September 15, 2008
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Wisdom
Sometimes (most of the time, I suppose), my decision-making process is a blend of logic and intuition. Doing it that way just feels right to me, and when I stop to think about it, I can find good reasons for it.
Sometimes, logic conflicts with intuition, and I feel like doing something that doesn’t entirely make sense, or the course that makes sense just doesn’t feel right to me. There have been times in my life when in such situations, I would let logic prevail. At other stages of my life, I followed my impulses, acted intuitively whether logic approved or not.
Experience taught me that neither logic nor intuition was a flawless guide alone, but when both were urging me the same way, things usually turned out well in the end. So, as long as logic agrees with intuition, I can act decisively. I could, however, bog down in indecision and dither interminably if I didn’t have a way to break those stalemates when logic and intuition disagree.
I break such stalemates with oracles. Professionally, they are my stock in trade. Personally, they are my trusted guides and friends… …well, maybe not. I think of them more as connections with, or channels to, a source of guidance. Anyhow, as long as I keep in mind some basic rules in how and when to use them, they don’t steer me wrong.
Four decades ago, when I started using oracles, before I learned the hows, whens and whys, I got some anomalous answers, some indecipherable ones, and some that were simply wrong. Then, somewhere, I found this: “The first time you ask the oracle, it tells the truth. The second time, it tells a lie. The third time, it gives you a riddle.” After I quit asking the same question over and over, the answers I received became dependably accurate.
The next important step for me, in learning to use oracles in beneficial ways, was the discovery that accurate info is not necessarily all there is to making beneficial decisions. If one asks the wrong questions, accurate answers are of no use. I had a decision today that involved me and another person. I did not have information to support a judgment on whether my proposed action would be beneficial or harmful.
It is the kind of question that I would answer with either a pendulum if one was handy, or with a coin flip otherwise. My pendulum has gone missing — I suspect kittens. Recently, I have been using a D6, a six-sided die, for those questions, because Doug keeps several handy here for his D&D sessions. Odd is yes, no is even, and a die can give nuanced answers a coin can’t.
First, I asked if it was in my best interest to do the thing I was thinking of doing. YES
Then, I asked if it was in the other person’s best interest. I did not ask if the other person would be pleased about it or approve. I wanted to know if the other person would be benefited or possibly harmed. The answer was, my plan was NOT in her best interest.
Then, as usual in cases of such a “tie”, I asked if it was in the overall cosmic best interest to do it. NO.
I’m not doing it, of course. That’s where the wisdom comes in: putting general, global, cosmic interests ahead of my own or any individual’s. It is no more wise, in my far from humble opinion, to put one person’s interests above another one’s, not even my own. But it is unfailingly wise to put everyone’s interests ahead of anyone’s, even my own.
Topic shift:I really like the new wood stove. We kindled a few fires on cold nights starting the first week after we got it installed. Spring and fall, when we don’t need a fire all the time, are the hardest times in using a wood stove. It is much easier to keep a fire going than to ignite one with cold wood. Kindling a fire was complicated by the discovery that the new kittens had adopted our box of newspapers as their litter box. Most junk mail is too glossy to make good fire starters, so we were having for a while to be creative about kindling.
The current fire has been going for… close to a week, I guess. It burns at a low level, uses fuel sparingly, and keeps me warm. Temps outside have been in the forties (F) and I have easily been able to keep indoor temps in the sixties by closing the draft all the way and putting only one layer of wood in the bottom of the fire box. I’ll let you know later how it does when it is below zero outside, the fire box is fully loaded and the draft open, and I’m trying to maintain a temperature differential of eighty degrees or so.
Comments (8)
Did you ever post a picture of the new stove installed?
@the_tramp - No, and I probably should have gotten one before the inside of the glass got all smoked up. For the first few days, the fire looked really cozy.
Amen. Well, up to the oracle part.
“The first time you ask the oracle, it tells the truth. The second time, it tells a lie. The third time, it gives you a riddle.” I’m gonna have to keep that in mind next time I consult an oracle. I have a tendency to ask the same questions over and over. lol
@Apocatastasis - So… what do you do when logic and intuition don’t agree?
