EINSTEIN'S INTUITION

After reading Isaacson's book on Einstein, which I heartily recommend, I picked up a book I took out of the library a while ago and kept renewing. It is called Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man, by William Hermanns. Until Einstein came alive for me, came out from behind the myth thanks to Isaacson, I had no mental place for it.

It consists of four interviews with Einstein by Dr. Hermanns, who was initially Einstein's fellow Berliner and then his fellow exile. Hermanns is a sociologist and poet, who has strong mystical leanings and little understanding of physics. The first interview takes place in Berlin as the Nazis are gaining strength and becomes entwined with marching Brownshirts. It is both a wonderfully and terrifyingly bizarre piece, and it would make a striking movie or perhaps play.

The next three interviews take place in the United States during and after the war. Although lacking the drama of the first, they are equally informative. Hermanns continually goads Einstein to talk about things that he is not comfortable talking about, such as mysticism, and then pokes fun at his own obtuseness for continuing to press him. Nonetheless Einstein reveals a great deal to him. The interviews contain a treasure trove of information about Einstein's understanding of intuition. I thought I had the intuition bug, Einstein had it even worse!

Intuition can take many different forms. I identified deeply with a portion of what Einstein said about it. "Yes that's what it's like for me," I found myself saying with wonderment and even delight at the recognition. This kinship to some of what Einstein evoked no doubt comes from the fact that we share a personality type.

After I finished the book, I copied down some quotes I found particularly moving or informative. By putting them one after the other and pondering them a bit I came to see that they formed a coherent, profound, and provocative worldview.

Intuition for Einstein—be it about cosmic law or about predicting the outcome of the Second World War—is intimately connected with feeling. Many associate both feeling and intuition with the gut. But for Einstein, intuition is grounded primarily in the feeling of the heart—in its receptivity and its tendency to move out. It depends on a deep caring and receptivity that pushes him to go beyond what is currently known or thought or happening in order make contact with the cosmic order.

The following passage comes when Einstein and Herrmanns are talking about the Nazis and the flaw in the German national character that lead to Hitler's appeal.

Einstein nodded: he was a good listener. After a pause he said, "The cosmic man must be restored, the whole man who is made in the image and likeness of the arch-force, which you may call God. This man thinks with his heart and not with party dogma. As I've explained before, there is an order in the universe – a cosmic order – and humans have the possibility of understanding these laws."
Einstein leaned back in his chair; so did I,putting my writing pad on my knees. He added, "I have no doubt that the allies will win the war."
I smiled, "Oh, you are my prophet again."
"Prophet or not," he scratched his head, "what I say is more often felt through intuition than thought through intellect."

Hermanns is constantly pushing Einstein to acknowledge his inherent mysticism. He succeeds in getting Einstein to say something that probably few scientists today would say—that there is a vital force or energy in creation. Einstein is willing to associate energy with what are generally seen as spiritual concepts.

I pulled out some notes. "Once, in England, I was at dinner with people highly trained in meditation, among them Professor Suzuki who asked me to ask you if spiritual vibrations and electricity have the same original cause or force."
"I believe," Einstein answered, "that energy is the basic force in creation. My friend Bergson calls it élan vital, the Hindus call it prana."

This acknowledgment of at least certain types of energy that cannot, or not yet, be measured by instruments is noteworthy but it is perhaps not completely surprising. Einstein was responsible for showing us that matter and energy are interchangeable. He understood empiricism to be only a tool of intuition. Finally like Spinoza, he saw God, the universe, and all of life as a harmonious whole.

Einstein looked through the window and seemed to mumble more to the trees than to me, "I believe that I have cosmic religious feelings. I never could grasp how one could satisfy these feelings by praying to limited objects. The tree outside is life, a statue is dead. The whole of nature is life, and life, as I observe it, rejects a God resembling man. I like to experience the universe as one harmonious whole. Every cell has life."
He turned to me and smiled, "Matter, too, has life: it is energy solidified. Our bodies are like prisons, and I look forward to be free, but I don't speculate on what will happen to me. I live here , and my responsibility is in this world now..."

Experiencing the universe as a harmonious whole, there is no reason to fear either life or death. True religion depends only on holding the world in a receptive, caring, and judicious way—on conscience. This opens the door to intuition, which allows at least Einstein to glimpse the law conformability of the universe (and the rest of us too, although no doubt somewhat more dimly).

