Reason, Critical Thinking, Intuition, Feeling, Instinct, Faith and Doubt
Mood:
happy
Topic: Spiituality, Dreams
First hello to everybody I saw at the Small Press Fair at The Church at Ocean Park yesterday. It was a great event for the most part and I had a lot of fun in spite of having a terrible cold. It really was a pleasure to be able to hang out, read and talk to people. I was helping out at the http://poeticdiversity.org/sybaritic press table. This was the second annual small press fair and I am sure next year's fair will be worth a look as well. Now on to what I am going to attempt to ramble coherently about today.
photograph Hall of Mirrors, Versaille, France copyright 2000 Annette Sugden all rights reserved.
Why am I posting something titled partly Reason and Critical Thinking in the Dreams and Supernatural category? The answer is that this a companion ramble to my previous blog entry about having a vocation as a seer (for lack of better term). In addition I felt I needed even though these concepts are not firmly formed in my own conscious mind to write about these ideas given the current environment of the society we call the United States of America and given what is going on worldwide as a result of decisions that we, through our leaders have made, decisions influenced by blind faith or in the name of blind fundamental religious faith rather than based on reason and critical thinking. The two points above coupled with what I have witnessed over the years in various new age and other spiritual communities I have been involved in, particularly regarding so-called "channeled" information and information pertaining to romantic soulmates really have influenced my need to write about this stuff now while I am still figuring out what for me are the nuances between reason, intuition, feeling and instinct and the place that both faith and doubt have in my life. I know I am far from qualified to write about any of this but I am anyway so please bare with any spelling, typing and gramatic errors while I wrestle with this gigantic topic in this and maybe future blogs.
First I would like to define what I mean by reason/critical thinking. Because reason vs intuition in particular is a concept of opposites that has been written about in numerous philosophical and psychological texts (as well as other disciplines) I am not going to let myself get bogged down in an argument of what I think Reason truly is at this current moment for me personally. I will just label it as the ability to step back or outside of a situation or idea and examine it from as many angles as possible using logical and mental faculties, thereby coming up with an opinion of what is either true and/or factual. This ability to think things through critically and thoroughly is well critical because without it we give up freedom and responsibility to whoever else we blindly allow to make decisions on what is right, what is wrong and even what is real or not and these others who we give up our power to are probably not using Reason themselves and usually do not have any group's best interests in mind other than their own. In my opinion if a mass of people allows a few to control and decide everything, then the few tend to end up being the most criminal, greedy and suspect individuals who in the end would kill each other if they could in their endless lust for power and control over all. So if the "masses" are discouraged from exercising their own Reason and critical thinking which is inherent, but suppressed in most people (at least in the US in my opinion) then it is easier for these few corrupt individuals to take control and this appears to be what is happening, has happened here in the U.S. Collective apathy and lack of critical thinking has led us down the road to despotism and imperialism.
But this entry is not supposed to be only be an anti-Bush rant. I just want to show how dangerous a lack of Reason and it's cousin critical thinking are. As hard as it may feel or as time consuming as it may seem, it is critical to explore and learn and look at all angles of every person, situation and idea and come to our own individual conclusions about them, based on logical methods. Other methods may be used as well, such as personal feeling, intuition (which is different from emotion but gets misunderstood even in psychological texts as being synonomous with feeling/emotion), and instinct. But these should all be filtered through reason. In fact if used all together without allowing one capacity to rule and filtering everything through reason, then in my opinion, the clearest course of action or idea can show itself to an individual.
Here is where I get to another word for Reason and critical thinking that comes up often in philosophical and metaphysical texts, that is discernment. Discernment is the faculty which is the filtering of feeling, instinct and intuition through the mental capacity known as reason. I have met a few people who are "sensitives" who employ reason and discernment, but for the most part we who do are in a tiny minority compared to the vast majority of psychics, seers, channellers, mediums and others in various spiritual and religious circles. This is why I hesitate to talk about my own "sensititvity" because actually I am above all else a sceptic and always have been and because if I am around non-"sensitive" sceptics, because of the other "sensitives" who do not practice discernment, I and my ideas might no longer be taken seriously or may just be grossly misunderstood because of the actions, words and deeds of other "sensitives." I still have doubt and always will about everything, even my own experiences because I want to remain open and because as soon as I say I am certain, that is when I know I am no longer using reason at all and am in danger of giving up my own freewill. Plus I strive as much as possible, although I am far from successful, to learn as much as I can while remaining open and curious and also hopefully my knowledge of the way of the world(s) is ever evolving rather than closed and fixed. (Evolution is a key term. Evolution I will discuss in another blog as it is a big topic. But let me say I am a firm believer in the theory of evolution).
I think for now I have defined Reason and what I mean by Reason. Now I will move on to defining, or attempting to posit a working definition of what I mean by Intuition. For me being an "intuitive" or "sensitive" the act of discerning whether a sense I have is a feeling usually a desire and/or a fear or an intuition is something I have and continue to wrestle with all the time, especially regarding my own personal life. Most "sensitives" I know will agree that it is always easier to get a clear intuition about a question that is not related to the "reader's" life in any way, because most things, especially intuition get clouded by instinct, emotion and current physical condition (ie illness, hormonal changes, tiredness, etc).
