That Slippery Intuition

What we mean by words is, ultimately, intrinsically personal—and especially so when it comes to “objects” that are beyond the reach of the outward senses. One such word is intuition. Prodded in Kant’s direction by a post today on Siris (link), I came across this fascinating quote (source):

Our nature is so constituted that intuition with us never can be other than sensuous, that is, it contains only the mode in which we are affected by objects. On the other hand, the faculty of thinking the object of sensuous intuition is the understanding. Neither of these faculties has a preference over the other. Without the sensuous faculty no object would be given to us, and without the understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions, blind. Hence it is as necessary for the mind to make its conceptions sensuous (that is, to join to them the object in intuition), as to make its intuitions intelligible (that is, to bring them under conceptions). Neither of these faculties can exchange its proper function. Understanding cannot intuit, and the sensuous faculty cannot think. In no other way than from the united operation of both, can knowledge arise.

       [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Introduction, translated by J.M.D. Meiklejohn]

[In the Original German:]

Unsre Natur bringt es so mit sich, daß die Anschauung niemals anders als sinnlich sein kann, d.i. nur die Art enthält, wie wir von Gegenständen affiziert werden. Dagegen ist das Vermögen, den Gegenstand sinnlicher Anschauung zu denken, der Verstand. Keine dieser Eigenschaften ist der andern vorzuziehen. Ohne Sinnlichkeit würde uns kein Gegenstand gegeben, und ohne Verstand keiner gedacht werden.Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind. Daher ist es eben so notwendig, seine Begriffe sinnlich zu machen (d.i. ihnen den Gegenstand in der Anschauung beizufügen), als, seine Anschauungen sich verständlich zu machen (d.i. sie unter Begriffe zu bringen). Beide Vermögen, oder Fähigkeiten, können auch ihre Funktionen nicht vertauschen. Der Verstand vermag nichts anzuschauen, und die Sinne nichts zu denken. Nur daraus, daß sie sich vereinigen, kann Erkenntnis entspringen.

This fascinates me because, in that first sentence, Kant defines intuition in a peculiarly narrow way. And for me, anyway, that definition, by itself, explains Kant’s view of reality—not least that we can only ever have access to appearances (phenomena) and never to the real (noumena).

The English version then made me curious what Kant actually wrote in German . The word he used for intuition was Anschauung—although Intuition is, and was then, a common German word. Our dictionary (Cassells) defines Anschauung as view, perception, observation, and contemplation, in that order, and finally also as intuition. Etymologically intuition derives from the Latin for  “looking at” (which is also what the literal German Anschauung means), but when I stand before a mural in a museum, Brigitte doesn’t approach me and ask “What are you intuiting there?” The word has come to have another meaning for us, with a contrarian etymology: it is a message, a tuition, from within. Thus it is the soul’s own grasp of something—which need not be sensory in character at all. Indeed, intuition is a kind of inner knowledge; it is always a feeling quite stripped of any visual or sensory modes.

Kant himself asserts that “all of our knowledge begins with experience.” Well and good. But he limits experience to the sensory whereas experience includes, for us, ranges of reality the senses know nothing about. If you stay on the reservation, you’ll never see what is beyond the borderzone.

Layers

I delight in analytical discussions and sometimes wish I could engage in them myself—but the right subject never occurs to me. The Maverick Philosopher here comes to mind; his essays are often delightful. Sorting this I realize that some matters are suitable for the analytical approach; others escape it. My own concerns always stray beyond the factual regions, one of the realms where Reason is at home. I like to read essays, for example, that try to sort bodies and souls logically—to take a factually marginal subject, and marginal because objective data are unavailable; but an argument concerning that subject does not fit the analytical category very well either. It fades off into the collectively unprovable, private, experiential sphere. One can gain interior knowledge here, but “making a case” based on logic is impossible. And why would anyone want to? In that context arises the generally ignored (perhaps it also resists analysis) subject of adequacy. Why are some people seemingly constitutionally unable to discern the transmaterial? Those who can, by contrast, do not need analytical arguments to persuade them—although reading them might be fun. They know it in their bones.

Reason is also comfortable in the realm of concepts. There the factual may be ignored, but definitions rule. Given consensus on a definition, analysis can flourish—and if the definition is contested, that only opens even wider vistas for debate. But concepts are ultimately private labels for clusters of more or less crystallized experience—more or less crystallized because we constantly redefine them based on our experience. Nothing “coordinates” or governs these redefinitions. Concepts also hold quite different ranks in the heads of different people.

The concept of being is a case in point for me. It plays an enormously important role in major branches of philosophy, but shorn of any attributes beyond the bald fact of existence, it is meaningless for me; and with attributes added, it becomes unnecessary. Life, by contrast, is very interesting, and in my own modes of thought has a real conceptual role to play quite apart from specific instances where it might manifest. When I use a word like real, the meaning ranges way, way beyond the word’s etymological root of res, thing. The genuinely real for me is infinities beyond the thing.

