Monday, May 11, 2009

Intuition Working Draft Blog

I actually want to reword this and make it perfect, so I'm gonna publish this and come back to it:

sometimes the answers are right in front of our faces, and we just keep putting off looking at them until its too late and somebody calls us on not knowing.
At least that seems to happen to me on occasion, sometimes with major things, sometimes with the littlest stuff. I mean, how many times did you pass by that envelope on the kitchen table wondering what was in it only to find out when it was too late that you had a bill due yesterday, and now you're $80 extra in the hole? Or heard a funny sound in your car and kept saying "I'll look into that" until one day your engine warps because it was bone-dry with no oil, and you simply forgot to look.
It's too bad, when the smallest missed moments dictate the biggest changes in our lives. One little word you didn't speak, one tiny second of checking your bills, one ounce of energy spent turning off your tunnel-driven path to investigate something that your intuition is affected by.
So much happens when we miss moments. The ripples start small, then expound into waves, then tsunamis crashing on-shore in a tidal of terror, tearing apart the trees and beaches we meant to preserve to soundly, all because of one little rock we let drop into the lake, that we thought about catching but didn't.
Maybe the process is natural. Maybe there's some kind of evolutionary purpose or advantage to these things. I mean, there is usually a force of some kind making balance out of chaos, and we're part of that force. So maybe our actions are the governors of change, bringing balance in the long-term.
I don't know. It reminds me of that phrase, "kicking against the pricks". There is the occasion that when I do something, I feel so wrong and out-of-balance about it that no matter how much I justify it logically in my mind, it still doesn't seem right. Sometimes though, when you do enough stuff and eventually nothing feels right, you don't know whether its your total misperception of pretty much everything, or that you're just plainly not doing anything right.
This is that weird thing about intuition: when your body tells you to do something and you don't do it, you're not listening to your intuition. Right?
I'm not sure. Because I get in big trouble sometimes when I do what my body it telling me is best to do. We live in this world that tells us to "sometimes listen to our bodies". Sometimes? Hmm. This gets really really complicated then, because what that means is that the "other times" when we choose to not listen to our bodies, we're fully using our imaginations to conceptualize an experience that will ultimately provide an outcome more valuable and greater for our personal well-being than what our body originally wanted us to do. It's like an override. A veto. Let's say your body was the body of the people, a democratic body comprised of your whole living organism, and your Logic (your brain, I suppose) was the President of that body, overseeing the greater version of you and making sure everything is going OK. Well imagine your body starts to experience something. It hurts, or something. Your foot hurts. And your President recognizes a conflict, looks down at the foot, and sees nothing. There's no cut, no bruise..nothing. So your President is faced with a decision: He can either acknowledge the body's strange invisible pain and do something about it, or he can Veto the call of pain, telling the rest of the body "There is nothing wrong with you, I won't listen to you anymore about this". (works a lot like our actual presidential system, really)
So the democratic body is in pain, but the Presidential logic has overridden the call with a "suck it up" veto.
Intuition. Who's more correct? The President's all-seeing eye, or the Democratic body's sense of touch? Reason versus Feeling. Here's what I think I'm trying to say: I don't want to differentiate between what I'm feeling and what I should feel in a given situation. I think in nature there is no differentiation, and we've only created it because our intelligence has become so far-removed from reality. We've invented these social, political and popular worlds that we have completely subscribed to, so that when we have an intuition to do something we are convinced by those worlds' forces to immediately reject the intuition as, "crazy" "insane" "dorky" "rude" "mean" "disrespectul" "ugly" "annoying" "politically incorrect" "too ________" fill in the blank, because you know you've said it or heard it about yourself.
I believe that we all have a built-in safety monitor that makes valid, unquestionable decisions for us before we even think. It's the same mechanism that helps us catch ourselves when we stumble, or duck from something flying at our faces. In our imagined society that we love to live in so much, there's sh*t flying at our heads in all directions, and for some reason we only duck some of the time. The rest of the time is spent getting beaten like stuffed duffel bag. Why is this? Why do we put up with it? Because we're all trying to get along? I'm not sure. I'll come back to this.

1 comment:

moonshinejunkyard said...

i believe in intuition, and in your safety valve idea. good truths migs. and try not to see it as getting beat up as a duffel bag because you are much stronger and more important than a duffel bag and you appreciate the beauty of life much more than one does too. i do think you should trust your own inner judgment and nagging voices much more than anyone else's.

by the way i got your facebook note that you are coming up this weekend. the grad ceremony is at 5 pm friday and then a little party at our house afterwards. is candice coming too? we are in the process of planning right now, should be fun.