On Intuition
An attempt on learning how to recognize the friendly voice that wishes us the best
“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
― E.E. Cummings
We have likely all been there before. Whether you have to decide where to go and study in our late teens. Or whether we should take this job or this other one. Which house should we move into? Should I get married or not? Should I leave my relationship? Do I really want to have children? And we learned that when we wish to make an objective rational decision we should gather more data or make two columns where we weigh the pros and cons. Or ask someone with more experience for example and go from there. And all that works most of the time, but somehow on this one occasion, days or weeks go by and we seem inundated with more facts and do not seem to reach any closer to a conclusion that feels right for us.
It may even be that despite all the facts that should point us to the right decision, we somehow feel very torn apart and you know that not deciding is also not something that feels good either, because time is ticking and we will miss the opportunity. So that’s where you start to feel bad for not being able to understand what your emotions are trying to tell you and guilt for wasting everybody’s time is added to the mix.
Perhaps you think you need therapy? Or you wish you would not care about it as much as your best friend or grand mother who seems to be more chill about things or knew from a very young age what sort of life they would embrace.
Why can’t we be more like them!?
We all have a voice in a our head. And most people identify with it and sincerely trust what it says about our experience of the world and its judgments. But if you dig a bit, and ultimately as you err in life you will encounter the idea that you have an angel and a demon that are counseling you during those ethical decisions is somewhat useful but perhaps incomplete, and highly subject to generating guilt and maybe even shame.
I call intuition the synthesis of the different voices that emerge throughout our body.
Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman extensively explained in Thinking fast and slow that we have a System 1 and 2 that helps us navigate the world.
Where System 1 constitutes everything we know and can summon in milliseconds; such as the alphabet, what is the capital of Italy, how much is 2+2 and all the myriad of cognitive biases born out of the shortcuts we have to take to process the infinite amount of data points around us.
System 2 is on the other hand has the ability to form new rational decisions that require abstract thinking like resolving a math problem, a puzzle, or reflecting on how to structure an essay.
The first is born out of repetition until the neuropaths are so frequently solicited that it is a minimal effort to our brain but can lead to rigid thinking and resorts to stereotypes. The latter is the one that makes us learn and process new things but uses a lot of resources. And that is likely why Carl Gustav Jung famously quoted that thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.
The conclusion of Kahneman is that we should learn our biases in order to properly think with our system 2 and make less foolish decisions. And while this is understandable, it seems also very unrealistic for most of us, especially if we are surrounded by fast pace culture.
In 2013 a paper in Nature explained how when researchers exposed rats to a cherry blossom smell and then shortly after sent them an electric shock to program and generate a minor trauma to them in a Pavlovian manner. Then they waited for them to have children and grand children. Then they exposed the new generation to the same cherry blossom smell and they noticed how they also showed signs of stress WITHOUT the electric shock. This leads us to believe that mammals, and likely humans too have stored trauma but also wisdom from our ancestors. This would explain why most of the victims of assault declared having a weird feeling about the situation but either listen to that feeling and survived or felt bad and dismissed it and got in trouble. And the advice from police force and self-defense experts to prevent crime is to urge people to follow their intuition! 1
In the famous documentary My Octopus teacher, we learn that this incredible cephalopod grows without parents protecting the babies and die soon before the eggs are spawn. Leading them to survive on their own ingenuity to the point that after millions of years it can shapeshift and change colours and textures among many other things to capture prey, hide or heal itself. And while it’s definitely capable of processing new information via its System 2, there is something else at play that is not System 1 and alludes to what the researchers earlier where capturing. And I wonder if they were not pointing to intuition is stored in our DNA and is simply guiding us when we are left on our own to figure out something we care about.
In Mathematica, A secret world of intuition, mathematician David Bessis emphasizes how much of the complexity of his field is not much in either systems 1 or 2 but in formulating and verifying objectively their intuitions. That Einstein, Descartes, Grothendieck and many others were masters precisely because they had a very powerful System 3!
A system that is very slow, very much like a vine, that undulates, makes detours, is unclear but relentless until it makes its way into clarity and gives a sense of alignment and relief throughout the body. He argues that the whole point of a human being is to work into paying attention to their intuition in all its nuances and refine it in order to gain valuable insights from what needs to mature in our body.
Is it this that “simple” then? Either we are in a hurry and have experience on the topic at hand and are safe to play and grow and we can use and sharpen our System 1, or we take some time to brute force through logic and research an elaborate and nuanced answer. Or we go back and forth between our head, heart and hara, go for walks, or brood in a place favorable for contemplation, etc.
Maybe for some, but in practice, there can be more voices in our bodies that can confuse us and render the whole ordeal more challenging.
In Jungian psychology, humans have a set of primary and secondary archetypes that can manifest themselves in ways that can cause a range of behaviors ranging from distress, anxiety, repression to trauma, especially if not expressed in a healthy way. They may often explain why doing the “right thing” or what is supposed to be “rational” can feel overwhelming as certain needs are not validated.