Layers and levels become visible here, translucent, to be sure. The analytical here forms two: the fact-based beneath the conceptual. Under those layers lies the common speech of ordinary experience in which a kind of muddy order reigns but contradictions are a common weed; beneath that lies mute feeling. And above the analytical shimmer other layers of mind freed somewhat of the turbidities of this, our current, realm: the poetic and, above it, the mystical. At those levels the sound of debate is but a muted rustle.

Faith

Faith is a difficult word to define—when you think about it. My old (1967) Webster’s seems to agree. The most interesting definition of it is 2 b (1): “firm belief in something for which there is no proof”; that is a commonly held view of it in a culture where the only things that serve for proof are physical observations. The Latin root it fidere, to trust, which Webster’s never uses by itself; but one must ask: When I trust, what are my proofs? Interior sources of proof have no standing in our culture because all internal experiences are derived, in turn, from brain functions; brain functions from physical actions of neurons, etc.

But ignoring all that, we can distinguish, nonetheless, between different roots of faith: external or internal. If the faith is in a learned transmission, the faith then resides in the transmission, thus it is a trust in the words or reports of other people that have reached us by an immensely long route of passing from mind to mind—and part of that proof is the very fact that so many people had passed it on. If the faith arises from a conviction that comes from my own intuition, it is a fact I cannot for the life of me describe. But it is very strong. And only that of which my own intuition thus approves do I accept as real proof. The physical? It sometimes gives me that feeling—but by no means always; and least so if the physical is a stand-in from something internal in minds other than mine. Transmission has drawbacks, not least that large numbers of people very often believe in things that are quite dubious—and hold such beliefs for many centuries.

The action of the will is not, in my opinion, engaged in faith. Faith must come first—and from the intuition. But will is involved in this structure in other ways. It may take effort to examine reality—to deepen understanding. For intuition to operate, it must be enabled to see. Another is to follow that intuition. I may not act in accordance with my own legitimately held faith. To do so, when my inclination is to ignore it, the will becomes involved. But to assert, by will, something I don’t inwardly believe is merely a gesture of some sort. It is not, to echo the existentialists, authentic.

The Organ of Intuition

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows naught. [Blaise Pascal, Pensées, §277]

We all have hearts, guts, and brains—also “heart,” will, and reason. I put that “heart” in quotes to signal what Pascal had in mind—which was not the cardiac muscle. In the modernist view only physical organs exist. Heart, will, and reason are epiphenomena, thus lacking hard reality. Epi- here means secondary or derivative. The heart is linked to love because lovers’ hearts beat faster as they think of one another or embrace; guts means will because our stomachs tense when we’re determined. The intellect is linked to brains by locational proximity: the eyes and ears that feed the brain—and the mouth that expresses the brain’s productions—are located in the head—which is mostly brains beneath a skull.

Human tradition knows better, it seems. We have spiritual powers already present before the fleshly organs even form. The organs are the means by which such powers manifest in a physical reality.

It pleased me to discover today that in Chinese traditional medicine refers to zàng-fǔ organs, thus functionalities of a transcending sort. Zàng being yin, fǔ being yang, shadow and light, the receptive and the creative. In that scheme the heart belongs to zàng and is associated with the soul. In Matthew 13, which begins with the parable of the sower, Jesus, explaining seeds that fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them, elaborates that case by saying (13:19): “When any one hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in his heart; this is what was sown along the path.”

Sown in his heart. Which has its own reasons. And is the first organ of communication with the divine. For me the heart is the organ of intuition—and has a privileged role. To be sure, our attempts to isolate the innate powers of the soul are always dangerous—unless very carefully conducted to gain understanding. They cannot be really disentangled unless they become disarranged. Intuition, will, and intellect must be in harmony and well developed; then the seed lands in “good soil” and bears much fruit; and here too, the results will vary—hundredfold, sixty, and in another thirty.

When we discussed the parable this morning, Brigitte hoped for thirty; I said I hoped for a thirteen-fold gain—competing in humility. She said, always ready to defend: “But that’s not an option Jesus presented, Arsen. I just go with the choices I have.”

What Can’t Be Mechanized

The religious life is a good candidate. But when I think about that, I realize that the religious life is just one aspect of individual soul development. Learning can’t be mechanized either. My meaning for mechanized? I mean repetitive behavior, following rules, repeating formulae, willing the truth of doctrines as opposed, say, to penetrating to their core meanings. The worst kind of mechanization, of course, is tribal behavior—where the faith is just a label of belonging to an “us.”

Excessive use of abstraction is a particularly dangerous habit in those spheres where the genuinely human is the core—provided that my own conviction is correct, namely that we belong to a much more sophisticated, subtle, and free order as souls than we do as embodied souls. It is a mistake to think that people who belong to one of the great religions, especially those with lots of ritual, are uniformly following rites and nothing else is going on. As there are no two snowflakes that are identical so also no two Catholics, Baptists, Buddhists, or Muslims are identical either, or any two adhering to yet some other faith—or none; vast differences separate individuals.

