For long, we thought that knowing belonged to the act of thinking and thinking to the human only and so, knowing was the domain of sapiens, and it was what set us free.
Beautifully written Renee! The image of you breaking into tears with your I-Thou encounter with innocence and instinct lingers with me. I live in wonder and reflection of how this great turn in western modern thinking towards the elevation of the intellect and suppression of other ways of knowing, has been a “wrong turn”. We have gotten lost on our way to becoming. In your deeply integrative writing I experience a Self correction.
When I read your words, I hear an echo in my ear of words you have long uttered: the suppression of the sublime. And other connected words begin to appear in my mind: subliminal, liminal.
Betwixt and between instinct and intelligence is their together inner intention, worthy of all exaltation: that is, the fullness of lived being as sacred expression.
I hope the forthcoming letters will show that the two ways of knowing, insinct and intelligence, need one another like plants need animals need plants. And if we can "Self correct," we may take our proper place in this luminous being.
I love your ability to discredit Aristotle - the more I hear from these old-philosophers - it seems the more we need to reduce their vestigial holds they have created in our pondering psyches - (and the zeitgeist, if I am to bring it that far) ... "let us not forget Freud, yet forgive him in his errors"
This essay (paired with the philosophy of one read prior) - brings to mind that
Awareness - holds the higher intelligence.
Awareness to the small actions - as a baby seeking bosom - and what that means to us. (To me, it brings the seeking of comfort - the childlike and absolutely youthlike significance of 'Being with another' - support)
Awareness to the bodies instinct - as a chronic illness in healing - there is so little we have been taught in the patchwork of bodywork. So disperse and unique to the individuals story - that the suckling teat knows as much to feed as to be feeder - intertwined in cosmology to the child's own body system - nourishing present and preparing to nourish for the rest of it's life.
Awareness to what this means in-between us - writers and readers - concepts and creation - your body.mind wanderings to my body.mind intake... to what can be taken out...
Thank you for these beautiful reflections, offered so freely from awareness itself, from the body of awareness.
You touch on a few things here that I wish to reflect on briefly.
'the old philosophers': If we look at their 'content' through the lens of human becoming, we can see the glimmers of our deeply steeped taken-for-granted belief in rationality. Aristotle and the like show us the formative phases of what the twentieth-century Swiss philosopher, Jean Gebser, refers to as the Mental structure of consciousness. This month's series on poetry will tip-toe into this a bit. . . .
Freud sits at a very interesting intersection in these structures of consciousness, because interestingly, Freud remedies what Plato set into motion by restoring the body to the realm of significance. The trouble is, he does so from an outmoded influence of but unarticulated assumption/belief in "original sin."
You have shared here and elsewhere in a comment (apropos fermentation) about chronic illness . . . in healing. As I read you here and there in those comments, I gather that you are "seeing through" the body's knowing and innate capacity to heal, and I applaud your recognition and respect of the body as a body of knowing.
"And if instinct is not lost but covered over, then perhaps it could be that innocence, too, is there in the shrouded wait?"
The connection between innocence and instinct is particularly intriguing to me. I hadn't looked at it this way. But you are absolutely right. And your instinctive tears in response to the waking baby is priceless.
Thank you for such profound observations and tender empiricism 💗🙏
This is what reading you here elicited from within me: hmmmmmm in a gratitude-filled way. And now, having read Chapter 7 of Synchronosophy, this is much more so than would have been perhaps had I read this comment before reading that. . . .
“While intelligence treats everything mechanically, instinct proceeds, so to speak, organically.”
So states Henri Bergson in his writings in Creative Evolution, a book which coincidentally we have touched on in French literature recently and perhaps you know far better than I dear Renée…
Being organic of nature, I can understand this concept perhaps more easily than any other, he further states;
“If the consciousness that slumbers in it should awake, if it were wound up into knowledge instead of being wound off into action, if we could ask and it could reply, it would give up to us the most intimate secrets of life. For it only carries out further the work by which life organizes matter–so that we cannot say, as has often been shown, where organization ends and where instinct begins”
What can be more secretly instinctual than a baby seeking a mothers breast? Or more instinctual to shed tears at the sheer and simple and utterly profound beauty of that, I would have shed tears by your side were I there with you… and they would have been instinctual, unstoppable as were your own.
We are an arrogant race, and I touched on this for different reasons replying to another post recently, we harbour beliefs that are unfounded in either science or nature and yet we cannot let go of them. I cannot say which, of instinct or intelligence can be said to be the more natural, for surely, instinct being organic, is almost impossible to dissect where as intelligence can be gauged.
