The original version of this essay was written in January, 2002. The intended audience at that time were particpants in the Guest Book at the Ishmael website . The bulk of the essay was to provide a context for the four paragraphs in the middle of the essay that summarized my reasons behind a point of view that I had been promoting in the Guest Book. Almost all of the participants are strongly and possively influenced by the writings of Daniel Quinn beginning with his novel Ishmael. His message is an original, at least to me, neo-Malthusian argument to explain the reasons for a soon to come Malthusian catastrophy and to offer hope for a possible way the catastrophy can be avoided.
In my opinion, many well-meaning paricipants were misinterpreting the message from a New Age prespective as advocating abandoning our intellect and "walking away" from our cultural influences that are leading us toward the catastrophy. Quinn calls our common world-wide culture responsible for the approaching catashtrophy the "Taker" culture and contrasts this with he "Leaver" culture. The Leaver culture was once the only human culture living a sustainable lifestyle for at least tens of thousands of years (or much longer depending on choice of definitions) , and now represednted only by a few surviving aboriginal groups that have not been totally assimilated into the dominant Taker culture.
In the new verson of the essay I have removed these four paragraphs, and I have moved them to this page below.
THE MOVED FOUR PARAGRAPHS
I now want to talk about the "New Age" advice about "abandoning your intellect" and "following your intuition" as a way to help you escape the bad influences of your culture and your upbringing. I will start out by saying that I think that this is very bad advice. It is certainly not to be expected that the words intellect and intuition used here mean exactly the same things that I mean when I use Intellect and Intuition. In fact, if one is following the advice, then one would have an intuitive understanding of what these words mean rather than an intellectual model for these concepts such as I have presented. However, in order to use language to present reasons why this is bad advice, I will assume that my concepts of Intellect and Intuition more-or-less correspond to the intended intuitive concepts of intellect and intuition.
For this purpose, the main ideas to keep in mind about the model is that the Intuition is busy all of the time you are awake, and that it makes most of the detailed decisions about what you do (based on your mental habits acquired throughout your life from your culture and upbringing and life experiences), even though you are unaware that this is happening. This immediately provides one reason the advice is bad. The typical time your Intellect makes decisions for you is when your Intuition recognizes that a situation is beyond its experience and its ability to deal with it. This mechanism is part of the biological survival skills that have evolved for humans. Most of the time, the Intuition pattern recognition mechanism is used to choose a response to a situation because it is a much faster and efficient way to respond to most of what a person deals with every day. This leaves the Intellect free to think about what is unusual, to make plans and carefully follow plans, to invent and learn new ways to do things, and to practice the acquisition of new mental habits. The only time it makes sense to abandon intellect and follow intuition is when you are engaged in some activity for which you have previously done a lot of training and have become an expert. That is, you have spent the time specifically to create a lot of good mental habits that are skilled at dealing with the situations that are common to that activity. That is the time, and the only time, when it is important to not think (abandon your intellect) and just do (follow your intuition) in order to achieve your best performance. Later in this essay I discuss this as the grooving state of mind. These special grooving occasions have nothing whatever to do with escaping the bad influences of your culture and your upbringing.
I should point out that abandoning your intellect is not the bad advice. As I will discuss later in this essay, states of mind in which the Intellect is temporarily disconnected from its normal awake state attachment to the Focus Of Attention are normal and useful mental states. The bad advice is following your intuition. The main reason the advice is bad is that following it will do exactly the opposite of what you are trying to accomplish. It will re-enforce all of the metal habits that you want to escape.
One good way to effectively change non-pathological mental habits, that is habits other than obsessions and compulsions, is to make your Focus Of Attention be aware of them in action, and to use your Intellect to plan and execute a training regimen to create replacement mental habits. This approach can incrementally accomplish your goal a little at a time. Alternatively, you can work on a mystical discipline, like Zen for example, and eventually achieve the mental state of Satori in which you will have, among other things, successfully escaped all of your mental habits. There is some similarity in language between mystical teachings like Zen and New Age advice, but the meanings are very much different. In particular, the New Age advice will not lead you to Satori. A third approach is to make a major change in your life style, for example, "walk away" and "live more like a Leaver". This will certainly change a lot of your mental habits, but likely not the most important ones you want to change, for example truly incorporating within your Intuition as new mental habits that there is more than one right way to live, and more than one right way to do anything.