"The truly religious man has no fear of life and no fear of death—and certainly no blind faith: his faith must be in his conscience. Then he will have the intuition to observe and judge what happens around him. Then, he can acknowledge that everything unfolds true to strict natural law, sometimes with tremendous speed."

As a part of the cosmic order, certainly Einstein, and perhaps all of us, have a purpose which we can recognize with our intuition. Since our instructions or purpose comes from this harmonious whole, we are participating in eternity in the present.

"Indeed, it is not intellect, [which means book knowledge and empiricism for him], but intuition which advances humanity. Intuition tells man his real purpose in this life... I do not need any promise of eternity to be happy… my eternity is now. I have only one interest: to fill my purpose here where I am. This purpose is not given to me by my parents or my surroundings. It is induced by some unknown factors. These factors make me part of eternity. In this sense I am a mystic...”

As an inherent part of this totality, we are much larger than we usually experience. Einstein's religion, like Spinoza's, is that the universe is rational. The highest calling is to ponder its laws. Our usual ways of knowing are crude and cannot comprehend the coherence and beauty of the universe. Only the heart with its intuition can lead us beyond what we know of the universe and of ourselves.

Einstein leaned forward, "… it is not a religion that teaches that man is made in the image of God—that is anthropomorphic. Man has infinite dimensions and finds God in his conscience. This religion has no dogma other than teaching man that the universe is rational and that its highest destiny is to ponder it and co-create with its laws. There are only two limiting factors: first, that what seems impenetrable to us is as important as what is cut and dried; and: second that our faculties are dull and can only comprehend wisdom and
serene beauty in crude forms, but the heart of man through intuition leads
us to greater understanding of ourselves and the universe."

Although intuition is what allows us to move forward—is the most important part of thinking—it alone is not enough. Knowledge also has its place, but intuition is the gatekeeper at the most critical juncture. Even though the workings of intuition remain mysterious, it is a reality.

"Isn't truth inherent in man?" I interjected. "You once told me that progress is made only by intuition, and not by the accumulation of knowledge."
"It's not as simple as that," replied Einstein. "Knowledge is necessary, too. An intuitive child couldn't accomplish anything without some knowledge. There will come a point in everyone's life, however where only intuition can make the leap ahead, without ever knowing precisely how. One can never know why but one must accept intuition as a fact."

Wolfgang Pauli on Kepler and the Transition from Alchemy to Classical Science

When I opened my new guidebook at random, of all things, it happened to fall on a page listing an alchemical museum. I was delighted at the thought of visiting on my upcoming trip to Prague what was billed as the only alchemical museum in the world. Yet when I looked a second time I saw it was closed for the summer. Instead I had to satisfy myself with rereading an article on alchemy by physicist Wolfgang Pauli I had found very thought provoking. He uses the work of Johanus Kepler as a lens through which to view the transition from alchemy to the classical scientific perspective.

Pauli is best known for his work on the spin of elementary particles. As a particle physicist he grappled closely with the wave particle duality. He also was a patient and collaborator of Carl Jung. He worked with Jung to integrate the intuitive, imagistic, and feeling material that came through his dreams with his much stronger thinking side. Like Jung, he came to feel that both mind and matter were manifestations of the same primary material or force prior to both. The article called "The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler" appears in a volume with an essay of Jung's on synchronicity. The book is entitled The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche and was first published in 1955.

Kepler (1571-1630) was a devout Christian with mystical tendencies as well as an important figure in the history of science. Converted to the Copernican heliocentric universe early in his career by his tutor, he became obsessed with proving that the planetary orbits were circular. He was strongly influenced by, among other things, neo-Platonic philosophy, which explored the harmonious mathematical relationships behind music and tried to generalize these to nature as a whole. Kepler saw the Divine in the regularity of geometry and saw the cosmos as what might be called Divine Geometry. The sphere was for him the most perfect geometric form. He felt its harmonious proportions encoded the Triune Christian God (with the Son standing for Creation), the relationship of the soul to the body, of God to the human soul, and, at least early on, of the sun to the planets. (The picture is a model of Kepler's early view of the solar system.) He thought the soul responded instinctively to the harmonies of the sphere because, as Pauli puts it, by virtue of its circular form [it] is an image of God, in Whom these proportions and the geometric truths following therefrom exist from all eternity. " Below are a few passages from Harmonices mundi, Kepler's book on "the harmony of the worlds."

