Intuitive Action: deciding without deciding, doing without doing

 For October 2024, I spent the entire month practicing intuitive action. The pitch was this: instead of scheming so hard, you can follow your intuition when it comes to choosing what your next action should be. On paper, it seemed simple enough, but as you can imagine, it required a lot of clarification. What the hell is an intuition? How is it different from a scheme? In the end, intuitive action revealed itself to be a form of non-dual thinking and non-dual doing.

Looking for Intuitive Action

Last time, I was speaking to Zhuangzi, and it led me to wanting more wu-wei in my life. Wu-wei is an ancient Chinese concept, the paradox of “doing without doing” or “effortless action”. The anecdotes of the Book of Zhuangzi¹ aim at giving the reader this ability, or at least depict all kinds of characters who are able to do this. Their lives seem all the better for it. One beautiful example is that of the dexterous butcher carving up the ox². He does his job, but at the same time, he does it very gracefully because, in a sense, he does not do anything. He lets it happen. It is an experience of total immersion and effortlessness. It is a state of flow where the sense of being a subject separate from one’s object of attention (subject-object dualism) simply ceases. It is a non-dual experience.

Yet something bothered me about this. Something remained unsatisfying. It is true that this image is beautiful, but whenever images like this happened in the Book of Zhuangzi, I could not help but feel a pang of disappointment. This is because those “graceful skill” stories, I felt, were reminiscent of the flow state in positive psychology. When you are performing certain activities, you can come to be “in the zone” if there is a good match between your level of skill and the difficulty of the task (neither overwhelm nor boredom). This is a wonderful experience, but it tends to not lead to spiritual transformation, because what triggers the experience is spiritually neutral (you can find a good match between skill and difficulty without having to philosophize about much), and when you come out of the flow state, you tend to reinterpret this very non-dualistic experience in very dualistic terms (“oh I forgot myself for a moment but I’m sure my ego was there all along”). There is very little about the circumstances of this experience that might help the non-dualistic insight stick. It is not, in itself, a philosophical exercise.

I am very enthusiastic about taking a very mundane thing and turning it into a philosophical exercise, so that’s not the issue. The issue is that if I want to cultivate “intuitive action” – by which I mean: following my intuition when it comes to deciding what activity to do next – these “skill stories” cannot guide me. They always take place in the groove of an already pre-determined activity (carving up the ox, after learning to carve up the ox for years, most probably because this was your father’s profession and you are now following in his footsteps). And that’s too bad because what makes me suffer in life is not so much “doing certain tasks”, but constantly having to decide what task to do next.

You might say that the Book of Zhuangzi is not here to tell me what action I should perform next. That’s true. However, the question arises, not because I am projecting my expectations on this book, but because, while I was studying it in September, it did introduce more intuitive action into my life. I started to follow my “intuition” more. It was like a little voice telling me what to do next, telling me that I already knew, deep down, what to do next. In a sense I was “deciding without deciding”. Yet, I couldn’t see how that was compatible with the skill stories of the Book.

You see, when people advocate intuitive action, they often describe it as following your instinct, your gut feeling. And they argue that doing this affords you an epistemic advantage: there are things that your heart or gut knows innately that your mind doesn’t know. Broadly speaking, this seems to vibe well with the “uncomplicated life” ethos of the Book of Zhuangzi. But as soon as you start introducing the idea of something being “intuitive” not because it is “first nature” (it comes from your animal body), but because it is “second nature” (the learned skills of butchering), then you introduce all kinds of difficulties! Because then your gut feeling is simply the repository of what your mind has internalized! Where is your epistemic advantage now? You can internalize all kinds of stuff. I am always reminded of Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, who does not wish to kill his cousins (understandable, if you ask me). He is then persuaded that it would be fine to kill his cousins while in an experiential state of “doing without doing”, very similar to Chinese Wu-Wei. To thine own self you can remain true, as long as you kill people in a non-dual state of mind. Now, I can’t help but think: what a weird story, you should have followed your gut-feeling of empathy and not have killed your cousins! Not even in a state of non-dualistic contemplation!

