Socrates Now!

THINK IS NOT A FOUR-LETTER WORD

My wife and I recently had dinner with some close friends. They are an Ashland couple who have been following a spiritual path for decades. They display attributes that I would associate with spiritual maturity: neither are afraid of their emotions, both are honest in their relationships, they are compassionate towards themselves and others, and they continue in their spiritual discipline as though they were still beginners on the way.

As we were sipping organic Merlot wine and feasting on some yummy salmon tacos, I noticed a small placard propped against a bowl on the far end of the table. It read: “Stop thinking and trust your intuition.” (Or words to that effect). And this got me thinking, in spite of that pointed advice.

I know many people on the spiritual path. I would describe these friends and associates as practitioners who cultivate some form of introspection, regardless of whether or not they are part of a traditional religious organization. Given our conversations over the years, I would infer that many of their practices are intended to either diminish or eliminate their thought processes. Stop your discursive thoughts and then get on with the real business of meditation and/or prayer. And what would that task be? Intuition. It’s as though intuition has been sanctified, while thinking is little more than the devil’s handiwork.

I’m not sure why the spiritual path has taken this kind of turn for so many people, and become an either/or situation. I certainly don’t see it that way. In fact, I don’t believe that thinking inhibits the intuitive quality of our spiritual nature at all. I would even suggest that thinking is an act of intuition.

I view our conceptual apparatus as an after-the-fact, add-on feature. In other words, thinking is part of the natural, evolutionary development of our species. Given our puny and almost defenseless bodies, it seems obvious that what keeps us one step ahead of the prowling packs of other predators is our brains. Package the software of language inside that enlarged cerebral cortex and the world has one ingenious animal on its hands.

The clear consequence of this radical development is that thinking has proved to be an extraordinary survival mechanism... up until now, at least. In his writings Darwin wondered whether the intellectual faculties of animals were of a different nature from those of human beings, or varied only in quality or degree of development. Given the evidence he collected over the years, he eventually opted for the latter explanation.

I also agree with the Vedantic and Buddhist view of the human mind. That is, that normal, reasoning, waking-state consciousness is but another of the sense fields. Ordinarily we identify five sense-fields. Some physiologists add our sense of balance to this list. Others add our proprioceptive sense, that awareness of our bodies’ relationship to itself and the environment. All of these sense mechanisms are modes of knowledge, the various means by which we gain information about ourselves and our place in the world.

Consciousness is yet another instrument by which we probe reality for her truths—a sixth sense field. By implication we could regard our thoughts as the synthesis of all the sense fields, wherein every bit of sense-data is coalesced into one (dare I say, intuitive?) moment. In my mind this unusual view of consciousness and the concepts she produces fits easily into an evolutionary model.

Finally, I would offer that many philosophers, the most notable being George Santayana, refer to both perception and thinking as intuitive processes. There are at least two ways we can approach this notion. One has to do with understanding the immediacy of sensation; the other is related to the immediacy of ideation and its relationship to concepts.

Most of us rely upon commonsense and believe that there is an independent world that exists apart from our private experiences. If you or I were to die this instant, we know that the world around us would not disappear. Some people may take exception to this view and insist that all experiences, including the experience of the world, are strictly subjective. When they die, I suppose, the universe is swept away with them.

Putting these objections aside, let’s agree that when the stimulus of the outside world reaches us, whether it be through photons striking the retina, or the rarefaction and compression of air waves thumping against our eardrums, our immediate experience of that world contains no concepts. No thought need apply for sensations to occur. Strictly speaking, sensation is immediate and absent of concepts, arising at the first moment of our subjective experience, despite a nearly undetectable lag before perception occurs. We need no thoughts to see the red rose. Instead, we intuit the rose via the immediacy of sensation and perception.

So, if we return to the notion of consciousness as just another sense field, we could then argue that the spontaneous arising of an idea is also immediate. I am not saying that concepts are like this. Concepts are the names and classifications through which we organize our ideas, and they take time to develop. Conceptual thought is the essence of mediated consciousness — a sequential process that takes us from point A to B, and all the way to Z, if we choose. However, any idea that gives birth to a concept remains both immediate and, in that sense, intuitive. Concepts provide the forms for the expression for our ideas, and ideas provide the meaning of those forms. For example, we could measure and describe a triangle in detail, but the meaning of that form is communicated through an idea — the Pythagorean Theorem – intuited by the mind. The philosopher Emmanuel Kant went so far as to say that the ideas of time and space are the most fundamental of our intuitions.

There are many forms of meditation and prayer that require quiet, measured, concentrated thoughtfulness. There are definitely other forms of internal absorption that temporarily abandon any ideas at all. In my practice, I use both meditative techniques. The meditation sessions begin absent of any concepts. Then a myriad of ideas, forms and concepts are generated, only to return in the end to complete silence and emptiness. All of this is designed to mimic the natural dynamics of our minds. And the only way I am able to appreciate the intent, method, and goal of these meditative methods is to think about it.