... the movement of a point located in the center [of the sphere] to a single point on the surface, represents the first beginning of creation, emulating the eternal generation of the Son in that the center flows out towards infinitely many points of the whole surface, which, under the rule of the most perfect equality, is formed and described by infinitely many lines; and this straight line is, needless to say, the element of corporeal form.

The point spreads itself out over this extension so that point and surface are identical, except for the fact that the ratio of density and extension is reversed. Hence there exists everywhere between point and surface the most absolute equality, the closest unity, the most beautiful harmony[literally: breathing together!], connection, relation, proportion, and commensurability. And although Center, Surface, and Distance are manifestly Three, yet they are One, so that no one of them could be imagined to be absent without destroying the whole.

...the circle beautifully fits into the intersecting plane (of which it is the circumscribed limit) as well as into the intersected sphere by way of a reciprocal co-incidence of both, just as the mind is both inherent in the body, informing it and connecting with corporal form, and sustained by God, an irradiation as it were, that flows into the body from the divine countenance; whence it [the mind] derives its nobler nature.

Alas poor Kepler, working with the careful astronomical data collected by Tycho Brahe, found that the planetary orbits are not circular. However his commitment to geometry had not failed him since he eventually was able to show that they are elliptical. He also determined that a planet swept out equal areas of its orbit in equal time periods (click for an animation of Kepler's 2nd Law. Finally he recognized the mathematical relationship between the (mean) distance of a planet from the Sun and the size of its orbit. By doing so he found a much more complex harmony in nature, which finally enshrined the sun at the center of the universe. Kepler's work was essential to the formulation of the law of gravity by Newton, who lived from 1643 to 1727.

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The final part of Pauli’s article explores the vitriolic controversy between Kepler and his contemporary Robert Fludd, a practitioner of alchemy.

Kepler's understanding of a rational universe ultimately grounded in the harmonies of mathematics collided with the traditional alchemical view based on a “archaic-magical” apprehension of nature in which boundaries between the real and the symbolic were completely absent. Like Kepler, Fludd understood the Divine to be reflected in the cosmos, yet much more dimly. Thus the relationship between the Divine and his creation was not harmonious for Fludd and other alchemists. They saw a cosmic struggle between form as the light principle, and matter, or darkness, which dwells in the earth. This struggle could only be redeemed by the alchemical process, which releases from matter its latent light and by the same token transforms the alchemist. The pictures below, what Fludd called "hieroglyphic figures," demostrate his view of the cosmos.



Pauli writes, "Fludd never distinguishes clearly between a real, material process and a symbolical representation. Because of the analogy of the microcosm to the macrocosm the [al]chemical process is indeed at the same time a reflection of the whole universe.... After the withdrawal of the formal light principle matter remains behind as the dark principle, though it was latently present before as a part of God…. In the middle, the sphere of the sun, where these opposing principles just counterbalanced each other, there is engendered in the mystery of the [al]chymic wedding the infans solaris, which is at the same time the liberated world soul."

Quantitative measurement has no role in, and was indeed a threat to, Fludd's understanding of the universe. Pauli quotes Fludd's spirited attack on Kepler's Harmonicies mundi and defense of the alchemical approach.

...What he has expressed in many words in long discussions I have compressed into a few words and explained by means of hieroglyphic and exceedingly significant figures, not, to be sure, for the reason that I delight in pictures (as he says elsewhere), but because I…had resolve to bring together much in little and, in the fashion of the alchemists, to collect the extracted essence, to reject the sedimentary substances, and to pour what is good into its proper vessel; so that, the mystery of science having been revealed, that which is hidden may become manifest; and that the inner nature of the thing after the outer vestments have been stripped off, may be enclosed, as a precious gem set in a gold ring, in a figure best suited to its nature---a figure, that is, in which its essence can be held by eye and mind as in a mirror and without many-worded circumlocutions.

For it is for the vulgar mathematicians to concern themselves with quantitative shadows; the alchemists and Hermetic philosophers, however, comprehend the true core of the natural bodies.

...I contemplate the internal and essential impulses that issues from nature herself; he has hold of the tale, I grasp the head; I perceive the first causes, he its effects.

