Consider this effort for what it is, not the truth, but an attempt to add one more, sometimes tediously serious, sometimes ludic, spark to the kindling dialogue on the subject of intuition.  The paper is part of an ongoing project in psychology at West Georgia to develop a conceptual framework within which intuition can be better viewed and understood.  This project, itself is associated with an international effort, coordinated by Dr. Jagdish Parikh (IMD, Switzerland) to explore practical ways by which intuition can openly serve the interests of mankind.

The method is hermeneutics.  The specific task: to pass between apparent opposing poles from which intuition can and is being viewed via a route of mediations. Via these mediations, the paper attempts to move as closely as possible into the intimacy at the intersections of Instinct and Superconsciousness and Innocence and Reflection.  Psi phenomena are explored both as one of these mediations and as indicator of where the road of mediation may end.

Here I present a symbol.  I will use it in my attempt to understand and convey an understanding of intuition.  This snake, eating its own tail, is an Eastern symbol of wholeness and unity.

Wholeness?  The poor creature is eating itself away.  Unity?  If ever there was a house divided against itself is not this snake its symbol?  Have the Eastern sages simply blown one?  Or are they sager than our own first encounters with this image may indicate?

Let’s see.  Taken in itself it is a circle.  The circle is a geometrical symbol of unity and wholeness.  But unity and wholeness imply, nay, implicate their opposites: disunity and separation.  This snake symbol takes that into account.  Here are the opposite ends of the snake, head and tail joined.  But weren’t they joined anyway?  After all, this - head and tail - is the same snake.  So the disunity, not yet recognized by it as it creates it, develops when the snake tries to join with its tail in this self-destructive way.  The snake in its innocence had taken opposite to mean alien or other, or appetizing.

I propose that this symbol says that the snake, like us, had to learn of this primordial unity of apparent opposites the hard way.  It, like us, has to pass from innocence to reflection to consciousness and do this through the process of experiencing its limitations - which realization opens up new possibilities for altered action or new visions concerning its relationship to itself and the universe.

Follow the hungry snake on its eating path, inch by joyously painful inch.  Let us start with the snake seeing some tantalizing food ahead which it grabs in its mouth.  In its innocence (of an activity of which it is anything but innocent in the legal sense) it sees its tail as an other than itself - i.e., as a prey.  That is, a satisfying prospect, an opportunity to be grabbed up.  But one can imagine that as the snake starts eating away, it begins to have mixed feelings centered in both satisfaction and pain.  If this is a particularly dumb snake - like contemporary humans with our environment - it may eat itself to the back of its own head before, if ever, being brought to the threshold of a disconcerting realization.

On its eating path the snake may be beset by doubts, unarticulated questions, vacillations and, who knows, perhaps a type of serpentine neurosis.  This conflictual experience calls for resolution by or towards an understanding of what is happening.  Perhaps even without benefit of therapy it arrives at a realization.

At the moment of that realization, the snake loses its innocence or, put differently, discovers that it was only innocent at the level of awareness, not innocent at the level of act.  It could then join a serpentine church whose pastor tells him about original sin.  Or it could explore other possibilities.  Realization is a stage where heavier forms of reflection may begin, leading either to creative problem solving and/or to deeper insights into the snake’s primordial condition.  In the case of practical problem solving, necessity - the conflictual experience which brought on reflection - here becomes the mother of invention.

The problem solving may lead to the snake’s attempt to back out of the jam it has got itself into, learn how to adapt to a not-perfect situation or, if and when the insight goes deeply enough, enjoy to a fuller, mystical recognition that there is no ultimate escape from that condition - only a new and perhaps fascinating way of looking at it via less dense consciousness of this inescapable condition.  We could then speak of an enlightened, unified, or whole snake.  At which point the symbol disintegrates into the real snake who is head and tail, one and the same reality, and it can straighten or coil up, as snakes do, and go about it’s business of catching and eating something else -which has a more appropriate part to play out in that realty - like a mouse.  The symbol is gone.  The snake is now what it Is.  The mouse, too.  But that is okay.

The symbol - the snake’s life from innocence to reflection to consciousness - has already done its work, and what it has revealed allows the snake to be itself fully.  This consciousness opens a second innocence of a universe now viewed differently.  The lived symbol has informed the snake - and us as participant observers - in and through its (our) particular unhappy circumstance of the greater reality of which it (we) is a part.  It is implicated - by its nature, its biology, its instincts - in an orgy of eating and being eaten.  The desire and fear engendered in this struggle are what prevented the snake from recognizing these implications.  What makes this snake different from other still primordially innocent snakes is that it understands this implication and, therefore, now identifies with the whole process, contributing fully to it in its particular way.

