Anomylos

How ironic.  What we call communication (read: common unification) bears the MO of division and distinction.  Words.  Language evolves nuances like connotation to protect against this confusion, but these themselves are functions of differentiation.  Further, most of our tools of clarification serve more often to crowd the table than to organize it.  One man’s derailleur is another’s cognitive paper jam.  The only solution at this point is to cultivate a means of inform-ation from the inside out, therefore transcending this arduous journey of fragile goods.  I am referring of course to intuition.

Lest this derailleur send your mind irrevocably into irrelevant territory, let me attempt to clarify what I mean by this abstract word.  It seems to carry connotations these days which limit it to the realm of emotion, interpersonal matters, right brain functions, and things on which logic and reason hold little or no grip.  But rather than categorizing it as if it were a world apart from logic and deduction, let us consider it more as an alternate route to the same destinations; a voice easily confusable with its myriad imposters in the mind, yet whose message is utterly flawless, as long as it is recognized rather than searched for.  Such a claim is wont to be seen as idealistic or starry-eyed, yet the very fact of the word proves its existence: it is the mind’s name for something which by its very nature transcends, eludes, and sometimes even subverts the mind, the vessel and commander of words and symbols, because intuition dispenses with symbols and deductive process and operates solely in the realm of truth, qua actual, factual existence.

Let me pause here for an etymological aside.  Very interesting histories of these words contribute to an oft-overlooked illumination into the mystery of What We Mean, in various senses.  Firstly: That intuition attends to truth rather than symbol illuminates the connection (and modern contrast) between act and fact. Whereas today we tend to imagine facts as static, objective bits of information, fact, in the 1530s, signified more fluidly an action, even connoting an evil deed, or a fact we are reluctant to acknowledge or confront (hence the later expression “the facts of life” which first meant any ominous truth and later came to mean the gory details of human reproduction, but I digress).  Minus this connotation, Latin factum “event, occurrence,” lit. “thing done,” comes from facere “to do” or “to make,” so we seem to be looking at a noun which refers to a verb, or to action itself, a philosophically suspect process by which we attempt to statically define (and thereby extract from time) time’s inexorable element of movement and change—which quite possibly illuminates the fundamental irony at hand here! Interestingly enough, we may cross over here to a parallel phenomenon regarding the word intuition, which is of course the mind’s indicator for that which is known without indication.  Intuition comes from Late Latin intuitionem “a looking at, consideration,” from in- “at, on” + tueri “to look at, watch over.”  This last translation requires, for English grammar, a superfluous “at,” which in the Latin is added for emphasis in the form of in-, indicating greater intensity of looking.  It is not done from an observer’s position, but “at” or “on” the object of observation: direct, immediate cognition (co- “together” + gnoscere “to know”), without representation or process—essentially transcendence of separateness. It is distinct in this way from tuition, from Latin tuitionem, “a looking after, defense, guardianship,” also related to tutor.

So, in differentiating that which we deduce by logical thought process from that which we know without explanation (read: that which we experience, inwardly or outwardly), we are tempted to reserve the word “knowledge” for genuine certainty, excluding conclusions of mere theory.  But language does not exactly have it this way, for the above etymological discussion seems to indicate a distinction, within “knowing,” between things analyzed and things felt—opposing, yet both sources of knowledge.  But practically, we find that some things explained perfectly logically can still omit details or nuances and sometimes even miss the end mark, because logical connections are forged by the mind actively and selectively, rather than understood receptively and holistically—and so the mind can go walking anywhere soundly in its own realm and still find itself nowhere in reality, to whatever degree it dispenses with receptivity and adaptability.  Ergo, we connote theoretical vs. practical certainty in our distinction between analytical and intuitive knowledge, and the difference is made by listening.

It has been said that because all sensory information takes time to reach our senses, travel through nerves and register in our brains, we are always experiencing the past; and further, that experiencing the present is impossible.  I would agree that this claim must be true; but only on the basis of the tacit assumption that our physical bodies ‘come first’, followed by our consciousnesses as more-or-less alchemical byproducts.  Conversely, if we assume that consciousness comes first, and that mind and body arise as its expressions, then an immediacy of perception qua dispensation with tools and expressions; a literal and scientific experience of the present would indeed be possible.  This line of thinking shares a very quaint bridge with another rather tacit idea: that life’s course, conceived as a confluence of forces acting within and among a constellation of structures, could in principle be defined, calculated, and predicted on the basis of a finite set of initial data.  This too is based on a picture of life as a primarily physical, or material system, from which consciousness and knowledge emerge as mere byproducts.  This view does, however, raise the issue of the singularity and focus central to the experience of consciousness.  Clarity of perception and of logical thought does confer predictive capacity; we could call this quality of experience inevitability.

