Edited, with emphasis added, from a comment in response to a recent post; comes this valuable analysis by Michael Dyer:
...Intuition paradoxically strikes people as "woo woo" or mystical or dodgy in spite of the fact that it is a sense you use all the time.
It's how you drive your car, walk, pick up on social cues make 90% of your daily practical judgements.
I weep when I think of the years of education I received that focused on getting me to doubt my intuition.
You need some intuition because, like every other sense. it is touched by infirmity and has to be trained. But the focus of my education honestly pushed it to the point where it gave me, basically, spiritual OCD.
There's an interesting talk I heard from a catholic priest who said that devils have the most influence over your imagination and the least over your intuition.
Intuition isn't feeling or emotion - that's another misconception - it's basically your minds eye. It can be deceived like everything else, but throwing it away is about comparable to blinding yourself because eyewitnesses in court cases can be confused about what they saw.
Note added: I would say that modern devils focus less on the imagination than they used to, and more on perception and reasoning; by means of the pan-global linked bureaucratic system which has extended deep into human living. This excludes the spiritual and intuitive; and defines what is 'valid' in public discourse.
"Spiritual OCD" -- a very helpful concept!
ReplyDeleteWe should be careful with this idea, I think we can easily get perception / intuition and true spiritual insight mixed up.
ReplyDelete"Intuition" in the sense you are using it is essentially precognitive pattern recognition a.k.a. "perception". The brain is constantly trying to find patterns in information received from the outside (and inside!) world and integrate them into a coherent model of the world. This occurs continually and automatically, but slowly -- changes in our intuition often require extended training, much like the analogous training of our motor skills.
Cognition has access to a subset of the pre-processed outputs of this pattern recognition system. These outputs form the contents of our scope of attention and are the basis for our conscious subjective experience.
From the perspective of The Adversary, both the perceptual and cognitive systems are vulnerable to subversion, but in different ways. The cognitive system can be fed lies in the form of misleading language and distorted images, leading to immediate wrong conclusions and actions. The Mass Media certainly does this. However, the Mass Media and educational system now have enough access to the average person's experience to begin corrupting their *intuition* directly. If a person is exposed to systematically biased nonsense long enough, their perception will be "conditioned" to see false patterns and ignore true ones. Even the seemingly "direct" physical senses can be compromised this way!
Modern cognitive science has studied the human perceptual system long enough that some of the heuristics it uses have been figured out and "weaponized" by marketeers for various political and business purposes, very few of which are friendly. Fixing one's "spiritual OCD" / overemphasis on cognition will not protect you from subversion of your perceptual / intuitive systems.
Our primary defense against all of this -- true spiritual insight -- relies on getting information *directly* from *outside* the physical universe, from the True Self / True Mind. The Adversary has no access to this information channel, the best it can do is distract the consciousness from paying attention to it. A crude gauge for how well connected someone is to this "clean" channel is how creative they are: an enlightened person can bring in lots of new information from the "outside", while a corrupted person is largely trapped in patterns of thought and behavior imposed by the System and is thus predictable.
-- Robert Brockman
@Unknown - I don't agree with this - except that we should always be 'careful' about everything; but intuition is no more hazardous than alternatives such as obeying the official leadership of the mainstream churches.
ReplyDeleteBut I think perhaps you misunderstand the nature of intuition as I am describing it - because I certainly don't mean precognitive pattern recognition.
To understand *exactly* what I mean would probably require getting to grips with Rudolf Steiner's Philosop[hy of Freedom (or word-searching intuition on this blog, perhaps).
Intuition in the sense I mean cannot be corrupted because it is divine, it is God within us, it is the thinking of the real self. The problem is rather to ignore the massive noise and distraction and superficial personality aspects; to get access to intuition; also to know when we do have access.
ReplyDeleteBC: "But I think perhaps you misunderstand the nature of intuition as I am describing it - because I certainly don't mean precognitive pattern recognition."
Ok, good. I am still concerned that Michael Dyer is getting the two mixed up:
MD: "Intuition paradoxically strikes people as "woo woo" or mystical or dodgy in spite of the fact that it is a sense you use all the time.
It's how you drive your car, walk, pick up on social cues make 90% of your daily practical judgements."
What Michael Dyer is describing here is normal perceptual and motor learning, not intuition in the spiritual sense you (BC) are describing. "Gut feelings" are usually precognitive perception, still not spiritual intuition. They are still very valuable in that now The Adversary has to compromise both cognition and perception simultaneously, but they are not a foolproof defense. Spiritual intuition in the sense of the inner divinity is quite different from conditioned sensory or motor processing.
BC: "Intuition in the sense I mean cannot be corrupted because it is divine, it is God within us, it is the thinking of the real self. The problem is rather to ignore the massive noise and distraction and superficial personality aspects; to get access to intuition; also to know when we do have access."
Yes, this is exactly the situation. When we have complete access to this spiritual intuition The Adversary is powerless.
-- Robert Brockman
I certainly didn't expect to see my name in my favorite blog aggregator this morning but there you go!
ReplyDelete@RobertBrockman To clarify, I refer, if I understand it correctly, to "common sense", understood as a sense. Like I said everything in a man is subject to abuse or corruption and God may allow us to get all kinds of things wrong for various reasons, but what I'm reacting against is the attempt to blind this faculty altogether.
From both Christian and secular sources there is an overemphasis on creating doubt. Those who do it from good motivations are trying to induce humility and this is fair and right as far as it goes. Reasoning has to be trained and many things seem one way on the surface but may actually be quite otherwise. There are also those who do it from bad motivations, trying to create confusion and relativism, because there is no purely "logical" argument against solipsism, for example, just a strong sense that it's insane. If you can blind that sense you can render all instinctive moral revulsions inert. On the internet it's also where you see the aspergery impulse of new atheists and others because they can always demand more evidence than is possible to provide because having lost proportion and "common sense" there's always room for doubt. Can you prove you're not hallucinating from a hospital bed right now? Without intuition, I know I can't.
As a matter of practical wisdom, intuition is the most used and valuable faculty. Not saying it can't go wrong, but it's the only channel that enables us to act from a place of imperfect understanding. Your intuition, I may go so far to say, may be factually wrong, but I think it's perhaps less likely to be morally wrong. When a decision has to be made in the heat of battle it's the sense that tells me what decision I need to make. To work in full of course requires the grace of God and the indwelling Holy Spirit. Gun to my head, I think it's the meaning of the proverb of Solomon where he talks about not leaning on your own understanding but trusting in God to direct your path.
Robert Brockman, precognitive typically refers to precognition -- the extrasensory apprehension of future events. You seem to be using it here to mean something like "not yet fully cognitive in nature" -- roughly equivalent to subconscious. Is that in fact what you mean by the term? I want to be sure I understand what you're saying.
ReplyDelete