To the contrary however, all athletes train the same way and underpinning all good bridges is genuine engineering functionally identical, whether in their design computers, slide-rules, or just plain reasoning and experience guide the construction. The physical and soul realms have radically different characteristics. The soul escapes all mechanical constraints; you can put the harness on, but it won’t hold the horse. That is both a blessing and a problem. If only we could find the magic phrase or the right sequence of motions…

There is a big difference between the channel that brings the water and the water that it brings. All religious battles are about stonework, embankments, depth, shape, decoration, and such—the engineering of the channel. Interesting subject, to be sure—but the water is the same in all and what it’s all about. But while the human body needs the ordinary water and knows precisely how to use it, individual reception of the higher water, Grace, is much more subtle and complicated. We thirst for it but don’t know what we thirst for. In that realm, where mechanics have no rooting at all, the process of development is invariably and damnably subtle. We have to develop enough as individuals—whether in a system or outside it—before it begins its work in us. It requires learning; but how that process actually takes place is a great mystery, despite vast Babels of learning applied to education all over the world—as, seemingly, we get ever more stupid.

The Grace of Recognition

Part of existence for all of us—it comes sooner or later to all—is a feeling of abandonment. Here I mean a certain you might say existential kind of feeling. At times like that we oddly yearn for a sign out-of-the-blue, as it were. And it must come, in that particular way, not through the usual routes of ordinary attention. It must be unusual. It must counter a feeling I’ve always expressed to myself by “a stranger in a strange land.” That biblical phrase—no Heinlein didn’t frame it though he used it as the title of a novel—is not exactly on target in its own context. Let me reproduce the context by way of showing the peculiar power of the highly compressed Biblical narrative. Here is Exodus 2:16-22:

Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters: and they came and drew water, and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock. And the shepherds came and drove them away: but Moses stood up and helped them, and watered their flock. And when they came to Reuel their father, he said, How is it that ye are come so soon to day? And they said, An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds, and also drew water enough for us, and watered the flock. And he said unto his daughters, And where is he? why is it that ye have left the man? call him, that he may eat bread. And Moses was content to dwell with the man: and he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter. And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.

So much for the phrase, which, for me, echoes something deeply embedded in a Gnostic kind of consciousness that sometimes rises.

Now the odd thing is that quite minor happenings, thus meaningful coincidences—which by their nature are both, meaningful and yet pure chance—serve to relieve the sense of strangeness whereas, surrounded as we might be by caring others in our own environment, that feeling of abandonment might still be present. The existential confirmation almost requires that it be untraceable to causes. Thus neither family, friends, nor public recognition serve the purpose of providing meaning—because we can easily trace the sources of these supports to a mutual kind of give and take. True love serves this purpose—when it first dawns. It then appears miraculous. Celebrity is vanishing if our head is screwed on right. Then we see that we are merely mirrors in which others see themselves. And complete strangers who come to understand us well, with whom we feel a kinship, rapidly enter, for functional purposes, the role of friends and family.

But here and there an odd event, very often of the most minor kind, lifts our moments of abandonment because we then get a hint that we might actually matter beyond the realms of mere cause and effect.

Reading—or Not Reading—Philosophy

I can never seriously attend philosophers. That would require reading them carefully and slowly, cover to cover, accepting the rules of their thought. I’ve only ever made the effort here and there—and in those few cases, finally, only with a kind of grim determination that I apply to certain stains—the kind that only ultimately yield to steel brush and razor blade. Thus, for instance, I once made that effort reading Sartre’s opus, Being and Nothingness, in English, and then, in that grim mood, even acquiring a French version to check those passages that struck me as incoherent; and they still were. More recently I read Whitehead’s Process and Reality, after which my main reaction was that all this effort for this pathetic conclusion appears to have been a waste. And, of course, I’ve read often huge chunks of many other philosophers just to keep the secondary commentators and summarizers honest. An almost tangible savor, odor, or aura of the philosophers’ personalities reaches me in about a hundred pages or thereabouts, which, in combination with the content, is most valuable and informative—and lacking in secondary renditions. I’ve also read, in full and many times over, the works of people classified as philosophers who, however, transcend the subject. They might be better labeled as theologians or, put more generally, students of the ineffable. And no. I’m not here using other phrases for “metaphysics.”

The best way to explain my own behavior to myself is to assume that all works minimally contain intellect and intuition. The more the ratio favors intellect, the less the work will draw or hold me. But intellectual content is also necessary to focus my attention. Pure clouds of intuition repel me just as surely as pure cathedrals of abstraction. Intellect is sometimes present with large doses of passion, such as I find in Schopenhauer. But passion isn’t interesting in this context.

One night, long ago, at a party, I spent a good part of it in intense conversation with a man. When the time came to break up, he asked: “By the way. Are you a mathematician?” I had to laugh. Quite the contrary, I said. He said: “Well, you certainly think like one.” Then I to him: “You must be one yourself.” And he nodded.

