 Okay, here's the deal, I'm gonna give you four keys to a successful long-term relationship with a loving, empathic, holding and warm partner, in short with someone like me. And these four keys, note them down, print them out, magnetize them on your fridge, hang them upside down and down sunny side up next to the alarm system, because these are the only four relevant keys when you meet someone, when you date someone, when you fall in love with someone, and when you consider having a life with someone. And so here we go, if it feels wrong, it is wrong, simple isn't it? If it feels wrong, it is wrong, number two, if it takes too much conspicuous and ostentatious effort, it is fake. If you see too much effort going into anything, dating you, talking to you, having sex with you, whatever, it's fake. Effort equals fake, or at least too much effort. Number three, if it is too good to be true, there's only one reason for that. It is not true. Number four, in today's world, believe nothing and verify everything. He tells you good morning, look out the window, make sure the sun is still up there. He tells you it's the 4th of July, pull out the calendar, click on your smartphone, make sure it is July and make sure it's the 4th. Believe nothing, distrust everything, verify every single thing. Why is that? Because studies have shown, studies by Dana Rielly and many other behavioural psychologists, studies have shown that people, all people, can I repeat this, not only narcissists, not only psychopaths, not only so-called sociopaths, even self-styled nonsensical empaths. All people, men and women, young and old, educated and less educated, blue-collar, white-collar, all people, like everyone with two legs, lie about every single thing, 90, a whopping 90% of the time. Did you get that straight? Nine out of ten sentences are false, fake, exaggerated, wrong, misleading, manipulative. That's not nine out of a hundred, that's nine out of ten. And these are studies. This is based on studies, it's not speculation. I recommend to you to go online and look up for everything ever done, ever written by Dan Rielly, wonderful behavioural psychologists, Israeli of course. So people lie 90% of the time and they lie unnecessarily. Most of the time, there's no reason, no rhyme, no goal, nothing, people just lie. And here's the clinch, here's the punchline. You believe them 90% of the time. This is called the base rate fallacy. And before you send me another lunch of emails, base like military base, B-A-S-E, not base the mathematician, base rate fallacy. People lie 90% of the time and you believe them 90% of the time. I call this the 1990 rule. So verify everything, trust nothing. Let me recap this for you. If it feels wrong, it is wrong. If there's too much conspicuous and ostentatious effort, it's fake. If it's too good to be true, it's not true. And last and by far most important thing. Check, check, check, do your homework, do your research, verify. In today's world, it's much easier. There's Google. All this has to do with, of course, intuition. This is the topic of today's video. Can you trust your gut feeling? What is intuition? Is there only one type of intuition? How does it operate? How is it constructed? So what I did being as old as I am, I went and spoke to philosophers dating all the way back to ancient Greece when I was young. And so I asked philosophers, what do they have to say about intuition? And I created an anthology, compendium for you. And I'm going to tell you in this video what philosophers say about intuition. And now before you turn me off, philosophers were very wise people. And what they have to say has applicability to your lives. It's a pity people study philosophy much less than they used to. The phenomenon of Jordan Peterson exemplifies, demonstrates the importance of philosophy, wrong philosophy, right philosophy. It's debatable, but it's philosophy. Philosophy used to be the mother and the father and the cousin and the grandparent of sciences. All sciences came from philosophy, including psychology. To this very day in many countries in the world, psychology is part of the faculty of philosophy. So don't underestimate what philosophers have to tell you. Now, before I go there, as is our habit. My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm a professor of psychology and a professor of finance and psychology in some other universities. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. First edition was published in 1999, like 20 years before everyone else. And I've written other books about personality disorders and numerous other topics. Today, we discuss intuition, but before we go there, let's straighten one administrative one issue. I usually answer someone. So I received an email and there was a comment, I think, on one of the videos regarding a new discovery, the dark empath. The dark empath is supposedly a narcissist or a psychopath who has empathy. First of all, there's no such thing as empath. I've been saying it numerous times. There's no such clinical entity, no diagnosis, nothing. There's no such thing as empath. Can you get it through your head? Empath is a self-attributed label, self-imputed label, victims with grandiosity or people who believe themselves to be victims or professional victims. They want to feel virtuous. They want to feel sanctimonious. They want to feel morally superior. They want to feel that they had nothing to contribute or to do with their own abuse. So they self-label empaths. That you self-label something doesn't mean that it has an validity in psychology. Now, we do have something called HSP, Highly Sensitive People, and I've discussed it in other videos which I recommend that you see. I do regret, however, to see academics, scholars, professors prostitute themselves and pander to the grandiosity of self-styled professional victims just in order to sell their products and services. There are people online who should know better because they are professors of psychology and so on and so forth. They should fight the good fight. They should resist the tide and they should not sacrifice academic integrity for self-enrichment, which is exactly what they're doing. Now, the particular study that came up with the construct of dark empath was conducted at the University of Nottingham and it is the outcome simply of ignorance. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is the Bible of psychiatry but only in North America. It is used mainly in the United States. In other parts of the world, such as Europe, such as the United Kingdom, we use another book called ICD, International Classification of Diseases. The 11th edition is about to be published. There's a huge gap, there's an abyss between the DSM and the ICD. Well, I'm not good into it right now. And the outcome is that European scholars and academics, and I can tell you this from personal experience, are not fully updated. They are not cutting edge. They are not bleeding edge. They're like five to 10 years behind. Absolutely, five to 10 years behind. I'm not exaggerating. And so had these esteemed colleagues from the University of Nottingham bothered to look up the alternate model of narcissistic personality disorder, in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual published seven years ago in 2013, they would have found to the shock that narcissists and psychopaths now do have empathy, or at least narcissists. According to the DSM-5, narcissists do have empathy. And they have a special kind of empathy. 15 years ago, I proposed, I was the first to propose that narcissists have empathy and I labeled it called empathy. In between, there were numerous other scholars who came up with a construct of cognitive empathy. In other words, I don't know what's the brouhaha, that narcissists and psychopaths have empathy. There's no need to invent a new label of dark empath unless you want to fit in, you want to fit into the hype of YouTube. If you're a serious scholar, you would have known, you would have known that narcissists and psychopaths possess cognitive or called empathy. And that this is a 15-year-old discovery at the very least, if not older. Additionally, of course, cognitive empathy is only one component. Another component that narcissists and psychopaths have is reflexive empathy. It's the bodily reactions, the biological reaction to the condition of someone else. This is mediated through a special type of neurons called mirror neurons. So narcissists and psychopaths to summarize have empathy. I repeat, they have empathy. Only it's reflexive or called or cognitive. I don't care about the label. Go on my YouTube channel and look up all the videos on cold empathy, some of them dating back 10 years. No need to invent a label, a new label, and definitely no need to prostitute yourself and to become popular on YouTube by using the absolute nonsensical, misnomer empath. Now, highly sensitive people fit into this video somehow because highly sensitive people have something called overexcitability. Overexcitability is a part of the developmental route or developmental path of certain individuals. It's a heightened physiological experience of stimuli resulting from increased neuronal sensitivity. I discussed it when I discussed in the video where I talk about whether narcissism is genetic or epigenetic and so on, I mentioned this. Overexcitability is gonna feature big time in this video. And in this sense, I'm somehow connecting overexcitability with personal growth with highly sensitive people with intuition. Of course, intuition implies some kind of over sensitivity. We feel ill at ease. When you meet a narcissist, you feel ill at ease. Even if you think that you are feeling perfectly fine, even if it's the first date and it's going swimmingly and it's the greatest date ever, you know, flowers, romance, limousines, white-beloved waiters with masks, of course. Even if this kind of date with romantic music played by a gypsy band, there's something there. There's something of note. There's something of key. There are these snippets. There are these smidgens. There are these flashes of wrongness. Ill-fitting things, ill-fitting expressions. They are called microexpressions. Ill-fitting behaviors. And you can't put everything together. It's like a jigsaw puzzle with one of the pieces wrong, one of the pieces coming from another box. So the jigsaw puzzle is never complete. And you have this ill background, background ill at ease. There's information there. It's not abundant. It's incidental. But there's information there that generates cognitive dissonance. He says one thing and he behaves in another way. Or it generates emotional dissonance. I am so into him, I will try to ignore his misbehavior. So these dissonances, they lead to something called confirmation bias. You filter out. You so want to be with him. You so wanted to work. You were so happy and so excited to go on this day or to develop this relationship or to talk to him or that you filter out. You ignore, you repress, you delete. Any information, to the contrary, any information that challenges your view of him as perfection. In other words, you idealize him. It's very common in a relationship with the narcissist that you idealize the narcissist as much as he idealizes you. I'm against, I actually came up with the concept of a cycle of idealization, devaluation and discard. In 1995, I'm the one who proposed this cycle. But today I've modified it. And I call the first phase, co-idealization. You idealize him, he idealizes you. And there are, there's always thin lines. There are always thin lines. For example, complexity is one thing. Defiance is another thing. Stupidity is a third thing. It's very easy, very easy to conflate and confuse. A complex person with a defiant person, with a contumatious person, and with an idiot. And so if he's an idiot, you would tend to think of him as complex. You would tend to believe that there are some background processes that you're not aware of and it will reveal themselves in due time. You tend to create confabulated narratives to justify your presence in his life. You tend to ignore your own intuition. Is he, is he a misogynist? Is he a sadist? Is he a narcissist? You know, is he an equal opportunity abuser? He abuses men and women. Does he heap his abuse only on weak people? Subservient people? People in positions where they cannot retaliate like other waiters, cabbies, service providers. Your intuition keeps ringing alarm in the background. Keeps telling you, hey, wake up, something's wrong, but you, you don't want to. You don't want to wake up from this dream until it's well advanced and you begin to realize that it's actually a nightmare. It's a realistic, lucid dreaming because you're inducing this dream. You're co-creating it. You're collaborating. Had you just listened to your intuition and followed the aforementioned four rules, believe me, 90% of your relationship trouble would have never happened. And philosophers have a lot to tell you about your gut feeling and whether, when and how you should trust it. There was a Polish combo, combo philosopher, psychologist, poet. His name was Kazimierz Dabrowski, yet another unpronounceable name which polifies you as a psychologist. And he came up with a theory of positive disintegration, TPD. Dabrowski was essentially an existentialist because existentialists came up with a concept of angst. Angst is mistranslated as anxiety. And angst is not anxiety. Angst has a component of anxiety, but it also has a component of tension, of stress. It's like the stress of existing. Existence itself exerts such an enormous amount of stress, so many conflict-laden tensions