Intuitive Dawnings Quotes

There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns—small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think you are on the right track. I watched a pale dawn streak the cliffs with Day-glo and realized this was one of them. It was a moment of pure, uncomplicated confidence—and lasted about ten seconds.

The motives behind scientism are culturally significant. They have been mixed, as usual: genuine curiosity in search of truth; the rage for certainty and for unity; and the snobbish desire to earn the label scientist when that became a high social and intellectual rank. But these efforts, even though vain, have not been without harm, to the inventors and to the world at large. The "findings" have inspired policies affecting daily life that were enforced with the same absolute assurance as earlier ones based on religion. At the same time, the workers in the realm of intuition, the gifted finessers - artists, moralists, philosophers, historians, political theorists, and theologians - were either diverted from their proper task, while others were looking on them with disdain as dabblers in the suburbs of Truth.

Just in time to pick up the shells after the shoot-out is over, I'm sure. I've known a few analysts and number crunchers. You work with paper, computers, pore over printouts-charts, graphs, scatter plots but you don't deal with people. You're more comfortable with bits and bytes," Caston tilted his head. "John Henry did beat the steam drill once. Maybe you were sleeping in when the information age dawned. Today, technology spans borders. It watches. It hears. It registers patterns, small statistical perturbations, and if we're willing to pay attention--" "It can hear, but it can't listen. It can watch, but it can't observe And it sure as hell can't converse with the men and women we've got to deal with. There's no substitute for that, goddammit.

Beholding the flash drive that may contain so many keys, intuition dawns: I’ve always been a butterfly trapped in Donovan’s net. My heart knows Donovan and I traveled together before, yet I’ve never allowed myself to think of the logistics. If the more I pull back, the more I crave his enclosure, what happens if I learn my deprivation has been for centuries, or even millenniums? Is being an old soul why I have always felt and sounded older than my years? Why do I have the passions I do? How did I become me?

Perhaps it was because a terrible anguish had developed within my soul, occasioned by a circumstance which loomed infinitely larger than my own self: to be precise, it was the dawning conviction that in the world at large, nothing mattered. I had had a presentiment of this for a good long time, but complete conviction came swiftly during this last year. All of a sudden, I realized that it would not matter to me whether the world existed or whether there was nothing at all anywhere. I began to intuit and sense with all my being, that there was nothing around me.

Usually, in everyday life, massive improbability is a good reason for thinking that something won't happen. The point about intercontinental rafting of monkeys, or rodents or anything else, is that it only had to happen once, and the time available for it to happen, in order to have momentous consequences, is way outside what we can grasp intuitively. The odds against a floating mangrove bearing a pregnant female monkey and reaching landfall in any one year may be ten thousand to one against. That sounds tantamount to impossible by the lights of human experience. But given 10 million years it becomes almost inevitable... It only had to happen once: great things then grew from small beginnings.

He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his half-dreams. Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated, but each reconstruction had required a whole day. He told me: "I alone have more memories than all mankind has probably had since the world has been the world." And again: "My dreams are like you people's waking hours. And again, toward dawn: "My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap." A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a lozenge-all these are forms we can fully and intuitively grasp; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a pony, with a herd of cattle on a hill, with the changing fire and its innumerable ashes, with the many faces of a dead man throughout a long wake. I don't know how many stars he could see in the sky.