Thank you dearest Renée for this deeply thoughtful reflection, as always with love xx
It enchants me so to read that Bergson's Creative Evolution has been weaving its way into your French Literature recently. This work is astounding in its insights, timeless, and with an almost poetic quality that reaches in and reaches in again, like your words here, which are, too, profound. I wish to be able to re-stack a comment!
Your words here:
". . . we harbour beliefs that are unfounded in either science or nature and yet we cannot let go of them."
It could be said that nature holds truths that in science, were we to let go of some of the beliefs in science that we harbour about science, we might come closer to being true to the truth of our existence! Ha! All to say, I sense that science needs a little more philosophy (i.e. love of wisdom) to liberate it from these long-held beliefs and so do we.
It is always heartwarming to reflect with you, Susie. Thank you for reading and sharing.
Sadly it was a brief sojourn we took in French classes Renée, but I am now planning visits to second hand book stores to track down his book Creative Evolution to read in its entirety…
It makes sense that instinct is either innocent or amoral - immeasurable in moral terms. It takes will to have culpability. For all that we are subject to judge and be judged, it is nice to think of some of our actions (instinct) as safe from judgment. I’m interested in where you take this line of thinking/feeling.
For some reason, my comment duplicated and in deleting one, the deletion happened to both. Let me see if I can recall what I wrote:
In essence, I said that I was intrigued by where you took this, apropos instinct as (if not innocent) amoral and 'safe from judgement'. And I offered that I am inclined to comment on more here but I may spoil 'the plot' if I do so.
Also, you highlight a new line of inquiry. What is the relationship between will and intelligence? And what is the role of will absent intelligence?
First, of course, we need to agree on what intelligence is. I hope the next letter will help us with this.
I think the reason we look at instinct as somehow inferior to intelligence is that we often look at animals (excluding us) and think that they operate mostly on instinct whereas we have this frontal cortex providing intelligence. And that allows us to feel superior to the rest of the animal kingdom, which is delusional in my thinking. It's part of our arrogance that allows us to herd, raise, and slaughter animals for our food while they passively allow it, or capture them and place them in zoos for our pleasure. It's what allows us as humans to feel separate from the rest of the animal world, and therefore we can do what we want with them, as we please. I believe this is part of our undoing as a species. Rather than use our intelligence to be stewards of the world and all that is in it, we use it to exploit the earth and its inhabitants. This idea of instinct vs intelligence is pretty interesting to ponder. We look at dolphins, for instance, and admire them because they are clearly "intelligent", meaning more like us; whereas, "lower" animals we look at with disdain to some degree, thinking they're just automatons, operating on instinct. I think I'm guilty of that tendency myself now that I'm looking straight at it. As for your example, Renée, of weeping upon seeing the baby; and asking if that is intelligence or instinct. You were emotionally moved to tears, and that, I think, is a form of emotional intelligence. However, perhaps instinct as well; as it brings forth a warmth and affection toward an innocent human, designed to provoke a nurturing response; one that will care for the baby and not harm the baby; a response necessary for perpetuating the species. Instinct is just as much a part of the human species as intelligence; it's just not seen that way or appreciated. I think if we were to do so, we'd see everything, including plants, as having both instinct and intelligence, which would alter our way of relating to everything, wouldn't it? Mary Oliver knew this well. "When I am among the trees...around me the trees stir with their leaves and call out, "Stay awhile"... and they call again, "and you too have come here to do this; do go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine."
"we often look at animals (excluding us) and think that they operate mostly on instinct whereas we have this frontal cortex providing intelligence. And that allows us to feel superior to the rest of the animal kingdom"
"It's what allows us as humans to feel separate from the rest of the animal world, and therefore we can do what we want with them"
"whereas, "lower" animals we look at with disdain to some degree, thinking they're just automatons, operating on instinct."
I hope we'll peer into the root of this in the coming weeks. That we look upon animals and instinct as inferior predates what we know of the frontal cortex, and I hope to show it is a manifestation of the evolutionary development of the frontal cortext--and may even predate it! That's a little teaser on where we might be headed.
This development also has to do with what we might refer to as the 'gift of tears' in us today.
We'll see if I can pull off articulating some interweaving threads in the coming letters!
You share that you believe you may be guilty of this tendency to see the human as superior to the other-than-human, and while it is a gift of awareness to be sensitive to this, it is also an indication of the potency of a long lived worldview that this is so. With deepening affective (note I did not write effective) understandings, we may transform ourselves toward fullness of being and, as you say "alter our way of relating to everything."