that it generates anxiety. And this complex is called angst. And Dabrowski said that angst is necessary for growth. He said that there are processes that disintegrate us, but he regarded them as positive. He said that people who don't disintegrate don't reintegrate. They remain stuck in what he called primary integration. He said to move from primary integration to secondary integration, to progress, to grow, to mature, to become an adult, true, full-fledged adult with all these dimensions, you need first to disintegrate. And if you don't disintegrate and then reintegrate, you lack true individuality. You must advance courageously, and sometimes you must induce, personally, your own disintegration, because it's a hierarchy. There's always a higher level of development, but you can't move into this higher level of developmental potential if you don't first destroy creative destruction, destroy the previous phase. And he said that it all depends on what he called over-excitability, above-average reactions to stimuli, as I mentioned before. He said that over-excitability is the thing that pushes you. That's the energy. That's the fuel that pushes you towards personal growth. And I think intuition plays a critical part in this. We'll come to it in a minute. Dabrowski shares something in common with Jordan Peterson. And in this sense, Peterson would hate me for saying it. Peterson is actually an existentialist. But both Dabrowski and Peterson suggested that suffering is crucial, that in order to grow and to develop, you need to suffer. I'm not talking you need to be disappointed. I'm not talking you need to have pain, or you need to suffer. You need to suffer is the condition of your existence. He said that intense personal suffering, self-infliction of suffering, you know. This is the key to healing mental illness. He said that the shaping of personality depends on this, on processes of suffering, which lead such extreme suffering, which leads to disintegration. He said that one of the major factors, he called it the second factor, one of the major factors in growing and developing and evolving and suffering is socialization. Socialization is mediated, it's conveyed to us via peer pressure. Society informs us how it expects us to behave. Society communicates to us its norms and mores, its values and its prescriptive behaviors. Society tells us always, conditions us, shapes us, molds us, use any words you want, any word you want. Society does this via peers mostly, peer pressure. And he says that when we challenge this, when we break through this, when we do not accept peer pressure, when we are essentially defined, then we grow. Now this is debatable of course, because if defines is taken to the extreme, it renders you a sack of bath. But if there's no defines whatsoever, you become a Robopath. Robopath is a term coined by a systems biologist. His name was Von Bertalan-Phee, my apologies again. And Von Bertalan-Phee suggested that people who have no defines who adhere 100% to what society tells them to do, who mold and shape shift in order to fit into their peer group, these people are not human, they're robotic, they're Robopaths, they're not only Robots, they're sick Robots. And so this integration requires fighting back society, fending back, fending society off. It requires countering, countering, countermanding, undermining social signaling and pressures. And then the question arises, how do you spot these signals? And my answer is intuition. I think major part of what we call intuition is signal, picking up signals, picking up signals mainly from others. And we have this radar, this detector, this scanner that is constantly on. And we scan all the time, exactly like narcissists and psychopaths. The difference between normal people, healthy people and narcissists and psychopaths, the narcissists and the psychopaths, they scan, but they scan and they have no emotional reaction to what the scanning reveals about other people. You do, you have an emotional reaction. So, but everyone, narcissists, psychopaths, normal people, healthy people, everyone is scanning all the time, picking up signals all the time. Beep, beep, beep, it's like this project of SETI, the project for discovering alien life in the universe. You know, we are trying to pick up signals and we're trying to make sense of the signal to discover structures, repetitiveness, rules. And I think this is what we call intuition. This is where this Polish psychologist, Dabrowski, fits into the video today. Because I think the missing part in this theory of positive disintegration is what mediates the communication. What is the communication channel? What is the transmission mechanism between individual and society, individual and peers? And you know what, individual in himself or herself. What is this communication channel? And I think this communication channel is intuition. And if we introduce intuition into Dabrowski's work, it is rendered complete. So, fascinating work. Encourage you to go online and look. Look for whatever you can find. Let's go to, let's now begin to discuss intuition problem. Prophets in the Bible and scientists, they're both in the business or we're in the business of making predictions. Both these types, prophets and scientists, resort to metaphysical frameworks as the source of their knowledge. The prophet will tell you, I got my knowledge from God. And the scientist will tell you, I obtained my knowledge via the scientific method. It's another argument where the science is not actually a religion. Put that aside, both prophets and scientists vehemently deny the role of intuition in their output. If you challenge a prophet, if I could talk to Muhammad or to Jesus and challenge them and tell them, actually you're not talking to God, you're talking to yourself, it's intuition, they would challenge me. They would have challenged me. They would have told me you're wrong, I am talking to God. Or if they would really be in an advanced stage, they would say this, what you call intuition, is the voice of God. The prophet claims to possess privileged access to a transcendental being. And the prophet says, I'm merely serving as a conduit. This supreme being has his own thoughts, his own intentions. I am nothing. I'm a channel. I'm channeling God. The scientist insists that his work is objective and rational, of course. God forbid, intuition, no way. And that in principle, this work can be emulated by a computer, for example. There's an open question now in the age of artificial intelligence. Why do we assume that computers cannot have intuition? Leave it aside for a minute. Both scientists and prophets actually transform deep-set unconscious processes into structural statements, sentences, laws. They think that if they take what is profound, what is deep, what is unconscious, and