Adapted from a chapter of a philosophy non-fiction book i’m currently writing and welcome thoughts
The Island, Robert Darch
Two rivers run through the mind: thinking and intuition. Thinking is deliberate, cautious, tracing paths, assembling meaning piece by piece. Intuition moves quickly, slipping through memory and senses, gathering the raw, wordless impressions of life — images, sounds, colours. Living in the dark well beneath consciousness, intuition births instincts with a hysteric urgency; the way a bird knows when to turn and follow the flock, and a hand draws back after touching the hot stove. Here, we don’t analyse, we absorb; we feel the unshakeable presence and the aching absence, of everything. In this place, sensations are pure and undivided, like a lingering scent of an early spring meadow. And then, they dissolve, into the muddy waters of the intuits; dark, infinite, forever in and out of existence, deciding whether or not to be. Only sometimes, if a sensation hovers like an overstayed guest, does it stir the slower, more contemplative waters of thought.
This transition — from the swift currents of intuition to the deliberate pace of thought — is what transforms experience into understanding. We think not because every moment demands analysis, but because some moments insist on it. A sensation loops in the mind, pressing on us until thought must come and make sense of it. And so, the intellect rises from the abysse, drawn up by the need to understand, to give a shape and a name to the unnameable abstractions. In that rising, we arrive at something like a judgment — a quiet resolution that settles over the mind; sculpting our beliefs and choices into a lighthouse to shelter us from an inherently absurd reality. Then, they sink into the dark chamber of the subconscious till life demands it with its greedy fangs.
Yet there is something else, something older and stranger that colours our intuition — something that feels much more ancient. Consider awe. When we stand before a dark sea, churning under a storm-filled sky, we feel something profound, something that draws us beyond thought. Such inexplicable awe for the stormy sea, that renders the linguistic device ever so feeble, echoes in the collective psyche:
“The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it… The miracle of a stormy ocean is not in its rage alone, but in the vast incomprehensibility that envelops it, as if it were the presence of something greater than ourselves.” Ralph Waldo Emerson — Essays
“The sea is an immense desolation, filling the soul with dreams and fears. It stretches into infinity, a dark mirror of the heavens, and it shouts to us of creation’s terrible secrets. In its depths is mystery, in its waves is wrath.” Victor Hugo — Toilers of the Sea
“In that oceanic tumult, standing at the edge of the deep, you feel a force beyond human reckoning. The mind is struck dumb, overwhelmed by the grand dread and glory, an awe that comes from beholding the earth in its most untamable form.” Henry David Thoreau — Cape Cod
Infants feel it, too, even though they have yet to form the a priori concepts of sea or sky. For them, the world is only sound and colour, as the edges blend into a formless blur reminiscent of a winter daze. To explain such an enigmatic phenomenon of awe, evolution is always convenient—but perhaps too convenient. In the face of such delicate sensation, this clinical, biological, utilitarian view is rather languid, brutish, almost blasphemy.
And what of those rare, fleeting moments when we sense something that has no category, no familiar name? Perhaps we glimpse, briefly, something nonsensical, a single encounter with an undefinable being or idea. Our minds, governed by patterns and logic, filter out the absurd, preserving only what aligns with the world we know. In the famous “inattentional blindness” experiment, a man in a gorilla suit walks through a scene, completely unseen by those who do not expect him. Because this blindness is a kind of protection. If we noticed everything, our minds would spin into chaos. Instead, we brush aside the dissonance to maintain coherence, to safeguard our fragile sense of reality.
And so these strange encounters, these fragments of unprocessed life, slip through our minds like sand through a sieve, left only to feed the quiet workings of intuition. Then, at any serendipitous, often uninvited, moment, intuition brews them into something strange and unsettling — unformed thoughts that seem to emerge from nowhere. These thoughts drift through the mind like fog, without origin or destination. They feel alien, detached, like distant echoes in an empty hall of a decadent mansion; time-worn, forlorn, forgotten. An objective foreignness that pulls us from our ordinary sense of self. We feel invaded, and slightly ashamed, as though touched by the private thoughts of another. And in that moment of dissonance, we wonder what do these strange notions mean, and why have they come?
I suspect that some of our most perplexing ideas, the ones we cannot quite pin down, are fragments of these strange encounters — gleams of realities we could not process at the time. Perhaps this is wishful thinking on my part, a longing for something beyond the rational, the knowable; for i gaze at those shadowy creatures, like an addict, as they are turned into stories, metaphors, numbers and symbols. As we mathematise and poeticise them, with self-indulgent fervour, hoping to capture a non-existent essence. Like a true hopeless romantics, I wish to grasp their elusive forms as much as I can, before they slip through my youth, mottled with the complacency of old age. So here is a series of odes, which I will update weekly, for those perplexing ideas that I’ve wondered and caught…(Continues in the next blog)
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