side by side and talking about whether they're different or not misses the point--they're two parts of the reasoning process. As I said, intuition is a great source of hypotheses to be tested, not an alternative to conscious reasoning. Both are part of the larger reasoning process.

[theindependenteye]

I have to confess to having not read the initial article (I will, I will) or followed all the responses -- I've been in production mode and only sporadically human. But it's a fascinating topic, and I'll just add a few thoughts, even if they're irrelevant to the heart of the discussion.

I work as a playwright, stage director, and actor, also doing some puppet sculpture and stage design. I connect strongly with athletes talking about being "in the zone" and the incessant struggle to get there -- probably one reason why many writers have had problems with alcohol, because it *does* clear the way, for about ten minutes. Being very near 70, I find it much harder to work late at night, when I've normally depended on those bizarre gifts from the gods. Now, when I'm very lucky, something will suddenly come into focus -- a new solution to a problem, a radically different approach, a different way of inflecting a line -- right at the moment of waking in the morning. In a way I hate that, because it's not in my control, I've found no way to invite it, it just happens when it does. i can induce it more consciously sometimes by going out for long walks, putting the body into motion.

Of course you learn all the stratagems of getting the work done, the next page written, Scene 9 staged, etc., without that gift happening. As an artist ages, he gets stupider, but he also gets craftier, and the concept "fake it till you make it" becomes the 11th Commandment. Oddly, when I feel the most "creative" is when I feel least that it comes from me, but simply comes as a gift; when I can trace every little logical building block that I've carefully & brilliantly developed in its creation, I feel like it's just typing out a formula.

I'm fascinated by the suggestion, which I read in one partially-read post, that there are those rare times when our individualism stands aside and allows our oneness with the Grand Wallaby Concourse in the Sky to receive little burps of inspiration, which then, yes, need to be organized into a meaningful sonnet or sewage treatment plant.

Enough. Time for dinner, that lovely giving-in to someone else's intuition.

Peace & joy--
Conrad

[Dixon]

...you put sensory perception first, as the primary way an organism can have “information” or “knowing” “about” its environment.

Note that in my essay, I explicitly, if briefly, mentioned the possibility of extrasensory sources of information, although, even if that's possible, it seems clear that sensory perception is indeed the primary source of information about our environments.

This assumption rests on an even more basic assumption: that the organism is one thing and that “its environment” is another.

I insist that this is true, while also insisting that organism and environment are two aspects of a larger whole. Philosophically, I am a sort of monist; I believe that everything can be seen as manifestations of the One. But unlike some mystics, I don't make the mistake of assuming that the One is real while the separateness is illusory. Both the oneness and the separateness are real. Onesess/separateness are two sides of the same coin, just like Yin/Yang, up/down/, good/evil, etc. Such is the polaristic nature of the universe. We can productively look at organism and environment as separate things and as two aspects of a greater whole. Both views are accurate and reasoning from both perspectives is the most comprehensive way to go about it. I'll be dealing in somewhat more depth with issues of oneness/separateness and the polaristic Yin/Yang nature of things in upcoming columns.

Microbes and plants do not have sensory perception...

I'm dubious about whether this is true. In any case, it doesn't seem relevant to our discussion of what I'm calling "intuition".

All this has been hard to think clearly about because our usual thinking assumes separate things which then interact, fixed entities which enter into and last across change events, linear cause and effect as a fundamental given.

As mentioned above, I believe that this is one entirely appropriate way to think of things (along with, and balanced by, seeing things as part of a larger Whole). If you reject this way of seeing things (as separate), I believe you're only seeing half the story, as if trying to have up without down or Yin without Yang. Notice the separation you yourself are making in your mind: you divide the polarity of oneness/separateness into two separate things and try to tell yourself one of them isn't real. This contradicts your own expressed wholistic view.

Second, I want to differentiate within what you lump together as “intuition”:[Neil goes on to enumerate several types of experience which I had subsumed under the general heading of "intuition", and to discuss his notions about Einstein's mental process in terms of one of these.]

Thanks, Neil, for analyzing, in more detail than I had space for, some processes which I subsumed under the heading of "intuition".

You disparage reading philosophies, but real philosophy is the practice of cutting into and shifting the underlying assumptions so that thinking can do what it could never before do. It can be a blast!

I don't think I disparaged reading philosophies. If I did, it must have been tongue in cheek, though I do feel much of what's called philosophy is pretentious wanking. I do like philosophizin' though (can't you tell?). I used to tutor philosophy in my junior college days.

Reading a powerful philosophy might just unstick the stuck tracking arm of your phonograph, Dixon.

I'm not sure my tracking arm is any more stuck than yours or the next guy's, Neil.

