The Hiding Hand of Intuition
When I began my project forty years ago, I sought to correct a misunderstanding about consciousness and nothing more. I hadn’t seen Bergson’s essay on intuition as method, and I knew nothing about this process. As I was working, however, I often found myself writing text that took me in a different direction than I intended. I was led toward ideas that were important, but I wasn’t in control of the process. Nevertheless, I liked what I was writing and appreciated its direction, so I allowed this process to continue. I imagined at the time that I would complete what I was writing and be done, but I had tapped into a powerful process that I did not control.
My writing gradually developed into a project as I gained trust in the process of intuition and learned ways of accessing it more effectively. I was bound to the project that had emerged even though I often felt inadequate to meet its demands. I gradually realized the power of thinking processes informed by intuition, and I incorporated my observations into a guidebook that I distributed among my friends. When I completed this twenty years ago, I had no idea that I was only halfway through my project.
In the two decades since, I have been guided toward a reconstruction of how we think about memory, perception, emotion and creativity. Each opened up to me intuitively, and I accepted the seemingly unlimited insights that emerged. I embraced the power of intuition as method even though I felt uneasy about what I was doing. I then encountered a New Yorker article written by Malcolm Gladwell in 2013 about Albert O. Hirschman.
Gladwell describes Hirschman’s essay entitled “The Principle of the Hiding Hand.” Hirschman states, “Creativity always comes as a surprise to us, therefore we can never count on it.” If I substitute “intuition” for “creativity,” this speaks to me directly. Hirschman goes on to say that “we dare not believe in it (creativity) until it has happened.” I took this to address the need to develop trust in the intuitive process. Lastly, he suggests, “we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming.” I would never have embarked on reconfiguring psychology if I had not initially been, as Hirschman says, “misjudging the nature of the task” and seeing it “as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity.”
Intuition is the “hiding hand” of creativity, if we “dare to believe in it.” It is necessary to first establish a core of experience at the first tier to draw upon and then develop trust in the wisdom and creativity that intuition brings. It is always there for us, hidden in the background of everything we think and do. We can access it as needed once we learn to use consciousness more effectively as a tool.
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