The mathematician must have an intuitive relation to numbers. Numbers leave me cold—and their relations, one to the other, strike me as self-evident if I spend enough paralyzingly boring time to trace them. As stellar a math great as Bertrand Russell agrees with me. And what applies to numbers also applies to abstractions stripped down to empty concepts.

Today, following some links into the nineteenth century, as it were, I encountered “a discussion of the problem of what makes the unity of an individual thing.” The example given was the unity of a lump of sugar which holds a multiplicity of properties. And these are? Sweetness, whiteness, and hardness. This is the sort of thing that, when I encounter it, makes me roll my eyes.

He Sold More than Razors

My reference here is to William of Ockham (1290-1349), famed for the principle of parsimony, usually rendered as Ockham’s Razor, which says that we should always prefer the simplest hypothesis able to explain the available facts. I came across Ockham in a conscious sort of way a couple of days ago, pondering the subject of the unity of the soul or self—and discovered that he asserted that intellect and will were a single unity. He is not alone in this. Among scholastics Duns Scotus held similar views; Aquinas said that “will and intellect mutually include each other,” but he set the dominant tone in scholasticism and gave the nod, the priority, to intellect.

Interesting, all of this. I’ve concluded long ago, based on little else than the sovereign power of intuition—and the lame sort of feelings I always get when abstractions begin to multiply and take on life—that the soul is a single unity in which intellect, will, and feelings are all facets of one thing; by feelings here I don’t mean sensory experiences but inward motions of the self—joy and revulsion, attraction and repulsion. The more I learned of Ockham—and it’s difficult to find things—the more I felt myself in sympathetic company.

Mortimer Adler, whom I admire, opted to omit Ockham from the Great Books of the Western World, a reliable source I managed to get cheaply long ago. (People buy such works with best intentions, but when the kids leave home, out they go, never read.) Internet summarizers of Ockham’s thought opt to focus on matters of modern interest, of which the soul does not happen to be one. My source of knowledge is therefore principally the Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion, W.L. Reese, editor, where, for instance, I discovered that Ockham held man to be “a complete rational being, incapable of inhering in anything and not supported by anything” [p. 629, emphasis added]. Ridiculous although that sounds, bound as we are to our bodies, I’ve long, long felt the same intuitive certainty in the very face of all contrary evidence.

Perusing that article, I noted that Ockham’s views on matter and form are also more simpatico. He saw matter simply as matter (“body”) and form as its arrangement (“structure”) —which strikes me as much more pleasingly parsimonious than the ultimately Aristotelian notions of prime matter and form together somehow fusing to make substance. Prime matter must be conceived of as pure potential lacking all actuality, and form a kind of agency of actualization. The energy involved in this fusion is never seemingly addressed.

I also lean in Ockham’s direction in seeing intuition as the genuine source of knowledge. The Aristotelian/Thomistic division of intellect into a passive (read matter) and an active or “agent” (read formal) duality—rejected by Ockham—also strikes me as carrying the concept of substance-dualism too far—especially if you think of the soul as the real thing and intellect as one of its powers.

Ockham’s thought developed as it did, it seems, because he was intent on simplifying scholasticism. If I were intent on such a project, I too would be tempted to attack substance dualism and to examine such strange notions as, for instance, that God creates essences and then, in a separate act, gives them existence. Labors along these lines made Ockham a nominalist (“universals don't exist independently of minds”). It makes sense in Ockham's context, but when it comes to universals, my own intuition leans the other way. I plant myself in the realist camp (“universals have real existence”) because it seems to me that that something, the something that makes a horse a horse, simply has to have an independent existence somewhere. I can't help myself. I see real patterns out there. I don't “abstract” them from anything. I see them. I deal with the weirdness of “form” in the Platonic-Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition by thinking of that idea as intention. In the greater cosmos, the intentions are divine. In the narrow, human, I see a lot of universals that spring from human intentions.

My survey courses in college omitted Ockham too. Thus it was fascinating to meet the maker of the razor late in life. Much of what he appears to have said resonates. I like his notions of the soul’s unity, at least as I find it expressed in the singleness of will and intellect. And I like his reliance on intuition.

Inspiration

Second in a series on Revelation and Scripture

Let me continue on this subject and, specifically, look at “inspiration.” As I’ve noted in the first of this series in the last post, revelations are said to be inspired. The first task then would seem to be to examine if inspiration has real standing in human experience. I think it does. And I’ll offer a theory of it.

But let me start with a working definition. A good point of departure is to look at ordinary inspiration as the word is used in the arts and in discovery, not least in science. This word, as usually used, refers to insights. They are almost always sudden and spontaneous; the artist disclaims being their source, thus as having “thought them up”; her or she will, however, acknowledge that a certain preparation came ahead of the inspiration, not least a readiness to receive, a listening attitude. We find many examples of this experience in the creative professions: every artist will agree. Inspirations also have an energetic character. They wake us up, delight us, they amaze us. Recognizing them as integral parts of experience, that experience, always, is a clear and immediate intuition that now we “have something,” also that that something didn’t come from us.

