The Flow of Ideas

The relation between intuition and rational thinking (or logical thinking) is fairly simple. Before intuition can function and solve a problem, it needs facts. The facts are acquired by rational thinking. Then when there are enough facts about a particular issue, intuitive thinking can supply the ideas that link the facts into a satisfactory solution. Without the necessary facts, intuition cannot function well: it only supplies partly-true solutions. So the thinker has to use his imagination to fill out the partly-true solution he prefers. Hence the thinker acquires some degree of understanding of any issue through the interplay of rationality and intuition.

Intuition and rationality cannot function together; rather, they alternate between themselves. So at any one point in time a person may be thinking intuitively, with his rationality “turned off ”. Then something requires some rational thought, so his intuition is turned off and rationality is turned on. When rationality is no longer currently needed, it is turned off and intuition is turned on.

It is a well-known fact that when a thinker has been devoting a lot of rational thought to some difficult issue and trying to find a solution to it but without success, he has to turn his mind away from that issue and do something completely unconnected to it. This allows his mind to switch from rationality to intuition, and he may find that suddenly the answer to that issue pops out of nowhere. The intuitive insight is also called the eureka moment.

Intuition versus Rationality

Mankind has always been intuitive, but only fairly recently in its history has it been rational. Hence intuition and rationality are not usually of equal “strength” in the ordinary person. I present my speculative view on the historical interplay between intuition and rationality.

The big picture of reality consists of many levels of consciousness. In the framework of theosophical thought, these levels are called planes of existence. In most of them, thinking is intuitive, usually with an absence of rational thinking. However, in a few of the lower planes, such as the plane of material existence (which is the plane where humanity resides), thinking can be rational as well as intuitive.

In the time when humanity began living on Earth, thinking was purely intuitive. So early man was very impractical. This was the “dream time”, the aboriginal beginnings of man. He had to be told by the Gods what he had to do, with the shaman as the intermediary between the Gods and the tribe. He could not yet think for himself. Times gradually changed. Under the demands of materialism, the person had to create shelters and homes, find and cultivate sources of food, and develop the knowledge of utilising fire for the production of artefacts. This requires both intuitive and rational thinking. So slowly, over long ages, mankind became acquainted with rational thought, but it was still rather primitive as a tool for thinking.

The beginnings of spiritual thought reflect the times when thinking was still primarily intuitive. Eventually the classic texts of spirituality, such as the Hindu Vedas, were formulated. Their beliefs about humanity and its place in reality were based on intuitive symbolism, which paints an ideal and simplistic picture of themes such as that of good and evil.

Now we fast-forward to historical times, times where mankind has left behind him historical remnants such as monuments containing pictographs and early forms of writing. We witness primitive creation stories as the first attempt to make sense of human existence on Earth. All this is still based on intuitive thinking.

With the expansion of commerce, rational thinking begins to get into second gear, through the need for barter, the building of large monuments, and the development of both astronomy and astrology: astronomy for navigation skills and astrology as a way of seeking heavenly guidance.

Finally, around 500 years B.C.E, rational thinking really takes off and fuels the development of the intellect. The setting for this event was ancient Greece, and moved into top gear with the triumvirate of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. This was a defining moment in human history. I personally believe that it was a greater defining moment than the birth of either Jesus or Buddha.

Not a lot happened during the Dark Ages; just enough moments of brightness to allow Aristotelian logic to progress. The next big step in rational thinking occurred when Rene Descartes found a method to transform geometrical problems into algebraic ones. Now mathematics had a firm basis from which to expand, and the age of science could begin.

As Western humanity developed its rationality, its dependence on intuitive thinking waned. Scientists slowly abandoned intuition. But others resisted; for example, the Catholic church retained its dependence on intuition and remained suspicious of intellectual development for a long time. Nowadays we have the situation where rationality, in its florescence as logic, is worshipped (especially in Britain and America) and intuition is despised. This is just as much an unbalanced state of affairs as the old days were when intuition was king.

