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Intuition and Scientific Discovery

Einstein said:

“The only real valuable thing is intuition.”

“The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why”.

Intuition and intellect really are inseparable. It is true that all human beings have a certain amount of gut feeling and animal intuition.  There is nothing extraordinary about everyday intuition. But for those who are well-read, intellectual, are able to problem solve and analyze data, the brain/mind is changed.  Consequently, the intuition is raised along with it. The two work concurrently.

So it is with scientists who read, write, study, across disciplines, across authors, that the ability to coalesce information and come up with a new hypothesis or theory can lead to breakthrough ideas. I believe this is the case for women or for men. Here is an example of science and intuition working together;

“A well-documented case of intuition concerns Frederick Kekule’s (1829 – 1896) discovery of the structure of benzene.  Kekule saw the answer in a dream of a snake coiled and biting its tail.  In an intuitive flash, he realized that the molecular structure was characterized by a ring of carbon atoms.  Benzene is a 6 carbon ringed compound with 6 hydrogen atoms with the carbon-carbon bonds arranged alternately single and double. This discovery opened the way to modern theories of organic chemistry.

Kekule wrote about his dream in his diary.”I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere.  I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were jumbling before my eyes.  This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion.  But look! What was that?  One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes.  As if by a flash of lightning I awoke…”.

The archetype of the snake coiled and biting its tail is the Ouroboros. It originated in ancient Egypt through a magical tradition that led it to be associated with alchemy, the science of turning base metals into gold. It symbolizes eternity or the continuation of nature re-creating itself. It is essentially the world serpent which is an ancient archetype of the natural cycles of the Earth, life and death, the alpha, and omega.

Remember that before there was science there was magic. Or…magic has just always been, a force of nature, not something unusual. To understand and control nature/magic, the human institutions of Religion and State were created. So far, they are failing at doing a very good job of it.

Science has taken magic and turned it into forms, technology, medicines and seeks to control these forces for the so-called advancement of civilization. Religion has codified and edited its books and called them holy to hit people over the head with. Religion’s main contribution has been to convince humans that sex is bad, their bodies are bad and we should not be attached to either; especially since that would make us too happy and then we wouldn’t be obedient to our betters. What is civilization but greed and money used to control humans and enslave them for the upper classes?

We know nature is the most powerful and will eventually win out as it always does but in the meantime when we speak of intuition and science as different, the fact is, they are two sides of the same coin. NATURE is what our ancestors called magic simply because they didn’t understand how it worked. We are still working on that. While doing so, it’s important to keep in mind that one is not better than the other.

Ouroboros

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Science: A Masculine Disorder?

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“Science is based on the professional creation and certification of knowledge which is tied to powerful interest groups, notably the state, corporations and the scientific profession itself. Patriarchy is based on male control of dominant social structures and the exclusion of women from positions of power through means such as direct discrimination, socialization and the gender division of labor.

Patriarchy within the scientific community is manifested through male control of elite positions and various exclusionary devices. The scientific method incorporates masculine features such as the objectification of nature. Scientific knowledge is masculine in its neglect of women’s experience and its adoption of paradigms built on assumptions of competition and hierarchy.”-Jill Bowling and Brian Martin, Ph.D.

Here is another article from an expert! It’s longer but VERY interesting.

Science: a masculine disorder

I woke up this morning, after being hijacked by “a friend” on a thread yesterday and then territorially denigrated in the patriarchal tradition, pondering the question; “Is the scientific method itself horse-and-buggy, materialist, patriarchal B.S.?  Is that possible? Before today, I pretty much supported it, although its methodology seemed very simplistic to me and not at all holistic. Was I the only one wondering if this might be true?

I wonder this because as a fifty-four-year-old female who is trained in science as far as needed in licensed health care, my intuition is as consistent and rational as anything I see or feel in this material world.  I also listen to it.  This phenomenon is mostly ignored, cynically scoffed at, and at best, not understood by most people including my ex-friend who has patently disrespected my intuitive read of the Mayan Harmonic for months now.  He just now told me how much better he is than me which kind of says it all.

My patients have confirmed my hands-on intuition with their bodies for fifteen years so it’s like breathing to me now.  I put my hands on someone and I can feel everything that’s going on. Then they confirm it verbally after I tell them what I sense.  Then I treat on the manifested body and they feel it again. I don’t feel it physically initially; I sense the energetic cause of the physical manifestation which is the cause of all illness; thoughts and feelings or vibrations then I assess and treat tactilely.

My ex-friend, who fancies himself a scientist, knows nothing to very little about the body and doesn’t even work in the sciences. I’ve made my living in healthcare for seventeen years. There are lessons to be learned by all.  For instance, in the last week I’ve learned two lessons:

  1.  It is unwise to only see the good in people when their shadow is blasting you in the face. They operate from cynicism and usage; not love, and you can feel it.
  2.  Many men do not have intuition on their radar and if they do, they subjugate it for the purposes of patriarchal power (money and control) or addiction. They view intuition as feminized or sub-cultural which would weaken their position in society. Other cultures can follow their intuition but patriarchal men from all cultures do not. They only use and objectify women sexually and poor people economically, no matter how nice they may seem and politically correct with their rhetoric. It’s fake. It takes an experienced and trained eye and ear to see it.  The first tip-off is, they never ask you how you are, and if they do, it’s not genuine.  You can feel it.