All of life, Alan Watts once mused, is a mutual eating society.  Or, if you like to see things in a more positive light, all of life is a mutual nurturing society.  In any event, animal life is pain and pleasure and terminates in animal death.  Consciousness not only recognizes the original unity of the opposites of head and tail (heads and tails joined from the inside and being mutually contradictory seen from without) but, as well, the unity of the opposites of pleasure and pain and their source in ignorance.  Simultaneously, such consciousness of that which was previously unconscious recognizes that pleasure and pain were the very creations of that ignorance or, put negatively, of actions based on the failure to realize that what is Is.

Carl Jung did not deny natural man or that such a man follows all the laws of cause and effect found everywhere in nature.  Nor did Maslow or the Eastern sages ignore or deny this.  But they saw in the human the ability to use this basic determinism as stimulation or inspiration towards original thought and liberating understanding.

What ties human behavior to that of other animals and other dimensions of nature are the instincts and the energy they draw upon.  For Freud, these instincts and energy both provided the repetitive patterns we see in human behavior as well as those we see in nature at large.  Nature is potentially predictable to the human mind, and thus, is considered by it lawful.  Mountain water invariably seeks the easiest path down to the ocean.  Not only because of gravitational pull but because all energy, in the 19th Century model Freud followed, moves towards a state of inertia.  For Freud, both the pleasure principle - later seen as the life instincts and the reality principle, later as the death instincts - were paths along which the human rushed to eat himself to death - the ultimate inertial state, just like the snake.

What distinguishes the human from the rest of nature is his ability to reflect.  Yet the rationalist, even the Christian valuing faith and diminishing the role of the body, separates this reflective ability from the body which gives reflection its source and necessity.

The intimacy between bodily necessity and the dawnings of reflection, often missed by reflection or faith, helps explain why we sometimes have a hard time distinguishing instinct from intuition.  Intuition, I suggest, often viewed as a form of cognition - a rudimentary source of non-logical knowing - is instinct seeking voice.  Put positively and more fully, intuition is the voice of innocence upon which then reflection can take hold.

But intuition is not instinct or reflection.  It is not either because it acts in and on the world offering the variety of ways by which fixed instincts can be satisfied and does so directly and immediately in a way that reflection cannot.

Thus, an almost infinite variety of art and poetry can be intuitively inspired relating to a few themes central to the human condition.  These themes can then be divided and subdivided by reflective distinctions and reclassifications into a much greater variety of works in philosophy, science, business, engineering, homemaking, etc. - the best of these reflective works being - each one, and at any stage - guided along the right paths by creative intuition.

Not only is intuition the voice of the instincts, it is the perpetual reminder of all human creation and activity of their sources, often forgotten by their authors in the reflective process, leading each author “back” to the necessities of nature.  Or, put positively, displaying like the rivers, the tides, the mountains, and the sunsets the variations possible on human nature’s central themes.

Stated provisionally, because these are only relative (yet, from the point of view of reflection, important differences between them), let me name four kinds of intuition within the framework of the process of Innocence-Reflection.  The first three start from the side of nature - i.e., as we, with limited vision and understanding, see intuition manifesting itself in our daily lives and activities.  That is, here we will take a characteristic Western perspective.  The first two kinds of intuition are directionally differentiated.  Within the time-space reference point of senses and logic-limited reflection, these can be viewed as forward and backward directions.

One which starts with innocence, I will call Dawning or Creative intuition because it presents itself in the forward movement from innocence towards reflection.  Another, which seems to he the opposite of this, in that it moves back from reflection to new innocence via reflective consciousness, I will call Recovery or even Discovery intuition.  The third and fourth variety I will call Spontaneous intuition 1 and Spontaneous intuition 2.  The latter appears to be unmediated and even unmediating, while Dawning and Recovery intuition are both mediated and are themselves vehicles or mediations.

Yet, I’ll suggest that only Spontaneous intuition 1 is purely immediate and even that assertion I will later try to cast into doubt.  To discuss this latter, Spontaneous intuition 1, we will have to reverse our frame of reference from a typical Western to a typical Eastern view of intuition.

Dawning intuition is exemplified by Heidegger’s interpretation of poetry:

The poet speaks the essential word.  This implies that poetry is not the use of ready-made language.  It is that particular kind of speech which for the first time brings into the open all that which we then discuss and deal within everyday language.  Hence poetry never takes language as raw material ready at hand.  Rather, it is poetry which first makes language possible.

There is no real distinction between this primary poetic expression and the first consciousness of some new aspect of reality.  . . .  Poetry appears as the first and primary mode of the life of a people - that is, their laws, their wisdom, their religious rights, their sacred formulas of birth, marriage, death and initiation.

The second kind of intuition which I’ve called Recovery or Discovery starts with reflection and returns towards innocence.  Many philosophies and methods which make a place for intuition find this leading towards and at the end - not the beginning - of a path.  Thus, it is through logic, empirical examples, and dialogue through well-used language that intuition leads us towards revelation of a “deeper” truth.  Phenomenology “uses” intuition - sees what it is questioning in a systematically intuitive light - in order to open consciousness from a stereotyped experience (formed by what is called the “natural attitude” through stages) “its” fuller possibilities of revealing the essential structures of that experience.