Do I contradict myself?
Then I contradict myself. I am huge, I contain multitudes!
-Walt Whitman, Leaves of grass.
Surely this starts to be very crowded in there. A bit of being less wrong and some some rudiments of philosophy or acquire some circling skills, practice authentic relating2, perhaps consult an reputable AI solution to dig deep into questions, and a bit of shadow work, and we should be now be among the wisest in our tribe, right? (I hope you can sense my irony.)
But how do we distinguish the insights in our head, from biases, reason, wisdom from other voices. Those voices can be quite dissonant, and our culture or our tribe may not approve some of our insights. We may chose to ignore them, feel unauthentic and survive another day. But risking to develop more chronic symptoms in our bodies. Or follow them and risk isolation.
In the light of that rat experiment, we can clearly extrapolate that we are largely conditioned by a lineage of success carried through our DNA. Our ancestors have had their challenges and either adapted for survival, or perished in the process.
This means also that anything they did to survived may have been based on their own interpretation of what the situation was at the time, which necessarily means it was not perfect. And while their solution may have allowed them to survive, chances are that their body has stored count of the scars in the process. It’s also not far fetched that at times they may have, like the mice from the third generation unconsciously, linked events that would stir them into stress. Discerning correlation from causation is the whole point of therapy after all.
And that is where we have our pickle. It feels important to me to have the right relationship with our intuition as what it may be trying to tell us was likely truthful and sincere at some point in the past, but may not be relevant in our present situation. While there are people out there that have a very good relationship with their intuition, thanks to a specific sensibility and an environment that fosters it, most of us may have a poor or distorted relationship with it.
In our culture, intuition is often tagged as irrational, romantic, erratic, unreliable. And this is because our society wants certainty that scales and if possible monetize it. However, I argue that we have so much possibility for wonder, and growth every time we stop and dedicate some time noticing what affects us, learning to discern our emotions and how they express in the body, what is similar and what is different. Noticing how empowering is to be thunderstruck by an idea, and how well we can refine it to what really apply to our particular situation. The simple practice of voicing what we feel out loud can do wonders.3
In that practice, landscapes in our mind and body form and one can dwell or brood in it and time becomes elastic. I had recently the curiosity to notice how siting down in my garden contemplating or indoors by the window affects what I feel and pay attention to. How a windy day on the bike seems to clear some of my haunting thoughts (weather it’s due to the effort or the alchemical properties of the elements, I don’t know) and of course how hopeful I become when the day is bright and how mellow my thoughts are when it’s overcast.
Overall, the sentiments are roughly the same but the colours and nuances seem greatly impacted by what is surrounding me, and even what I have eaten, and what activity I am engaged with. And from there, this insights emerges:
What if I am one of the many catalysts of what is “real” in the landscape?
What I often feel is a sense of clarity from just being emerged in a state of diffused focus. Like a hunter or forager that observes the landscape for hours or sitting by the fire. Often what we are looking for will not be right in front of us but will present itself from the edges. And if we are practicing introspection, the insight will likely bubble up from a deep place or will give you a sense of being struck from something above.
The result from that insight is often a deep desire to engage playfully with the world and seek truth.
In other words: Enthusiasm!
When it still feels fuzzy and split, another approach seems to be to simply to take action4, ANY action. Taking action only when we have full and perfect information is often unrealistic. There are no certainties in life and any action is better that ruminating and being anxious, because that behavior can become a habit and become something we can identify ourselves with.
Life is infinitely complex and no one can know for you what is better for you. And even if we make a mistake, life being infinitely complex means objectively that there is always a place for redemption. Plus, you can always change course in many situations before it’s too late. Any action or movement often leads to clarity or more data points to empower you and give you a clearer sense of direction.
Regardless of how you find a way to befriend that mysterious voice, I truly think and feel that until we rekindle with that potential elusive feeling that can guide us to a breakthrough or solution that otherwise would not have been possible, we are missing a powerful ally and sitting next to a sense of sovereignty.
Befriending your intuition is likely the ONLY relationship that will never ever leave you and provide an educated yet foolish call to adventure.
And like any relationship, it can be confusing and yet exhilarating. Refined over time and forever deepening.
Whether it comes from the Mystery or your own sense of Self that can defy the Universe and adversity , it defines our singularity and uniqueness, and cultivates what we stand for and what we deem to be Good, True and Beautiful.
Listen, Feel and be a voice in the world for it!
Matt Thornton, The Gift of Violence “This doesn’t mean we need to be paranoid, but it does mean you need to pay attention, trust your instincts, and create and enforce boundaries.”
This is a great read. It was a bit of a slap in the face for me. It can be considered controversial in some aspects, especially if you consider yourself left leaning politically, but to ponder the ramifications can be a healthy thing as a society.
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The whole episode is interesting but if you wish to jump right into our topic go for minute 11th onward)