Kepler answers:

If you know of another mathematics (besides that vulgar one from which all those hitherto celebrated as mathematicians have received their name), that is, a mathematics that is both natural and formal, I must confess that I have never tasted of it, unless we take refuge in the most general origin of the word...and give up the quantities. Of that, you must know, I do not speak here. You, Robert, may keep for yourself its glory and that of the proofs to be found in it---and how accurate and how certain those are, that, I think you will judge for yourself without me. I reflect on the visible movements determinable by the senses themselves, you may consider the inner impulses and endeavor to distinguish them according to grades. I hold the tale but I hold in my hands; you may grasp the head mentally, though only, I fear, in your dreams. I am content with the effects, that is, the movement of the planets. If you shall have found in the very causes harmonies as limpid as are mine in the movements, then it will be proper for me to congratulate you on your gift of invention and myself on my gift of observation---that is, as soon as I shall be able to observe anything.

Pauli points out that Kepler, a transition figure, overstates the empirical impetus behind his ideas. Pauli is also unwilling to side completely with the quantitative mode that Kepler defends, lamenting what was lost in the transition to the classical science that was to come. (Even thought Newton was a devoted alchemist, he kept his scientific work and writing separate from his alchemical concerns.)

Whereas as Kepler conceives of the soul almost as a mathematically described system of resonators, it has always been the symbolical image that has tried to express, in addition, the immeasurable [emphasis added] side of experience which also includes the imponderables of the emotions and emotional evaluations. Even though at the cost of consciousness of the quantitative side of nature and its laws, Fludd’s "hieroglyphic" figures do try to preserve a unity of the inner experience of the "observer" (as we should say today) and the external processes of nature, and thus a wholeness in its contemplation....

Pauli felt psychology as well as physics was beginning to bridge the gap between the quantative and qualitative that Kepler's work helped bring about. My sense is that more than 60 years after Pauli's article, this important coming together of the quantitative and the qualitative is still just beginning.

Blink and For the Time Being: A Tale of Two Books

In my initial post back in October, Things Are Not As They Seem, I wrote how glad I was to hear an NPR commentator resist the urge to say in ‘a blink of the eye’ and say ‘in a flash’ instead. Alas yesterday another NPR reporter, I am sad to say, did not resist the urge. Beside the fact that I first published the idiom as a metaphor for unconscious cognition and intuition in 1997, I dislike the trendiness of the phrase. But it seems like I’d better settle in for a much longer run for the distressingly facile use of this my adopted intuitive soul child. Apparently Blink is being made into a movie---or so the scuttlebutt on the web claims.

It is being made by the people who made Syriana. I didn't particularly like Syriana. I suspect it is a guy movie. (Too broad in sweep on the one hand and not enough heart on the other.) Its message seems to be 1) everything is interconnected---which is also its subtitle 2) the good guys if they don't get killed turn out to be in cahoots with the bad guys, because everyone who survives just wants power---or something like that. I apologize to the makers of the film (and to George Clooney) if I have missed the more important message--- such as American capitalism turns even the good guys into bad guys. But that is not what stuck in my mind.

What links Syriana and Blink, I guess, is that they both keep jumping between a number of stories. Yet Syriana builds to something--- even though I didn't particularly resonate with the film. Blink doesn't build to anything at the conceptual level, though Galdwell is a good story teller. Rather one is left with a jumble of self-contradictory themes. Admittedly unconscious cognition and intuition are tough subjects to deal with. (Perhaps no one knows this better than me.) Yet the job of an author is to find a thread through the jumble---or at the very least to acknowledge the dissonance the material creates. Gladwell takes the kitchen sink approach and blurs over all the essential distinctions.

Why then has Blink been such a tremendous success? I think it comes from 3 things in addition to Galdwell's skill as a story teller. The first is the sheer power of the metaphor ‘a blink of the eye’ for intuition. Yet the metaphor is not original to Gladwell and he does not develop it. Rather it seems like an afterthought used as packaging to market the book. Well sometimes the wrapping paper is more valuable than what is inside.

