“Love says: There is a way.”
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
Albert Einstein
Using our advanced intellect humans delight in sending rockets as far as we can go into space, but has that ever improved life on earth one iota? Yet we persist! “One prominent Nobel Laureate [Seyyed Hossein Nasr] makes no bones about it, stating that the more we learn of the universe, the more obvious that it is pointless … that as values lose their grounding, not only does the danger to the natural world increase, so does the probability of human atrocities … the end result can only be ugliness and destruction.”[i]
It’s clear that all our highly-developed brain power hasn’t created a more sustainable community! Relying on our intellect alone to “figure things out” has left humans uneasy, disconnected and anxious. Interestingly, Freud’s description of schizophrenia is a hauntingly close portrayal of humanity today: “detached, unrelated, lacking in affect, tending toward depersonalization, and covering up their problems by means of intellectualization and technical formations.”[ii]
In the East “The Upanishads … speak about a higher and lower knowledge and associate the lower knowledge with various sciences, the higher with religious awareness. Buddhists talk about ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ knowledge, or about ‘conditional truth’ and transcendental truth.’”[iii]
In China some have embraced the words of the late 15th century philosopher Wang Yangming. His most famous phrase is zhi xing he yi which means knowledge and action are one. “This knowledge, according to Wang, comes from an inner light … one that no government, no matter how powerful, can control.”[iv]
Einstein was familiar with the power of his intuitive self. “In keeping his intellect subordinate to his intuition and thereby seeing deeply into the nature of Simple Reality, Albert Einstein demonstrated for all of us a foundational principle which enables anyone who chooses to enter the timeless NOW.”[v]
Our intellect was designed to function in the material world; but to enter into the process of Self-Transformation and Transcendence we must come to rely on our intuition, the path with a heart.
Insight # 55 comes to us from the poet Rūmī (1207-1273). Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī was a 13th-century Persian poet, Islamic scholar, theologian and Sufi mystic.
“The intellect says: ‘The six directions are limits: there is no way out.’ Love [intuition] says: ‘There is a way: I have traveled it thousands of times.’”[vi]
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Additional Reading:
- Intuition and Intellect, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
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[i] Haisch, Bernard. “Freeing the Scientific Imagination.” IONS Noetic Sciences Review. Institute of Noetic Sciences: Petaluma, California, September-November 2001, p. 27.
[ii] May, Rollo. The Discovery of Being. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1983, p. 118.
[iii] Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics. New York: Bantam, 1975, p. 14.
[iv] Johnson, Ian. “China’s New Civil Religion.” The New York Times. December 22, 2019, p. 7.
[v] Henry, Roy Charles. “Einstein.” Science & Philosophy: The Failure of Reason in the Human Community, 2015, p. 202.
[vi] Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics. New York: Bantam, 1975, p. 156.