So the truth is that I was split in two: the Book of Zhuangzi led me to want more intuitive action in my life, but I kept hesitating between two kinds of intuition. Either the kind of intuition that tells you what to do next, even if that comes at the expense of your best laid plans, because it claims to have epistemic superiority over your rational mind: “Deciding without deciding”. Or the kind of intuition that accepts your best laid plans and makes the ride smoother, because it removes doubt and friction: “Doing without doing”. In a way, I didn’t like any of those options: I don’t believe instincts have a lot of wisdom, and I don’t think internalized values and skills have a lot of wisdom either. I have a lot of bad instincts and I have a lot of bad internalized work ethic as well. So I was pretty stuck.

Non-duality as the crucible of Intuitive Action

I was stuck until I discovered Nonduality by David Loy!³ A book in which the author makes various philosophical concepts (such as Wu-Wei) completely clear only by using the framework of non-duality! A framework I am very familiar with when it comes to Indian philosophy, but not so much with Chinese philosophy. Non-duality (the dispelling of subject/object duality) is a contemplative stance that constitutes the basis of most of my spiritual life and work (most of my writing here too). So this book truly spoke my language! It had two chapters in particular that looked like they were written to solve my problem, since they touched on the two aspects - doing and deciding - that I couldn’t join together: a chapter on Nondual action and a chapter on Nondual thinking.

What really cemented the impression that I had found what I was looking for, is when David Loy started to express discomfort with a common translation of the word prajñā (a Sanskrit term that refers to non-dual thinking, according to Loy, see p.135 onwards). He writes: “However, ‘intuition’, is unfortunate [as a translation] in the sense that it more commonly suggests another faculty of the mind apart from the intellect, whereas the function of ‘intuition’ here is nothing more than the function of the intellect when it is experienced nondually.”⁴ I absolutely loved this way of putting it. It shifted my perspective.

First of all, it echoed my discomfort with the idea that “rational thought” would be inferior to another kind of faculty, whose job would be to critique it from the outside (superior “gut feelings” or something like that). I think this way of thinking is a mistake because: in being eager to side with emotions in order knock rationality off of its pedestal, we end-up only reinforcing the pedestal, by agreeing with the dichotomy between thoughts and feelings, which represses the emotional aspect of thinking. It is counter-productive. The dichotomy is at fault, not the privileging of the wrong side of the dichotomy. (something that non-dualistic contemplation is uniquely apt to make you realize).

Second of all, it made me reconsider the “intuitive action as second nature” theory. It is true that the ability to internalize skills and habits does not guarantee that those skills and habits are any wise. But you can subscribe to that theory without thinking it offers such a guarantee or even seeks to offer such a guarantee. You can say: all I can rely on to make decisions is the same fallible intelligence that I always use, but it is possible to experience that intelligence in different ways, either dualistically or non-dualistically. And there might be virtues to experiencing it non-dualistically sometimes. David Loy is clear about the fact that the experience of non-dual thinking is not a guarantee of superior insight.⁵

That said, the virtues of non-dual thinking might sometimes lead to superior insight (I take David Loy to imply that, maybe I’m wrong). How could that be the case? Well... non-dual activity tends to decrease one big distraction: the feeling of effort. When your whole being is engaged in the activity, you do not feel effort. Effort requires contrast to be felt. If your whole being is engaged in the activity, there is no contrast between different parts of yourself (the ones that strain and the ones that don’t). If it seems to us that our pristine willpower is lifting our weary limbs, or if we feel that one muscle is straining on its own in the midst of a constellation of other unengaged muscles, then, yes, we do feel that contrast. But otherwise we don’t. Here, David Loy connects the dots between quotes that I find absolutely genius: one by Buber “For an action of the whole being does away with all partial actions and thus also with all sensations of action (which depend entirely on the limited nature of actions)”⁶ and one by Nietzsche “We separate ourselves, the doers, from the deed, and we make use of this pattern everywhere […] What is it we have done? We have misunderstood the feeling of strength, tension, resistance, a muscular feeling that is already the beginning of the act, as the cause, or we have taken the will to do this or that for a cause because the action follows upon it.”⁷

