Intuition, Art & Scientific Imagination
It all starts with intuition, the name we have given to the wisdom that flows from the physical core of experience into our conscious thoughts. We draw upon intuition whenever we engage in creative activity. Is there any reason that we shouldn’t think of science as a creative activity?
I have been working as an intuitive scientist for forty years without identifying myself as such until recently. I completed my first manuscript book thirty-five years ago, Spiritual Pragmatism, and it contained the seeds for the entire project that has followed since. Although I intended to write about the limitations of our conscious control over the things we do, I found myself writing about intuition and spirit. I was surprised by this at the time, but I continued what I was doing to see where it would lead. This is still what I am doing, and it has taken me quite far from where I started. I look back on what I have accomplished as a work of scientific imagination.
In a real sense, I have been writing the same work over and over repeatedly, completing a better version of what I had already done each time. A friend who was recently editing some of what I was writing pointed this out to me, and I realized that this had become my working method. When one works intuitively, ideas often emerge in an inchoate form that is easily misinterpreted and misunderstood. The words one finds to express these ideas are inevitably inadequate, resulting in an endless series of attempts and failures that, nevertheless, move one closer to expressing the intuition.
The extent to which this process has directed my efforts for nearly 40 years has only now revealed itself to me as I reviewed my work while composing this essay. How is it that this wasn’t obvious to me until now? Despite my attempts to express my intuitive process as a method, I still do not fully understand how intuition impacts our everyday choices. I am convinced that I could not relied on intuition in developing my ideas without the core of experience I accumulated in my years of clinical practice.
There is a formal structure imposed by science that interferes with the use of intuition as a method. Science constrains the flow of ideas that can be legitimately considered by subjecting every new thought to a review and justification in terms of all that had been done before. A few years ago, I was excited to discover a book on emotion by James Hillman, an imaginative Jungian thinker of the best kind. I was disappointed to find little more than a comprehensive review of previous theories of emotion. Hillman, trying to be scientific, was nowhere to be found. My own attempts to be scientific in both several minor research projects and in writing were similarly unsuccessful.
My theoretical writing about the brain and consciousness led me away from mainstream thinking, and it would have added very little to review and debate existing ideas that had nothing to do with what I was writing. To even consider them in any detail would interfere with the intuitive flow of ideas I depend on. I value this intuitive flow highly along with the insights that continue to surprise me.
I understood how to do scientific writing. One must first know the points to be expressed, then has to organize them into an outline and finally can incorporate them into a text. My writing about the brain and consciousness repeatedly led me away from what I had intended to express. This even occurred after I made an outline prior to starting. I had no choice but to follow the lead of the thinking processes that flowed through my writing because I was no longer in conscious control. I still believed myself to be engaged in scientific writing because the ideas I was developing were anchored in my years of experience as a neuropsychologist.
This shift began about forty years ago, shortly after my marriage to Joan, the artist who shares this collaborative website with me. She went through similar transformative changes after we married: first becoming an artist, then completing her education in art and lastly finding her way to the “spontaneous process of mark making” that is the basis for the abstract figurative work that appears in our book, The Two Tiers of Consciousness: A Physiological Paradigm.
As I developed my ideas, I found myself increasingly relying on a creative process that I did not control. I was still in the early stages of learning how this process worked. About twenty years ago, I became excited by the thought that I had discovered a new, more powerful way of thinking, and I created my first guidebook at that time. I knew that we do not have the degree of conscious control we think we have, and I developed the concept of a greater version of who we are, a Big Self responsible for the thinking that I as a little, conscious self, had now learned to access. I did nothing more with the guidebook except to use what I discovered in my own thinking processes from that point on. I collected the methods I developed into what I called the consciousness toolbox. These ideas remain an essential part of my thinking, and they are included in Chapter 4 of The Two Tiers of Consciousness.
The method of writing premises proved to be a particularly powerful way for me to access my intuitive thinking processes. It only involved premises that didn’t need to be proven or justified. Each premise provoked its own implications, and these became sub-premises as I went along. I drew from my experience as a clinical neuropsychologist in generating these premises, and I became increasingly aware of the critical role this experience base played in the process. I was also stimulated at that time, thirteen years ago, by my discovery of J. J. Gibson’s later work on perception. This was a rich, productive time for my work. It seemed that I could have continued creating premises indefinitely, but after 117 premises, I elected to convert what I had already done into a text.
Since the premises had been written without constraints, they didn’t offer a simple, logical structure for a text. I was still, at that time, trying to ground the text within a scientific format, with new ideas embedded in a review and critique of the old. This writing proved to be much more difficult than I imagined. I organized the first of the manuscript books I produced into an initial section called “Who are We” and a second section called “What is the World” followed by a discussion of the implications of these sections. I saw myself as a new kind of behaviorist regarding consciousness while retaining a belief in the infinite, unknowable realm of the whole self. I had already begun moving toward The Two Tiers of Consciousness at that time without knowing where I was headed.