My hope in this series is to illuminate some of what you touch on here, tie togehter some loose threads, and see where we might begin to explore new ways of knowing and being. In this way, we might be inclined to "stay awhile" when we, in fact, hear the leaves call.
Your reflections are most illuminating, Ed, in showing where next week's letter might go, and I thank you.
Truly beautiful, my friend! As always, you've enlivened my mind. Thoughts swirl and I'm not sure which to grab first. We had a gorgeous discussion about the soul (one of my favorite conversations ever!) and I said then that I believe the body is part of the multi-part soul. Along those lines, instinct must be a form of intelligence. Last night my son was in a car accident. He's doing fine now. After many phone calls and even more text messages...I guess once I knew for sure he was ok...I began to weep. It was much like you described when you saw the baby. I knew it to be a wholly bodily response. It was not a reaction to my thoughts, but something my body simply needed to do. This happens a lot in my healing work with the dead too (a topic for another time). One other thing that comes to mind here is that I recently listened to a podcast about artificial intelligence. An author (whose name escapes me now) was being interviewed and he said that humans seem to have a need to create a model of something before they fully understand it. He gave the example of maps and globes to understand space. And then he said that he believes artificial intelligence functions this way for us. It is through creating a model of intelligence that we might come to understand it, and then recognize it within all the beings and systems around us, including within the earth itself. I thought that sounded so hopeful! ♥️
First, permit me to share (again, after our call today) mutual gratitude that your son is ok and heartfelt prayers for ease.
When I read of your weeping, I recognize your human experience with depths of inner feeling and sympathy. And if we look at it from a little distance as the phenomenon called weeping, we come to the recognition of something profoundly mysterious. No one really knows why we weep, and I'm beginning to wonder if it straddles instinct and intelligence, and if so, what is the significance?
This perspective on AI as way toward understanding intelligence is intriguing, and it surfaces many questions. Intelligence itself seems bound to search for ways to understand it and expand it.
That conversation on soul was one of my favorites as well. Some conversations we do not forget. That is one of them for me. And I thank you.
Beautifully written Renee! The image of you breaking into tears with your I-Thou encounter with innocence and instinct lingers with me. I live in wonder and reflection of how this great turn in western modern thinking towards the elevation of the intellect and suppression of other ways of knowing, has been a “wrong turn”. We have gotten lost on our way to becoming. In your deeply integrative writing I experience a Self correction.
Dear Megan,
When I read your words, I hear an echo in my ear of words you have long uttered: the suppression of the sublime. And other connected words begin to appear in my mind: subliminal, liminal.
Betwixt and between instinct and intelligence is their together inner intention, worthy of all exaltation: that is, the fullness of lived being as sacred expression.
I hope the forthcoming letters will show that the two ways of knowing, insinct and intelligence, need one another like plants need animals need plants. And if we can "Self correct," we may take our proper place in this luminous being.
Thank you for this.
With love,
Renée
I love your ability to discredit Aristotle - the more I hear from these old-philosophers - it seems the more we need to reduce their vestigial holds they have created in our pondering psyches - (and the zeitgeist, if I am to bring it that far) ... "let us not forget Freud, yet forgive him in his errors"
This essay (paired with the philosophy of one read prior) - brings to mind that
Awareness - holds the higher intelligence.
Awareness to the small actions - as a baby seeking bosom - and what that means to us. (To me, it brings the seeking of comfort - the childlike and absolutely youthlike significance of 'Being with another' - support)
Awareness to the bodies instinct - as a chronic illness in healing - there is so little we have been taught in the patchwork of bodywork. So disperse and unique to the individuals story - that the suckling teat knows as much to feed as to be feeder - intertwined in cosmology to the child's own body system - nourishing present and preparing to nourish for the rest of it's life.
Awareness to what this means in-between us - writers and readers - concepts and creation - your body.mind wanderings to my body.mind intake... to what can be taken out...
Jacob,
Thank you for these beautiful reflections, offered so freely from awareness itself, from the body of awareness.
You touch on a few things here that I wish to reflect on briefly.
'the old philosophers': If we look at their 'content' through the lens of human becoming, we can see the glimmers of our deeply steeped taken-for-granted belief in rationality. Aristotle and the like show us the formative phases of what the twentieth-century Swiss philosopher, Jean Gebser, refers to as the Mental structure of consciousness. This month's series on poetry will tip-toe into this a bit. . . .
Freud sits at a very interesting intersection in these structures of consciousness, because interestingly, Freud remedies what Plato set into motion by restoring the body to the realm of significance. The trouble is, he does so from an outmoded influence of but unarticulated assumption/belief in "original sin."
