Beyond the Edges of Perception
Reflections on Intuition
Conscious awareness is regulated by the faculty of “sensory gating.” This is the mechanism in the human mind that filters out “irrelevant” information from out of the barrage of stimuli that perpetually bombards the senses. It ensures that only “relevant” information reaches conscious awareness.
Sensory gating is determined, in part, at least, by the verbal narrative “installed” in the brain and mind, like the operating system of a computer. Words and language identify what reaches conscious awareness and what is discarded, because our waking consciousness is largely verbal. This process of filtering out perceptions deemed to be irrelevant or unimportant takes place at a level of mind that is almost hypnotic. Indeed, the essence of hypnotic suggestion is to implant a verbal instruction deep within the subconscious mind, which is then experienced and obeyed as an absolute command — even, potentially, a “system override.”
In this manner, the narrative that one subscribes to at a conscious level shapes and determines the extent of one’s conscious awareness itself. Narrative controls the nature of human attention. If one lacks the vocabulary to describe something in words, it invariably escapes one’s attention entirely.
It is possible, however, for one to notice something even without the words to describe it. Information can register at a subliminal level and come to one’s attention at the periphery of one’s awareness. For instance, the vague feeling that something is not quite right with a situation, a sense of deja vu, or an unusual apprehension or concern that one cannot put a finger on — an odd sensation that one does not have the words to describe.
Such a feeling may be understood to be intuition, at least in part. It may be described as a mode of awareness at the periphery of one’s conscious attention that triggers a sensation or response in one’s consciousness that one cannot verbally identify, simply because one lacks the vocabulary to describe it.
The natural human tendency is to suppress or ignore such a feeling — to discard it as unimportant or insignificant because it doesn’t fit into the “mainstream” verbal narrative that occupies the center of one’s awareness and attention. One does not have the language to describe the feeling, and, as such, one is inclined to disregard it. However, this human inclination in and of itself does not imply that the information or experience is irrelevant or insignificant. Indeed, it may be a matter of profound importance, except that one may be conditioned, by the scope of one’s own attention span, to pay no heed to it. It really only means that one does not have a verbal understanding of the information triggering the feeling.
For instance, if one doesn’t include the word “blue” in one’s personal lexicon, then awareness of the color blue invariably escapes one’s notice. Ancient Greek texts, including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey clearly demonstrate the lack of such a modern awareness of the color palette. Under such circumstances, however, the color blue might, nevertheless, register subconsciously and trigger an “intuitive” feeling or response, from beyond the threshold of one’s awareness.
Such intuitive feelings may also be triggered by extra-sensory agency — sensations somehow experienced from beyond the universally acknowledged five senses. If we lack the language or vocabulary adequately to describe experiences such as empathy, telepathy, remote viewing, etc., so as to render such experiences immediately tangible or recognizable, they become dismissively relegated to the domain of the supernatural, and broadly categorized as intuition.
The Limits of Experience
Peripheral vision and experience, perceived at the uttermost boundaries of one’s sensory apparatus, invariably do not register with us at a conscious level. If one is not looking at something directly, so that it occupies the center of our attention, then that which one perceives from the corner of the eye tends to register with one’s awareness only subconsciously, if at all. The question then arises — to what degree are we aware of the peripheral domain of experience? How much attention do we ascribe to that which occurs at the edges of our attention, as opposed to that which remains at the central focus of our experience or apprehension?
Often, that which we perceive only at the periphery of our experience may provide us with important sensory clues about that which is at the center of our attention. It might provide us with valuable contextual information or give us profound insights. If such peripheral sensations are somehow able to bypass the natural tendency to dismiss them out of hand and trigger an emotional response of some sort in a highly sensitive observer, we might refer to them as intuitive, for no other reason than our inability to describe them linguistically.
This all-to-human inclination in us to dismiss anything we cannot describe with the language and vocabulary at our disposal explains why we are driven to dismiss and disregard the possibility of experiences involving telepathy, remote viewing, or similar “unscientific” modes of perception. However, another important factor contributing to their dismissal is the fact that they tend to be qualitative forms of experience that may not easily be independently verifiable through “scientific” methodologies. Being intangible by nature and, therefore, not necessarily scientifically observable or measurable, such experiences tend to stretch our credulity.
