Dr Oliver Shaw

What is it? Where is it? And how do you learn to trust it?

Catchy title eh? This morning I would like to write about intuition; I feel as though it’s something I’ve been cultivating for years, creatively, but that I struggle to act on in my life. Nowadays my creative life is my life so it feels like an important thing to think about. As usual, this writing is intuitive–I’ve been for a walk on the beach, had a (freezing) ocean swim, sat facing the sun drinking a soy chai (my life sounds pretty good when I write it down), picked up a blue painted chair from the sidewalk for my little balcony, and picked a book off the shelf: Touching Feeling by Eve Sedgwick.

I’m reading through the final part in Touching Feeling, which begins with a long chapter on cats and how they bring us gifts to teach us how to hunt and we never get the memo, so they keep trying. I’ve experienced this with my own cat but now we’re living in a top floor apartment and she can’t hunt. This passage has made me reflect on what she’s been teaching me lately–I’m only thinking of it as teaching now after reading Sdgwick–, to play. She’s been really playful these days, waking me up in the morning not for food but to play. And now that I think about it, I haven’t been very playful lately and she has been reminding me of that, according to this philosophy of Sedgwick.

Using this example: ‘Peabody one day walked right smack into a tree, she was naturally asked whether she had not seen it in her path. “I saw it”, she became famous for replying, “but I did not realize it”. If the story points to a certain Transcendental fuzziness, it also indicates her interest in a distinctively Buddhist opening out of psychology and phenomenology of knowing’ (167).

I’m so happy to read these words, they are comforting to me. I am right now in the midst of a transcendental fuzziness of my own; I have completed my PhD, cultivated a deep sense of intuition, and am yet to ‘realize it’. And I believe that I now need to cultivate tools while I ‘wait’, as understood more by continuing to read Sedgwick:

‘In modern Western common sense, after all, to learn something is to cross a simple threshold; once you’ve learned it you know it, and then you will always know it until you forget it (or maybe repress it). In this model, learning the same thing again makes as much sense as getting the same pizza delivered twice’ (167).

(Pic of me from riding my bike into the beautiful pink-hued sky yesterday to remind my current fuzz that life is beautiful ~ and perhaps acting as a nice reminder for you too–it’s good to ride the bicycle, and it’s great to ride it into sunset).

‘To go from knowing something to realizing it, in Peabody’s formulation, is seen as a densely processual undertaking that can take years or lifetimes. Even to “tolerate” the incomprehensible idea that all things are unborn, for example–even for a bodhisattva [dictionary: ‘a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so for through compassion for suffering beings]–involves three evolutionary stages of knowing the same thing’ (167).

Wow, I’m so glade I picked up this book, it’s really clearing up some of my transcendental fuzziness, and heading me in the right direction of self compassion: I may continue to keep learning the same things over and over in this lifetime, without ever knowing them fully, and that is okay.

I am not sure whether I understood the passages of this book that I picked up this morning or not but I’m happy, perhaps a little ironically, that my intuition guided hand picked it off the shelf because it has helped me this morning and reminded me that my cat is my greatest teacher: play more, she says, which is actually what my practice is all about but there’s that Western-educated part of me that gets too serious about it and starts worrying about where the rent will come from if I stay covered in paint. I am learning, constantly, to quiet this voice and continue in play.

Ciao for now.

Oliver Shaw. Mon 23 Sep 10:44 AM.