The second is the nature of popular culture. Being a popular culture guru means staying a millimeter ahead of the crowd--- capturing a trend a second or two before it explodes. Unconscious cognition and intuition have become hot topics of scientific investigation. But let's look more carefully at what is happening here. With respect to intuition, science is finally catching up with experience. Blink in popularizing this material says what everyone knows---if they've ever looked at their thought processes. I have to conclude that an awful lot of people have not. Only then could it come as a revelation that sometimes we don't use rigorous analysis, and furthermore what we use instead works just as well most of the time, and often even better. But Blink gets it wrong because it mistakes figure for ground. Analysis, if it comes at all, for the most part comes after intuition--- and this is especially so in our personal lives, as the work of Antonio Damasio makes clear.

The third reason Blink has been so sucessful is the most interesting to me. Reading Blink is a little like going to a cool cocktail party where everyone is a little high and full of themselves for being at such a cool party. One feels ---why yes--- Glad and Well. I was not a sympathetic reader of this book, as you might well imagine, yet about a third of the way through, even I felt Glad and Well (henceforth G+W). It's as if he encoded a little bit of an illicit substance into the prose. I don't know how he did this. Perhaps it is because as Jeffrey Rosen said in his critique, the book “…succumbs to the fallacy that people with good ideas must be good people. Everyone in the book who gets psychology right is not only or mainly a bright person, he is also a noble human being.”

As soon as the discriminating reader comes down from the G+W high they will recognize that very little interesting or coherent has been said. Rosen called Blink “a book for people who do not read books." I got two thirds the way through and then skipped to the end. I don't recommend Blink; I recommend a glass of wine instead. But if you have already read it and have some insight into the G+W thing, please let me know.

For the Time Being is a book by Annie Dillard I have written about several times ( Oct 24 and Dec 4 posts). After reading 40 or so pages when I first got it, I put it down. It is heavy duty---not aimed at making one feel either G+W. A year and a half later, I picked it up again where I had stopped. Reading a few pages at a time before I went to sleep, I found it to be one of the most compelling books I have encountered. Page after page was packed with insights and a quirkiness that penetrated to my core. Some nights I would only read over the few pages I had read the night before. I still keep it by my bedside. Sometimes I open it at random, and contemplate one of its passages. In one of my many favorites, Dillard says:

Mostly, God is out of the physical loop. Or the loop is a spinning hole in his side. Simone Weil takes a notion from Rabbi Isaac Luria to acknowledge that God's hands are tied. To create, God did not extend himself but withdrew himself; he humbled and obliterated himself, and left outside himself the domain of necessity in which he does not intervene. Even in the domain of souls, he intervenes only “under certain conditions.”

Does God stick his finger in, if only now and then? Does God budge, nudge, twist, help? Is heaven pliable? Or is …praying for things and events, for rain and healing--- delusional?

For the Time Being, like Blink, jumps back and forth between a number of interconnected “stories.” Yet unlike Blink, it builds to a crescendo that unifies all the content and brings the theme of interconnectedness home in an extraordinary meaningful and unexpected way. Though it didn't make me feel G+W in a cocktail party sense, it did something much more important. It left me feeling very small and very big (vS+vB) both at the same time. Dillard's book considers the most difficult questions of existence and then manages to reframe them in a very different sense high. One is also given an interesting mission---should one choose to accept it.

If the Syriana people are really interested in the theme of interconnection and in conveying some of its depths, I suggest they should make a movie out of For the Time Being instead of Blink. I admit it would take a lot of skill and also may require some rearranging. But imagine the cinemagraphic power of a movie that keeps switching between historically important archeological digs on the inhospitable steppes of China, Jerusalem, a maternity ward, and the ceramic soldiers in Xian. Also imagine Annie Dillard as narrator, and my favorite palentologist/theologian Teilhard de Chardin ( played by George Clooney of course) weaving in and out. That is Teilhard to the left. Finally imagine cameo appearances by Isaac Luria, Simone Wein, and many of the other deeply feeling and colorful theological thinkers of the ages.

In fact, you might even say that For the Time Being--- a story about existence--- is the real Blink. Perhaps this is part of what is beginning to bug me about the overuse of the phrase 'a blink of the eye.' Because it is so in, people feel cool and G+W when they say it. However the idiom used in its traditional sense has an undertone of sadness that is experienced largely at an unconscious level. Dillard’s book, in part by heading directly into this sadness and into the heartache of existence, comes out the other side. It brings the powerful (and grounded) sense of Being that comes from accepting what is.