Let me suggest one: Eugene Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit, which I have been studying for nine years.[ He goes on at length discussing Gendlin's philosophy]

I've been aware of Gendlin's work since the late 70s, when he was mentioned in my studies of psychotherapies. His idea of a "felt sense" was always intriguing to me. I can see how it's relevant to the issue of intuition. I never found time to get much into it, though.

This model can think clearly about what has always been the most difficult to think about—including the “intuitive” functions to which you referred, and, in evolution, the origin of novelty which natural selection then acts upon. (To hold that such novelty is random is poor thinking and only gives the creationists fuel for their crusade to further dumb down society.)

I insist that much of life is random (in the sense of being goalless, not directed by any planner). Your labeling that "poor thinking" carries with it a burden of proof. If you wish to make an argument for the existence of some a priori plan or goal which would replace randomness in the process of evolution (or elsewhere), go ahead. Many have tried; none, to my knowledge, have succeeded. As for the creationists, I'm not responsible for their idiocies.

Having acquired some relative fluency, I’ve begun helping others to bite into Gendlin’s thinking. A new Skype/phone study group is forming. Interested Dixon?

Yes, but not enough to find the time to do it. I'm not even finding the time for various other things that are more urgent, such as keeping up with the comments about my essays, LOL! Thanks anyway, and enjoy your studies. And thanks for your thoughtful response to my essay, Neil.

[Dixon]

Hi, Conrad!

I have to confess to having not read the initial article (I will, I will) or followed all the responses --

No need to feel obligated to read my stuff; I haven't gone to most of your plays.

I work as a playwright, stage director, and actor, also doing some puppet sculpture and stage design. I connect strongly with athletes talking about being "in the zone" and the incessant struggle to get there -- probably one reason why many writers have had problems with alcohol, because it *does* clear the way, for about ten minutes. Being very near 70, I find it much harder to work late at night, when I've normally depended on those bizarre gifts from the gods. Now, when I'm very lucky, something will suddenly come into focus -- a new solution to a problem, a radically different approach, a different way of inflecting a line -- right at the moment of waking in the morning. In a way I hate that, because it's not in my control, I've found no way to invite it, it just happens when it does. i can induce it more consciously sometimes by going out for long walks, putting the body into motion.

What you describe is similar to my process in writing poetry or other creative endeavors. And yes, much of it is what I'd call intuition. And it's true that some situations or states of mind are more conducive than others. For instance, I've found that the practice of "free writing", spewing out unconsidered material without judging it, helps to access unconscious material which can be very powerful. This could be thought of as a gateway to a type of "intuition".

Oddly, when I feel the most "creative" is when I feel least that it comes from me, but simply comes as a gift...

My assumption is that all my ideas come from some part of me, not from outside my mind (although the "raw materials" in my mind are largely made from what I've observed in the external world). The distinction I make is not between "from me" or "from other", but between upwellings of unconscious material, as in intuition or dreams, and conscious processes of reasoning, decision-making, etc.

...when I can trace every little logical building block that I've carefully & brilliantly developed in its creation, I feel like it's just typing out a formula.

My experience is different. Some of my pieces come more intuitively, while some are more thought out from the beginning. I don't feel that the latter kind are in any way lacking. Of course, using my own definition of intuition, much of the process of making specific decisions about what words/images/ideas to use is intuitive even in the context of very planned-out stuff--even my essays on critical thinking!

I'm fascinated by the suggestion, which I read in one partially-read post, that there are those rare times when our individualism stands aside and allows our oneness with the Grand Wallaby Concourse in the Sky to receive little burps of inspiration...

Or, as I would put it, the Grand Wallaby Concourse in Some Cobweb-Festooned Backwater of My Brain.
One of my favorite writers, Alan Moore, who I know you're familiar with, posits some transpersonal realm he calls idea-space, where ideas exist independent of anyone's mind, just waiting to be discovered by the enterprising writer, artist, or whoever. I don't happen to agree with him on that, but it's an amusing idea.

[neil]

Dixon,

Thank-you for your responses.

[Quoting myself here]
All this has been hard to think clearly about because our usual thinking assumes separate things which then interact, fixed entities which enter into and last across change events, linear cause and effect as a fundamental given.

By this I mean that when we do try to think carefully about something and try to explain it, we do so with the assumption of discrete things which then (already being those discrete things) interact (as those discrete things coming together or being together) and over time affect each other. This is how explanatory thinking goes on.

We can ponder "Oneness." We can have experiences of "Oneness." We can "know" that there is something right about this "Oneness" way of having. But when we want to explain something carefully, "Oneness," as a lone concept, doesn't give us much footing to think into the complexity which any real event or situation always is.

