Intuitive Wisdom - Part 3

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Intuitive Wisdom - Part 3

 

(p.42) The passive intellect is the 'feeling intellect' of Wordsworth. It is the

intellect united with feeling, with the emotions. It was thus that Wordsworth

described poetry as 'emotion recollected in tranquility.' It rises in the

emotions and ascends to the level of the intellect, where it is 'recollected',

gathered into unity and given meaning. Wordsworth described the whole process

beautifully, when in the 'Lines written above Tintern Abbey' he spoke of

sensations

 

felt in the blood and felt along the heart

and passing even into the purer mind

with tranquil restoration.

 

This describes the whole process of intuitive knowledge. It is an integral

knowledge embracing the whole man, starting from the 'blood,' the physical

being, passing through the heart, the seat of the affections, the psychic being,

and finally reaching the 'purer mind,' not the reason but the intellect, the

intuitive mind.

 

Thus intuition exists at every level of our being. It starts with the 'blood,'

with bodily awareness. Even at this level the intellect, the self, is present.

The idea of 'thinking with the blood' is not an illusion. There is a very

profound self-awareness at this deepest level of our being. Tribal people,

especially in Africa, always tend to think with the blood, expressing themselves

in the beat of the drums and the movements of the dance. (p.43) This is an

authentic mode of knowledge, of self-discovery and self-affirmation. All simple

people tend to live more from their bodies than from their minds, that is, from

the intuitive knowledge of the body rather than from the rational knowledge of

the mind.

 

D.H. Lawrence, who was the prophet of this kind of knowledge, has expressed it

well: 'We have lost almost entirely the great intrinsically developed sensual

awareness or sense-awareness and sense-knowledge of the ancients. It was a great

depth of knowledge, arrived at direct by instinct and intuition as we say, not

by reason. It was a knowledge based not on words but on images. The abstraction

was not into generalizations or into qualities but into symbols, and the

connection was not logical but emotional.'[9] It must be emphasized that this is

real knowledge: it is not merely sensual or emotional experience. It is sense

awareness, emotional experience reflected in the mind, not in the rational mind,

the abstract intelligence, but in the intuitive mind, the passive intellect. It

finds expression not in abstract concepts but in concrete gestures, in images

and symbols, in dance and song, in ritual sacrifice, in prayer and ecstasy.

 

It is the great illusion of the western world that knowledge consists in

abstract thought and that an illiterate person is ignorant. In reality, many

illiterate people possess a wisdom which is totally beyond the reach of western

man. Ramakrishna, the Hindu saint, who more than anyone else was responsible for

the renewal of Hinduism in the last century, was an illiterate Brahmin, who

spoke from the depths of an intuitive wisdom.

 

Intuition, then, can exist at the level of bodily instinct. People who

habitually go barefoot and expose their bodies to the sun, as they do in many

parts of Asia and Africa, have an intuitive awareness of the power, the sakti in

Hindu terms, in the earth, in the air, in the water and in the fire of the sun.

They experience these forces of nature acting upon them and have an instinctive

knowledge of the hidden powers of nature. A farmer often has an instinctive

knowledge, a knowledge by sympathy, of the productive powers of the earth, of

the effects of the seasons of the year, and the changes of the moon, and of the

weather reflected in the sky. (p.44) Rational scientific knowledge can increase

the precision of this kind of knowledge and make it systematic, but it alienates

man from nature and creates an artificial world.

 

People who live in a world of concrete roads and buildings, of steel structures

and plastic instruments, lose touch with the world of spontaneous feeling and

imaginative thought. This is because the rational, scientific mind separates

itself from the 'feeling intellect,' the source of intuitive wisdom. It is not

that science and reason are wrong in themselves, but that they are divorced from

sense and feeling. What we have to seek is the 'marriage' of reason and

intuition, of the male and the female, then only shall we discover a human

technology corresponding with man's deepest needs.

 

The One Light - Bede Griffiths' Principal Writings

Chapter I, Mind, World and Spirit, p. 42-44

Edited and with Commentary by Bruno Barnhart

Templegate Publishers, Springfield, Illinois

ISBN 0-87243-254-8

 

Notes:

 

[9] D.H. Lawrence, 'Apocalypse'.