The pre-phenomenological natural attitude was the separation from essential truths while the method returns reflection ever closer to understanding of a more intimate orderliness uniting the experienced and experiencer in and through their differences.

But much literature or art also provides the same vehicle within which this return or discovery intuition operates.  At first opening, the book (say, a novel) is simply lines of words which when read present personalities, places, events, expressions, etc.  All these are detached and separated from one another and from the reader.  At points in the reading (and all guided by the author) these tend to gain a coherence relative to one another until this understanding deepens to the point that the reader (now on the inside) can “see” the inner unity - truth, theme, or principle which unites them - and which actually carries implications and possibilities well beyond them separately or in the way they are related.

At this “deepened” stage of insight, words and descriptions first read mechanically - and presenting themselves as having not much more than standard dictionary meanings, because they were chosen by the author - are increasingly experienced in the reading as expressing his theme.  Each one “contains” or expresses in and through it, relative to the others, the theme itself.  Each is a variation of that theme or, put inversely, the theme expresses itself in each word, each personality, each event. Thus do both Scarlet O’Hara and Rhett Butler, as names and personalities, express dimensions of the same principles of the human condition the author wished to treat. The whole work - including the author and reader - is now experienced as something of a hologram.

Perhaps it did not pass your notice that these two types of intuition have, at least to a point, analogies in the two types of Myths of Creation which appear universally.  The first version of the myth, relative to Dawning intuition, starts with innocence in the Garden and moves towards the separation resulting from the eating of the fruits of the tree of good and evil.

Think of Dawning intuition as coming from a space where there existed no good or evil, no judgments - just being.  But doesn’t this thought introduce a snag?  For, according to the view I am putting forward that intuition is an extension of instinct in the cognitive domain, innocence is not of a seemless perfection but, rather, it is innocence of an instinctual complicity in the struggle which brings about the experience of pleasure and pain.  In other words, for the Garden myth to be seen as more fully consistent with my view of innocence, the seduction and eating of the apple had to be a foregone conclusion.  Instinct was going to have out.  The fall from grace then was not a fall from perfection but a recognition through and upon reflection of the evil act and of that act’s inevitability.  Man took consciousness of his mortal limits.

Or was this God, coming on as a flesh and blood human who through finite means would have to “work” - or play a sort of hide and seek to find - his way back into His (City of God) city.  More on this later.

The second version of the Creativity Myth moves in from a different, opposing, angle.  Here, everything was chaos, separated, and then it all came together.  Thus, modern science speaks of the “Big Bang” theory where the explosion-induced chaos came to re-form into the lawfulness of our universe.  This reverse path is from separation to harmony.  This parallels in some ways the path of that which I’ve called Recovery or Discovery intuition, in that something new isn’t created but that something consistent, insightful, whole, and of origin is discovered - beginning with and passing back through the thickets of finite segments of used language and bits and pieces of already created matter.

Before giving examples of this “way back” from disharmony to harmony, let me point out that this myth or theory also hits a snag in relation to the notion of innocence, which I’ve regarded as instinctually grounded.  Even though the diversity of explosive expressions of an original unity returns to a state of unity, that new unity - the arrangement of our universe - is conceivably different from the pre-exploded one.  This possibility of difference vies with the instinct theory which speaks of invariability.  Must we consider the possibility that the instincts themselves are “remedial”?  Again, let us talk about that possibility below when we inverse our perspective from Occidental to Oriental in the discussion of Spontaneous intuition 1.

Seeking an example of the return from pieces of already created matter towards consciousness of a deeper unity, we may find instruction in Vygotsgy’s kind of what I would call intuition, as interpreted by Leontiev, which brings the scattered everyday consciousness back to the insight of a shared memory.  The novice farmer, in the activity of learning to accommodate to a plow enters through this instrument, a technology, into the memory of farming - i.e., the essence of being a farmer, that space shared by every farmer who ever lived at any time period.  This occurs, according to Leontiev, because the plow (taken by itself but a piece of metal) has evolved over centuries to accommodate to both the farmer at one end and the soil at the other.

Likewise, to seat one’s self properly in ice skates (taken by themselves but leather and steel) which over the centuries have been attuned to ice, opens such an individual to the universe of skating and skating possibilities, experiences, attitudes, values, etc. Through openness to the guidance of the instrument, in activity one is drawn to the source from which that instrument was inspired, designed, and created.

This last sentence already suggests the relationship between Dawning and Discovery intuitions in that the return back reopens the ‘‘source “ to new variations (new skate movements or dances, etc.).