This said, opinion the splits. Some will argue that inspirations do not, repeat not, come from any outside source; to the contrary, they are the end result of subconscious brain activity. This view is legitimate enough, but if brain activity is viewed as purely naturalistic—thus if combined with a denial of mind as a separate reality—it forces the conclusion that many of our most astonishingly creative insights are the consequence of random chemistry. We’re forced to a decision here because we don’t really understand these processes mechanically—if they are purely brain-based. To assign them to the subconscious amounts to substituting one word, easily associated with brain activity (a word like reflex, which also is), for another word, inspiration, which hypothesizes some kind of higher mental realm. In our direct experience inspirations have a creative aura that puts them in the mental realm; they are exceedingly complex on examination and always surprising; they don’t resemble unconscious outcomes, like reflexes, which are adaptive rather than creative.

A decision is needed. Hence what follows is addressed to people who feel spontaneously drawn to the view that mental operations have an immaterial grounding. Those to whom the materialistic explanation sounds innately more reasonable won’t see any merits in the hypotheses I’m about to offer—despite the fact that what I propose also adequately explains their leanings.

My own theory of inspiration might be put this way. Our selves, our souls, belong into another and higher region. Even in these bodies, our mental operations are therefore grounded in another region or dimension. We don’t draw on its energies much, certainly not in our mundane activities, but when we are engaged in creative ventures, our use of higher energies increases and the filtering processes that keep it more or less inaccessible and certainly invisible get in the way of our creative endeavors. The listening stance that we assume when we’re trying to produce arts, understand difficult problems, understand the physical world beyond the kinds of actions we have in common with chipmunks, in creating arts of all kinds—in words, sounds, or visions—that attitude of listening is testimony of our effort, somehow, to reach a dimension native to us although we’re unaware of it except as motions of our will. Here I would stress two things. One is that active involvement in a problem often interferes with its solution, especially when we hit a snag. Inspirations often arise precisely because we turn aside from the problems, release them from active consideration, when we let our minds wander, or sleep, or engage in relaxation. While we thus remove some of the interference, some element of our mind or self is able to contact a more energetic realm, our native dimension. There the elements of the problem are resorted, new linkages form, and visions that don’t reach us in waking states appear. The solution, more or less complete—but by no means fully worked out—then suddenly presents itself in time. The Aha! moment follows. Sometimes we remember participating in this process while we are asleep but dreaming.

This theory fits experience rather well. It explains why inspiration sometimes reaches us suddenly and, at other times, flows like a river. In the first case it was blocked, had to be allowed to cumulate; in the other our personal openness to a higher energetic streaming was greater and therefore every note was perfect and every stroke of the brush brought delight.

I note that these entries require more space than I like to devote to a single blog entry. Therefore, to go on, I’ll need another day.

The Accounting or Mapping Department

Words not only clarify, they may also obscure. I can’t help believing that what the schoolmen called Intellect is but the accounting department of the enterprise we call the soul. The counting house is important, to be sure, but the store or factory matter more. It seems clear to me that, as humans, we gain knowledge not merely and exclusively from sensory experience, which the medievals and moderns both assert; on the contrary, I think we also get knowledge from invisible dimensions. In both cases our knowledge is direct; our understanding flashes up or slowly dawns. I hold that the intellectual operations of abstraction and reasoning arise a little later—an eyewink or much labor later—as we engage in ordering and relating our direct and spontaneous grasp of reality into larger patterns of coherence.

Another way to put this is that the intellect produces maps, but maps are not, as it were, universals. We think of universals or essences—perceptions shorn of accidents, so-called—as in some manner superior to particulars. I see that as an assertion that maps are superior to the landscapes they depict. I’m very fond of maps; I’m devoted to patterns of all kinds; they’re indispensable for orientation but, ultimately, we never visit maps; we visit places.

The interesting fact here is the iterative functioning of what I view as the higher power of the soul, its intuitive grasp. The intellect is a servant; reason is a tool. Intuition first understands the particular and then, once intellect produces its patterns, intuition understands and grasps those in turn—enriched by both but never deceived by what is what: the landscape is the landscape and the map’s a map.

More on "Primacy of Intuition"

Intuition “flows” or “bubbles up,” “flashes,” “dawns,” “strikes like lightning,” and—sometimes “nags” as conscience. All but the last of these words suggest waters or energy. Indeed I think of intuition as an influx of something energetic from the higher level of reality. Now in this modern age our almost reflexive tendency is to formulate experience in naturalistic term. It feels more real to think of intuition as an energy, thus as something impersonal. In other times, and in still active traditions, we see the same experience rendered in quite another form. We speak of “the voice of conscience,” for example. The artist feels “inspiration” coming from the Muse—that lady surely conceived of as a person. We think it sophisticated to label such things as anthropomorphizing.