But we cannot simply escape uncertainty by appealing to fate;  the linear nature of experience is intertwined intimately with intuition, and the knot that they form joins the mundane with the transcendental.  As consciousness continues to consume time and transmute it into memory, our trajectory, connecting past and future, can occasionally ‘zoom out’ to take up a different perspective; we catch a glimpse of the river within which our individual lives are running like currents; concurrently, oftentimes seeming to lead, but then again, and also, simply following; flowing.  At other times we can feel very much that we are these intervals, connecting these viewpoints; that there is nothing other than our own choices and actions from moment to moment driving the whole thing forward as it hangs in suspension; poised between mystery and revelation like a curvilinear Russian doll of composite decisions; perfectly compressed, and occupying only imaginary space.

Before leaping  to the obligatory defense of individual dignity under threat of determinacy -and here we must rely on a crucial distinction between intuition and conditioning; in this case perhaps we would do better to call our method counter-intuition- can we not simply pause to appreciate these delicately poised positions, whereby the plurality of phenomena balance delicately with the communion of identity?  Is it not precisely in this moment of appreciation, briefly unfettered by the machinic demands of a logic obsessed with incremental progress, that the lines separating past and future, cause and effect, agent and act, blur and give way to the connections between and among them?

To prevent the ghostlines of the “new age” from being cast around the present writing, let me offer a sharp grain of salt to accompany these abstract descriptions of subtle processes.  The directness of intuition varies very greatly by degree, the lowest being often lumped in with ‘emotion’ because it is thought to oppose logic and reason, and shares the loose descriptor ‘feeling’.  However intuition does not so much oppose logic as transcend it.  Like a crutch on a perfectly good leg, the bulky syntagms of explanation are largely unnecessary for an awareness that’s sturdy and upright in itself.  Further, intuition transcends emotion: “I do like the beach, and seafood, and women in bikinis, but that’s not why I’m choosing to go there instead of the mountains this time…  Actually I don’t know why; it’s just where I want to go.”  Perhaps one can imagine later running into a long lost friend at said beach trip.  In such a situation one’s emotions and reasons, causes and constraints all interact while remaining intact, but the intuitive draw to a particular option emerges from their interaction.  As if receiving some kind of transcendental communication that evokes a sense of destiny, all these currents align to encourage a specific outcome.

But what of the moments when the more tangible, logical, and visible paths array themselves in opposition to a less quantifiable, yet somehow more undeniable direction, making the conclusion of discernment itself an anomaly with respect to its own generative matrix of balances and comparisons?  To paraphrase Hesse’s Siddhartha, “the complete, coherent, unbroken chain of cause and effect which, as you the Buddha teach, binds the whole world together, is broken in one place, and that is your very doctrine of enlightenment, of salvation, of opting out of this endless cycle.”  In light of Siddhartha’s subsequent decision to reject the Buddha’s teachings not for their inferiority but for the specificity of their perfection to the life of their author, the landscape of discernment seems here begins to look rather like a Google map, which can zoom in or out to any resolution and omit or include any level of detail in its picture.  The line is still drawn from point A to point B, but one can see and follow step by step how it is done.  Here is where analysis and intuition overlap, and why indeed the irony of an essay about it is even possible in the first place.  Like using one’s hands as a balance scale, the abstract work is done by action and choice, and yet the fine-tuning difference is made by quietly attending; listening.

Of course, we have barely begun to sample the various levels of resolution and focusing frames at and through which to view the myriad forms of experience: for example; when intuition appears unbidden and completely without satisfactory rationale, internal or external, for following it; or when it appears in a negative form, like the stale flavor of mechanistic precision; or when simply to observe and understand the process by which an intuited outcome unfolds becomes the necessary challenge.  Perhaps the metaphor of the map, which after all can only allow so much room for detailed labels and divisions, before its meaning begins to be obscured, is appropriate:  the map, as Korzybski pointed out, can never be its territory.  Maps, like cultures, armies, machines, and organisms, are therefore always plural and multiple, and must occasionally clash like Nietzschean swords, throwing off sparks of truth.  What is intuition if not this quiet realization: that after a point, clarity cannot rely on the strategic machinations of logical force alone, but must come to rest in the communion of focus ignited by these inevitable sparks, illuminating both the objects of attention and the innerworkings of the mind itself.