As we move into the Aquarian Age, the Age of Holism, the requirement for the thinker will be to balance his mind. That means he should be willing to use either intuition or rationality as the occasion demands. Balanced thinking requires the use of both intuition and rationality. They are complementary states of mind. Intuition sees the big picture, and rationality discovers the details that make the big picture work.

Two Functional Levels of Mind

The mind has two functional levels: the psychological, or lower mind, and the psychic, or higher mind. The psychological mind is the level of worldly desires and goals. The psychic mind is the level of intellectuality, of mysticism, meditation, contemplation, philosophy, and mathematics.

In the psychic mind, life is just drama, nothing more and nothing less. A human life is only a journey, with each person being on his or her own journey, a journey that has no foreseeable end. When we come to an end of a material journey and have no further need to reincarnate around the material plane, we just continue the evolutionary journey in higher worlds. There is no final goal, at least not within any conceivable time span. Time is irrelevant, so we can take as long as we want on the journey. It makes little difference overall how long the journey to God takes. It makes little difference whether we grasp spiritual opportunities when they arise or whether we miss them.

Sometimes we are the good guys in a life, and sometimes we are the bad guys. The good guys are on their journeys. The bad guys are on their journeys. It is just drama and spectacle. I often look at my life as a drama. Even though things went drastically wrong in my childhood, when I experienced trauma, the difference it made was to change the original plan of my life’s drama to a different one. Nothing is wrong. Even when things go differently from the plan, nothing is wrong. All it means is that I have wandered through some regions of the mind differently from that which was originally planned in heaven.

When consciousness is in the psychic mind, it is so easy to celebrate a human life on Earth. Everything in one’s life is justified, no matter how bad a life has been. There are no recriminations over what one has done on Earth. So there is nothing to forgive, and nothing to seek forgiveness for. When I think of my personal distress in the past, I can feel oneness with my enemies. Though actually no one is my enemy. I can feel love to everyone that hurt me. No judgements are made in the psychic world. In the psychic state I can be joyful even if my body has terminal illness or terminal decline.

The psychic mind and the psychological mind have different attitudes to pain.
This is a point that confuses many healers. When a person centres himself on the higher mind, it is only what he learns from sorrow that matters. The pain is of less interest, and may even be brushed aside as being of no importance, no matter how traumatic that pain may be. Whereas when a person centres himself on the psychological mind, it is the pain that matters, not what he learns from the pain. In fact, he rarely learns from it.

The Flow Begins

Around late 2019, when I was 75 years old, I noticed what appeared to be a new mental phenomenon. I call it the flow of ideas. This was a stream of ideas passing through my mind when I had raised my consciousness to a psychic state and I was in a reflective mood. The ideas varied from good to brilliant, but the presentation was precarious. As I watched the flow, I simply could not remember the ideas unless I wrote them down. The ideas came quickly into consciousness and fairly quickly got pushed out of consciousness by the next idea that came along. The ideas occupied the “fast lane” within consciousness.

Another hindrance is that sometimes an idea from the flow starts a train of thought in me, which may be interesting in its own right. Then I try and remember why this train of thought began, and I cannot do so. The originating idea has floated through my mind and disappeared off-screen, so to speak. I try to pull it back into consciousness but rarely manage to succeed. So I may end up with a good idea, but cannot remember why I thought of it.

To be accurate, the ideas don’t come phrased in words, nor do I “see” them or “hear” them. They seem to be in-between these categories, so I think of them as being nebulous, and then my mind transforms them into definite, cognitive, ideas. In retrospect, I had occasionally absorbed ideas from the flow when I began creating my psychology in the 1990s, but I had not identified them as coming from the flow (since at that time I had no idea that the flow existed). Rather, I just thought that I had some good ideas occasionally whilst engrossed in reverie or deep contemplation.

With the flow, I just let it take its own course. Not a lot will happen, in terms of coming up with interesting ideas, if I attempt to direct the flow. This mirrors psycho-analysis, where the person follows the current stress and anxiety in the mind; not much is achieved by trying to force the analysis to go where it doesn’t want to go.

