Explaining our Power Away

Each of us has been raised in the age of reason and socialized to value reason over intuition.  Reason is verifiable, visible and free of prejudice.  Intuition is subjective and suspect. Our families, teachers, supervisors and peers all emphasize the supremacy of reason as a way of knowing.   

Reason has a time and place.  However, reasoning is one way of knowing, not the only way of knowing. You can also know through your heart, through your intuition, through your gut.  

Consciously, we know that rationalizing is not always the best approach for decision making. You make decisions that make no rational sense - you help someone you don't know, you forgive, you choose to put your attention on what's strong when everyone else is focused on what's weak.  The people I admire allow their hearts and spirits to guide them..  

Despite consciously understanding that rationalizing is not inevitable, I we feel threatened - attacked, humiliated, scared, confused - my automatic way of interpreting my experience is to rationalize.  In other words, when I feel backed into a corner I rationalize by default not by choice.  Don't believe me; check it out for yourself.  Think of a situation where it seems like someone wronged you.  Don't you try to understand the reasons for what happened, attempt to explain their behavior, justify your behavior and otherwise package the experience in a rational linear narrative? Maybe you don't.  In which case, bravo! I mean that.  However, I do this because rationalizing the experience reassures me that I never have to go through that experience again.  If I can understand the pattern, I can avoid it and I'll be safe. Explaining the experience takes the power of it.   

The problem is, explaining things also takes the power out of me.   

Excessive attempts to explain experience reduces a miraculous life of seasons turning, stars exploding, falling in love, invention and transformation to the copy of an out-dated textbook.  

We cannot solve our problems 

with the same level of thinking that created them.

- Einstein 

We are moving out of the age of reason because reason cannot address the issues of today - climate change, environmental stress, social upheaval, information distribution, the proliferation of anxiety, depression and attention-deficit.  These issues require more from us than the linear, rational cognitive approaches that sourced these challenges.   

What other ways of knowing am I willing to access?  The heart?  The gut?  The spirit? 

What if you don't believe in God?  How do you open up to miracles of existence that cannot be explained through the physical brain?

These are questions worth exploring. Go get 'em!