You have shared here and elsewhere in a comment (apropos fermentation) about chronic illness . . . in healing. As I read you here and there in those comments, I gather that you are "seeing through" the body's knowing and innate capacity to heal, and I applaud your recognition and respect of the body as a body of knowing.
With love,
Renée
Great questions! especially this one:
"And if instinct is not lost but covered over, then perhaps it could be that innocence, too, is there in the shrouded wait?"
The connection between innocence and instinct is particularly intriguing to me. I hadn't looked at it this way. But you are absolutely right. And your instinctive tears in response to the waking baby is priceless.
Thank you for such profound observations and tender empiricism 💗🙏
Veronika,
This is what reading you here elicited from within me: hmmmmmm in a gratitude-filled way. And now, having read Chapter 7 of Synchronosophy, this is much more so than would have been perhaps had I read this comment before reading that. . . .
Kindred.
With love,
Renée
“While intelligence treats everything mechanically, instinct proceeds, so to speak, organically.”
So states Henri Bergson in his writings in Creative Evolution, a book which coincidentally we have touched on in French literature recently and perhaps you know far better than I dear Renée…
Being organic of nature, I can understand this concept perhaps more easily than any other, he further states;
“If the consciousness that slumbers in it should awake, if it were wound up into knowledge instead of being wound off into action, if we could ask and it could reply, it would give up to us the most intimate secrets of life. For it only carries out further the work by which life organizes matter–so that we cannot say, as has often been shown, where organization ends and where instinct begins”
What can be more secretly instinctual than a baby seeking a mothers breast? Or more instinctual to shed tears at the sheer and simple and utterly profound beauty of that, I would have shed tears by your side were I there with you… and they would have been instinctual, unstoppable as were your own.
We are an arrogant race, and I touched on this for different reasons replying to another post recently, we harbour beliefs that are unfounded in either science or nature and yet we cannot let go of them. I cannot say which, of instinct or intelligence can be said to be the more natural, for surely, instinct being organic, is almost impossible to dissect where as intelligence can be gauged.
Thank you dearest Renée for this deeply thoughtful reflection, as always with love xx
Susie,
It enchants me so to read that Bergson's Creative Evolution has been weaving its way into your French Literature recently. This work is astounding in its insights, timeless, and with an almost poetic quality that reaches in and reaches in again, like your words here, which are, too, profound. I wish to be able to re-stack a comment!
Your words here:
". . . we harbour beliefs that are unfounded in either science or nature and yet we cannot let go of them."
It could be said that nature holds truths that in science, were we to let go of some of the beliefs in science that we harbour about science, we might come closer to being true to the truth of our existence! Ha! All to say, I sense that science needs a little more philosophy (i.e. love of wisdom) to liberate it from these long-held beliefs and so do we.
It is always heartwarming to reflect with you, Susie. Thank you for reading and sharing.
With love,
Renée
Sadly it was a brief sojourn we took in French classes Renée, but I am now planning visits to second hand book stores to track down his book Creative Evolution to read in its entirety…
I wish you a gentle week xx
Reading this enchants me, Susie. Gentle week to you, dear Friend.
It makes sense that instinct is either innocent or amoral - immeasurable in moral terms. It takes will to have culpability. For all that we are subject to judge and be judged, it is nice to think of some of our actions (instinct) as safe from judgment. I’m interested in where you take this line of thinking/feeling.
Tara,
For some reason, my comment duplicated and in deleting one, the deletion happened to both. Let me see if I can recall what I wrote:
In essence, I said that I was intrigued by where you took this, apropos instinct as (if not innocent) amoral and 'safe from judgement'. And I offered that I am inclined to comment on more here but I may spoil 'the plot' if I do so.
Also, you highlight a new line of inquiry. What is the relationship between will and intelligence? And what is the role of will absent intelligence?
First, of course, we need to agree on what intelligence is. I hope the next letter will help us with this.
More on Sunday.
With love,
Renée
Fascinating! I look forward to mulling this over with you.
(I've had that double-comment thing happen before, too. Funny bug.)
