Intuition

"The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why".

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

"The only real valuable thing is intuition."

Albert Einstein

It's always gratifying to discover that Albert Einstein is on your side, but it's not too remarkable if the subject is intuition and you are an Introverted Intuitive type. Einstein was an INTP and I'm an INFJ. However, once you go past the Introverted iNtuitive stages of problem-solving, the two types have little in common. Also, these are somewhat approximate, or perhaps average, traits that are recorded in these definitions. There are 16 personality types in the Myers-Briggs typology and billions of separate personalities in the world. For example, the linked INFJ definition opines: "No other personality type is better suited to create a movement to right a wrong, no matter how big or small".

I can't really imagine myself creating a movement to right some wrong although I have supported (but not joined) such movements in the past. My intuition tells me that while movements can do great things, whenever they get too large there is a tendency for them to divide into factions and then spend more time arguing or even fighting over things than actually doing anything.

When the movement is of a type where the individual can have little influence, my interest wanes. When Wayne Sayles invited me to handle the public side of the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild, I gave it serious thought before I agreed, but then set about things with enthusiasm. After helping to get overwhelming public support against U.S. import restrictions on ancient coins, I discovered that the public opinion process was just a sham and was categorically ignored by the U.S. government. Even worse, I realized that the U.S. government's aim in these procedures was not to protect "cultural heritage" but to obtain concessions from various countries by doing so, These concessions were secret and even the court system did nothing to bring them before public scrutiny. People were "buying a pig in a poke", but to add insult to injury, it was a forced sale.  I realized that my task was redundant and I resigned. It seemed to me that the legal route at least had some chance of success, but minority groups are mere cannon-fodder for political/economic purposes. Our opposition, though, was even worse off because they thought that they were being given greater credit. Sooner or later, their own interests will be squashed in the same manner for some other political/economic gain.

The Zeitgeist Movement and the Venus Project have split. Various reasons have been offered but I tend to think that this is evolutionary. Such splitting is quite common in belief systems and thus organized religions are the commonest expression of that. The degree of agreement between two sects of the same religion acts as the fuel for hostilities and religious wars are most noticed between beliefs that share more things. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (chronologically sorted) not only share certain beliefs, prophets etc, but are often in close geographical proximity, so mutual distrust is combined with the opportunity for conflict between the great religions and between various sects of such and nationalism is always there to fan the flames by adding xenophobia to the mix.

Unlike Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli was an extravert, and he had a big problem with "natural selection" as the numbers did not work out. Christian Creationists have used this to further their own ideas about intelligent design, but now epigenetics has resolved Pauli's problem. Dr. Bruce Lipton has a very interesting take on that subject. I suspect that Dr. Lipton, too, is one of the intuitive types.

More tomorrow.