they convert it via language to something that is communicable, it had lost its profundity and its inexplicability. I think it's a very dubious proposition that you talk about something, doesn't change its essence. And there is a problem with intuition. There is a problem with the essence of intuition. And if you listen carefully from now to the end of the video, you will learn a lot about your gut feeling and your intuition and how and when and where should you trust them. And you can come handy when you date the next narcissist or when your next relationship falls apart or when it succeeds or when you have children or when you start a new job. And intuition is arguably a much more critical part of decision-making than rationalization. Because our ratio, our reasoning are not what they are made out to be. And our intuition is very powerful. Because first, let's clear the field. There are three types of intuition. And I will start by describing the first type. The first type is called idetic intuition. Intuition is supposed to be a form of direct access. When I ask you what is intuition, you would say, well, I directly receive an answer to something. I didn't even know that I had the question but suddenly I have the answer. But it's direct access to what? This intuition, does it access directly some objects called intuitions? Is it like you're going to a supermarket of intuitions and there's off-the-shelf intuitions and you pick up one of them? Are intuitions abstract objects? Are they like, I don't know, numbers or properties? Are they the objects of the mental act of intuition? Or maybe intuition is the mind's way of interacting directly with some ideals, platonic ideals or phenomenological essences. Maybe there are things out there that are essential, maybe even ideas and symbols, if they're all existence. And it is true intuition that we access them. And what do I mean when we say direct access? Like access by itself is problematic. But what do you mean direct, directly? Well, when we say direct access, we usually mean without the intellectual mediation and arbitration of a manipulated symbol system and without the benefits of inference, observation, analysis, deduction, experience or reason. Like all these things, higher level, upper level things, they are absent in intuition. Tuition is very animal-like, very primordial. The appropriately named philosopher Kant thought that both Euclidean space and time, for example, are intuitions. He said, there is no such thing as space, there's no such thing as time. They are intuited. In other words, he thought that the senses interact with our transcendental intuitions to produce a synthetic a priori knowledge. We have this intuition of space and time. We get sensory input and then we organize it within these intuitions of space and time. The raw data obtained by our senses, our sensory experience, these data presuppose intuition. Intuition is like a drawer, like a big cupboard. You arrange your clothing according to the shape and the internal space of the cupboard. One could argue that intuition is independent of our senses, of course. Thus, these intuitions, and these are the idetic intuitions that I mentioned. These intuitions are not or would not be the result of sensory data or, I don't know, of calculation or processing or manipulation of sensory data. It's like there's intuition and there's sensor. Our senses have nothing to do with our intuitions. They are independent entities. They are like file folders. They are like operating system, in a way. And Kant came up with the term Ershayung. Ershayung means phenomenon or appearance. It's the way an object appears to our senses. And he says that Ershayung is a kind of sense intuition. And then it's processed by categories of substance, of course, so first we have, there's an object. It has objective reality, presumably. We have no way of knowing, but we think there's objective reality because we all share the same way of watching it or seeing it. And then there's Ershayung. Ershayung is essentially the interaction, the way it appears to us. And only then, once we have gone through this sense intuition, do we begin to organize it in drawers and cupboards and categories and file folders and so on. And as opposed to the phenomenon, because this is a phenomenon, yes? There is something called Nuomenon. Nuomenon is the object, the thing in itself. And the thing in itself, of course, is not dependent on us. It's not dependent on us seeing it. It's not subject to any category or any intuition or anything. It's just a thing in itself. Even that is debatable. Now with insights that we have from quantum mechanics, even this is very debatable. You see, immediately we started to talk and we're stuck. We're stuck because what is access? What is direct? What is intuition? What is object? Our language breaks down. Ironically, our language breaks down when we try to cope with reality. How do you wanna cope with the narcissist? Or the psychopath? They're so alien and removed from your daily experiences. When I ask you to describe intuition, which is something you've had experienced a billion times, you fail. Language fails you. How would you want to describe the alien landscape of the narcissist's mind, which is non-human in any critical sense of the word? And why won't you trust your intuition? When it beeps, beeps the alarm and warns you. Decart, Venedicart, which is my favorite punching bag. Venedicart in the 17th century, a French philosopher. He, of course, came up with a famous sentence, I think, therefore I am, cogito au resume. I think therefore I am. It's actually about intuition. Because I am the knowledge that I am, that's an immediate. Immediate and indubitable innate intuition. And you can develop a whole metaphysical system from it as he did. So there is at least one intuition which all of us share. I am. And here again, it breaks down when you come to the narcissist. The narcissist has no sense of I am. He has no sense of existence. He outsources his existence. He needs you to make him feel alive. He needs you to regulate his internal environment. He needs you to stabilize his sense of self-worth. He has no ego. He has no constructs. He's a whole of mirrors in an empty space. He's a vacuum. He's what Kernberg called the emptiness, the void. So even this foundational Cartesian intuition, I am, breaks down when we discuss narcissism. People ask me, why do you make so many videos about narcissism? Are you kidding me? Narcissism is where philosophy breaks down. I mean, forget psychology, forget relationship advice, forget YouTube coaches and self-styled experts and so on. Forget all this. This is the fluff of the matter. This is the lintel on the suit. This is nothing. As far as I am concerned, narcissism is where all our categories of thinking, all our way of seeing