“Long-term structural change in science must be predicated on changing the relations between men and women.”

This applies across cultures, all over the world.  The real issue of disparity on the planet is between women and men all over the world and the rest of the issues follow.  Women are still treated in a barbaric manner, especially the child bride phenomenon.

“Complementing this approach is that taken by those specifically focusing on the reasons why there are not more women involved in the sciences. Several writers have examined science education, particularly looking at the reasons why girls leave science in their school years. Following the observations that boys get more teacher attention and girls have less confidence in their ability, in Australia, there have been some experiments with all-girls science and mathematics classes.

There has also been an analysis of the way in which science is constructed to reflect male values and suggestions about how to create a different sort of science. Arditti, for instance, argues for a feminist perspective which “would re-introduce and re-legitimize the intuitive approach”.

To be continued…

 

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Crossing Over, Coming Together, Part II

I’m almost done giving you the scoop on “Molecules of Emotion” by Dr. Candace Pert, Ph.D. I’m going to finish summing up Chapter 11 of this great book where she talks about healing herself after all she’s been through in the NIH lab, with the men, and being unfairly excluded from the Lasker Award because she’s a woman.  She says,

“I realized that I had been angry for years, harboring deep resentments that went all the way back to Sol and the Lasker, perhaps even further back… (more details). In the Lasker days, when I began comparing what happened to me to the losses inflicted on Rosalind Franklin. I had only intuited that suppressing my emotions was dangerous and might lead to cancer, but now I had amassed enough hard scientific data to convince me that I needed to heal my emotions if I wanted to pull through this difficult time-alive and healthy” –pg. 236

Rosalind Elsie Franklin (25 July 1920 – 16 April 1958) was an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer who made contributions to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, coal, and graphite so her comparison was apt given her work and success. Born in 1920 in London, England, Rosalind Franklin earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Cambridge University. She learned crystallography and X-ray diffraction, techniques that she applied to DNA fibers. One of her photographs provided key insights into DNA structure. Other scientists used it as evidence to support their DNA model and took credit for the discovery. Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958, at age 37.

This is what women do to themselves because there is so much negativity reflected back to us regarding having power, intelligence, and self-esteem from other women, men, and religion.  Dr. Pert says,

“There was no doubt I had a reputation for being a spitfire, someone who was so hellbent on her own path that other people often felt the best thing they could do was simply stay out of my way. For the first time, I seriously considered; Was I the problem? If I’d behaved differently, been a good girl, and played the game according to the rules, would Peptide T have made it to the market, saving the lives of people who were now dead because it wasn’t available sooner?

I wrote “No” all over the margins. We’re not called to be saviors of the world or co-dependent. The short of it is, she found some spiritual healing for herself, was about to understand the true nature of forgiveness and forgave Sol, her old boss. She began to accept herself and found a quiet mental state where she didn’t feel the need “to perform” or achieve so much anymore.  I can totally relate to that as many women can.  She says,

“I also started to become aware of synchronicity, to see connections between events and people happening simultaneously and then to act on this awareness instead of out of the more familiar linear cause-and-effect model”-pg. 242

Here is where intuition really kicks in and she says,

“It appealed to me intuitively. The mind-body network is so taxed by unprocessed sensory input in the form of suppressed trauma or undigested emotions that it has become bogged down and cannot flow freely, sometimes even working against itself, at cross-purposes…When stress prevents the molecules of emotion from flowing freely where needed, the largely autonomic processes that are regulated by peptide flow, such as breathing, blood flow, immunity, digestion, and elimination, collapse down to a few simple feedback loops and upset the normal healing response.”

As a professional bodyworker and reiki practitioner, I see this every day and align it every day with my patients.  They can feel it and I stay busy!

“My colleagues were doing research on how trauma and blockage of emotional and physical information can be stored indefinitely at the cellular level.“-pg.243

So there you have it. And does our health care system understand and act on this in their treatment before they charge you $10,000/year for health insurance? No. Do they cover treatments by practitioners that really empower and help people get well?  No way! They are mired in materialism and greed most of the time and their treatments don’t work unless the placebo effect kicks in. It’s your belief in their pill that makes you feel better, not the pill itself. That’s an expensive magic show and sometimes they make it worse. It’s a crap shoot they play with our body and most people let them.