Ideas in the flow come fast and are in my mind before the words arise to say something about the ideas. Unfortunately, the ideas also disappear fast – I quickly forget the contents of what I have seen in the flow. Why is this? Each nebulous idea seems to have a half-life of only a few seconds, so that it is highly impermanent, and will quickly fade away if not quickly written down. I’m very familiar with trying to hang onto an amazing idea that is racing through my mind, and failing; as the idea slips out of my grasp, it fades into oblivion. All I’m left with is the humorous thought that it was an amazing idea that got away from me.

I put it this way. In the flow, lose a word and you lose the thought. If I spend time trying to think of the exact word I need to crystallise the nebulous thought, then I lose the thought. Or, I lose so much time trying to think of the right word, then once I find it I cannot remember why I wanted it. I have forgotten so many amazing ideas that sometimes I think I could write a book about all the ideas that I have forgotten!!

A person’s existing ideas about reality determine what he can take from the flow. Anything that is slightly beyond his existing ideas will seem interesting, and eventually he may accept them. However, anything that is way beyond his existing ideas cannot be accepted, and so he will not attract such ideas.

A Quick Summary

b). The depth of insight you receive on any topic relates to the depth of your interest in that topic.
So the intensity of your search for relevant ideas will determine the depth to the ideas that you attract. If your searching is shallow, then you get shallow answers.

c). The answers you get are relevant to your existing level of knowledge of the topic.
The more you know about a topic, the more ideas about it you get in the flow. Though occasionally some of the information you receive is beyond your present ability to understand. When this happens to me it stimulates my sense of wonder.

What does the Flow achieve?

It is quite difficult to describe how the flow stimulates thought. I sometimes look on it as learning to “read” the mind. It is rather like learning to feel the ideas, rather than them appearing in a cognitive way. It seems to be that the potential of an idea comes into my mind and then, very fast, my mind turns it into an actual idea.

An idea in the flow has a fleeting life in my mind; the idea only attains stability when I crystallise it into a physical form which I can then remember. There seems to be no structure in the flow; I presume that it is rather like what occurs in the formless worlds. Structure, and hence permanence, is produced by capturing a part of the flow and turning it into form. The ideas in the flow find their manifestation by being translated into actual form in the physical world. This is similar in some ways to Plato’s view that archetypal ideas or “forms” are eventually expressed in physical forms in the material world. Or I can say that what goes through my mind is the potential of a idea, and then when I focus on it I turn it into an actual idea.

Another way to look at these views is that the psychic world generates ideas, and then humanity puts them into practice in the material world and explores what effects they lead to (including any side effects). Hence the ideas manifest into physical form in the material world. Interestingly, I assume that the feelings associated with the flow find structure as fluid form in the material world, that is, as emotions. Emotions are fluid forms which are transient and have a short life in the material world.

What does the manifestation of ideas into form in the material world achieve? One answer is beauty. The single ego cannot see its own beauty. The concept of beauty cannot exist if there is only one ego acting as the sole witness. When one ego can see other egos and their works, then beauty is born.

The flow of ideas responds to my mood. My mood determines the quality of the thoughts that are attracted to me. This fact brings in a fundamental law: you attract thoughts that are similar to the ones you prefer to think about. Like follows like. This is the basis of positive thinking.

An Aphorism to End with

I am a free thinker, rather in the style of 18th and 19th century thinkers who could debate over a wide range of intellectual thought, instead of being focused just on a single interest such as science.

The copyright is mine, and the articles are free to use. They can be reproduced
anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.

Ian Heath
London, UK

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.	Two Basic Ways of Thinking The mind has two basic ways of thinking, the ways of intuition and rationality. This fact is an awkward issue for academic and scientific thinkers who rely on rational thinking. What seems to scare many of them is any suggestion that they have deviated from rationality in their expositions and writings. If they admit to being intuitive they will no doubt be labelled as being irrational, and this may hinder, or even end, their academic careers. To avoid such censure, some thinkers dress up their intuitive thinking by using terminology that does not carry any emotional weight, such as saying they think outside the box. What needs to be accepted is that the big insights that solve major problems are never the result of rational thinking, but of intuitive thinking.
Sub - Headings
Intuition versus Rationality
Two Functional Levels of Mind
The Flow Begins
A Quick Summary
What does the flow achieve?