“Maybe people with the discipline to think more rationally are not as drawn to (the high-IQ) societies as the intellectual eccentrics seem to be.”
Editor of “Oath Journal”
In my opinion, rational thought and the imagination/intuition are not good bedfellows. So, what one wins in rationality may be lost in creativity. Rational thought, disciplinarian as it is, rejects a priori what cannot be explained rationally. Each discoverer, pioneer of new thought, had to overcome at one stage, the fear of the ridiculous.
Everybody probably knows the apparently true anecdote about the Gurka fighter lost in the Indonesian jungle during World War II. When he emerged, his superiors asked him how he succeeded. And he answered, “Simple – I had a map.” “you had a map?!” he showed them and it wasn’t understood then or now because it was a map of London, England.
The rational explanation would be, of course, that the fact of “having a map” gave him confidence which saved him from despair in his situation. And for the rest, he was just lucky. Perhaps it is the correct explanation but correct or not, it seems to be banal, limited, boring, colourless. The subject, in my view, deserves more speculation. It is true that empiricism is not in the Western tradition and it is to the credit of Western thought because it led to methodology, the mother of all sciences, adopted as such by the whole world. But it doesn’t mean that we should dogmatically reject everything that doesn’t fit into rationality.
What if his naïve confidence, feeling of security, did more than save his mental health. Could it be that total self-confidence is a gate-opener to intuition?
Our rational thought makes a big concession by reluctantly accepting the word, “intuition.” We know the pathways and limits of the rational mind. We know nothing about intuition. Intuition may be anything, may be an internet connecting us with the universe even if we don’t know how and why. Intuition is jealous; it doesn’t accept the competition of intelligence. We must accept to be blindly at its mercy, otherwise it will leave us.
Naturopaths and chiropractors currently practice a method which, from their experience, works, and which is rejected by traditional medicine because they can’t explain how and why. By a very simple method they observe the patient’s muscular tone when a remedy is placed near the body. The remedy may be completely sealed and the patient doesn’t know what is in the bottle. Still the body “knows” what’s inside and accepts or rejects by changing its muscle strength. Of course those who have never experienced it will not believe but I know from my own experience that it works and maybe other readers have had similar experiences.
I quote one Polish writer from memory; “I once had a talk with a young man who cultivated a vocation of total ignorance. He accepted only ‘the mystical whispers of intuition.’ But the problem was that this mysterious lady never wanted to whisper anything to him.” I certainly don’t try to be an advocate of this young man and his cohorts, but I try to keep a nonpartisan view of those two sisters/enemies – intelligence and intuition – who guide us in the universe.
unpublished letter/essay August 1995