The Academic Bias
Modern science and academia are largely financed by commercial corporate interests and are designed, from inception, primarily to serve those interests. Modern science is primarily interested and invested only in that which is quantifiable and quantified. Indeed, with the advent of quantum theory in 20th Century physics, the idea has arisen that reality itself is quantitative and quantifiably measurable at a fundamental level — pixellated, like the image on a television or computer monitor.
For something to be commercially viable and exploitable — for it to be commodified — it must be absolutely quantifiable in some way. For this reason, Einstein’s concept of relativity is not necessarily easily commercially viable. Thus, the tendency in modern academia and culture leans towards defining reality in quantifiable terms so as to render it commercially viable, commodifiable, and exploitable.
This proclivity explains the trend in society towards the digitization of everything — towards computerization, artificial intelligence, and transhumanism. The underlying premise is the impulse to make everything quantifiable and digital — defined by bits and bytes and binary digits — so as to render it commercially viable and commodifiable.
And failing the ability to render reality into neat little quantized packets of information, the next best thing is to construct an alternate reality as an immersive experience — a virtual reality that is, in actual fact, inherently quantized and digital, and so, inherently quantified and quantifiable. As such, it can be manipulated and exploited at will by anyone in control of it towards commercial ends, and deployed at will as a means to psychologically enslave anyone mentally ensnared by its grasp.
The Engine of Commerce and “Inhumanism”
Transhumanism — the merger of human beings with machines — is a trend that seeks to convince, indeed con, human beings into yielding up a large part of their humanity and accepting a digital mode of thinking and awareness. This mode of cognition is completely quantifiable and, thereby, completely subject to manipulation, control, and exploitation for commercial reasons and ends. A great deal of the human experience is qualitative and, as a result, inherently unquantifiable. It involves sensations and experiences for which we do not have an adequate vocabulary and cannot verbally express, and so, escapes our conscious awareness. Such intuitive experiences, as we broadly tend to categorize them, would be the first aspects of our humanity we would have to sacrifice on the chopping block if we were to subscribe to the agenda of “transhumanism.”
Indeed, I think the more appropriate term to describe the trend is “inhumanism,” as it hinges on the capitulation of one’s humanity in order to conform with an inhuman, mechanistic, commercially-oriented agenda.
Modern academia — even at the highest levels, such as in Ph.D. programs at leading universities — has been commercialized, compromised, and bought over by corporate interests. Modern academia is designed to serve the end of “science” — which is really a euphemism for a broader cultural impulse that seeks to limit the human experience of reality. It seeks to relegate it exclusively to the domain of the quantifiable and quantified, to the exclusion of the qualitative, such as the intuitive, the aesthetic, the emotive, and so on. This is precisely why mainstream academia tends to value the “sciences” over the “humanities” — science is quantitative and measurable and, therefore, commercially viable, while the humanities are qualitative and, therefore, not easily commodifiable or commercially exploitable. This is also why AI-generated art (i.e. “AI slop”) is so fundamentally lacking in any genuine aesthetic value — it is tawdry and devoid of spirit, missing an unquantifiable, indescribable quality that defines true art (in my opinion). And because we do not have the language or vocabulary adequate to express or define this quality, it often escapes our conscious awareness, especially for those among us with a predisposition for boorish, philistine attributes.
Modern academia seems to be inclined to condition the human mind so as to limit its thought and experience along quantitative, quantifiable terms, because such modes of thinking are valued by mercantile concerns. The “scientific” mode of thinking — which is, essentially, synonymous with “quantitative” (as opposed to “qualitative”) reasoning — can be commercially exploited and therefore has commercial value in a broader context or system that only values that which can be quantified. Such a binary matrix of reality, constructed by modern academic and cultural institutions, is fundamentally defined by and reducible to binary digits. It is, therefore, entirely digital and quantitative and seeks to exclude the qualitative simply because those dimensions of experience are not essentially commercially viable, even though qualitative attributes are often exploited (and debased) for commercial ends.
In this manner, modern academic institutions seek to mold and condition the human mind to limit its thinking along quantitative, quantifiable, digital lines that serve corporate commercial concerns. Such minds must be commodified and exploited because the machine of the system — the engine of commerce — needs everything to be quantified and commodified so that it can be chewed up, extracted of value, and spit out — and so that it can keep on running its incessant machinery of commercial exploitation.