I think that the reason why this feeling of effort is so distracting is that it is so easy to choose to double-down on it and to not listen to your body. And this feeling of effort shows up not only while doing a task that moves your limbs, but also while doing the task of all tasks: making decisions, deciding on what to do in the first place. It leads to laborious rumination. If I remove laborious rumination, my quality of life increases drastically, and I am more free to notice things around me.

And there are important things to notice! There is probably something to the metaphorical idea that we have a tiny little voice inside of our heads that we simply refuse to listen to. I think there is a lot of censorship of our own insights and ideas. I don’t think this tiny voice is anything different from our usual intellect, and I don’t think its position as “censored” is automatically a sign that we should believe what it says. But I do believe that, very often, we’re not even willing to hear out what it has to say, and that is a sure sign that things have gone wrong.

Consider the example that James Morley gives to illustrate his phenomenology of lucidity: “too often we come to see that we knew all along [...] People often report that during their wedding ceremony, walking down the aisle to the altar, they were flooded with the full cognizance that this marriage was a mistake. We seem to have this lucidity, but we are not trained to access it, trust it, and act on it.”⁸ It could very well be that this person is just experiencing nerves during their wedding. There’s all kinds of intrusive thoughts in our heads. So there is no guarantee that the tiny voice is telling you something worth acting upon. However, we do not need such a guarantee, and wanting such a guarantee is an extension of the problem: it’s not all or nothing, and if we are not willing at all to at least consider the possibility that the voice is saying something insightful, then we are in for trouble. Keep in mind that we are not talking about big gambles based on small vibes, we are talking about situations where people will sometimes marry someone who is physically violent against them! Self-censorship is that strong! This is the type of stuff that happens when listening to the small voice in your head is perceived as a complete non-starter.

Concrete implications and conclusion

All in all, non-dual practice – the ability to dispel the false dichotomy between subject and object (not just theoretically, but in actual daily living and daily perceiving) – is not new to me. But I still learned new and useful things from this month’s practice.

David Loy makes a brilliant observation: a lot of philosophies are built on the back of this non-dual experience, but they choose different strategies to express this insight. Since language is inherently dualistic, they will struggle with that, and they will choose how to face that challenge. Unsurprisingly, this means that some philosophies will end up saying something like “it is all Subject, there is no object” or, on the contrary “it is all Object, there is no subject”. (of course, in their more challenging moments, they will flat out say “there is neither subject nor object” [they will even go further and deny even that as a statement...], but that’s the big climax of their philosophies; if we were always challenged to that extreme, no beginner practitioner would ever get there, so the dualistic rhetoric still holds sway). This brilliant observation by David Loy unlocked a lot of textual resources for me. I was used to Advaita Vedanta’s strategy of “all Subject, no object” (aka, the Self as opposed to the mundane ego), but now I am equipped to understand other traditions, like Buddhism or Daoism, because I can understand the “all Object, no subject” strategy (emptiness, no action is being done, etc). I can understand the paradox of “nothing is being done, yet nothing is left undone”, which is slightly different from the paradox of “something is being done, but my ego is not the one doing it”, though it is related.

All my previous experience of non-doing practice was with Advaita Vedanta, but now with Wu-Wei I am back at practicing non-doing with a different emphasis! A change of emphasis, even slight, is very helpful when it comes to meditation! Very very helpful!