By necessity then, it seems, thinking has needed to begin with concepts of discrete entities of some kind, and then work out the relations: this affects that, how, and so forth. And this works fine for some purposes, like building and making things. But when we want to think about the living that is typing (or reading) just these words now, if we want to think how making (something) changes us, if we want to carefully and specifically explain how someone could come up with a whole new theory like general relativity, or how microbes not only develop novel resistances to specific novel poisons we make to kill them but also how some (I've read) are apparently developing an increasing capacity for developing novel resistances--in other words, when we need to think about living process as it actually goes on (and as distinct from how a human observer sees it)--then starting with discrete parts and functions falls short, too, but in a different way than "oneness."

So, neither just "Oneness" nor just "separateness." Agreed.

But does saying "both oneness and separateness" change each of them, or do they retain their respective powers (as concepts, ways of thinking)? Does this become one new way to think, or is it an alternating back and forth between two extant ways? Is your "both" simple combination, or does it make something new possible? Can you reason using your "both"? If you can, can you show that?

[theindependenteye]

>>>Hi, Conrad!
>>>No need to feel obligated to read my stuff; I haven't gone to most of your plays.

How dare you! Though I guess you have that in common with about six billion other humans.

>>>I've found that the pracitce of "free writing", spewing out unconsidered material without judging it, helps to access unconscious material which can be very powerful. This could be thought of as a gateway to a type of "intuition".

Yes, very much so.

>>>My assumption is that all my ideas come from some part of me, not from outside my mind (although the "raw materials" in my mind are largely made from what I've observed in the external world). The distinction I make is not between "from me" or "from other", but between upwellings of unconscious material, as in intuition or dreams, and conscious processes of reasoning, decision-making, etc.

Agreed, and certainly some of these things come from an unconscious "reasoning" process that's working on a problem that's posed in the conscious realm.

>>>Or, as I would put it, the Grand Wallaby Concourse in Some Cobweb-Festooned Backwater of My Brain.
One of my favorite writers, Alan Moore, who I know you're familiar with, posits some transpersonal realm he calls idea-space, where ideas exist independent of anyone's mind, just waiting to be discovered by the enterprising writer, artist, or whoever. I don't happen to agree with him on that, but it's an amusing idea.

[Dixon]

We can ponder "Oneness." We can have experiences of "Oneness." We can "know" that there is something right about this "Oneness" way of having. But when we want to explain something carefully, "Oneness," as a lone concept, doesn't give us much footing to think into the complexity which any real event or situation always is.

Right. If there were only the Oneness, not manifest in the myriad forms Taoists call "the Ten Thousand Things", there'd be essentially nothing to think and, in any case, no one to think it. There's a lot more meat to chew on in the complexity of things. The more we analyze larger systems into their component parts, the more detail there is to think about. And then of course, there's the other side of the analysis coin: synthesis--putting it all together again, and understanding that, in a sense, it never was separate except insofar as we conceptualy abstracted it out from the whole.

But does saying "both oneness and separateness" change each of them, or do they retain their respective powers (as concepts, ways of thinking)? Does this become one new way to think, or is it an alternating back and forth between two extant ways?

In practice, I don't think there's a difference between the two. It's like an optical illusion; now you see it as two silhouetted faces, now you see it as a chalice. You can't see it both ways at once, but by integrating the learning you get from seeing it both ways alternately, you get a more comprehensive, wholistic understanding of what it really is. This learning through alternating between the two views results in a new, more comprehensive, emergent view.

Is your "both" simple combination, or does it make something new possible? Can you reason using your "both"?

See above.

If you can, can you show that?

I thought that's what I've been doing!

[starseed]

Humans most likely experience the difficulty of describing "oneness" because we may seldom have the experience of it, unless we can access it through meditation, "being in the zone," breath work, psychotropic plants, mind altering drugs, or by sudden spiritual transformations.

I had the experience of living in a state of "oneness" most profoundly for 3 years during a kundalini crisis or awakening. It was a life-threatening state because it exposed me to numerous spiritual worlds we seldom have access to, and I was unable to explain most of it to anyone, especially my family. It is a state that is meant to evolve humans spiritually & physiologically that has no real context for western minded people. I had no cultural context for it, so was left to fend for myself in a 'do or die' situation.

In the presence of these many spiritual influences that did not resemble anything that I had previously known through study, belief, cultural teachings or casual exposure to, it was shocking to my senses and my being on all levels. To sum it up, it was absolutely terrifying at first, because in my mind, none of this existed to my knowledge.

My extremely limited background included having been raised a very strict Catholic, with expectations of becoming a Maryknoll Missionary nun. At the time I considered myself a non-practicing catholic. There was some reason I couldn't name that disallowed me from being involved with the church. (Now I know why.) I had also read a great deal about the Edgar Cayce readings, and had applied this information from the health readings to support the health of my children and family.

