Science has a long and distinguished history of showing that human intution is completely unreliable.
- The Earth is the center of the universe. No, it’s just a relatively small, insignificant planet orbiting a medium-sized star buried in a perfectly normal galaxy.
- The Earth is flat. No, it’s a sphere.
- The sun goes around the earth. No, the Earth goes around the sun.
- People are fundamentally different from animals, just like animals are fundamentally different from plants. No, humans are animals; in fact, we share 98% of our genetic material with chimpanzees — we’re more closely related than horses and zebras.
- Fire is a spirit that needs food and shelter, like any other living thing. No, it’s just a chemical reaction that is powered by fuel and oxygen.
- If you take 20 people at random and put them in a room, it’s very unlikely that two of them will have the same birthday. No, the probability is almost 50%.
- You can’t know something without knowing you know it… Actually, your subconscious is aware of all sorts of things it isn’t telling you!
What this shows is that human intuition is seriously flawed. Our rational minds are just fine, it appears — nothing wrong with our reasoning faculty. But our hunches, our guesses — they are way off. One wonders how we managed to survive this long as a species.
I Love You with All My Limbic System
Of course, science has an answer for that, too. The seat of emotion and intution, it says, is not in your heart, but in that mass of neurons behind your eyes. Of course, the brain can think rationally, too. But different parts of the brain do different things: there’s a section for language, and a section for vision, and a section for wiggling your toes, and so forth. Some processing is distributed everywhere — memory, for example. There are no “memory banks” in your brain; memory seems to be spread all over the place. Same goes for the subconscious mind: assuming it’s there at all, it isn’t local to any one spot. The rational mind resides in the cerebral cortex; while the emotions commonly associated with the heart — love, fear, compassion, excitement — actually seem to be generated in a part of the brain charmingly called the “amygdala”.
The amygdala acts like a fast-acting decision maker for dangerous or intense situations. It processes sensory input (like if the eyes let you know that you’re standing right in the path of a really big truck), assigns an appropriate emotion (“fear”), and sends out messages to speed up the heart, shorten the breath, jump for safety, and so forth. The higher functions of the cerebral cortex need not be informed of the sensory input at all until afterwards. This is handy when decisions have to be made fast. The cortex is smart, but it can take forever to decide things, especially in certain clothing stores.
From the standpoint of science, then, emotions are a gut-level, pre-programmed response to certain stimuli, and it is just the sort of thing you want if you’re frequently involved in hunting, being hunted, or otherwise pursuing the idyllic life of our forbears.
What about love? What about intuition? Here, science suggests, the situation is more complicated. Your cerebral cortex interacts extensively with the amygdala and the rest of the limbic system, generating a variety of automatic responses, emotions over which you have little control. They, too, are designed for life in the stone age. Fear of strangers? Perfectly rational if you hardly ever meet anyone outside your tribe. Love at first sight? A chemical interaction, in which your nose identifies a good mate. Shivers up your spine in a dark room? You’ve subconsciously noticed an odd noise or something, and your amygdala is freaking out, thinking a saber-toothed tiger might be nearby. Emotions, according to science, are largely useless holdovers from an earlier evolutionary era.
This is the 21st century, and our wetware is badly in need of an upgrade. Today, if you want to find the truth of a matter, you have to set aside your intuition and look up the latest scientific studies.
Doubt
But keep in mind that science reserves the right to change its mind. Darwin actually suggested that women were less intelligent than men, and listed some perfectly good evolutionary reasons to explain this. (After all, if your primary function in the species is to bear and raise children, of what earthly use would a brain be? Gotta love those 19th century guys.) Scientists no longer believe this, because a century of careful and meticulous scientific studies has shown that it’s a load of baloney.
The scientific method thus encourages Doubt on two levels. First, doubt of your own intuitions and feelings, because they’re automatic, knee-jerk reactions held over from the Stone Age. Second, doubt of scientific theories, because a new study or finding could come along tomorrow and overturn everything. Science generates doubt, and is built on doubt.
So what should you believe in? Well, nothing, obviously. Agnosticism — in the broad sense of acknowledging ignorance of EVERYTHING — is the only rational choice.
Doubt and Fear
But agnosticism is paralyzing. It’s paralyzing and paranoid. If you know nothing, there are no good choices; all choices are ill-advised; so you are paralyzed into non-action. And doubt leads to fear; because if you don’t know what’s around the next corner, or under the bed, or at the bottom of the dark staircase… you imagine something horrible there.
If you allow doubt to sit by the throne of your soul, then you are reduced to a shadow of what you should be. You don’t trust yourself. You don’t trust others. You are left cowering and jumping at every sudden noise.
There are those that say that darkworking — using fear as motivation and energy for manifesting — is a viable life choice, but this is misguided. Fear does not provide energy for manifesting. On the contrary, it saps your creative powers away.
In order for anything to be done, in order for any life to be lived, fear must be set aside and doubt must be left behind.
Trust Yourself
One of the worst side effects of the rise of science has been the fall of intuition. People no longer trust themselves, and they have lost the ability to listen to their own bodies and hearts. When the small, quiet voice whispers to them, they ignore it. They are afraid of being fooled. They turn a deaf ear again and again, until they can no longer hear it at all.
And so people turn away from their intuition when it could serve them best. They jump from diet to diet instead of learning how to listen to their bodies. They buy houses based on resale value and local crime rates instead of finding a place they want to live in. They push their children to beat statistical averages instead of tuning in to the child’s natural pace of growth. They take aptitude tests to find out what their life’s work should be.
But intuition is a reliable guide — if you learn to listen to it properly.
- The Earth is the center of the universe. It’s the center of your universe.
- The Earth is flat. It’s flat where you are.
- The sun goes around the earth. Actually, according to relativity, this is just as true as saying that the Earth goes around the sun. All motion is relative. And for your life here on Earth, it makes a lot more sense to think of the planet as motionless.
- People are fundamentally different from animals, just like animals are fundamentally different from plants. Genetic material doesn’t tell the whole story. Steam may be chemically identical to water, and just a few degrees hotter, but its properties are vastly different.
- Fire is a spirit that needs food and shelter, like any other living thing. If you treat fire with the respect it deserves, as a capricious and dangerous spirit, you’re likely to live a lot longer.
- If you take 20 people at random and put them together in a room, it’s very unlikely that two of them will have the same birthday. In this universe, twenty people are never thrown together at random.
- You can’t know something without knowing you know it… If you tune in to your intuition, you will know everything that you know!
Druid Journal 
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