This slight change of emphasis manifested itself, in my spiritual practice, during an exercise that David Loy calls “not linking your thoughts in a series”. Instead of viewing your thoughts as a series of thoughts, with the previous one chained to the next one, you can view your thoughts as discrete, discontinuous entities. Quoting Advaitin Ramana Maharshi, Loyd discusses a helpful metaphor: the ego is like a worm which leaves one hold only after it is sure of catching another. But, amazingly, thinking can occur without such ego-behaviour! This gives us this handy little image:

Ultimately, what you’re aiming for is an experience where you see through the dichotomy between thinker and thought. But there’s two paths to that insight, depending on whether you want to express this non-dual experience by putting emphasis on “All Subject, no object” or “All Object, no subject”.

I was familiar with the first one, the Higher Self route, which consists in not feeling like you are the author of your thoughts when it comes to their appearance in consciousness. You do not will them into existence, they simply arise out of pure consciousness. Let’s call it Formulation 1: you are pure consciousness, not your thoughts.

However, I was less familiar with the second one, which is all about undermining the impression that your thoughts are fated to be linked together. You no longer feel like the integrity of your train of thought (retrospective & prospective) is such an inevitability. Formulation 2: Each thought stands on its own, not having to be linked to any other. It’s a very paradoxical insight (not that conclusion 1 is not paradoxical too) because I don’t think it arises from being blind to the relationship between things. In a way, you can only get to that insight if you take the relation between things so seriously that you become hyper-critical of how these relations are usually imagined to be. So it’s not like you don’t see the connection between thought 1 “there’s no milk in the fridge” and thought 2 “I need to go to the store”. On the contrary, it’s because you experience this connection so clearly that you can begin to see all the things that are added to it by your imagination. Including a sense of ownership “thought 3: I am the one thinking about the milk that needs to be bought” and a sense of necessity “thought 4: when there’s no milk in the fridge, you have to think about going to the store, that’s just how it is” and who knows what other things you add to the mix.

I think Formulation 1 (you are pure consciousness, not your thoughts) was creating the dilemma that I had about intuitive action. I was uncomfortable with the gut feeling narrative, but also with the narrative of “Take a backseat in pure consciousness”, aka Formulation 1. For intuitive action, I like Formulation 2 better: each thought stands on its own, not having to be linked to any other. It is smarter than the gut feeling narrative. But it also loosens you up. Good ideas will come to you, not as the result of effortful thinking, but as the result of giving your thinking some much needed space to breathe. Formulation 1 produces language that is burdened with the image of a binding agent that has to bind the thoughts together. You might come to experience yourself as the greater glue that binds thoughts together. And then dualism sneaks up on you. Whereas Formulation 2 insists on discontinuity. There is no glue. It shakes off continuity without being burdened with explaining how that is possible.

(PS: On this blog, we explore a new philosophical exercise every month. In the previous episode, we developed a parasocial relationship with dead philosophers, and before that, we got our minds blown by Jhana meditation. Take a look around the blog for more experiments!)

(15/11/2024)

Pierrick Simon

my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr

(do not hesitate to reach out)

Bluesky: @pierricksimon.bsky.social

Twitter: @PhiloTranquille

NOTES:

1See the Burton Watson translation of The Complete Works of Zhuangzi

2Chapter 3 of the Works of Zhuangzi “the secret of caring for life” , it’s the story of “Cook Ding”

3https://www.davidloy.org/downloads/Loy_Nonduality.pdf

4David Loy Nonduality p.136 ; Here he distinguishes between “Intuition”, as in Spinoza’s Intuition, which he is ready to accept as a term, and “intuition” as in common parlance. The common idea of “gut feeling” for example.

5Nonduality p.161

6Quoted page 107 of Nonduality ; Martin Buber, I and Thou

7Quoted page 126-127 of Nonduality ; Nietzsche, The Will to Power

8MORLEY James, “Meditation, Lucidity, and the Phenomenology of Daydreaming”, in Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness, p.469-470