Genius and other oddities…
All the things that truly matter: beauty, love, creativity, joy and inner peace, arise from beyond the mind.
Eckhart Tolle
Logic plus Occam’s razor had led me to the conclusion that Higher Mind must exist, and might/must? even be closely connected to our Intuition.
Could it be that this ‘Higher Mind’ operates through ‘the unconscious mind’, and somehow contacts our normal Body-Mind via Intuition, bringing Direct Knowledge as it does so? Wacky stuff, but then so is quantum physics, and everyone takes that seriously. And it’s only wacky if you can prove that Idealism is definitely wrong. And it isn’t. It’s definitely right, by logic, being the sole alternative to irrational Materialism. So maybe the guess above is correct.
Bearing that in mind, it would seem that Intuition is some sort of external input. However, as above, the etymology of the word suggests that intuitive learning comes from within (‘inner tuition’) which implies that our Inner Self, our unchanging ‘I’, either already knows the answer, or that it has immediate access to it. So, putting the two poles together, could it be that the Lower Body-Calculator-Mind (Intellect) has constant access to the Higher Know-it-All-Mind (Intuition), which is our constant synthesiser of meaning from data… and which occasionally offers us unexpected ‘insights’ or ‘hunches’: ie, little drops of Intuition? (Is this the link between inspirational-right-brain and regulatory-left-brain?)
This would not be too strange to Yogis and Sufis and the Esoteric world in general. And the various Exoteric Religions all recognise some form of apparently external mental input, which they attributed to angels, saints, demons or God. Kant and many other philosophers were interested in this. In fact, only Materialists had (and have) no time for it.
§ Carl Jung was keen on the reality of Intuition. Freud seems to have been hostile.. which is not surprising. Einstein thought that it was the only thing that really mattered.
As far as I can see, it is Intuition that makes sense of our daily world for us.
Genius
‘Genius’ is what you are called if you gain enough insights via Intuition.
As per my ‘barramundi’ experience above, there is ample evidence for insights arriving when the Lower Body-Mind Intellect is switched off or distracted, allowing the Higher Intuition-Mind access. It’s as if our constant internal chunter is blocking input from the Higher.
§ The ‘still small voice’ comes to mind here. Coincidence? And the very principle of meditation is to ‘still the mind’ to allow access to something else… something ‘higher’. There is even a powerful phrase in the Bible: ‘Be still and know that I am God.’
If you can staunch that chunter, important things sometimes happen: the mathematician Henri Poincaré solved a mathematical problem in a flash of Intuition after spending ages focussed on it, then relaxing to go on a trip.
§ In fact he ‘realised’ that ‘An automorphic function is one which is analytic in its domain and is invariant under a denumerable infinite group of linear fractional transformations.’ Quite.
And it is well known that a relaxing bath can serve as a distraction which allows the Intuition to make itself heard. Many scientists are clear that their work is inspired by a hunch. Alfred Russel Wallace suggested the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection before he had any data to prove it.
§ In fact it’s hard to conceive of any new Hypothesis that doesn’t begin as a hunch: an Intuition: a sudden moment of association: a connection made: a sudden ‘Maybe, if…?’, arising maybe while poring over data; maybe while feeding the ducks: maybe after ‘sleeping on it’. Richard Feynman, the Nobel physicist, was clear that Hypotheses begin as ‘guesses’ (ie, connections intuited but not yet supported).
The phrase ‘I’ll sleep on it’ is not a metaphor. ‘Sleep’ is the best known example of Lower Body-Mind being distracted or disabled for a while, thus allowing Higher Intuition-Mind to peep round the ‘doors of perception’. There are dozens of examples of artists and scientists waking up with the answer to a problem, or an inspiration.
§ Albert Einstein: Dreamed he was sledding down a mountainside, approaching the speed of light. He saw the stars refract into a spectrum of unearthly colours. This experience led him to the principle of relativity: ‘I knew I had to understand that dream, and you could say and I would say, that my entire scientific career has been a meditation on that dream.’
Auguste Rodin: Dreamed pictures of his finest sculptures in advance.
Friedrich Kekulé: Was dozing and dreamed of snakes. ‘One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes.’ This vision gave Kekulé the circular (later hexagonal) shape he needed to define the structure of benzene.