the world, all our understanding of literally everything breaks down. Break down. It's an investigation into the core. It's like Jules Verne wrote a book about a travel to the Earth's core. This is the core. I'm not elevating narcissists. Most narcissists are total buffoons, clowns, and not very bright. That's all I'm saying. I'm saying the psychological disorder, psychological phenomenon of narcissism, if we study it properly and deeply, we are gonna reach, it's like travel to outer space, to another galaxy. We are gonna reach unimaginable places. And I'm trying, this is certainly what I'm trying to do in my videos. You know, galaxy far, far away. And it's the only spaceship we have. Luckily, narcissists use language. You know, it's exactly, I mean, people are waiting with bated breath for alien spaceships and UFOs to land on Earth. Are you kidding me? There are aliens among us, the likes of which no extraterrestrial can equal or compete with. There's nothing more alien than the narcissists. Nothing can be more alien. Why? Because it's partly human. And the part that is human is insignificant. It's a simulation. It's an imitation. It's artificial intelligence. It's amazing. Narcissism is an amazing phenomenon, philosophically speaking. One of my PhDs is in philosophy. I'm a philosopher. Another is in physics. I'm a physicist. I mean, it's all there. Descartes' work in this respect is reminiscent even of Gnosticism, of religion. Gnosticism is a folk of religion, secular religion. And so Gnosticism says that the intuition of the mystery of the self leads to revelation. So narcissists are incapable of revelation. If you don't have an intuition of the self, they don't have a mystery of the self. For the simple reason, they don't have a self. How can you have a God if you don't have a self? How can you have an epiphany if you don't have a self? It's, I'm an agnostic. I'm not a believer. And I regard people of faith as people-minded and possibly mentally ill, delusional disorder. I have an extremely deep view of religion. I mean, compared to me, Richard Dawkins is a religious person. That's not the issue. The issue is that the process of revelation, the process of relating to God is a process of self-discovery and self-evaluation, which should culminate in agnosticism. But even if it doesn't, it's a laudable process. And it's barred. It's blocked. Narcissists and psychopaths can't do this. In a way, you could say that on a first date with a narcissist and the psychopath, your first intuition should be, is he godly? Not, does he believe in God? Is he a godly person? Berkson, another Jew, of course, and I Berkson, a French philosopher, described a kind of instinctual empathic intuition, which penetrates objects and persons, identifies with them, and in this way derives knowledge about the absolutes. He called it duration. Duration for him was the essence of all living things. And he distinguished it from Elan Vitale. Elan Vitale is the force of life, the creative life force. So this is what I'm talking about. If you don't have empathic intuition, you are not human. And if you are not human, there is nothing meaningful you can learn or say or discover or even explore about any object and any person, even an absolute person like God. You are in a penal colony isolated and when you date a narcissist, or when you begin to have a relationship with a narcissist, let alone a psychopath, you can see this penal look. You can see this haunted, hunted criminal look in his eyes, even when he orders wine in the restaurant. There is this tension of the body and emptiness of the eyes. There is this about to leap sensation. It's like permanent state, permanent frozen state of flight or fight. Bexon wrote, intuition is an instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely, clever man he was. And so to Bexon's science, the use of symbols by our intelligence to describe reality is the falsification of reality. He said that only art based on intuition and unhindered by mediating thought not warped by symbols, only art provided one with access to reality. In this sense, of course, modern art is much more art than naturalist art, ancient art. Spinoza, Benedicto, Baruch Spinoza. I keep telling you this anecdote. My great, great, great grandfather was the rabbi of Amsterdam. His name was Paudo. And he's the guy who excommunicated Spinoza. He made Spinoza walk across the aisle and everyone spat on him because he dared to challenge the conception of God. He dared to undermine in their view or question the attributes of God. So my great, great, great, great grandfather was as much a sage as I was, runs in the family. Anyhow, Baruch, Benedict Spinoza and Bexon, two Jews, they entweeted knowledge of the world as an interconnected whole. And this is also a form of idetic intuition. Remember, we are discussing the first type of intuition, idetic. Spinoza thought that intuitive knowledge is superior to both empirical knowledge, sense knowledge and to scientific knowledge, reasoning knowledge. Because intuitive knowledge unites the mind with the infinite being and reveals to it an orderly holistic universe. In his view, intuition was kind of a penetrative instrument. I don't want to be gross, but I use the word penetration. Yes, intuition creates unity also in a sexual way. What is sex? Sex is the merging of bodies and minds. What the youngsters call hookups and meaningless sex, they have no idea what they're talking about. They're denying, they're denying the meaningfulness of sex. That's not the same as rendering sex meaningful. Sex is the supreme, most subtle act, most religious act in a way. No wonder religions all over the world were obsessed with sex, with the regulation of sex. Intuition is having sex with the world. When you have an intuition about someone, when you have an intuition about something, you just had sex with the world. You just had sex with the world. The climax in your mind is the intuition. There was a guy Friedrich Schleier-Marvel. Did you notice that every word in German sounds like I'm gonna execute you and burn your body? I mean, even ich liebe dich, which believe it or not means I love you, sounds like a serious threat. It's like, you know, I'm going to mutilate you and then we're gonna feed you to the crows in the field, something like that. German has a way with words, no question about it. So Friedrich Schleier-Marvel and Rudolf Otto, they discussed the religious experience and there is a concept called the numinus. Numinus is God, essentially. It's the spiritual power that pervades the universe. And they discuss the numinus. And they suggested that the numinus itself is a kind of intuitive prelingual, before language and immediate feeling. And this immediacy, where I disagree with them, is that this immediacy does not pertain only to the numinus, but