Elizabeth snapped awake in a terrified instant as the door to her bed chamber was flung open near dawn, and Ian stalked into the darkened room. “Do you want to go first, or shall I?” he said tightly, coming to stand at the side of her bed. “What do you mean?” she asked in a trembling voice. “I mean,” he said, “that either you go first and tell me why in hell you suddenly find my company repugnant, or I’ll go first and tell you how I feel when I don’t know where you are or why you want to be there!” “I’ve sent word to you both nights.” “You sent a damned note that arrived long after nightfall both times, informing me that you intended to sleep somewhere else. I want to know why!” He has men beaten like animals, she reminded herself. “Stop shouting at me,” Elizabeth said shakily, getting out of bed and dragging the covers with her to hide herself from him. His brows snapped together in an ominous frown. “Elizabeth?” he asked, reaching for her. “Don’t touch me!” she cried. Bentner’s voice came from the doorway. “Is aught amiss, my lady?” he asked, glaring bravely at Ian. “Get out of here and close that damned door behind you!” Ian snapped furiously. “Leave it open,” Elizabeth said nervously, and the brave butler did exactly as she said. In six long strides Ian was at the door, shoving it closed with a force that sent it crashing into its frame, and Elizabeth began to vibrate with terror. When he turned around and started toward her Elizabeth tried to back away, but she tripped on the coverlet and had to stay where she was. Ian saw the fear in her eyes and stopped short only inches in front of her. His hand lifted, and she winced, but it came to rest on her cheek. “Darling, what is it?” he asked. It was his voice that made her want to weep at his feet, that beautiful baritone voice; and his face-that harsh, handsome face she’d adored. She wanted to beg him to tell her what Robert and Wordsworth had said were lies-all lies. “My life depends on this, Elizabeth. So does yours. Don’t fail us,” Robert had pleaded. Yet, in that moment of weakness she actually considered telling Ian everything she knew and letting him kill her if he wanted to; she would have preferred death to the torment of living with the memory of the lie that had been their lives-to the torment of living without him. “Are you ill?” he asked, frowning and minutely studying her face. Snatching at the excuse he’d offered, she nodded hastily. “Yes. I haven’t been feeling well.” “Is that why you went to London? To see a physician?” She nodded a little wildly, and to her bewildered horror he started to smile-that lazy, tender smile that always made her senses leap. “Are you with child, darling? Is that why you’re acting so strangely?” Elizabeth was silent, trying to debate the wisdom of saying yes or no-she should say no, she realized. He’d hunt her to the ends of the earth if he believed she was carrying his babe. “No! He-the doctor said it is just-just-nerves.” “You’ve been working and playing too hard,” Ian said, looking like the picture of a worried, devoted husband. “You need more rest.” Elizabeth couldn’t bear any more of this-not his feigned tenderness or his concern or the memory of Robert’s battered back. “I’m going to sleep now,” she said in a strangled voice. “Alone,” she added, and his face whitened as if she had slapped him. During his entire adult life Ian had relied almost as much on his intuition as on his intellect, and at that moment he didn’t want to believe in the explanation they were both offering. His wife did not want him in her bed; she recoiled from his touch; she had been away for two consecutive nights; and-more alarming than any of that-guilt and fear were written all over her pale face. “Do you know what a man thinks,” he said in a calm voice that belied the pain streaking through him, “when his wife stays away at night and doesn’t want him in her bed when she does return?

The first flicker of dawn licked the eastern sky. The light grew stronger, revealing that the white larkspur had turned dark crimson overnight. Within her shrine, a new and beautiful light gray flower sprang from the ground, surrounding her. Asphodel. Kore touched the gentle flowers growing around her and shifted the coloring of her dress to a soft white, mimicking the color of the blossoms. How beautiful they were... like last night, like him, though she knew 'beautiful' was seldom applied to men, and was too soft a word for him anyway. Asphodel... she was the Maiden of the Flowers and knew that's what these were intuitively, but tried to remember where she had heard that name- and what their significance was. She had only ever seen asphodel as a gnarled dark gray weed. It was one of the few plants her mother would rip out of the fields wherever she had seen it. Kore had always trailed behind her, doing the same. She had never seen asphodel bud and and blossom. The white blooms were thin, veined with a centerline of crimson, six petals with bright filaments bursting from the center and ending in deep red anthers. They were beautiful and foreign.