John Lennon: Said Across the Universe came to him lying in bed with his wife, who was talking, and suddenly the first line came to mind. He described it as being seized by something which would not let him sleep until he had gone downstairs and completed the lyric. (Not exactly ‘a dream’, but a state of semi-distraction.) ..and
Paul McCartney: Awoke with the music to Yesterday in his head. He thought he’d heard it somewhere else for quite a while. Let it Be came from a dream as well.
Mary Shelley: Had ‘a waking dream’, which led to her writing Frankenstein.
Dmitri Mendeleev: Dreamed that chemical elements are related to each other in a manner similar to octaves in music. This led to his Periodic Table.
Elias Howe: The inventor of the sewing machine: he could not think of how to get the thread and needle to work together until he had a dream of a bunch of ‘natives’ dancing round, jerking their spears up and down. The spears had holes near the tips.
RL Stevenson: Was subject to vivid nightmares. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde occurred to him in one of them.
Wolfgang Mozart: ‘I always dream music. I know that all the music I have composed has come from a dream.’
Vincent van Goch: ‘I dream my painting and then paint my dream.’
Leonardo da Vinci: ‘Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the mind while awake?’
We might add statements by Watt, Newton, Picasso, Raphael, and perhaps not surprisingly, by Milton and Blake.
Freud called his worldview ‘scientific,’ as his premiss was that knowledge can come only from empirical research. But this premiss is not itself based on scientific research! It is actually an assumption to claim that all knowledge comes only from research and that no knowledge comes from any other source. All the evidence above suggests that research is certainly not the only way to gain knowledge. It can come via dreams (ie, a sort of ‘revelation’), and other modes of partial mental dissociation. Perhaps the precise opposite of Freud’s premiss might be nearer the truth: that Intuition, the Hunch-Deliverer and Synthesiser, might be the only way that anyone ever knows anything.
§ Perhaps we should separate ‘knowledge’ from ‘ideas’. Perhaps ‘knowledge’ (facts) does come only from research, while ‘ideas’ (making connections between those facts) come only from Intuition, arriving when the straight-down-the-line Intellect is disengaged: when right-brain takes over from, or engages with, left-brain.
‘If the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.’ Enrico Fermi, physicist.
But you have to be open to the significance. A contrary result, or an anomaly, is a beacon lighting the road ahead: but only to those with unblinkered eyes who have no Dogma to defend.
Precognition
Science finds precognition entirely unacceptable, as do most of us. After all, what does it say about the nature of time, and our being, and the future? If things can be foretold, they must already sort-of-exist, must they not?
§ …and where does that put our free will? Our very identity? Are we just acting out some mad pantomime? If so, who is directing it? A mad, or worse, a bored God? Nobody wants to feel he’s a puppet.**
Not much S/scientific work has been done on precognition, but there was once a famous study done on train crashes.
In the 1950’s WE Cox suggested that some people somehow avoid trains which have accidents. He compared the number of passengers aboard 28 trains involved in accidents with the number of passengers in the same scheduled trains a week earlier, and trains on the same schedule a few days after the accidents. He discovered that there were significantly fewer passengers on the crash trains than on the same trains over the weeks before and days after. He suggested some form of precognition would account for the statistical blip. As precognition tends to be anecdotal by its nature, and hard to verify too, it’s very hard to pin down, although many of us have experienced it in a feeble sort of way.
§ Dr Rupert Sheldrake, the biologist, has done experiments on these lines, including the Hypothesis that some dogs can tell in advance when their owners are coming home. See Seven Experiments that Could Change the World.**
There are a lot of premonitory dreams on record. Here’s one famous one that Abraham Lincoln told his wife just a few days before his assassination:
‘About ten days ago, I retired very late. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream.
There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break?
I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The President’ was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin!’ Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream.’
Lincoln was not the only statesman who had intuitions concerning his own future. Winston Churchill commented at various times: ‘I believe I am watched over. Think of all the perils I have escaped.’ (1898); ‘It is not meant for me to be killed. My future is in other hands. When my time is due, it will come. In the meantime, I have lots to do. Don’t worry.’ (1931); ‘There is someone looking after me besides you, Thompson (bodyguard). I have a mission to perform. And that person will see that it is performed.’ (1940). Later Churchill wrote ‘I felt as if were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial’.