 

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The Mind-Body Connection; Emotion-Carrying Peptides

Molecules of Emotion cover

I’m sorry I haven’t blogged on here in a few days but I’m totally engrossed in this book! Wow did Dr. Candace Pert get put through the grinder in the NIH (National Institute of Health) Science Palace where it was all about competition, politics, gossip, and the good-ole-boy system.  I’ve heard recently how bad the sciences have gotten for women, sort of like the current sexual harassment scandal that is causing men in power to drop like flies, but frankly, what I’m reading about her experience is far worse than anything overtly sexual. (Charlie Rose is the latest one today and I liked his show!) It’s all very disappointing, but not surprising, at least not to me given what I’ve been through in my jobs.  It’s all outlined in my book “Healer”.

The scientists she worked with at the top in the science field were unmitigated assholes.  They lied, were verbally abusive to her, said, “be a good girl” to her, stole her ideas, took the awards and credit for her work, and basically broke her heart. As I was reading the last chapter, I googled her to find out what she was doing now and she died already.  Not surprising from what I’m reading.  She was a brilliant, breakthrough scientist, wife, and mother. But of course, her personal life suffered due to all of that stress in addition to her passion for her work.  Such is the case for any very smart, accomplished woman.

I’m in the section where Candace’s father has died and she’s had it with being treated like dirt because she’s a brilliant woman with quite an intuition.  Again, gee, ya don’t say! Here are few tidbits:

“The body is the unconscious mind. Repressed traumas caused by overwhelming emotion can be stored in a body part, thereafter affecting our ability to feel that part or even move it.”

This was her conclusion after giving a detailed blow by blow of lab experiments that allowed her and her team to reach this conclusion.  It’s pretty technical (pages 138-140).

“Using neuropeptides as the cue, our body-mind retrieves or represses emotions and behaviors. …biochemical change wrought at the receptor level is the molecular basis of memory.” (then she goes into specific science jargon)-p.143

On page 146 she starts pulling it out.

“There is no objective reality!” And she details how our brain and memory filters out what it deems unnecessary.  “Through visualization, for example, we can increase the blood flow into a body part and thereby increase the availability of oxygen and nutrients to carry away toxins and nourish the cells.

“Repressed emotions are stored in the body-the unconscious mind-via the release of neuropeptide ligands, and those memories are held in their receptors.-p.147

Stay tuned, because she’s about to follow her intuition 100% as she pivots away from Science Dogma.  You mean…she becomes creative? Yes. And it leads to a huge discovery.

It’s amazing what can happen to the mind when you lose the ego and follow the heart which is the seat of the intuition.  Oh, and she found a good guy to fall in love with and work with.  Yes, there are good guys out there.

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The Role of Intuition in the Scientific Method

This is a “tree” that shows where intuition fits, historically, into the sciences and how the sciences are actually offspring or children of philosophy.

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All intellectual disciplines start with Philosophy.  Ph.D. behind a person’s name means Doctor of Philosophy no matter what field their major is.  Its namesake is Philo of Alexandria who was a Hellenistic Jew who wanted to create harmony, maybe in a contrived fashion?, between Judaism and Greek Philosophy.

  1. Logic-the attempt to codify the rules of rational thought.  Here is where formal, informal, symbolic, and mathematical logic fits.
  2. Epistemology-the study of knowledge itself, which to me sounds like gazing at your navel.  Religionists, agnostics, and atheists exist on this spectrum. Here is where all the branches of religion fit.
  3. Metaphysics-the study of the nature of things. This one is my favorite, of course, being holistic. Branches are cosmology and ontology. Here is where all of the natural sciences fit under cosmology. The life sciences, physical science, physics, astronomy, chemistry, earth.  If these are subdivided, they are fields.
  4. Axiology is the philosophical study of value. It is either the collective term for ethics and aesthetics, philosophical fields that depend crucially on notions of worth, or the foundation for these fields and thus similar to value theory and meta-ethics. Ethics and Aesthetics are it’s two main branches.  On the chart, the box that says Ethics could say Axiology.  Here is where all law science, art, and aesthetics fit. 

Intuition comes under ontology and metaphysics, then down to philosophy of mind, then down to the philosophy of psychology.  You’ll see it sits right on the shelf with the philosophy of science equally. It then goes down that track and merges under the philosophy of science track with the science of psychology.  Psychology is a SCIENCE that comes from the philosophy of mind.  So, let’s have some respect here.  It’s not in a mushy bog.  It has to get through the rigors of the scientific method as well.

You’ll notice the five categories under the philosophy of science. There is a biased preponderance on this category, I believe due to Newtonian materialism. That is shifting now. The field of quantum physics is impressing on all the science categories now and shaking them up. In addition, that one field is also impacting the philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, AND the parent field of Metaphysics. So give the quantum physicists all the ribbing you want. Those folks are on the leading edge. More power to them.

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Apparition

All of the atoms that make up the material world (and us) are 98% empty space.  That’s a fact.

The nucleons and the electrons, in all of the atoms nucleus’s, in every single particle are spinning so fast around the nucleus that we and the world appear solid, when in fact, we are not.  Physics has proven this.

Everything is an apparition and we are just moving about like so many embodied thoughts in a ghost town called Earth.

Earth in a Spiral