The Death of Intuition

Do you know the things that truly speak to your soul?

And not just some whimpering of spirit, not just some whisper of love — I’m talking you never get sick of it.

You’ll do it even when you don’t have the proper tools to do the thing;
you’ll do it without any thought to how good you are at it;
you’ll do it when all color drains from the face of logic.

True love arises here. The stumbling, too. When you find that thing, that pursuit or art or action or movement or loving that you never can tire of — what are you supposed to do with it? And how are you to know that it truly is your calling? I mean. All this “calling” stuff is just a word. A concept.

We stumble over concepts because they can never apply more than the word itself stretches.

We stumble over true love because everything is within love and needs nothing. Nothing is a part of love, but without love nothing is simply that; I’m confused.

Still, though. The question is a good one.

What were you meant to do in this life? What is your calling?

We can only excel at so precious few things; intuition itself can be the guide to knowing which things are ours. Without trusting your intuition, you’ll never know the thing for which you’re bound.

What exactly is intuition?

It is the sense of being able to garner knowledge without stooping to reasoning consciously. It is trusting in the goodness of our feelings when doing the thing.

You’ve found your thing when:

• Thinking becomes optional;

• Thinking becomes pleasurable about it;

• The “flow state” takes over while doing it;

• You care not for having the tools to properly do it, the task itself is good either with or without the proper tools;

• You have a natural talent for the thing;

• Logic becomes optional.

But people don’t trust intuition. They don’t think truly what yearns and yells to their soul and that’s the problem with all being facts first and foremost. Maybe in a world where everything is supposed to be absolutely true, we feel tempted to learn all of it.

Isn’t it strange that what got someone into their job in the first place is most often intuition - a sense free of logic, a joy beyond words that brought them to understand their purpose in life.

And once they are in that job, they cease completely from trusting that inner sense. Now they write for The Guardian. Now they examine the lymphatic systems of dogs. Now they opine on Situational Leadership in the workplace. Now they study the statistics of voters.

As if we start with a base of feeling only to build upon it supposed “facts”.

The temptation is too strong to surround ourselves with impregnable knowledge and stand at the ready, armored with everything we need — all ammo to launch rhetorical attacks at our enemies.

It’s all billed at the start as correct. It’s science.

You do know the science, don’t you?

To know the science is to know the absolute truth. Bar none.

But more often than not, science is a work in progress. A progression. Never static. We went from the food guide pyramid to MyPlate. We went from the center of the universe to just beyond Venus. We’re still not really sure what the female orgasm is really for, from an evolutionary perspective.

Of course, human knowledge has roads that are more works of subtle refinement rather than theories out of the blue. Just because science changes doesn’t preclude the changes from being really subtle. Don’t get it twisted.

The point is that learning the correct views via science is learning the correct views for the current intellectual climate. Today’s modern person.

But most people don’t see science and the facts like that. They see the facts as static. Absolute. No room for intuition. No room for stories.

No room for myths.

The temptation expands as our reading does too — we gather facts and science; at the onset it is billed as truth. We think now that we are experts.

In a world where all knowledge is recognized as absolute truth from the onset, people stock statistics like canned bread for the apocalypse.

I see it here too - well-thought arguments. The art of the essay.

And it bores me endlessly.

Because-

Science itself is beyond the scope of most people. They haven’t the time nor the ability to grasp the nuances of any field in-depth beyond the bare facts of “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”, etc.

It’s actually Foucault. Did you catch that?

This extends to the fields that dominate discourse on the internet: psychology, political science, biology, etc.

To devalue intuition and the soul is to value empiricism above all else. And if everything is empirically correct via the scientific method, there’s no reason to engage in intuiting. There’s no reason to trust your soul that some things speak to you and other things do not.

There’s no reason to ever see that you cannot truly know everything.

Because everything, every scrap of knowledge is but a fact to gather. Assemble the correct ones and it is over. Gather them like strawberries, close to the clover of intuition. But it can’t be so simple. You cannot truly know things.

This stone is implacable. Cannot be rolled.

Every argument on facts is just the facts.

You’ll never know what you’re meant for if you don’t give them up.

This is strange and unfinished because I am too.

Maybe that’s my thing.

What’s yours?