Curiously, Hitler had similar views on his destiny and invulnerability. During WW1 he had a dream that made him leap to safety, just before a shell landed, killing everyone else in his trench. A decade later, in Munich, he unaccountably ended a speech early and left the venue. Thirteen minutes later a bomb exploded. During WW2 an anxious aide tried to get Hitler into a shelter during an air raid. Hitler said ‘Don’t worry. Nothing will happen.’ After the 1944 briefcase bomb failed to kill him, he said ‘Fate has saved me for my mission. I must do what I must do.’
Overall, there were more than 40 attempts on Hitler’s life, including an American attempt to bomb him from the air, in a Berchtesgaden carpark. His car had a puncture, three minutes from the bomb point.
Hitler claimed that he was ‘a sleep-walker on the way Providence dictates’ and ‘living in a dream’, and more than once when a great decision had to be made, he said: ‘We must hurry. My time is short.’
He relied on his ‘intuitions’ increasingly, and with spectacularly disastrous results. He had no faith in meteorologists, for example, claiming that ‘What we need are men gifted with a sixth sense who live in and with nature’. He thus dispatched millions of men in summer uniforms to freeze to death in a Russian winter, and hastened the defeat of his own regime. Why? Well, that’s another story. No space here, alas.
***
If we accept the idea that we are essentially Intuitive Beings, we can get a firmer grip upon such otherwise odd effects as vibes, and vibes might or must have something in common with ghosts, it seems to me.
§ I suggest that Intuition is what enables us to perceive the vibes of a certain place. Of course, before Intuition can integrate the vibe into our general world-view, there must be a mechanism whereby the outside vibe could be detected by our sensory system. Vibes seem to have locations, in a place or a thing. The questions arising are: how do they come to be in that location or thing, and how do they actually impinge upon our physical being, before Intuition gets to work on them? Might it be a question of tuning in?**
‘Everything connects’, I was discovering. It was this flurry of connections that led me on. Truth cannot be paradoxical; therefore things which are not paradoxical and which also inter-connect may be Truth. So keep going…
***
While writing this passage our first calf was born. He struggled to his feet, staggered about, then butted his head against his mother’s side. She nudged him round to her udder, where he butted again. This serves to get the milk flowing. But how could he have been born knowing he had to do it? ‘Instinct’ we say, but if so, how had it been passed on? By his genes, Materialists say. But genes are mindless chemicals. How can they instruct a naive newborn to butt its mother’s flank, then her udder, and to then latch onto a teat?
Even odder was the fact that the mother, a vegan of the most pedantic sort, somehow knew that she had to eat her own placenta. I could not believe it, but she did, one endless glutinous gulp at a time. This is also ‘normal behaviour’. How does this ‘instinct’ get transmitted? A calf has no background to learn from; nor has the new cow-mother. How do they know to butt, or eat their own body? A sort of collective ‘species memory’ is suggested, I would say, plus a means of selecting one particular item from that memory and delivering it to the local point of action: ie the brain of the cow-mother, which then takes over and sets the chops a-chomping. Another hopeless challenge for a Materialist, but another fascinating puzzle for an Idealist.
§ Rupert Sheldrake’s notion of ‘morphic resonance’ may one day prove to be the solution here. Check him out in any of his books, especially perhaps A New Science of Life.
So where had I now reached?
Mind definitely influences body via dreams and hypnotism and, it was now clear to me, in an absolutely fundamental way via Intuition. But how does it do this? What rational explanation might there be? My previous reading had led me to the point where I knew I really ought to hold my nose and delve into even murkier waters.
The Occult
OH NO !!!!!!!!!!!!!
My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all
Stephen Hawking
The Church is wary of ‘The Occult’, partly because it sees it as a threat to its own power and partly because it thinks it should remain ‘occult’, while Materialist Science dismisses it on principle, as it apparently requires non-Material elements to have real independent existence… and anyway, the whole idea is silly.
But is it? The word ‘occult’ is related to ‘occluded’, meaning ‘concealed’ or ‘hidden’. ‘The Occult’simply refers to a supposed hidden body of knowledge.
‘Is this stuff interesting? If so, please tell two other people. Thanks. CG.’