also to the phenomenon. In other words, also to the world around us. I think the numinus pervades the world around us. It's not because the world is made of spirits or the spiritual, the world is made of atoms and whatever, but it's because we are incapable of perceiving the world properly and fully, except through the spiritual dimension. There's no wonder that religion is far more popular and always has been far more popular than competing alternatives like ideologies or I don't know science. Because it has an advantage. The advantage is the leveraging of the spiritual. Corce, an Italian philosopher, distinguished what he called concept, representation or classification from intuition. He said that intuition is expression of the individuality of an object art, of artistic object. And he said there's concept, which is how we represent the object, how we classify it, how we analyze it, how we categorize it, how we et cetera, et cetera, the boring stuff and there's intuition. To which I was like, boom, this is the object and it's individual is no one and nothing like it. Of course, we have the same reaction to people. A static interest is intuitive, but a static interest is intimately connected to individuation and separation. There is beauty in becoming an individual and one cannot become an individual if one is not beautiful. Everyone therefore, who is an individual, is also beautiful. Some people are beautiful in the outside as well as the inside, like me for example, but some people are beautiful only in the inside, but there's no person alive who has an individual, who is an individual, who doesn't have an aesthetic value, a beauty, who is not therefore an object, a artistic object, with two exceptions, narcissists and psychopaths. They have no individuality. They have hive minds, collages and so when you come across a narcissist or psychopath, one of the main reasons that you feel ill it is, is that they are not beautiful. There is ugliness there. Sometimes they are too functional. Sometimes they are too goal-oriented. Sometimes they are distracted by their own absence. Something is wrong and it's wrong in an ugly way. You feel ugliness when you are with the narcissist and psychopath, even if it's your first meeting and within the first 10 seconds. You're trying to compensate for it because you're lonely and you want a partner and you want to have sex. You didn't have sex for four years, it's your opportunity. Or you want to go on a date or you want to drink wine. You want to have fun. So you repress it, you deny it, but think back. There was ugliness there, or at the very least, the absence of beauty. Art according to Croce and Collingwood should be mainly concerned with expression. In other words, with intuition, as an end unto itself. Not as a means, but as the end. It shouldn't be concerned with other ends, expressing certain states of mind and so on. Identical intuitions are also similar to what is called paramarfa satya, the ultimate truth in the Madhyamika school of Buddhist thought. The ultimate truth cannot be expressed verbally and it is beyond empirical and illusory phenomena. Eastern thought, Zen Buddhism, for example, uses intuition or experience to study reality in a non-dualistic manner. Okay, enough philosophy, next type of intuition. Next type of intuition is what we call emergent intuition. It's the second type. And subjectively, the intuiting person, the person who exercises intuition has the impression of a shortcut. A short circuiting of his usually linear thought processes. In other words, you feel a sudden flash. It's like there was a short circuit in your brain. Perhaps the equivalent of a cognitive stroke. It's based on trial and error, but the trial and error are obscured. They are not accessible, they're not transparent. And this type of intuition feels magical, like a quantum leap from premise to conclusion. The parsimonious selection of the most useful and the workable from a myriad possibilities. Intuition, in other words, is rather like a dream-like, truncated thought process. The subjective equivalent of a warm-up in cosmology. It is often preceded by periods of frustration, dead ends, failures, and blind alleys in one's work or one's relationship. Artists, especially performing artists, musicians, for example, they will often tell you or often describe their interpretation of an artwork, a musical piece, and they will say, well, I intuited the piece, it was intuition. That's especially true in jazz, you know? Many mathematicians and physicists, those who follow the kind of Pythagorean tradition, mathematicians and physicists of which I'm one, they use emergent intuitions in solving general nonlinear equations, the dirty secret of physicists and mathematicians. When we are faced with nonlinear equations, very difficult equations and so on. Differential, partial differential, nonlinear equations and so on. What we do, we guess. We guess the approximants. They say, well, it looks to me like this would be the solution. In partial differential equations, it's very common. It's a guess, and once we guess, we try to retrofit reverse engineer to see if the guess works. If it doesn't work, we guess again. We guess again. Intuition, Henri Poincaré, one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of the late 19th, early 20th century, a predecessor of Einstein in many, many ways. Some even accused Einstein of plagiarizing some of his work. In a presentation to the Psychological Society of Paris in 1901, Poincaré said that even simple mathematical operations requiring intuition of mathematical order without which no creativity in mathematics is possible, which is why we can be pretty certain that the language of mathematics is inadequate and insufficient to capture reality or even the laws of nature. Poincaré described how some of his creative work occurred to him out of the blue and without any preparation, the result of emergent intuitions. He said, these intuitions that just came to me had the characteristics of brevity, suddenness and immediate certainty. Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination, manifest sign of long unconscious prior work. The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me incontestable and traces of it would be found in other cases where it is less evident. Remember these words. When you are confronted with someone new in your life and you're wondering, is he a narcissist? Is he a psychopath? Will he be abusive? Will the relationship be a horror movie? Let it go. Stop controlling. Stop analyzing. Allow the Poincaré perception of intuition to work. Rewind this video and listen again to what he said. Subjectively emergent intuitions are indistinguishable from insights. Your brain is telling you, giving you insights is telling you to walk away. You know, cut it out. Emerge, diverge, run away, the scream like Munch's famous painting. Insight is more cognitive and structured and concerned with objective learning and knowledge, but both of them have the same mechanism. Intuition is a novel reaction, a novel solution based on already acquired responses and skills to new stimuli and new challenges. And still, both in insight and in intuition, there's a strong emotional example, aesthetic correlate. And this helps the emergence. So trust your life experience, unbeknownst to you, everything you know, everything in your cautiousness, every single bit of information, everything from your name to the name of your daughter, everything you know, your job, your skills, absolutely everything. Statistically, is 5% of what's in your mind. 95% is submerged in the unconscious. Why would you let the 5% rule the 95%? When you meet a new person, let your unconscious run free, release the horses. You know, release the stallions. These are race horses, Arabian race horses, they're gonna win the race. Let it go. Intuition and insight are strong elements also in creativity. The human response to an ever-changing environment. They are shock induces, they are destabilizers. The aim of intuition and insight is to move the organism from one established equilibrium to the next established equilibrium. And in this way, to better prepare the organism, to cope with new possibilities, challenges and experiences. If you have an intuition, you will have a bodily reaction. Don't be afraid. Don't recoil. Don't avoid. Let your body also talk to you. As van der Kork says, the body remembers the trauma. Both insight and intuition are in the realm of the unconscious, the simple, the mentally disordered. The great importance of obtaining insights and integrating them in psychoanalysis is because of this. Psychoanalysis uses the insights to establish a new equilibrium. The third type of intuition is the ideal intuition. These are thoughts and feelings that precede any intellectual analysis and they underlight. You know, you're all acquainted with one such ideal intuition. It's called empathy. Empathy is an intuitive mode applied to the minds of other people. It's a theory of mind. It yields an intersubjective agreement. Moral morality is another example. Moral ideals, moral rules are intuitions. Can you prove to me, is there any way to prove, with reason, with logic, that killing someone is bad? No way. Let me save you the time. There's no rigorous way to prove, to substantiate, to convince that killing someone is bad. So why do we all universally agree that killing people is bad? Because it's intuitive. It's an intuition. Mathematical and logical axioms, basic rules of interest, necessary truths. I believe these are intuitions, you know? You can prove an axiom by definition, it's an axiom. These moral, mathematical and logical self-evident conventions do not relate to the world. They relate to our inner world. They reflect the structure of our mind. The elements of the languages we use to describe the world or the codes that regulate our conduct in the world. It follows that these a priori languages and codes are nothing but the set of our embedded ideal intuitions. As the rationalists realized, ideal intuitions, a class of undeniable, self-evident truths and principles, these intuitions can be accessed by our intellect. In other words, intellect and intuition are not mutually exclusive. It's a myth. It is the intellect that allows us to access ideal intuitions like mathematics, like morality and even like empathy. When you date a narcissist or psychopath, let your intellect do the work as well. Don't block any part of you. You need all the resources, trust me. You need your sense of aesthetics. Is this an ugly person? You need your intellect to analyze discrepancies, misbehaviors, tiny flashes. You need everything. Rationalism is concerned with intuitions, though only with those intuitions available to reason and to intellect. Sometimes the boundary between intuition and deductive reasoning is blurred and fuzzy. They both yield the same results. Moreover, intuitions can be combined, can combine them to yield metaphysical or philosophical systems or a judgment of another person or a situation. Descartes applied ideal intuitions, reason to his idetic intuitions. And this gave rise to his metaphysics. Husserl, Twardowski, Bolzano, they did the same. When they developed the School of Phenomenology in philosophy, they combined intuitions. The a priori nature of intuitions of the first and the third kind, idetic and ideal, led thinkers such as Adolf Lasson to associate it with mysticism. He called it an intellectual vision which leads to the essence of it. Lasson said that there is no real distinction between reason and belief in God, for example. In both cases, we are accessing, we are touching the essence. When you are with another person, your essence constantly talks to the essence of the other person. There's constant dialogue. By the way, this dialogue starts with an exchange of molecules. The minute you meet a new person, giant molecules are exchanged between you, mediated by the olfactory system, smell and so on. These molecules contain close to 100 bits of information about the other person's genetics, immune system and so on. This is how it starts. And from that moment on, your bodies are talking all the time and your minds are talking all the time and your essence is your soul if you wish. There's constant dialogue in communication. Only we have been trained by information overload, by mass media, by social media and by social conventions. We've been trained to shut off this dialogue, to suppress it, to ignore it, to consider it politically incorrect or misleading or stupid or inferior. The irony of it, it's a foundation of all knowledge. Earlier philosophers and theologians labeled the methodical application of intuitions the science of the ultimates. Of course, this misses the strong emotional content of mystical experiences, but still. Confucius talked about fulfilling and seeking one's human nature. He called it ren. He said, this is the way. The way is to fulfill your own human nature. This nature is not the result of learning. It's not the result of deliberation. It's innate. It's who you are. It is intuitive. And in turn, produces additional clear intuitions which he called yonk. And these new intuitions pertain to what is right, what is wrong, what is productive, what is destructive, what is good, what is evil. So he said, a condition for learning about the world and about what works for you and about the right people, people who are right for you and about relationships. And you know what, about dating in a bar. Condition for all these yonks, clear intuition, is ren to seek your own human nature. This is the way. The operation of the natural law requires