I come from a demanding religious tradition, Catholicism. It takes reality seriously, insists that action has real consequences, here and beyond. In my early schooling we were invited to see our selfish urges as temptations whispered in one ear by the devil; our conscience had the other ear. The devil was recruiting future inhabitants for hell; the guardian angel strove mightily to save our soul. These images are vivid, sensory, and therefore effective ways to teach. The abstract formulations—and energetic or liquid analogies—are somewhat less compelling but more suited for the adult understanding. I’ve waxed eloquent on the symbol of the spiral just recently. In that imagery intuition might be imagined as an attraction upward, a kind of negative gravity. (It is, by the way, put almost like that by Beatrice in Dante’s Paradise. The soul “falls upward” toward heaven as naturally as water falls into the depths at a waterfall.) Temptation is the “pull” of the depths.

But I am wandering afield. If intuition manifested in sharp, precise words heard in the ear, all would be clear. It manifests as feelings, images, and perceptions of patterns. So does temptation. We supply the “little voice”—and it is an interpretation, an interpretation in both cases, be it of higher inflows or of feelings produced by hormonal reactions to stimuli. The two differ in taste, as it were; tastes are difficult to render in concepts, but attention to our experiences develops the palate, as it were. The intuitive has a certain joyous sharpness—even when it is a “dark” intuition; temptation is always heavy in flavor (as we speak of certain wines, for instance); one feels the pull of the flesh, the greed for dominance.

To state simply what I’m groping to make palpable: Intuition is primary, but it needs interpretation. The images, feelings, and sensed patterns must be properly understood. The intuition will always be right, but we can make a hash of it nevertheless by inattention or excessive attention to it, by twisting its meaning or direction. Art supplies endless examples. The same inspiration produces both kitsch and the sublime.

Scrupulosity—obsessing about one’s own sinfulness—is a good example of the abuse of conscience. Naturally, under the influence of Modernism, it is labeled as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It can also be seen as sloppy interpretation of intuition, of conscience. The consequences of sin on the one hand (damnation, etc.) and of the self’s importance on the other are exaggerated, deformed, and produce a downward spiraling of obsessive self-absorption. Here, as in everything human, a comprehensive approach is vital. Intuition must be consulted about judgment—and judgment applied to intuition. I assign primacy to intuition in this sense: we don’t produce it ourselves. Nor do we produce our own desires. But intuition comes from above; most desires rise from the body. In the use of both we must apply ourselves correctly.

Now the human is the most maddeningly perplexing reality. I use the word “interpretation” above—and now feel the urge to interpret interpretation more comprehensively. We interpret an intuition in two ways: intellectually, thus as something meant or intended; and by action, thus by doing or abstaining to do something, by the exercise of will. A popular phrase comes to mind: “Which part of NO don’t you understand?” When we ignore a nudge of conscience, we interpret it by action.

The Boundaries of Experience

One of the brute facts that balances out the primacy of intuition is that our perceptions are bounded by experience. Let me illustrate this. Some people have extraordinary experiences; those who lack these and merely hear about them by report, possess very limited means of judging the veracity of the experience itself. But let me make that sharper. I don’t want to limit that word, “veracity,” to mean “speaking the truth.” Suppose I accept that the individual really did have the reported experiences. But even then I can wonder whether or not—in the absence of physical proofs—the interpretation of the reporter would be the same as mine would be if I had the experience. I’ve noted time and time again in life that my interpretation of an event can radically differ from that of someone standing next to me. When it comes to paranormal experience, the only analogue to physical proof is to have “been there,” thus to have experienced the same thing. Lacking that we’re left with analyzing the basic pattern that the experience offers. We can examine it in terms of consistency, comprehensiveness, probability; by analogy to other patterns; and so on.

A famous case is that of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the man who conversed with angels and visited both heaven and hell. The book to read is Heaven & Hell. It was published 251 years ago, written in Latin, then translated—thus it doesn’t have a modern flavor. And it is tough going—but not because it’s difficult. But an awful lot of it is moralizing, a good deal of it is abstract reasoning in which you have to buy into the concepts Swedenborg offers. Here is a paragraph to illustrate what I am saying:

In heaven, there are two distinct loves—love for the Lord and love toward the neighbor. Love for the Lord dwells in the inmost or third heaven; love toward the neighbor dwells in the second or intermediate heaven. Each comes from the Lord, and each constitutes a heaven. In heaven’s open light, the way these two loves differ and the way they connect is clear, but it is quite hard to see this on earth. In heaven, “loving the Lord” is not understood to mean loving His character, but loving the good that comes from Him. Loving the good means intending and doing what is good, out of love. “Loving the neighbor” is not understood to mean loving a companion’s character, but loving what is true that comes from the Word. Loving what is true means intending and doing what is true.

We can see from this that these loves differ the way the good and the true differ, and associate the way the good associates with the true. But this will not fit comfortably into the concepts of a person who does not realize what love, the good, and the neighbor are.