So this may be a good point, also, to suggest how these two types of intuitions - Creative and Discovery, along with their analogous versions of the Creation Myth - tend to work themselves into the heart of the creative process.  The term “originality” is a two-vectored one.  One vector of its meaning leads to that which is new and unique.  The other vector of meaning goes to the origins, that which is at the heart or which has always been.

Henri Bergson, in discussing his own life’s experiences, gives us a personally experiential insight into this paradoxically intimate relationship between creative and discovery directions of intuition.  Bergson said that when he was young, he was at one time this, another that - sometimes high, sometimes low; sometimes good, sometimes mean.  He had a shifting variety of interests and passions which often seemed mutually incompatible and he fell often into despair because each role or temper or state or interest felt like him in part and yet he could not imagine what he was altogether.  Then at some point along this disparately divided life, he came to see, nearly all at once, that all of these so different and more often contradictory tendencies were, in musical terms, variations - assonances, dissonances, points and counterpoints on a theme, his life’s theme.

Once he discerned these as variations on a theme, these differences and contradictions began to cohere, make sense, from his earliest childhood out towards his most distant future - the completion of his symphony.  His moment of revelation simultaneously informed him that from there on he was the composer of his symphony whose theme he was just discovering.  As he composed - created in tune with the theme being revealed in its variations - he would discover, discern, what his symphony sounded like - who he was.  But to be himself, he had to create what he was in the process of discovering.
 Sartre might have put it, “He had to choose to be what he was.”

But let me pass on to another brand of intuition.  Unlike clearly-mediated kinds of intuitions just described (creative and discovery), Spontaneous intuition 2 seems to have nothing like poetry or art (words or materials) as vehicles through which it expresses itself uniquely or by which it provides a guiding path back to consciousness of source.  It seems to be unmediated.  Such are the intuitions which get us through everyday life with an amount of correctness and grace which cannot he attributed to logic or probability.  What is called “women’s intuition” may be of this variety in that it recognizes, discerns, from presentations certain that are valid in some immediate, essential way.

This type of intuition is connected with the grace of dance or in-tune lovemaking where one senses almost instantly the other’s full presence and even the most subtle coming movements.  At this very immediate level it is difficult to distinguish instinct from intuition (e.g., An “instinctive” or “intuitive” lover?  An “instinctive” or “intuitive” boxer?  An “instinctive” or “intuitive” mother?).  We might use intuitive in all these cases if there is any awareness of the flow of action.

But I really think that this second kind of Spontaneous intuition is more like either Dawning or Recovery intuition - in that it is focused in the specific activity and uses the body itself as a subtle vehicle for intuition.  That is, if intuition is the voice or recovery of innocent bodily instinct, that “ voice” is “whistled” through the body as if it were a musical instrument - the body as instrument being the equivalent of the words of the poet or the brush stroke of the artist.

But let us observe here that intuitions even of the most mediated Dawning and Recovery kinds are, also often experienced as having their sources in the body.  Thus, it is common to hear the term “gut feeling” substituted for intuition and, likewise, many creative artists and scientists speak of the intuition as coming from a certain “spot” in their bodies, “spaces” they can “consult” intentionally by posturing their bodies in certain ways.  For many a baseball player, the home run is in such a space which is consulted by using postures or body ritual and fetishes.  From the perspective of Merleau-Ponty, what I - not he, necessarily - would call intuition can almost completely be conceived as lived body.

To get to the authentically Spontaneous intuition 1, we have to flip to the other side of everything we’ve been talking about thus far - to an Oriental view that everything is consciousness and consciousness is intuition.  By this view, consciousness embodies itself (creates everything) and expresses itself through its embodiments.  This is the consciousness which engenders all mediated intuitions (including Spontaneous intuition 2), creativity, and creativity’s products, and is their telos - that is, it is also that towards which these are guided or lured.

Reversing the perspective from Occidental to Oriental as we are now doing - from a perspective where intuition is a subtle, even fragile, furtive, or uncertain phenomenon and now starting from the side of consciousness as intuition - evidently puts much of what has been said thus far about intuition as the voice of innocence into question.  Especially since innocence as I’ve viewed it is the innocent voice of instincts.  Instincts are the invariables which lead through intuition to creative versatility and ultimately to consciousness.

So - like the snake I’ve been using as a guiding theme - starting with consciousness as intuitive source of creativity and rediscovery of itself, I encounter what seems to be sitting opposite to where I am now perspectively situated.  The instincts seem from this vantage like the other pole - a radical other - and far too few, narrow, invariable, and rigid to be the father of intuition.  It seems from this Oriental perspective presumptuous - even blindly arrogant to the extreme - to make any such a claim.  Spontaneous intuition 1 - consciousness as intuition, it would appear, could eat all the natural instincts for breakfast and hardly work up a good burp.