A Ph.D. or similar advanced qualification in modern academia may be said to be nothing more than a badge of corporate compliance — of intellectual capitulation to and collaboration with a commercial, corporate system and apparatus of exploitation and consumption. Are such academic credentials truly reflective of authentic higher learning, or do they really only add an aura of legitimacy to the institutional conformity and tunnel vision that the corporate machinery leverages in order to perpetuate itself?
Expanding Consciousness
Practices like Transcendental Meditation and Vipassana Meditation are designed to open up and expand human awareness beyond the narrow constraints of verbal consciousness, circumscribed by language and narrative. Through the medium of silence, aided by a vehicle such as the recitation of a mantra or focusing on one’s breath, one is able to escape the restrictive boundaries of one’s verbal attention and expand one’s awareness into the silent expanse of limitless non-verbal consciousness.
The expansion of consciousness enables one to perceive and experience sensations that transcend one’s verbal, linguistic threshold of perception. In other words, one gains awareness of sensory stimuli for which one does not have the words or language to describe. By the same token, the narrowing of consciousness limits one’s awareness to the immediately tangible and quantifiable aspects of our experience. This may be induced by stress and anxiety, or by verbal reinforcement and sensory gating — what I refer to as the “hypnosis of words.”
Modern academia values conformity with mainstream commercial and corporate interests because it is economically beholden to them. Thus, modern academic programs and institutions tend to perpetuate the narrowing and limiting of human consciousness — conformity, groupthink, tunnel vision, and mercantile venality. Modern academia tends to pressure academics to fall in line with the narrative advanced by corporate concerns and purposefully blinker themselves off from unconventional, unorthodox ideas and possibilities.
This approach is ultimately self-defeating because it seeks to undermine the very human skills and abilities that form the basis of any academic pursuit. Such faculties as reading comprehension, focus, deep understanding, heightened observation, etc. are all enabled and enhanced through the expansion of consciousness. Modern academic institutions, however, are inclined to replace such living human skills and abilities with dead credentials, qualifications, and degrees, which are really only the badges of conformity with the system, the machinery of commerce, and not necessarily any real indicator of the level of one’s actual awareness or understanding of reality.
Modern academic institutions are, therefore, largely factories of conformity. They actively reward quantified, limited thinking and adherence to an orthodoxy, while marginalizing and suppressing any authentic original thinking. Modern academia rewards and encourages the commercially viable, the digital, and the algorithmic modes of thinking and being, while undermining organic human modes of thought and expression — skills like intuitive reading, critical thinking, deep learning and understanding, and so on.
An educational system that is financed by corporate entities to serve narrow commercial interests leverages “science” as the mechanism of quantitative reduction to achieve the ultimate digitization of everything — even of life itself. Social media, for instance, constitutes the digitization of human social behavior so that it can be commodified and commercially exploited.
Future Shock
Ultimately, the question we are faced with is this: do we bet on enhancing human skills, abilities, awareness, and consciousness? Or do we rely on feeding the corporate machine of rapacious commercialism and resource exploitation? In other words, do we bet on a future of expanded consciousness or one that prioritizes advanced technology? Which path enables the ultimate success of humanity? Which approach allows human beings to win out in the end — to preserve and enhance one’s humanity and soul?
The scientific and academic establishment appears to be invested in technology — in developing the machine and the system to the exclusion of humanity and the humanities, of the expansion of human consciousness. The thinking appears to be that future tech will solve all our problems and bring about utopia. And, if we pursue the transhumanist thread, it suggests that the ultimate destiny of humanity is to merge with and turn into some form of advanced technology ourselves.
On the other hand, there is an alternate trajectory that we might opt to pursue. This is a future wherein we invest in human capabilities — in humanity and the humanities. It is a path of investing in education — in the development of human skills, abilities, and character, in the expansion of human consciousness, not just in developing machine intelligence.
Surely a future characterized by an advanced technology, but lacking in comparable human advancement — devoid of human beings with an inherently high level of skills, abilities, ethical stature, moral character, and expanded awareness — is a recipe for disaster and dystopia, not the utopian future that we are led to expect. A future with advanced technology and an inept, corrupt, foolish humanity with no real skills or abilities, with narrow-minded attitudes, and a limited awareness or consciousness, is no Star Trek future. Rather, it is a nightmarish Orwellian dystopia in the making.