Agnostics and other relativists dispute the value of metaphysical certainty; in order to demonstrate the illusory character of the de jure certainty of truth, they set it in opposition to the de facto certitude of error, as if the psychological phenomenon of false certainties could prevent true certainties from being what they are and from having all their effectiveness, and as if the very existence of false certainties did not prove in its own way the existence of true ones. The fact that a lunatic feels certain he is something that he is not does not prevent us from being certain of what he is and what we ourselves are, and the fact that we are unable to prove to him that he is mistaken does not prevent us from being right; or again, the fact that an unbalanced person may possibly have misgivings about his condition does not oblige us to have them about our own, even if we find it impossible to prove to him that our certainty is well founded. It is absurd to demand absolute proofs of suprasensorial realities that one thinks one ought to question while refusing in the name of reason to consider metaphysical arguments that are sufficient in themselves; for outside of these arguments the only proof of hidden realities—as we have already said—is the realities themselves. One cannot ask the dawn to be the sun or a shadow to be the tree that casts it; the very existence of our intelligence proves the reality of the relationships of causality, relationships that allow us to acknowledge the Invisible and by the same token oblige us to do so; if the world did not prove God, human intelligence would be deprived of its sufficient reason. First and foremost—leaving aside any question of intellectual intuition—the very fact of our existence necessarily implies pure Being; instead of starting with the idea that “I think; therefore I am”, one should say, “I am; therefore Being is”: 'sum ergo est Esse' and not 'cogito ergo sum'. What counts in our eyes is most definitely not some more or less correct line of reasoning but intrinsic certainty itself; reasoning is able to convey this in its own way: it describes the certainty in order to show forth its self-evident nature on the plane of discursive thought, and in this way it provides a key that others might use in actualizing this same certainty.

Everyone is intuitive, even you.

Young people need looking after,” she said. “Think of that beautiful boy Galois. People felt there was something secret in his character. They were right. The secret was mathematics. His father a suicide. His own death a horrible farce. Dawn in the fields. Caped and whiskered seconds. Sinister marksman poised to fire.” I need all my courage to die at twenty. “Then there was Abel, not much older, desperately poor, Abel in delirium, hemorrhaging. So often mathematical experience consists of time segments too massive to be contained in the usual frame. Lives overstated. Themes pursued to extreme points. Adventure, romance and tragedy.” I will fight for my life. “Look at Pascal, who rid himself of physical pain by dwelling on mathematics. He was just a bit older than you when he constructed his mystic hexagram. The loveliest aspect of the mystic hexagram is that it is mystic. That’s what’s so lovely about it. It’s able to become its own shadow.” Keep believing it. “The tricky thing about mathematical genius,” she said, “is that its sources are so often buried. Galois for one. Ramanujan for another. No indication anywhere in their backgrounds that these boys would one day display such natural powers. Figures jumping out of sequence. Or completely misplaced.” (...) “Numbers have supernatural harmonies, according to Hermite. They exist beyond human thought. Divine order through number. Number as absolute reality. Someone said of Hermite: ‘The most abstract entities are for him like living creatures.’ That’s what someone said.” “People invented numbers,” he said. “You don’t have numbers without people.” “Good, let’s argue.” “I don’t want to argue.” “Secret lives,” she said. “Dedekind listed as dead twelve years before the fact. Poncelet scratching calculations on the walls of his cell. Lobachevski mopping the floors of an old museum. Sophie Germain using a man’s name. Do I have the order right? Sometimes I get it mixed up or completely backwards. (...) “Tell me about your mathematical dreams.” “Never had one.” “Cardano did, born half dead, his inner life a neon web of treachery and magic. Gambler, astrologer, heretic, court physician. Schemed his way through the algebra wars.” “Can I see the baby?” “Ramanujan had algebraic dreams. Wrote down the results after getting out of bed. Vast intuitive powers but poor education. Taken to Cambridge like a jungle boy. Sonja Kowalewski wasn’t allowed to attend university lectures. We both know why. When her husband died she spent days and days without food, coming out of her room only after she’d restored herself by working on her mathematics. Tell me, was it Kronecker who thought mathematics similar to poetry? I know Hamilton and many others tried their hands at verse. Our superduper Sonja preferred the novel.

there are two distinct modes of scientific thought. These are certainly not a function of different stages of development of the human mind but rather of two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific enquiry: one roughly adapted to that of perception and the imagination: the other at a remove from it. It is as if the necessary connections which are the object of all science, Neolithic or modern, could be arrived at by two different routes, one very close to, and the other more remote from, sensible intuition.