That being said, the kundalini crisis was brought about in a dream state, while I was taking a nap one spring afternoon. The energy at the top of my head exploded like the 'big bang', when I re-entered my body after traveling too far out in my dream. The force of the energy explosion catapulted me across the bedroom, interrupting a severe epileptic seizure that I witnessed myself having, as I descended closer to my body to re-enter through the base of my spine.

As I stood there upright, fighting with my mind to control the shock and burning I was feeling, I immediately noticed that my body was quickly disintegrating into a sparkling mass of cellular light and then almost coming back together again reforming as a physical body. . .but not quite. I wasn't solid. I knew I was in deep, deep trouble.

Turning around to look toward the center of the room, each "separate object" in the room (furniture, bed, etc.,) was 'alive' with a completely interwoven energy field made up of a precisely constructed network of 'cellular' light. Each tiny, individual "cell" of light, was strung together on a 'string' (line) of light, that comprised the net. The net that was woven into the physical object was responsible for holding the shape of the object intact. I was able to feel each individual cell of light as an individual cell. Each was alive and aware of all the other cells of light through an intelligence of heart. This profound sense of heart intelligence in each cell, expressed a unity of purpose that was at one with all other forms. There was nothing in my room, my body, or outside as I looked out the window that was not contained by an interwoven web of "intelligent light cells," all at one with the "other."

Although the 'things' were man-made material objects, (i.e., the bed, dresser, chair, shoes, clothes, walls, etc.) each interwoven web of cellular light was conscious of its shape, function and energetic interaction with the "other" due to the oneness of heart intelligence.

These networks of individual cells of light, that I experienced as One living intelligence of heart consciousness, held my attention for a very long while. It was an extremely humbling state of awareness that has taken me many years to be able to describe in words and until recently I wasn't so sure I'd be able to even write about.

I work with these principles in my practice as a doctor of indigenous medicine and have recently begun teaching how it is possible to bring about various types of healing and regenerative capacities for humans, animals and our environments.

There are many different styles of communication that all life forms have. Everything has intelligence because the Heart of Creation is the spirit or consciousness that animates everything. What we call 'inanimate' objects, don't move in the manner we are used to seeing, but their spirits are certainly animated and able to participate in life with us, to help bring this ailing world and ourselves back into balance if we are willing and able to explore another way of participating. . .by including the intelligence of our hearts and becoming a little more humble, playful, open to diversity & a healthy sense of wonder.
Phyllis

[Dixon]

Phyllis, thank you so much for taking the time to articulate your quite profound experience for us. Having had some experiences that are similar in some ways (mostly through the psychedelic path), I can appreciate the effort it takes to articulate experiences that are even more ineffable than our everyday experience! You seem to have done a good job of it.

The part I resonate most with is your mentioning of the Oneness of everything. When I had the experience of Oneness and afterwords verified logically that it is apparently true--rather than just being one of those things which seem true when we're in a certain mental state but may in fact be mistaken--I was transformed. I'll be addressing various aspects of Oneness in upcoming columns.

I can also relate to your experience of having one's mind/heart expand out from a conservative, patriarchal religious base into a more cosmic perspective. My history is Mormon and then Christian Fundamentalist rather than Catholic, but the experience is similar, I think.

FWIW, and in the context of a discussion of a column on critical thinking, which is what this is, I can't agree with some of your other conclusions, such as "It is a state that is meant to evolve humans spiritually & physiologically..." (meant by whom?).

Also, your attribution of consciousness to inanimate things is a claim I've encountered frequently but have never seen any good evidence for. Likewise the "unity of purpose that was at one with all other forms". In fact, I suspect that latter claim may be self-centered, as I'd be willing to bet that you think the purpose that "all forms" agree on happens to be what you want to happen!

You also say "...to help bring this ailing world and ourselves back into balance..." Are you sure it's not already in balance? Maybe our experiencing horror and distress, and our judgment that there's something "wrong" with the universe, are part of the balance! Maybe the ultimate imbalance is our thinking that there's an imbalance?

Keep in mind that these powerful states of consciousness can yield illusion as well as profound truths. A feeling that, e.g., everything is conscious, no matter how strong and inspiring that feeling may be, doesn't mean it's true. It's an interesting hypothesis given to us by an amazing experience. That's why we have reason--to figure out which of these hypotheses is true and which ones are just strongly-felt illusions. So I would hope that you're not too attached to any one particular interpretation of the meanings of your profound experience and, in the spirit of "becoming a little more humble, playful, open to diversity & a healthy sense of wonder" (your words), will consider other possibilities.

Thanks again for your contribution, Phyllis!