But let us remember, first, that neither the instincts nor consciousness as intuition is making this claim.  I the writer - who am humbly trying to understand intuition from behind a keyboard and in front of a screen in the backwoods of Carroll County, Georgia - am suggesting this apparent contradiction.  In other words, I am finding this contradiction in the logic I use.  But let me follow this logic further along some experiential and intuitive lines.  A native Georgian, one of which I am not, knows the man can’t be separated from the land.  It is the intuitive source of his literature and art.

Experientially, I think that what the Oriental sages would in various ways identify as consciousness/intuition is the equivalent of what the American Orient – California - likes to refer to as higher consciousness, transpersonal consciousness, or superconsciousness.  Freed from the lace curtain groundings of the East Coast, Californians (and here I speak of a state of mind) find it easy to leap into visions.  But then, we East Coasters often claim they and their visions are not sufficiently grounded.

Every castle can use some lace curtains, or at least some solid foundations.  Every architect can use an engineer.  Sometimes Californians, in their exuberance, forget this.  Or, in their wide open spaces they become innocent to these more limited, logical, realistic, rigidly guided, dimensions.  So they, as “New Agers,” sometimes seem to us down-home East Coasters a bit airy-fairy.  Again, sort of like the snake who innocently sees its own tail as something it could have for breakfast and blithefully begins to eat away at it by substituting that perspective for all others and calls it “holistic.”

Maslow recognized the need for foundations, or guts (from which “gut feelings” get their name), when he grounded his own humanistic-transpersonal psychology at the biological “deficiency need” level and spoke of human behavior and experience as being instinctoid - that is, directed by forces which are instinct-like.  Unlike other animals, the instincts in humans are less highly developed, and less coercive.  Put differently, they are overlain with the means, lures, and products of civilization.  Likewise, Maslow, among others, has noted the limitations of the Freudian model due to this latter’s having attached his own instinct theory to a closed system view of energy as understood by 19th Century physical scientists.

For Maslow, the search for consciousness itself was instinctoid, often lost sight of in pursuit of fulfilling the destinies of other instinctoid needs.  But also for some who are realizing these destinies optimally (those self-actualizers who did not get stuck in any one or more of these), this instinctoid source provides both path and telos from and towards full consciousness.  To extrapolate from Maslow in this regard, I would see my own view of intuition as that which voices these instinctoid tendencies.

As we move from energy viewed in terms of closed system physics to open systems, these instinct voiced intuitions, when heard and followed, can lead through and beyond a solipsistic (read at the psychological level, narcissistic) model towards discovery of “self” in the little “personal” and big “transpersonal” senses.  This happens in and through awareness of lived world experience and culture, centered around creative-discovery engagement with symbols.

As Paul Ricoeur so rigorously elucidated in his hermeneutic treatise on Freud, natural language symbols can be elucidating and empowering when opened to their potential as inner crossroads of energy and meaning and intersections of human origins and destinies.  He particularly stresses the power of symbols to represent both the sacred and desacrilized dimensions of human experience as well as the lived meanings of good and evil (consciousness and shadow in Jung’s terms) - which is not necessarily the same thing as sacred-desacrilizing.  Freud’s was a desacrilizing hermeneutics, one necessary to demystify symbols that had become sedimented into false idols.  For instance, all the previous symbols and literature of and about reason and consciousness had become so hardened as to turn their subject into a false God - King Consciousness.  Freud’s opening of the power of the unconscious thus served to demystify that idolic understanding of consciousness.  Ricoeur’s resacrilizing hermeneutics, moving through the same universe of over-determined symbols as Freud, was able to disclose and restore an authentic quality of sacredness to consciousness.

Ricoeur, like Freud, sees these over-determined or multi-determined symbols as having potential for versatile, interrelating, and deepening interpretations.  For Ricoeur, these open up the horizons of (not close in on) what is now being called super- or transpersonal consciousness.  Ricoeur speaks of Kerigma - or the call which finds, in my terms, its “buoys” of guidance in and through the symbol in stages of creation and interpretive disclosure of fresh understanding.  The call ties the personal - through the interpersonal (cultural) - to the collective or transpersonal destiny, as does another variant or manifestation of intuition, called vision.

Ricoeur, like Jung and Joseph Campbell, sees symbolism as the mediation vehicle between earth and consciousness.  But there are other mediations between instinct as source and consciousness as source of intuition.  Let me call these mediation maps which have the qualities of being seen themselves as collective intuitions.  One can find these at all stations along the trip from the instinct to consciousness and back.

Two of these collective intuitive guides are reason and, even, logic itself.  Not only do these (reason with its broader focus on experience, and logic with its narrower, more rigorous adherence to internal consistency) act as checks on intuition - distinguishing it from other manifestations such as pathological projection or inference, etc. – but also, they spark and guide intuition, giving it checkpoints and the “progressing” possibility inherent to reflection.