Use your love and good instincts to know when to growl, to pounce, to take a swipe, when to kill, when to retreat, when to bay till dawn. To live as closely as possible to the numinous wild a woman must do more head tossing, more brimming, have more sniffing intuition, more creative life, more “get-down-dirty,” more solitude, more women’s company, more natural life, more fire, more spirit, more cooking of words and ideas. She must do more recognition of sorority, more seeding, more root stock–keeping, more kindness to men, more neighborhood revolution, more poetry, more painting of fables and facts, longer reaches into the wild feminine. More terrorist sewing circles, and more howling. And, especially, much more canto hondo, much more deep song.

Many complain that they are unable in meditation successfully to bring their active thoughts to an end. In the ancient Indian art of yoga, this cessation—called nirvikalpa samadhi in Sanskrit—is placed as the highest stage to be reached by the practitioner. This situation must be viewed from two separate and distinct standpoints: from that of yoga and from that of philosophy. Would-be philosophers seek to become established in that insight into Reality which is called Truth. Intuitive feeling is a higher manifestation of man’s faculties. So long as the feeling itself remains unobstructed by illusions, and—after incessant reflection, inquiry, study, remembrance, reverence, aspiration, training of thought, and purification—a man finds the insight dawning in his mind, he may not need to practise meditation. He may do so and he will feel the satisfaction and tranquillity which comes from it. Those who become sufficiently proficient in yoga, even if they achieve the complete cessation of thoughts, should still take up the pursuit of understanding and insight. If they are content with their attainment, they can remain for years enjoying the bliss, the tranquillity, the peace of a meditational state; but this does not mean knowledge in its fullest meaning. (20

All the technology in the world is not going to help you if it’s not intuitive and if the end user can’t use it.

Existential dread to philosophy’s end in an objectively indignant and unknowable universe is principally all we shall ever expect to bear and intuit but more importantly were intended to observe in dull harmonious respite, the congenital lack of a resolving creation myth or prime reason to exist, for anything to survive and billions of years lay dormant for the incidental arrival of our brains unwillingly limited to these strictures that were already set for us by the dawning of contumacious evolution without cause but local expedience, no matter the latest surge of scientific ingenuity or imagined promise in our comprehension of the universe’s layered and aimless design by scoping the hanging stars gripped by a listless Milky Way within speculative aeons of unshored blackness, only a dubious reasoning to our being ever spun and plied from the remaining equally unknowable shunted gaze of the cosmos.

When ego, unopposed, assumes its throne, The world, in fragments, reaps the seeds it’s sown. A kaleidoscope of discord and divide, Where separate streams in ceaseless turmoil bide. Through ego’s lens, reality transforms, A battleground where rampant desire storms. A sphere of strife, of victory and loss, Where fortunes shift as dice of fate are tossed. In ego’s solitary, narrow view, The world is painted in a hue so skewed. Confined by fears, by selfish dreams confined, Its canvas bears the limits of the mind. Thus, perception, in its manifold grace, Reflects the light of ego and soul’s face. In balance, may the truest sight be found, Where essence and ego in harmony abound. In the crucible where essence blends with sight, A wondrous transformation takes its flight. Where once division’s shadow coldly lay, Interconnection’s dawn breaks forth in day. What opposition’s harsh gaze once discerned, To harmonies of concord is now turned. The essence, with its ancient wisdom’s glow, Unveils the unity that lies below. Each leaf and stone, each soul that wanders free, A note within reality’s grand symphony. Essential, bound within the vast expanse, In life’s intricate, cosmic dance. This alchemical shift in vision’s sphere, Brings forth changes profound, both far and near. Challenges, once daunting, now unfold, As growth’s opportunities, bright and bold. Foes, once clad in enmity’s harsh guise, Transform to teachers, wise beneath the skies. Each joy, each pain, in life’s intricate weave, Threads of our evolution, we perceive. No longer a stage for vain rivalry’s play, But a landscape where learning’s blossoms sway. Growth and learning, in rich abundance, thrive, In this new world where our spirits come alive. Where once the ego’s voice, in solo strain, Ruled with iron will, in self’s domain, Now in harmony with the soul’s sweet song, It finds a place where it truly belongs. No longer master, but a partner kind, Guiding through life with a humble mind. It learns compassion’s tongue, intuition hears, Acts with mindfulness, as purpose nears. In perception’s alchemy, a journey grand, From fractured states to unity’s soft hand, From discord’s harsh cacophony to peace, A path that leads where true essences release. This sacred path, evolving as it weaves, Into our nature’s heart, where spirit cleaves. The veil of separation gently falls, As interconnectedness softly calls. Upon this path, with every step we tread, Our world transforms, new visions in its stead. The mundane now with sacredness imbues, The ordinary in extraordinary hues. Each day becomes a picture, rich and vast, For deepest truths, in vibrant colors cast. Through alchemy of sight, our roles transcend, Not mere observers, but creators bend. In world’s unfolding tale, we play our part, Co-architects, with collective heart. A reality, where highest potentials shine, In this, your design, our spirits intertwine.