In the margin next to this I scribbled: “Empty concepts.” I’m not exaggerating when I say that much of H&H is filled with paragraphs like that. To extract meaningfully descriptive material requires extraordinary patience. To get beyond the abstract order and the preaching that fills Swedenborg’s best known work, the best thing to do is to read his Spiritual Experiences, two volumes of what were originally diaries. But here one encounters very little order, structure, or context—because here Swedenborg was making notes for himself, often very elliptically: he knew what he meant, and he left out precisely those details that someone who “hadn’t been there” needs to know. You become convinced that he did have experiences—also that they were far from the pristine order he hammers out in H&H. The sense you really have is of a man who is suddenly opened to a very strange, complex, vast reality that he has difficult understanding and struggles to master while, in a way, stretched across a border.

Knowing how crucial experience is—and that it is the only genuine proof of such realities—my approach is to stick closely to the ranges that I can reach, trusting that, mastering the problems of my reality as best I can will prepare me well for what lies ahead—when the Reaper finally comes.

Souls Sort Themselves

There are three forms of culture: worldly culture, the mere acquisition of information; religious culture, following rules; elite culture, self-development. [Hujwiri, Revelation of the Veiled]

Suppose that we are guided by our own intuition. That this is so follows as the consequence of two facts. One is that the physical world is harsh. If we violate its rules we will be punished. In that dimension guidance is simply feedback. The second fact, as I’ve endeavored to show in the last post, is that intellectual arguments concerning higher matters, the metaphysical, are never compelling in and of themselves because they can’t be proved—as physical facts can be. But to orient ourselves, we must rely on something. That something concerning matters that can’t be proved (and are not harshly enforced by nature), is our own judgment. And our judgment is guided by a feeling from within: this sounds true; or, this sounds phony.

Let me be precise. Intuition, as the word itself implies (“tuition,” “tutoring” from “within”) is not something we do. It is something we experience. After an intuition is received, something else must follow. It is our agreement or disagreement. In other words, we can act contrary to our intuitions too. When the matter is in the area of knowledge, we can deny the knowledge or act contrary to it. When the intuition is the judgment of an action, thus in the moral sphere, we can override it. Hence “conscience,” in the sense that Catholicism uses that word, is intuition in one of its modes. The presumption here is, one, that we are guided; and, two, that this guidance isn’t our own or, if it is, it emanates from a higher aspect of ourselves.

This suggests that if we correctly understood and invariably followed our intuitions, the world would be paradise. What makes life “interesting”—in the sense of the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times!”—is that our condition, the Church Militant of which are now members, is developmental in character. We’re moving up a spiral or, refusing to do so, sliding into an abyss. The downward movement is not interesting but must be acknowledged to exist. We live side by side with others. Most are moving up, some are willfully sliding down. The intuitive “hearing” of individuals varies; some are more and some less sensitive to this inflow; sensitivities, furthermore, can be enhanced by effort or dulled by ignoring the guidance. Intuition is not only accepted or ignored; its strength and effect are also influenced by innate intellectual and physical characteristics which appear to be randomly distributed. The intuition is there, but it may be more dimly or powerfully felt; it may be understood swiftly by some, slowly by others. Whatever the innate disposition, the will still plays a crucial role. The super-bright, for instance, may understand the intuition immediately, but if they don’t want to follow it, they will be very clever in rationalizing it away. Therefore the strength of the intuition is not as important as the direction the person has chosen to follow. It’s a free universe. The soul is sovereign however it may be enabled or delimited by the characteristics of its vehicle.

This then sets the stage for the suggestion that souls sort themselves out by using intuition and will. It is this sorting which produces the three cultural forms that Hujwiri uses to show the hierarchical arrangement of humanity in this realm. The foundational level is physical—where straightforward understanding of the ordinary world suffices; the religious sphere is on a higher level, but behavior is guided by semi-mechanical arrangements, rules. Here a higher dimension is already intuited, but conformity to it is expressed in the language of law, motivated in terms of reward and punishment, and expressed in ritual forms. The highest level is also the most free. Here the intuition is very strong and willingly followed. People at various levels of development find comfort in the culture that feels best. Not surprisingly, those on the lower levels cannot understand and therefore disparage the practices at the levels above. The highest level, however, is marked by understanding of the lower. It’s a good self-test to examine one’s own views, say, of religion, science, or mysticism. You’re certainly not a member of the spiritual elite if you bad-mouth legitimate science or ridicule the true believers.

The sorting process no doubt continues after death. And concepts like hell, purgatory, and heaven are mere labels, very roughly hewn, of other clustering of souls on the other side of the border zone. The sorting over there follows the inclinations of the soul. A way to illustrate that is to say that those who, in this realm, are seeking the depths will feel much more comfortable in hell than anywhere else…

* * *

Ali Hujwiri (990-1077) was a Persian Sufi, teacher, and writer. He was born in what is today Afghanistan. He wrote Revelation of the Veiled, also rendered as Unveiling the Veiled, in Persian. The quotation cited, which I took from Idries Shah’s The Sufis, should be rightly understood. Hujwiri, like all Sufis, believed that the highly developed individual will not only understand but also practice the wisdom available at all three levels of culture.