But more, reasoning and logic are themselves grounded in what are called by philosophers such as Kant a priori’s - i.e., pre-givens or cognitive equivalents of instincts.  At the level of these pre-givens we find the grounding principles of, say, mathematics - e.g., axioms, or the great interconnecting “road map” of metaphysics.  As the Eastern sages have long realized, any of these collective intuition “systems” can be used to narrow in on specific and natural, even practical issues (e.g., the use of logic to fix a broken toy) or taking the implications of metaphysics (e.g., “justice”) to argue that one slice of pie is unfairly bigger than the rest.  The principles of two other mediation maps, esthetics or the moral imperative, can also be used in trivial or perverted ways.

Or these, like Jung’s archetypes, can be the basis for opening up to fuller consciousness.  Thus, we are alerted by the Perennial Philosophy - if fuller consciousness is our aim, to work towards insight into the principles of any endeavor rather than to allow ourselves to become fascinated with (stuck in) these or specialize in the specifics those principles give rise to.  We should seek instead the intrinsic relationship among these - i.e., the principle of the principles.

 Let us suggest still another potential mediation between intuition and superconsciousness, and use this as a vehicle for examining the possible limits to mediation.  The following discussion takes us occasionally somewhere but as often nowhere.  By “nowhere,” I mean to a space.

 This mediating and possibly end to mediation vehicle I refer to is that range of phenomena which are dealt with in the field of parapsychology.  The literature of Eastern sagesse has often noted that those powers associated with psi tend to manifest themselves during the process of consciousness-taking (the French prise de conscience means insight) but are not in themselves doorways of passage from dense to more enlightened awareness.  These are seen as by-products of the process and, yet, are seen also as potential dangers which can block the process if one comes to dwell in their powers.

In this sense of that which can both mediate and that which can block, psi abilities joins virtually every other vehicle of mediation just mentioned, including symbols which can be used manipulatively rather than heuristically - logic which can deny intuition, metaphysics which can easily lead to destructive ideology, and so forth.

But psi abilities are different in two ways.  First, in that they share with intuition a special mystery not accorded the mediations we’ve discussed.  Symbols have an empirical dimension which cannot be denied even by the most sensate among us - esthetics, logic, metaphysics, etc. are culturally experientiable at some level and in some cases can even be “taught.”  Even creativity has its tangible products which at least logically imply a not-yet-understood process which brought them about.  But psi abilities, though widely experienced and reported, seem almost like special gifts available to certain people at certain times, under certain conditions and applied to very specific events.

Second, psi abilities seem to differ from all the other mediations mentioned above, and from intuition itself, in that these seem to traverse in very individual and unique ways natural time-space constraints.  Other mediations mentioned above do pass beyond time and space but not via specific, apparently random, or even selected targets.  Art can manifest itself as vision, metaphysics can speak to eternal truths.  But psi abilities seem capable of far greater specificity in their time-space leaps.

Yet, again, the differences between psi and other mediations are certainly not absolute in this regard.  For having noted these distinctions, it must be added that psi abilities are also reported to increase in frequency in the midst of other activities.  We already noted the frequently reported increases in psi abilities along the “spiritual’ paths towards superconsciousness.  Also, in the “heat” of the creative engagement, many creative individuals report that they experience remarkable happenings such as a heightened sense of the synchronicity which is aiding their process.  Poetry and art are often themselves prescient and even prophetic.

Indeed, the theme of the artist seems often to be coming from the future the artist himself was not at all aware of.  His hand is pulled out - ”It seems by some Divine force” - towards this emerging theme’s articulation.  Another link, some of the same rituals and body fetishes reported in relationship to intuition often acknowledged as significant to the creative artist or scientist.

That is, such activities which specially relate artists to their materials – or, inversely, material related fetishes to intuition or psi - often implicate a special relationship between mind and matter.  The artist’s materials often have a profoundly intimate and unique significance for him, approaching a love relationship.

Such observations from the creative process are remindful of the circumstances of intuition mentioned above in the discussion of Vygotsky's (Leontiev’s) theories of a cultural memory being opened through increasingly intimate activity with an instrument.  What differentiates such instances as these from abilities shown in, say, psychometry, is that the former end up with a universal experience (open a cultural memory) while the psi corollary is very personal and related to very specific incidences, thoughts, etc. - which are read through very personal objects.  What links the two views, it seems, is intimacy with matter.

Or examples associated with Spontaneous intuition 2 of intimacy in dance or lovemaking.  Here, the bodies are opened, rendered vulnerable to one another, and it is as if in that intimate state the partners can “read” in or through their own not only the body of the other, but also the other’s consciousness (mind).