which a drawing imported into a text document can no longer be altered, but must be changed in the original graphics program and reintroduced into the text document.) Out of the box the Star was multilingual, offering typefaces and keyboard configurations that could be implemented in the blink of an eye for writing in Russian, French, Spanish, and Swedish through the use of “virtual keyboards”—graphic representations of keyboards that appeared on screen to show the user where to find the unique characters in whatever language he or she was using. In 1982 an internal library of 6,000 Japanese kanji characters was added; eventually Star users were able to draft documents in almost every modern language, from Arabic and Bengali to Amharic and Cambodian. As the term implied, the user’s view of the screen resembled the surface of a desk. Thumbnail-sized icons representing documents were lined up on one side of the screen and those representing peripheral devices—printers, file servers, e-mail boxes—on the other. The display image could be infinitely personalized to be tidy or cluttered, obsessively organized or hopelessly confused, alphabetized or random, as dictated by the user’s personality and taste. The icons themselves had been painstakingly drafted and redrafted so they would be instantaneously recognized by the user as document pages (with a distinctive dog-eared upper right corner), file folders, in and out baskets, a clock, and a wastebasket. Thanks to the system’s object-oriented software, the Star’s user could launch any application simply by clicking on the pertinent icon; the machine automatically “knew” that a text document required it to launch a text editor or a drawing to launch a graphics program. No system has ever equaled the consistency of the Star’s set of generic commands, in which “move,” “copy,” and “delete” performed similar operations across the entire spectrum of software applications. The Star was the epitome of PARC’s user-friendly machine. No secretary had to learn about programming or code to use the machine, any more than she had to understand the servomechanism driving the dancing golf ball to type on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Changing a font, or a margin, or the space between typed lines in most cases required a keystroke or two or a couple of intuitive mouse clicks. The user understood what was happening entirely from watching the icons or documents move or change on the screen. This was no accident: “When everything in a computer system is visible on the screen,” wrote David Smith, a designer of the Star interface, “the display becomes reality. Objects and actions can be understood purely in terms of their effects on the display.

IBM launched its Chess machine, renamed simply the Personal Computer, in August 1981, a scant four months after the Star. Judged against the technology PARC had brought forth, it was a homely and feeble creature. Rather than bitmapped graphics and variable typefaces, its screen displayed only ASCII characters, glowing a hideous monochromatic green against a black background. Instead of a mouse, the PC had four arrow keys on the keyboard that laboriously moved the cursor, character by character and line by line. No icons, no desktop metaphor, no multitasking windows, no e-mail, no Ethernet. Forswearing the Star’s intuitive point-and-click operability, IBM forced its customers to master an abstruse lexicon of typed commands and cryptic responses developed by Microsoft, its software partner. Where the Star was a masterpiece of integrated reliability, the PC had a perverse tendency to crash at random (a character flaw it bequeathed to many subsequent generations of Microsoft Windows-driven machines). But where the Star sold for $16,595-plus, the IBM PC sold for less than $5,000, all-inclusive. Where the Star’s operating system was closed, accessible for enhancement only to those to whom Xerox granted a coded key, the PC’s circuitry and microcode were wide open to anyone willing to hack a program for it—just like the Alto’s. And it sold in the millions.