The Primacy of Intuition

One reason for the high profile of science in our culture—apart from supposedly fathering our technology—is that, ultimately, no metaphysical assertions are capable of demonstration. Our wealth, thanks to fossil fuels, has temporarily eased our sufferings. Hence our intuitive faculties have been distracted. The small change that science offers, and in the grand scheme of things that’s all it is, suffices for our ordinary lives.

An example of a metaphysical assertion may be drawn from the first line of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” This assertion contains several others within it. One is that God exists. Others are that matter did not always exist, that it came into being at a certain point in time (“in the beginning”), and that an agency produced it out of nothing. Contrary claims—e.g. that the universe has always existed, that were is no God, that all that is is matter, or that the universe is God, etc.—are also metaphysical assertions and hence impossible of demonstration.

What serves as an alternative to proof is reasoning, but if we look at the products of reason, we find them to be empty. They rest on abstract ideas. These, carefully defined, are linked to one another and examined for logical coherence. All we get is formulae of which the terms are suspended in the air. We can understand the ideas—toss them back and forth in play—but we cannot demonstrate that they correspond to anything real. An example? Let’s take Aristotle’s definition of substance. Substance is a duality of matter and form. But this idea requires proof of unformed matter, what Aristotle called prime matter, and of disembodied form. We cannot find such things anywhere. The unbeliever cannot be forced to admit that substance, as here defined, exists by simply being shown prime matter and forms awaiting to be actualized.

Similar problems also plague our most cherished conception, namely that everything has a cause. The problem here is that causes cannot be tidily disentangled from the flux of reality. If we don’t separate them out, however, everything that happens is caused by—well, by everything that happens. The damage to the lamp post down the street was caused by the truck that hit it. Really? What about the driver’s drunkenness? And why did the driver drink? What caused a tavern to be opened so close to the driver’s last stop? Was it the incompetence of the restaurateur who occupied that space last? Why was he incompetent? What caused the current owner to post a sign saying, “Drinks at 1/2 price 5 to 7”? We could go on and on, of course. Modern scientific thought has drifted from the old-fashioned cause and has substituted for it concepts of probability. All change is thus due to random motion; but what we call “cause” is just a way of saying that certain outcomes are much more probable than others. Cause, once the property of agencies, has now become a servant in the house of Chance.

This sort of thing has radiations. Thus the various proofs for the existence of God were built on the older conceptions of cause and motion. Taking the last first, the proof from motion relies on the a priori assertion that nothing moves unless moved by another; a first and unmoved mover is thus necessary because an infinite regress is intolerable. But an infinite regress is only intolerable if we grant the first premise (“nothing moves unless…”). If that is true, yes. Motion then has no beginning, and the presumption is that it had to have had one. Indeed, the very definition of motion has, hiding within it, the denial of infinite regress. But that’s not immediately obvious. The problem is that we cannot demonstrate the first premise. What we observe is motion in everything, down to the hydrogen atom, and below. This motion—thus the motion or energy of hydrogen’s sole electron—seems to require no “fuel” or “push” at all. Nor does it gradually dissipate. Let’s turn to causes. If causes are impossible to package or quantize or separate out from the flux, the argument for an uncaused cause, God, also falls apart. Here, too, the argument depends on the notion that discreet, serial events are accurate definitions of reality. The contrary assertion is that everything has always moved and, indeed, motion is an aspect of reality; this motion clusters in various ways and has always done so, producing what we naively call “causes.”

Notice here how abstract concepts drive the metaphysical project. In one case we have an abstract definition of motion as the temporary property of things; hence they need to acquire motion from something else. This leads to the unmoved mover and the uncaused cause. In the other case, motion is ascribed to reality from the git go, as it were. Other arguments for God’s existence rely on concepts of order, teleology, law, or self-existence versus caused-existence. In none of these cases can we discover tangible proofs for the abstractions. All we find are hints.

This then leads to my premise today: Higher knowledge requires a faculty that transcends reasoning. Reason cannot give us answers to why questions. To the extent that it does, it relies upon the quiet collusion of our intuitive faculty. We have to grant standing or status to certain abstractions—such as they cannot obtain from demonstration or from logical reasoning. We do so, when we do, because we find the abstractions “intuitively true.” This in turn means that higher truth cannot be imposed; logical demonstration can never force us—as physical demonstration can. More importantly, the knowledge obtained will depend on the development of the intuitive power within us. It cannot be acquired by the usual brute means of hard work, memorization, and exercise—as reasoning can be.

For these reasons debate on religious or spiritual subjects has no merit whatsoever. The higher life is a realm of freedom. The compulsions present there must always come from within.