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Japanese woodblock prints of the Edo period (1603 – 1868) did not portray shadows. This is because the artists did not regard shadows as real and saw no reason to depict them.

A paradigm is a shared way of looking at the world. We live in an age dominated by logic, and the principles of logic inform everything we do, from politics to religion, to education, science, philosophy, morality, and even to the media. It is for this reason that any statement, idea, or action must be judged and labelled as either correct or incorrect. This is logic.

It is owing to the dominance of logic that intuition is regarded as little more than a refined instinct. Being regarded as such, it is assumed we can do nothing about our intuition. But of course, we can.

Logic became dominant in Western culture owing to the Church, which adopted it as the means to attack the heresies. It is telling that the word ‘heretic’ means ‘one who chooses’. The twelfth century Alain de Lille, who wrote Contra Haereticos (Against the Heretics), had the following to say about them:

‘The perfect freedom with which they were endowed meant repudiation of all formal religious institutions and law. No hierarchy was needed.’

From the point of view of logic, something is either right or wrong. Intuitively however we can know that something can be mostly right but wrong in parts, or even wrong but understandable. Logical judgement is black and white; intuitive judgement is conditional. It is owing to  history that are taught to think logically at school, but not to think intuitively.

Just as we can become better at mathematics, language, music, or art through practice, we can become better at applying intuitive judgement through practice and understanding. If we don’t attend to our intuition, we will still use it, but we may mistake it for raw emotion or self-certainty. We ignore our intuition at our own cost.

I am in the process of setting up Intuition Workshops here in Bath. For those who are interested in a fuller understanding of the inner life than conventional logic will allow, the workshops may be of interest. The link below provides more information:

Intuition Workshops

(artwork by Utagawa Hiroshige)

Where do new ideas come from? Logic is under our control – indeed, the purpose of logic is to govern our thought processes – but inspired ideas arrive whole, and instantly, and are more like a gift than a laboured product.

I have had three songs come to me in dreams. This is not a brag – I had no control over the process – but it means that how this can happen is a puzzle to me.

In each dream I thought the song belonged to someone else. It was only after I was unable to place the melody that I realised the song was original. Other songwriters have been inspired by dreams, including Keith Richards with Satisfaction, Jimi Hendrix with Purple Haze, and Paul McCartney with Yesterday. He too was convinced the melody was unconsciously filched:

‘For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before. Eventually it became like handing something into the police. I thought if no one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it.’

Dreams were also responsible for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Beyond the arts, Niels Bohr, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of the structure of the atom, recalled that the image of electrons revolving around a nucleus, like a solar system, came to him in a dream. And Larry Page stated that he got his vision for the Google landing page from a dream.

Dreams, by their nature, are visionary, immediate, emotional, and above all illogical. It may be that overcoming the constraints of logic is essential to the creative process. If logic deals with the known world, intuition deals with the unknown. Carl Jung wrote:

‘Through our feelings we experience the known, but our intuitions point to things that are unknown and hidden.’

This indicates that intuition may be the key to creativity. To be creative, we have to imagine what is ‘not there’. This can, in highly creative people like William Blake, appear in the form of actual visions. He began to have such visions from a very young age; they stayed with him all his life and informed his art. He wrote:

For double the vision my eyes do see,
And a double vision is always with me.

Just as it is possible to be better at mathematics or grammar through practice and attention, so too is it possible to improve our intuitive ability in the same way. We are all born with a natural degree of intuitive ability, but we do nothing about it and hope it will kick in when we need it. It is possible we have more inspired ideas than we realise, but if the logical (or chattering) mind has our attention, we won’t hear them.

For those who are interested, I am in the process of setting up Intuition Workshops here in Bath. The workshops are not discussions about intuition, but actual practices aimed at putting us in touch with the intuitive mind. The link below provides more information:

Intuition Workshops

Jim Blackmann

Artwork: Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897

What is an enigma?

In 809 AD, the Arab ruler, Harun al-Rashid, presented a peace offering to Charlemagne, the Holy Roman emperor. The peace offering was an elaborate water clock. At noon a weight dropped, bells sounded, and twelve brass horsemen emerged from twelve windows. Charlemagne did not understand what the clock was for, and thought it was merely a device for making sounds.

An enigma is something we don’t understand. The problem is not the enigma itself, but in our limited understanding.

There are obvious enigmas, such as how the ancients knew of the precession of the equinoxes, or how the proportions of the human body are an expression of mathematics, but such enigmas are not pressing enough to cause us to question our understanding of the world.

There are also enigmas which present themselves to us on a daily basis and demand our attention. One such enigma is human nature.

The dominant view of human nature is that we are no more than machines, or as Daniel Dennett put it ‘robots made of robots made of robots’. If we are satisfied with this explanation, then we will see mechanical people and look no further.

Our direct experience of people is that there is always something in them which is not revealed to our direct observation. It was for this reason that the diplomat, Lord Chesterfield, advised his son to ‘look into people, as well as at them’. It follows that what we see depends as much on the mind as on the eye.

Logic deals with what we know; once we know what something is we can define, label and categorise it. But to discover what we don’t know – what is hidden – we have to apply intuition. Just as logic has its methods, so too does intuition.

In Zen, the practice of silent observation in order to experience the essential nature of a thing is called observing its ‘isness’. To observe without thinking is absurd from a logical point of view. From an intuitive point of view however, silent observation allows the less obvious, or hidden elements to come to the fore in our attention. We can study all nature in this way, from simple items to the seasons to human beings.

I am in the process of setting up Intuition Workshops here in Bath. For those who are interested in learning about intuition and its methods, the workshops may be of interest. The link below provides more details:

Intuition Workshops

(artwork: Flammarion engraving, 1888, unknown artist)