Likewise, so-called “women’s intuition” often seems to bear amazingly close resemblances with defined characteristics of psi, such as precognition.  So-called “women’s intuition” can also manifest itself, like psi, with great specificity and through time-space dimensions - e.g., “You should not take that plane.”  W. G. Roll argues that intimacy in relationships greatly enhances abilities.  But whether “women’s intuition” is intuition or psi, what if anything is the media of intimacy - i.e., intimate with what?  The members of her family?  Why could we not argue with equal prospect of accuracy that “women’s intuition” is manifestation of “maternal instinct”?  Of course, one problem with this proposal is that “women’s intuition” is also manifested in many men and we would have to look for the “maternal instinct” in them.

A more likely source of intimacy which would enhance “women’s intuition” (or psi) is the intimacy with one’s own experience and memory, which is specifically brought to bear on any situation or person relative to which or whom the intuition is manifested.  Here we see - as Ference Marton has revealed so clearly from interviews with Nobel Prize winners - a clear analogy with reports of creative artists or scientists, etc.  They have a special access to their experiences and memories which are all immediately available in any creatively engaging situation.  This “repertory” of possibilities serves as a tool of discernment within that creative engagement.  In such cases as these, memory in intimate relationship with the project, person, or situation becomes the media through which the intuition or psi ability is manifested.  In the other, something within one’s self is recognized leading to a discernment.

But is this personal memory alive to present events not the equivalent at the level of the personal to that which Jung calls memory at the level of the collective unconscious?  Or does personal memory accessible in this way, and so used, not a doorway itself to those instinctive memories of the collective unconscious?

In all of these potential analogies, as with the case of “women’s intuition,” it must also be stated that psi abilities seem often to be “gifts” to those who are following no particular path towards consciousness and who are completely and often permanently innocent as to the source or destiny of these powers.  Could our snake have gone parapsychological instead of on the path to consciousness?  That so many people apparently do this suggests that intuition - as well as psi - can serve many paths, none of which need necessarily be the path to fuller consciousness.

The literature on creativity may again suggest the validity of this almost self-evident observation.  Yet, at the same time as it suggests that - at least Western style - creativity is itself a separate path from the spiritual one towards superconsciousness, it simultaneously implies that both the creative and spiritual one tap an inner source.

In line with this thought, the American artist John Ferran wrote that even though the creative artist focused on highly specialized and tangible projects having nothing to do with personal awareness, s/he dips into the same intuitive source as the mystic whose “aim” is precisely this greater internal blossoming of consciousness.

The artist, according to Ferran, prepares himself for the intuition or insight which s/he then grabs up like a predator and incarnates in the world of tangibles, stone, or canvass.  By a similar means - or state of preparation - the mystic, when opened to the insight, “reinvests” it in the internal development of consciousness.

Is the “space” that is tapped for insight by artist and mystic the same although, subsequently, the paths diverge according to chosen destiny?  Is the “space” tapped by the psi sensitive the same or similar to these?  Are they prepared for in a similar way?  And even if the chosen destiny of the psi-gifted individual should move towards stage demonstrations or the like, could not the same “space” serve another destiny - i.e., towards closer identity of the personal or interpersonal with the transpersonal?

This opens the question of whether there is not an unmediated “space” into which the personal goes, or “seats himself” in order to he intuitively “refreshed,” so to speak.  The notion of superconsciousness as pure intuition, pure implying un- or pre-mediated, certainly offers itself as that source to be tapped for a variety of quite different more earth-bound destinies.

I have tried by the process of mediations to soften what first seemed an irreconcilable opposition between instinct and consciousness, each having claim to being the source of intuition.  I would like to get this snake - my own inquiry or movement from innocence to consciousness - to discover its inherent wholeness from within.  Put there is a matter to be considered before presuming that enumerating and elaborating on mediations can fully bridge the gap between body and consciousness, matter and mind.

Is there an unmediated or direct path to transpersonal or superconsciousness?  What about the path of meditation, or even of faith?  Of course, one can think of each of these as a technique, vehicle, or mediation in itself.  But the claims for these are too great, and too often made, to get caught in trivial arguments over definition.  In meditation, the body and its needs and associated mental processes are hardly ignored.  However, these are often used cleverly as weapons against themselves.  By being in some manner stilled, the body and its random thoughts are brought to serve the interests of insight or discovery made possible by more intimate attunement to superconsciousness.  In some ways, faith shares essentials with meditation in the sense that it calls for surrendering personal will and desire, presumably linked by thought to body.

In some cases of both Eastern and Western (primarily Christian) traditions, such surrenders of body (instinct) demands leads directly to the way or will of the superconscious.  And this presumably results in the awakened individual wisely living out this way or will.  But what is this way or will, and how is it recognized - not simply in principle, but in the everyday discernment of right choices and paths?  How does one come to be, as Maslow described his self-actualizing subjects, the “good chooser”?  Or better, to use the term of the Potlatch group which insightfully sees intuition in terms of discernment, how do we become at every level of our lives wisely discerning?