I think the reason we look at instinct as somehow inferior to intelligence is that we often look at animals (excluding us) and think that they operate mostly on instinct whereas we have this frontal cortex providing intelligence. And that allows us to feel superior to the rest of the animal kingdom, which is delusional in my thinking. It's part of our arrogance that allows us to herd, raise, and slaughter animals for our food while they passively allow it, or capture them and place them in zoos for our pleasure. It's what allows us as humans to feel separate from the rest of the animal world, and therefore we can do what we want with them, as we please. I believe this is part of our undoing as a species. Rather than use our intelligence to be stewards of the world and all that is in it, we use it to exploit the earth and its inhabitants. This idea of instinct vs intelligence is pretty interesting to ponder. We look at dolphins, for instance, and admire them because they are clearly "intelligent", meaning more like us; whereas, "lower" animals we look at with disdain to some degree, thinking they're just automatons, operating on instinct. I think I'm guilty of that tendency myself now that I'm looking straight at it. As for your example, Renée, of weeping upon seeing the baby; and asking if that is intelligence or instinct. You were emotionally moved to tears, and that, I think, is a form of emotional intelligence. However, perhaps instinct as well; as it brings forth a warmth and affection toward an innocent human, designed to provoke a nurturing response; one that will care for the baby and not harm the baby; a response necessary for perpetuating the species. Instinct is just as much a part of the human species as intelligence; it's just not seen that way or appreciated. I think if we were to do so, we'd see everything, including plants, as having both instinct and intelligence, which would alter our way of relating to everything, wouldn't it? Mary Oliver knew this well. "When I am among the trees...around me the trees stir with their leaves and call out, "Stay awhile"... and they call again, "and you too have come here to do this; do go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine."
Dear Ed,
You touch on some of the complexities here.
You write:
"we often look at animals (excluding us) and think that they operate mostly on instinct whereas we have this frontal cortex providing intelligence. And that allows us to feel superior to the rest of the animal kingdom"
"It's what allows us as humans to feel separate from the rest of the animal world, and therefore we can do what we want with them"
"whereas, "lower" animals we look at with disdain to some degree, thinking they're just automatons, operating on instinct."
I hope we'll peer into the root of this in the coming weeks. That we look upon animals and instinct as inferior predates what we know of the frontal cortex, and I hope to show it is a manifestation of the evolutionary development of the frontal cortext--and may even predate it! That's a little teaser on where we might be headed.
This development also has to do with what we might refer to as the 'gift of tears' in us today.
We'll see if I can pull off articulating some interweaving threads in the coming letters!
You share that you believe you may be guilty of this tendency to see the human as superior to the other-than-human, and while it is a gift of awareness to be sensitive to this, it is also an indication of the potency of a long lived worldview that this is so. With deepening affective (note I did not write effective) understandings, we may transform ourselves toward fullness of being and, as you say "alter our way of relating to everything."
My hope in this series is to illuminate some of what you touch on here, tie togehter some loose threads, and see where we might begin to explore new ways of knowing and being. In this way, we might be inclined to "stay awhile" when we, in fact, hear the leaves call.
Your reflections are most illuminating, Ed, in showing where next week's letter might go, and I thank you.
With love,
Renée
Truly beautiful, my friend! As always, you've enlivened my mind. Thoughts swirl and I'm not sure which to grab first. We had a gorgeous discussion about the soul (one of my favorite conversations ever!) and I said then that I believe the body is part of the multi-part soul. Along those lines, instinct must be a form of intelligence. Last night my son was in a car accident. He's doing fine now. After many phone calls and even more text messages...I guess once I knew for sure he was ok...I began to weep. It was much like you described when you saw the baby. I knew it to be a wholly bodily response. It was not a reaction to my thoughts, but something my body simply needed to do. This happens a lot in my healing work with the dead too (a topic for another time). One other thing that comes to mind here is that I recently listened to a podcast about artificial intelligence. An author (whose name escapes me now) was being interviewed and he said that humans seem to have a need to create a model of something before they fully understand it. He gave the example of maps and globes to understand space. And then he said that he believes artificial intelligence functions this way for us. It is through creating a model of intelligence that we might come to understand it, and then recognize it within all the beings and systems around us, including within the earth itself. I thought that sounded so hopeful! ♥️
Jenna,
First, permit me to share (again, after our call today) mutual gratitude that your son is ok and heartfelt prayers for ease.
When I read of your weeping, I recognize your human experience with depths of inner feeling and sympathy. And if we look at it from a little distance as the phenomenon called weeping, we come to the recognition of something profoundly mysterious. No one really knows why we weep, and I'm beginning to wonder if it straddles instinct and intelligence, and if so, what is the significance?
This perspective on AI as way toward understanding intelligence is intriguing, and it surfaces many questions. Intelligence itself seems bound to search for ways to understand it and expand it.
That conversation on soul was one of my favorites as well. Some conversations we do not forget. That is one of them for me. And I thank you.
With love,
Renée
I'm making a note that for our next call I have something to say about weeping that we can wonder about together. Can't wait!
I can't wait! Thank you!