Intuition is magical.  I don’t know how I understand what I understand.  Understanding happens to me and I just know, but I don’t know how I know.  Which is why the ancients believed that understanding comes from outside, from spirits, gods and muses.

 

What’s the mechanism of intuition?  The modern answer is pattern-matching.  In the modern view, I see patterns in the world and I match them with patterns in my neurons.  I see something in the world, then my mind moves through neuronal networks that are related to that something, moving from connection to connection, using relevance as my guide, until I get to the matching pattern in my neurons.  Relevance is a game of hot and cold (“you’re getting warmer”), and I choose neural networks that are warmer (that is, more relevant), until I reach destination.  It’s like a mosquito who finds her prey by moving along a carbon dioxide gradient, getting closer to prey by always going toward more CO2.  And because “neurons that fire together wire together,” over time, my brain develops a system of networks that connects me instantly to the relevant, for example, when I see a dog, I go directly to my neural network for dogs. 

 

In the modern view, I’m a pattern-matching machine.  That’s not a bad hypothesis, but it assumes more than it proves, namely, the who, what, when and how. 

 

Who’s matching the patterns?  Me.  In first-person experience.  I see the pattern, I move forward on the relevance gradient, I match it with other relevant patterns in my mind, and I feel its meaning.  Which is interesting, because, to know relevance, I must know relevance to.  Something is only relevant in relation to something else, therefore, I must have a taste of the answer already in mind; I must see in advance an outline of the story-arc so that when I move on the relevance gradient, I know what direction is warmer and what’s colder.  In brief, pattern-matching requires a purpose-driven self, a free-agent who chooses his way down the gradient to arrive at goal.  Pattern matching requires a seer of meaning. 

 

What’s a pattern?  No one knows.  I just know a pattern when I see it.  A pattern arises in first-person experience and announces itself via a feeling of meaning: “yes, this is the essence of the thing.”  Here’s my definition: a pattern is that which makes a meaningful whole out of individual parts.  In all things, there’s a stable and organized pattern of relating among the parts, and this pattern unifies the parts into a whole, said whole being more than the sum of its parts.  Aquinas called it essence, Aristotle called it form, and it’s more spiritual than material.

 

When/How?  The modern view just assumes my ability to see and to understand a pattern-- but that’s the miracle!  And the subject of my 4-part miniseries, Real-to-Real.  In contrast, the ancients, Aristotle and Aquinas, offer a mechanism for this ability: they say that patterns exist in the world and I grasp them by becoming them.  Per Aquinas, the intellect’s nature is for itself to become the essence of the thing perceived.  I see pattern and (somehow, someway) my mind becomes pattern, then I convert that pattern into an idea which is stored in a neuronal structure (explained here).   

 

I’ll summarize the situation so far.  Modern pattern-matching can explain intuition and understanding as a mechanism, but only if I stay on the surface of things.  When I look deeper, I see that a self, a seer of meaning, is required to match the patterns; a spirit, moving in first-person awareness, passes over the neural connections.  I see that a pattern isn’t a material thing; it’s an Aristotelian form.  And I wonder at the miracle that I can see and understand anything at all, including patterns.  There’s spirit in the mechanism.

 

Who is this spirit that does the pattern-matching?  Remember, understanding happens to me in a flash of insight and I know not how.  I’m not conscious of it and my rational ego doesn’t control it.  I think this spirit is the unconscious mind.  Enter Carl Jung, for whom the unconscious mind is the seer of patterns and the self who knows meaning and relevance.  Said Jung,

“And so it is with the hand that guides the crayon or brush, the foot that executes the dance step, with the eye and the ear, with the word and the thought: a dark impulse is the ultimate arbiter of the pattern, an unconscious a priori precipitates itself into plastic form…. Over the whole procedure there seems to reign a dim foreknowledge not only of the pattern, but of its meaning.  Image and meaning are identical; and as the first takes shape, so the latter becomes clear” (On the Nature of the Psyche).

 

Some nights I lie in bed and drift in and out of sleep, and if I’m really lucky, I can watch my conscious and unconscious drift together.  There’s a good story from M.L. von Franz (from Man and his Symbols) that shows it.  The mathematician Henri Poincare was having difficulty with a math problem.  He couldn’t sleep and he watched his equations move around in his mind until some of them (in Poincare’s own words) “found a more stable connection.  One feels as if one could watch one’s own unconscious at work, the unconscious activity partially becoming manifest to consciousness without losing its own character.”

 

Jung saw the unconscious as a semi-autonomous personality.  It’s an active participant in the self.  I recall a Jung story (from Psychology & Religion) of a rationalist philosopher who didn’t believe in the unconscious.  Our philosopher was obsessed with a cancer growing inside him, except that every doctor and every test said he didn’t have cancer.  The philosopher said to Jung, “I know I have no cancer, but I still could have one.”  His rational mind knew that his cancer wasn’t real, but his unconscious (that which his rational mind also couldn’t accept) had other ideas.   

 

The unconscious is the matcher of patterns, and archetypes are the mechanism.  Archetypes are part of the unconscious and they’re the mini-me who recognizes the pattern and knows its meaning.  An archetype is an inherited thought-pattern that’s universal for all humans and that lives on a biological platform like an instinct.  For example, all humans have a biological understanding of mother, father, children, men and women.  When listening to a story, we know which character is the hero, or trickster, or witch, or wise old man, and we know opposites like dark and light, good and evil.

 

An archetype forms an outline of understanding, like a tendency, and when it activates, it predisposes me to understand the world along certain lines.  When it activates, I say, “oh, I get it.”  If all this sounds far-fetched, consider that archetypes have an evolutionary basis.  For more than a billion years, we living beings have been evolving a mental way-of-being in the world, a way of making sense of the world.  In the evolution from simple to complex minds, we’ve layered function on top of function, “the heaped-up, or pooled, experiences of organic existence in general, a million times repeated, and condensed into types.  Hence, in these archetypes all experiences are represented which since primeval time have happened on this planet” (Jung from Psychological Types).

 

The mechanism of understanding is an evolved function that dates way back before language and reason.  Understanding begins in images not propositional sentences.  I see something in the world, and an archetype grasps its essential pattern, makes sense of it as image, then presents the image to my conscious mind.  That’s why, when I understand, it comes to my conscious mind as a flash of revelation: “Wow! I see it now!”

 

Understanding is revelation and it’s an activity of semi-autonomous spirits.  My favorite character from Jung is an autonomous spirit called Philemon: 

“Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, ‘If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them’ ” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections).

 

My eyes see what’s in front of them and I don’t control what they see.  Likewise, I don’t control what my unconscious understands.  They’re like birds in the air. 

 

Patterns exist within a bodily structure (like a painting holds a pattern, or a neural network holds a pattern), and soul is the movement that knows their meaning.  Hence my thesis: a pattern is a spiritual being, and understanding is a spiritual activity.  A pattern is that spirit who makes a whole out of individual parts; and understanding is that activity of a self (moving within first-person awareness) who sees the pattern, knows its relevance, and feels what it means.  We are embodied soul.

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Aristotle and Aquinas got it right at the deepest level.  They said I know the pattern of something (I see its essence) when my mind becomes it.  Knowing is becoming.  Said Paul Grenet in Thomism, “the knower unites himself to the form of the known: by remaining what he is and allowing the known to be what it is.”  I let you be you, you as you are, and I become you by seeing your essence and bringing it into me.  We get down in the dirt and wrestle, like Jacob, and we become one another.  Understanding is a spiritual activity, Thou to Thou.