Western thought tends to dismiss intuition as irrational and unreliable. It lumps it in with all the “lower” mental; faculties, like emotion and instinct. Intuition is, after all,just a feeling. If it was more than a feeling, in other words, if it was something we could explain in a logically coherent manner, then it would cease to be an intuition, at least by Western rules.

It’s all part of the antagonistic dualism that infects Western thought. The whole “reason good, feelings bad” notion of intellectual idealism where we are supposed to be trying to transcend earthly matters and striving for some kind of Olympian detachment.

This is, of course, a ludicrous idea on many levels. We can no more transcend the flesh than we can split atoms with our minds. We are bodies with minds and vice versa. What we think of as our minds are products of the flesh and the two can no more be separated than an object and its shadow.

Transcendental thought seems to believe that if the object tries hard enough, it can become all shadow.

Myself, I have always resisted these petty dualisms. Who says it has to be A or B? Maybe its both.  Maybe it’s neither. Maybe light is both a wave and a particle. Maybe its made of waves of particles. Maybe it’s a third thing that we haven’t even thought of yet.

In short, maybe we have no idea what the fuck it is.

So for me, reason and intuition are not at all opposites, let alone antagonistic ones. Neither could function without the other. Reason is a very powerful tool, especially when bolstered by the scientific method, or at least rational inquiry.

But mighty Dame Reason would be useless without intuition. Reason is a product of the conscious mind, and the conscious mind is merely the interface for the power supercomputer that is our mind. Everything else is intuition.

My own mental processes are definitely a seamless integration of reason ad intuition. In general, it is usually a matter of intuition leading and reason verifying.

Take my creative process. The primary process is the deep listening I wrote about before. My mind blanks out n order to let my creativity have all te room it needs to create, and then the solution forms in my mind and I “see” it.

But that’s only half the process, because the solution doesn’t come to me as words. It is up to my conscious mind to take that raw creative substance and articulate it. Without that, it would just be an idea that streaks through my mind like a million others, without form or purpose.

And it is the conscious mind that submits the request (so to speak) in the first place. It’s the conscious mind that says “Think of something here” or “how can we connect these two things” or “what would be a funny way to say this”.

And of course, all this is happening at the speed of thought and I am only slightly aware that it is happening at the time.

This artificial wall between reason and intuition has done a lot of damage over the years. That’s what happens when you have people pursuing this mad dream of the ego’s of doing away with the rest of the mind so it can be “free”, and then judging themselves for not be able to achieve it.

Worse still are those who believe they have achieved it. Those are the people who will convince themselves that their basest emotions somehow represent the highest of ideals, and that requires a shockingly intellectually compromised mind where reason’s only job is to come up with justifications for what the id has decided to do, unfettered.

And the thing is, in all probability this is a highly intelligent and articulate person and therefore can convince people with less mental muscle that these base and twisted actions are full justified and the right thing to do.

Andif they can convince others, they can convince themselves as well.

It is something I must guard against, both in my self and in others. That’s part of why I pursue the truth so relentlessly. It would be so easy to fall into the trap of dominating other people intellectually in order to get my oral retentive needs catered to.

But I refuse to abandon my intellectual integrity, because without that, I would be just another animal grubbing about in the shitpile of life.

So I suppose I have my own form of rationalist idealism. It has a lot less to do with suppression of emotion than it does with letting our powers of reason modify our emotional state. To me, to be truly human is to be able to choose not to believe everything that our emotions tell us.

Because emotions lie. That’s one of the things the rationalists got right. Emotions will tell you something is true because it feels true, evidence be damned.

That;s why it is so hard – and so important – to keep an open mind. To be prepared to change how you feel about something based on new information, rather than deny the information because it upsets you and making up reasons for it after the thought.

An illustrative case : a man is accused of rape and arrested. The news reports on it extensively all the way up to the court date. Public outrage is high and the man’s family, associates, and life are threatened constantly.

Then the trial begins and the case is immediately thrown out for lack of evidence, lack of merit, and lack of anything else that would merit prosecution. There is absolutely no evidence he did the crime and the whole thing is based on rumours that got out of control. The man is not, nor has he ever been, a rapist.

But that’s not how the public will see it. They have invested a lot of hate in this innopcent man and they gave really enjoyed dumping their rage and frustration on him.

To put it plainly, they do not want him to be innocent. Him being guilty is a lot more fun and him being innocent means they have change their emotions and they don’t want to do that. They want to keep believing that the cops caught the guy that did it and he will be punished by the state in their stead.

So to the public, he is not an innocent man. He’s a man who got away with rape. And that will be how people in that region see him for the rest of his life.

At the same time, the real rapist walks the streets, free to rape again, because the justice system knows that the people have no patience for starting over from scratch and so they too will keep on thinking they know who do it rather than look for the real perp.

All because people don’t like having to change their minds.

Everyone except us humans, of course.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.