As the term Perennial Philosophy indicates, there is a very high agreement across cultures, times, religions, and philosophies as to the principles associated with the path of higher consciousness.  At the same time, that higher consciousness is given very different names.  And many quite different traditions, theologies, rituals, and practices are created around each name and explanation for its status and meaning.  In all cases of these variations, the body has to be dealt with and lived in some way.  The figurative “Eating of the blood of Christ” and all the bodily references mentioned in the scriptures shows that Christianity is no exception.

In such references as these and those of other traditions, the body serves at least (which may be the most) symbolically to refer to higher consciousness.  Christ himself is an embodied mediator between the earth and heavens.  Ricoeur points to the number of metaphors in dreams, poetry, philosophy, and prophetic and eschatological literature which sees the big (infinite) consciousness in the small (finite and earth bound) consciousness.  The “stained” soul has its earthy counterpart in the soiled shirt.  In other traditions, tuning into consciousness is tuning into body in its new graceful, discerning relationship with the world and way.

That way or path of superconsciousness may be anything but a strict new set of rules or determinisms to replace those of the instincts.  As a possibility, there is a playful intrinsic relationship between these guides of nature and those of superconsciousness - between intuition as voice of innocent instincts and intuition as voice of superconsciousness.  So let me become lyrical here, inspired by the suggestion that what is below is above; above, below.

Like Bergson, let me start with music as the metaphorical vehicle.  Playfully imagine the following and then begin playing with your own imagination.  Imagine that superconsciousness needs as much care and attention, as much recognition and sustenance as each one of us, as much titillation and joy.  Imagine that It, who created us in its image - a provisional hypothesis - enjoys, like us, stretching out, venturing and adventuring – playing.

Imagine that we, the instinct-bound bodies, were created like some musical instrument - a flute or violin - finite and capable of operating each only according to its specific nature.  Imagine that the infinite is that pure consciousness, or spontaneous intuition, which created all the finite instruments of earth to hear its own tune played - e.g., a limited “flute” which can, nonetheless, play infinite variations of a pure melody and all the instruments simultaneously playing out the symphonic theme of that superconsciousness.  All the instruments would contain within them the creative spirit and thought of their designer including the creative spirit itself.

So that within every tree or creature (in tune with what holographic theorists such as Carl Pribram are now suggesting) would exist the potential to be what it is and reveal its relationship to everything else and to express in its uniqueness the greater theme which cannot he heard - may not even exist - until all the instruments are playing for all they are worth to some appreciative audience.
 
One can even imagine that like all creative souls, superconsciousness put His, Her, Our, Its whole Being into the project.  As a consequence, the instruments – ourselves - when in tune with our natures may actually create God as He, She, It, Us, creates us and all enjoy the satisfaction of self-discovery and realization.

Thus do I imagine one way of understanding those snags I’ve noted above in the two Creation Myths.  Like the rest of us, God (or the superconsciousness) has a little of the Devil in Him, Her, Us or It and gave The Word - which separated Himself in us and us from one another as part of a grand game of hide and seek.  Starting with the rules of our limited instincts, we are - through creativity and discovery - to find one another again, during the process of which game even these rigidly invariable instincts are transformed into versatile intuitions leading the way back Home.

Where we can all celebrate and laugh at our family reunion (until the party wears down and we get bored - see Devil below).  You might have even called this “space/moment” Heaven - if the word hadn’t already been copyrighted in the beginning.

What, then, is Hell?  Sartre says “Hell is other.”  I would amend this slightly to read “other unrecognized” - like the snake and its tail.

And the Devil? The Devil is that part of superconsciousness (God, He, She, It, Us) who suggested the game of hide and seek breaking us into little bits and pieces to break up - as George Bernard Shaw might have put it - the infinitely Divine boredom of Heaven.

And Intuition as superconsciousness?  That is the great memory within and of the source of everything - including the original innocence of every child who recognizes and slowly forgets, as limits and fascinations with things take over, the game-like source and dimensions of life.

And so I imagine that intuition is available to us through our limited natures to imaginatively carry out those limits for all they are worth and, as well - and sometimes in this process - to complete the game of hide and seek, to recognize in and through the specifics the greater symphonic harmony, which can take any number of variations. God, as we saw, gets bored easily.

I imagine that in this process we pass through guidance (by consorting) with the Devil who offers us the crooked - devious, perverse, chaotic, paradoxical paths back to the Divinely boring source of that last game he inspired.  With all the mediation “buoy’s” we discussed there to serve as points of reference.

And that we never really rid ourselves of need for the Devil until we get beyond the polarity of Heaven and Hell itself into a state of Grace(fulness) - a sort of enlightened version of Spontaneous intuition 2 - within matter-Divine being, where our lives - like the dance - express and stretch us simultaneously towards earth and the Heavens.

That is how I can imagine naturalistic, existential, humanistic, and transpersonal views of intuition being quite compatible.  But this is only a working hypothesis.