The biggest clouder of intuition is the emotional body or feelings because given human nature we tend to see what we want to see which is usually either what we hope/want to happen and/or what we fear will happen (sometimes these can be identical). Then we can rationalize and convince ourselves that we should take certain action or not based on these emotions because we delude ourselves that we intuited that something will or should happen. This is not intuition at all. In fact intuition can't give you a clear thought picture. Usually my intuition and I admit it can be different for other "sensitives" gives me a clear sense that something is important, or there is a deep and/or important connection between me and somebody else or me and an event or idea, etc. What it can't tell me clearly is the meaning of that connection or sense beyond the fact that there is a potential meaning for me personally in that connection to a person and/or event. It is just purely a sense/connection that there is something meaningful about this person, thing, event or idea. Not that a connection or sense isn't important or useful, but that given a sense or connection between me and another or an event does not mean that a particular outcome will or should happen. Here is an example: Say I see a man, and I sense that there is for me some sort of deep connection between us, perhaps on a soul level. The intuition is the sense of the connection. The problem comes in when I add what I as a woman who is physically, emotionally and psychologically wired to be attracted to men might want or fear about such a connection. Usually what happens is from feeling a connection, one assumes ok this man is a soulmate, therefore we are destined to have an amazing romantic relationship and possibly even live together happily forever like in a wonderful fairy tale. That part is not intuition at all. That is desire. If I apply reason to the same feeling of connection between myself and a male I am deeply attracted to on several levels, I will see that I wish to possibly see if there is mutual romantic interest but that the reason I feel a connection may have nothing to do with romance at all. Reason will tell me that until I or even if I get to know this man, that really I can have no idea of what exactly will occur between us at all. I have merely identified that at least for me there is a connection or sense about this other person. However if I do not apply reason and just go on the intuition and feeling, I will then rationalize that what I want to happen will happen and that what I want to happen is what is ordained or destined to happen because my intuition told me it would happen. This how people can end up obsessed or stalking somebody because they have convinced themselves that they are meant to be with a particular person because they intuited a connection and then misinterpreted or projected a desire and/or fear onto that connection. I haven't even talked about instinct in this mix, which can include physical desire and sexual instinct which adds hormones which influences thinking and judgement in this and other similar situations. Not that painful messes can't be fun sometimes or that we can't learn from them, just they can be bad if there is any danger involved to either person.
Because I mentioned channeling as well as soulmates at the beginning of this long entry on reason, intuition and feeling I will go on to another example of mistaken intuition and dangerously, actually disasterously misused intuition in absense of any sort of reason or critical thinking, let alone discernment. That is the case of the supposed spaceship in the tail of Hale- Bop comet which led to a mass suicide of 38 people in 1997 all members of a cult known as Heaven's Gate whose leader supposedly channeled information that the members needed to shed their physical shells in order to join the aliens in the spaceship and I guess attain some sort of ascension. Now I am not going to argue whether or not any actual channeling did or did not happen. This entry has gone on way too long so I think I should devote another entry to what I think and believe about so called channeling. But it is related to this topic of reason and using it to filter intuition, feeling and instinct. Say for argument that the leader know as DO really did channel information from a being from another layer of reality and/or another dimension of space/time, reason will still say how can anyone know whether this being or beings is giving true and/or valid information that can apply to us given our and this other beings respective understanding of human consciousness vs whatever is the type of consciousness of this supposed other worldly being. Or is this supposed otherworldly being lying for it's own motivation? There is a blanket blind faith assumption in a lot of spiritual circles that any channeled information comes from a "higher" being and is therefore true, good and infallible. But how can we reasonably know if this is true or not. Why would it be any more true than if a neighbor told me that he was really Santa Claus and that his kids were all his elves and his dogs reindeer who would come down my chimney at Christmas time. Perhaps this is true of my neighbor. But if come Christmas time he didn't come down my chimney, then I would could reasonably tell that he was lying. In the case of the comet and Heaven's Gate, it is harder to tell, but Reason can safely say that since we can't know for sure, probably a person should not eat barbituate laced applesauce in order to take a ride on a spaceship. However it is not to judge the people who did blindly believe in this channeled information, perhaps they are riding through space on a their own magic spaceship ride. I have no idea. But there is a danger when both a leader and his or her followers do not employ reason or critical thinking.
This gets me back to Bush and the current state in the country that I was born in and that I love. If we as a society are to restore out democracy and end the illegal wars in Iraq and Afganistan then we need to all start using Reason, Critical Thinking and Discernment and we need to stop having blind faith in any leader. In my opinion personal responsibility and freedom demand work. It might be nice to be able to sit back and allow a few men and even fewer woman make all our decisions for us without having to consider the opinion of the masses they govern but this is dangerous and even more dangerous when we allow the few to manipulate and delude us into thinking it is wrong and unpatriotic to employ our own reason, discernment and critical thinking in how we treat ourselves, others and the planet. In my reasonable opinion if Bush and others like him or after him are allowed to continue to bully and control most of the world then there is probably not going to be much of a world as we know it for very much longer. So regardless of whether you believe or doubt the existence of intuition, I hope maybe this rambling rant will inspire you to pull out your rusty thinking cap and try a dose of reason.
Posted by annettesugden
at 2:39 PM PDT
bright
awake 
happy