I increasingly relied on an intuitive process, and the book I wrote had a form that reflected its intuitive source. It was unacceptable as a scientific text in a variety of ways that are now obvious to me. I sent it to an academic press and was rejected. Undaunted, I expanded the text to include a new theory of emotion, affect theory. This new manuscript book, Psychology Re-Imagined, was better organized but had the same weaknesses in scientific form. It was seriously considered by another academic press but ultimately rejected. I realized that it was a work, not of science, but of scientific imagination.
I made a complete break. I had been engaged in writing the two manuscript books for about six years, and I returned to a guidebook format. I was working at home, surrounded by art created by my wife, Joan, and I asked her if I could incorporate her work into the book. She agreed and suggested that I also include several poems I had written related to the text. Her whimsical figurative abstractions fit with the spirit of the book, and a new, collaborative way of working began.
Several things happened over the months that followed. The first involved my recognition of similarities between what Joan and I had done and the illuminated books that Willam Blake completed more than 200 years earlier. I had read Blake extensively prior to the surge in writing that has carried me along for forty years, and I realized his importance to my thinking for the first time. I revised the guidebook to incorporate an acknowledgement of William Blake, and I developed a presentation of Blake’s work in relationship to what Joan and I had done. This presentation was given in August of 2024, and it is available on this website.
Two critical corrective thoughts regarding the concept of the whole self arose during this time that led me to begin an immediate revision of this book. The idea of the whole self addressed the need for understanding who we are in terms of our greater brain-body system rather than the consciously defined self, but it did this in a general way that left much undefined. The whole self needed a structure to organize it in terms of its physiological realities. I thus organized the revision around a physiological paradigm, and this in turn led directly to the second corrective thought.
The very first manuscript books I wrote 35 years ago referred to the greater brain-body system as the big self, and this was conceptually equivalent to what I later came to call the whole self. My working premise was that we are not in conscious control. We are directed by a more complex brain-body system than can be expressed consciously, and this system is responsible for formulating and initiating the behavioral sequences expressed in our thoughts and actions. I now realized that the enormous complexity of this system in itself cannot explain the development of human functioning. Complexity can only develop into wisdom through experience.
I eventually came to see that such a system exists in the core of experience we accumulate that is responsible for the physical movement sequences involved in everything we do. It was then only a matter of time before the idea of two tiers for conscious awareness emerged. This occurred very recently, only about fourteen months ago. Although I was trying to complete the guidebook, it needed grounding in terms of its physical core. I made this adjustment surprisingly quickly. Still, as I was completing The Two Tiers of Consciousness, I saw that I had been mistaken in calling the first tier perceptual. Perceptual acts are acts of recognition that only take place within the verbal-symbolic tier of consciousness. I had described the first tier clearly as a continuous physical core of experience, but I mislabeled it.
I will take my time with a new revision which I have tentatively titled Of Two Minds, and I will use my blog on this website to introduce new insights as they become part of that revision. I will also indulge in reflections on the evolution of ideas that have captured me for so many years. I know that my intuitive productivity would not have been possible without the core experiences I accumulated while doing diagnostic evaluations as a clinical neuropsychologist. I also, however, had to let go of conscious control and allow my core base of experience to lead the way. The series of changes reviewed in the above two paragraphs could not have happened so smoothly and rapidly if I had first to submit them to scientific tests of logic and proof.
Joan’s art and my poetry do not simply add illustration or embellishment to our book. They each, in their own way, express the same intuitive process that made the book possible. In my theoretical writing, I learned to wait for the ideas that inevitably flow through an intuitive process that I do not control. I set the stage for accessing the intuitive connection to my core of experience, and I wait. I am often surprised and delighted by the insights that arrive. The recent major insight of two tiers resolved a problem that had been hidden within my writings on consciousness for 35 years
I assume this stage setting positioning more naturally when I am writing poems as does Joan when she is doing the mark making that creates her images. There are important differences in the process involved in these three kinds of creative activities. Scientific writing must always be grounded in a conceptual framework within the verbal-symbolic tier in which the ideas are being developed. Poetry, also grounded in the second tier, can be more freely creative, but it remains firmly within the realm of words and meanings.
The line that Joan makes in her art establishes a ground of its own for the images she later creates. It is solely grounded within the physical core of experience. The images she creates upon that ground reproduce the emergence of human consciousness in the transition from continuous encounters with reality at the first tier to the identification of entities in the verbal-symbolic tier. Her artistic process repeatedly crosses the boundary between the two tiers of consciousness. Thus, when she overlays a new line on images identified from a prior grounding, she ungrounds these images and introduces an experience of the sublime.
We can be clever and skillful without intuition, but we can’t be creative. Science has tried to gain legitimacy through a rigid adherence to a set of formal steps designed to ensure that the individual scientist does not intrude him or her self into the process. In doing so, science has successfully neutered itself, rendering its results impersonal and often lifeless. Intuition may take us in personalized and often confusing directions, but it remains connected to the most vital source that scientists can bring to the task.
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