@SuSu - I think I’m going to need an example or two. The situation’s happened to me enough times, it’s just… my mind is totally blank when it comes to thinking up scenarios where logic and intuition conflict. I’ve never paid attention to how I actually act in those situations. They are long forgotten, or at least I can’t retrieve the memories of them right now.
I don’t use pendulums, coin tosses, bibliomancy, and something similar in technique to dowsing (although it had nothing to do with water) anymore - I inadvertently used them all as a child. At that point, it was magical thinking (and I’m using that term in the same way psychology does). I was applying meaning where meaning didn’t belong. I was assuming that by randomly flipping to a certain Bible verse, that verse would have some kind of special relevence to me – God (some kind of force that intimately permeated, or possibly was everything) would guide me to what I needed to read. Much like the Nostradaman prophecies, it worked because I interpreted the verses I found vaguely, and thought of any possible thing it could apply to. It worked because of elastic standards! In the present, I don’t dismiss such techniques because of my ignorance regarding them, and like you I’ve learnt that there is a lot of bullshit in consensus reality. Of course, like everything I’ve seen no evidence for, I approach it with a skeptical eye.
Moving on from that little story: Can you think of anything that I (or someone else) might find conflicting? If not, perhaps an example drawn from your personal experience.
@Apocatastasis - Nevermind. What I do is introspect, until I find myself leaning one way or the other. Or just say “fuck it” and pick one without worrying about it.
If you come back to this, can you give me the gist of why putting general, global, even cosmic interests ahead of your own or any individual’s is a good thing?
“It is no more wise, in my far from humble opinion, to put one person’s interests above another one’s, not even my own.”
^ Scenario: You’ve won $1,000,000 in the lottery, and word has gotten out. A homeless man who hasn’t eaten in 6 days, and the daughter of a wealthy, upper-class American politician come to visit you. The daughter really really wants a new sports car, because her current one is only a 2007 model, and it’s the highest priority on her mind lately. The problem is, her father won’t buy her a new car. The homeless man is half-dead from starvation and the brutal Alaskan winter – he wants a bowl of muesli + a blanket. At that moment, a drunken stranger stumbles through the door, compelling you at gunpoint to serve only one person’s interests, while you must turn the other away. Whose interests do you serve? To you, they are tied, because it’s no more wise to hold one person’s interests above anothers. Purchasing the daughter a new sports car is just as important as granting a homeless person a meal and a blanket. Isn’t this position bloody weird and counter-intuitive, ethically speaking (assuming the above implication of your wisdom would be incongruent with your ethics)? Unless your definition of a person’s interest is broader than either, “what someone desires” or “what someone thinks is best for them (in their own opinion)”, which seems probable.
Most of us find some people’s interests to be more compelling and urgent than others… so we do prioritize. Evolutionary psychology/sociobiology/human behavioural ecology can help to explain our ethical behaviour, altruism included. Frankly, I’m completely unsure what is wise or not, wise being distinct from ethical. I should note that the above fields are to find out what is, not what ought to be.
Here’s what Richard Dawkins had to say about altruism in his debate with Frances Collins, “Most people understand that sexual lust has to do with propagating genes. Copulation in nature tends to lead to reproduction and so to more genetic copies. But in modern society, most copulations involve contraception, designed precisely to avoid reproduction. Altruism probably has origins like those of lust. In our prehistoric past, we would have lived in extended families, surrounded by kin whose interests we might have wanted to promote because they shared our genes. Now we live in big cities. We are not among kin nor people who will ever reciprocate our good deeds. It doesn’t matter. Just as people engaged in sex with contraception are not aware of being motivated by a drive to have babies, it doesn’t cross our mind that the reason for do-gooding is based in the fact that our primitive ancestors lived in small groups. But that seems to me to be a highly plausible account for where the desire for morality, the desire for goodness, comes from.”
So, since you think it’s wise not to place one person’s interests above anothers, what happens if, say, Doug and Greyfox both want your help with something at the same time? Who do you help first?