Reason vs. Intuition

A number of books of an academic or semi-academic nature have appeared in the last number of years on intuition. Many of them highlight the conflict between reason and intuition. However, I think for the most part this is a false dichotomy, one of the many reasons I do not like these books. Also they only tilt their hats to intuition, while their deeper subtext seems to be that intuition is not to be trusted.

Intuition and reason most often work together. In fact, evolution demands that this is so. If they didn't, we never would have been successful as a species. For the most part, the confluence of reason and intuition occurs below the level of awareness, so we are not aware it is happening. Instead we only become aware of the relatively infrequent situations in which the two conflict. Very recently I did encounter one of those situations.

There was a small chance that the furnace could be fixed. My intuition told me not to replace it, but my reason said yes. The old one was a converted coal furnace, the original in the house---which was built in 1926. They were called “snowmen,” because that's what they looked like all covered with asbestos. It's time, I thought. I don't want it to fail in the middle of winter, especially if I am away on a trip.


It was not easy to say goodbye to all the funky bells and whistles of my old snowman. In fact, I saved the wonderful old pressure gauge to put on top of my shiny new heat box as a masthead of sorts. I now have a new spiffy red furnace, half the size of the old one. But guess what ---it turns out that the pipes bang when the heat comes on, which did not happen with the old one.

I thought I would call the company that installed the furnace and ask them to try to fix the banging. But my intuition said no! I didn't know why, but it seemed a serious warning ---so I didn't call.

The banging has woken me up several nights running. It also regularly jams the voice activated word processor I use. This is silly I thought, why suffer like this? So yesterday I again decided to call the company. Again my intuition said no. But this time I called anyway. They said they would come today; here I sit waiting for the repair man.

What is going on? First of all, a matter of definition: I am calling this an intuition because it came through the same channel my intuition generally does and with enough force for for me to listen to its guidance. This is not a rigorous treatment of this complex and thorny issue, but it will do to begin with.

One possibility is that this dire warning about the furnace was based on some precognitive knowledge. Perhaps the furnace is a lemon, the company is not trustworthy, or the repair man will come and make things worse. I certainly cannot exclude any of these possibilities.

However there is another possibility that is at least as interesting and as instructive with respect to understanding intuition. I live in the house I grew up in (I have lived many other places as well). The deep steady purr of the furnace played base to my father's rhythmic snoring. Together they were the nightsong of the house. At an emotional level in some sense removing the old furnace means removing my father and his influence---for better and for worse---from the house. Thus what seems to be a conflict between reason and intuition instead may well reflect an emotional conflict between my loyalty to the past and moving on. I'm not sure this is the reason my “intuition” is kicking up a fuss--- but I do know I have a lot of emotion going on this highly symbolic act of replacing the furnace/father.

Emotion and what we call intuition are highly linked. Gut feelings or any bodily feelings connected to decision making are just another way of saying emotion---as the work of Antonio Damasio has shown. This is what makes going with your gut a reasonable bet much of the time. It is also why ‘going with your gut’ cannot always be trusted.

But is ‘going with your gut’ intuition? It is certainly one of the components involved in intuition, and often an important one, yet not necessarily the only one. The best way to think of it is as one level of intuition.

The emotions that generate gut feelings are a double edge sword. They have an important role to play in decision-making and likely in all intellectual activity, but by the same token they can also lead us astray. This is especially true when these decisions are attached to unresolved emotional conflicts--- even if only symbolically. Most of the time, however, as Damasio's book Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain shows, emotion and reason work together seamlessly.

Another of my complaints with books that stress the dichotomy between intuition and reason is that they do not provide even the beginning of a framework for thinking about or holding situations in which they seem to conflict. (One of them did say that we should train intuition to be scientific! But this seems to be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.) We need a larger framework, since no one-size-fits-all or any other simple approach will do.

My book tries to lay a framework for understanding this very complicated issue by resonating in-depth experiential exploration with in-depth scientific exploration. This framework may not help anyone decide whether to replace a wonderful old furnace or not. But it will interest them in paying careful attention to their experience over time. It will also interest them in the broad scientific questions involved in unveiling this elusive mental capacity we call intuition. The two approaches to exploring intuition begin to bootstrap on each other in a very interesting way. More than in most areas, experiential understanding and scientific understanding of intuition must work together.