that there be no rigid codecs, but only constant change. Transformation, Heraclitus, the flowing river guided by the central and harmonious situation of life. And now I went and talked to some of my contemporaries in the 17th and 18th century and asked them, hey guys, how you been doing? Put on your mask please. I want to talk to you. So they put on the mask and we discussed intuition. And the first was lok. Lok said to me, are intuitions really a priori or do they develop in response to a relatively stable reality and interaction with a stable reality? Would we have had intuitions? For example, in a chaotic, capricious, unpredictable, disordered universe, do intuitions emerge to counter balance surprises and shocks? Lok thought that intuition is a learned and cumulative response to sensation. The assumption of innate ideas, he said, is unnecessary and count is a count. The mind is like a blank sheet of paper. Tabula rasa filled gradually by experience by the sum total of observations and external objects and internal reflections, operations of the mind. He said that ideas, what the mind perceives in itself or what the mind perceives in immediate objects, ideas are triggered by the qualities of objects. But I plowed him with a few pints and I pushed him hard to the corner and finally Lok said, okay, I accept that they're ideal innate intuitions. According to Lok, a color, for instance, can be either an idea of in the mind, ideal intuition, or the quality of an object that causes this idea in the mind that evokes the ideal intuition. And he said that the primary qualities, quality shared by all objects, come close to being idetic intuitions. So ultimately he ended up as much a count, as a count himself. Lok himself admits that there is no resemblance or correlation between the idea in the mind and the secondary qualities that provoke the idea in the mind. And so Berkeley demolished Lok's claim that there is such resemblance or mapping between primary qualities and the ideas that they provoke in the mind. It would seem therefore that Lok's ideas in the mind are in the mind irrespective and independent of the qualities that produce them. In other words, these ideas are a priori and Lok resorts to obstruction in order to repudiate it. Lok himself talks about intuitive knowledge. It is when the mind perceives the agreement or disagreement of two ideas immediately by themselves without the intervention of any other. The knowledge of our own being we have by intuition. The mind is presently filled with a clear light of it. It is on this intuition that depends all the subtlety and evidence of all our knowledge. Knowledge is a perception of the connection and of the agreement or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our ideas. Knowledge is intuitive, intellectual perception. Even when we demonstrate and few things, mainly ideas can be intuitive and demonstrated. Relations within the physical realm cannot be grasped intuitively. So even when demonstrated, each step in the demonstration is observed intuitionally. Lok's sensitive knowledge is also a form of intuition known as intuitive cognition in the Middle Ages. It is the perceived certainty that there exist finite objects outside us. The knowledge of one's existence is an intuition as well, but both these intuitions are judgmental and they rely on probabilities. Okay, Lok defeated one zero in favor of ideal intuitions. Even Lok had to admit that they exist. So I went not far away and met Hume. Hume denied the existence of innate ideas exactly like Lok. According to him, all ideas are based either on sense impressions or on simpler ideas. They can be deconstructed into simpler ideas. In this sense, by the way, Hume is the father of deconstruction centuries before. But even Hume accepted that there are propositions known by the pure intellect as opposed to propositions dependent on sensory input. These propositions deal with the relations between ideas and they are logically necessarily true. Even without any sense input, even a blind, deaf, dumb, quadriplegic, resurrected deaf person would come up with these ideas. It didn't have a single second of sensory input. Even though reason is used in order to prove these ideas, they're independently true all the same because they merely reveal the meaning or information implicit in the definitions of their own terms. These propositions teach us nothing about the nature of things because they are, at bottom, self-referential. And isn't this the exact equivalent of Kant's analytical propositions? Yes, it is. Which leads me, of course, to Kant. Kant was a recluse who rarely left home, which proves to me that he was a highly intelligent person and he said that our senses acquaint us with the particulars of things and thus provide us with intuitions. The faculty of understanding provided us with useful taxonomies, classifications of particulars, which he called concepts. And yet concepts without intuitions are as empty, as futile as intuitions without concepts, they need each other. Perceptions, phenomena are the composite of the sensations caused by the perceived objects and the mind's reactions to these sensations form. These reactions are the product of intuition. I said to myself, I'm getting lost. I can't tell anymore if there are ideal intuitions or not. Locke says no, then he says yes. Jung says no, then he says no. Kant says no, then he says yes. I mean, the hell with these people. I'm going to meet the absolute idealists. Schelling suggested a featureless, undifferentiated union of opposites as the absolute ideal. Intellectual intuition entails such a union of opposites, subject and object. And thus it is immersed and assimilated by the absolute. It becomes as featureless and undifferentiated as the absolute is. Objective idealists claim that we can know ultimate spiritual reality via intuition or via thought independent of the senses. And this is of course a mystical argument. The Kabbalah makes the same argument. The mediation of words and symbol systems only distorts the signal and inhibits the effective application of one's intuition to the attainment of real, immutable knowledge. Sounds good. The phenomenologists, the phenomenologists. The phenomenological point of view is that everything has an invariable and irreducible essence. I'm very close to this view by the way. This essence is idos as distinguished from contingent information about thing. So everything has essence and then it has information that codes the essence. It's like a wrapping of a gift. And this wrapping of course is discarded, it's contingent. The essence remains the same. We can grasp this essence only intuitively, idetic reduction. This process of transcending the concrete and reaching for the essential is independent of facts, independent of concrete objects or mental constructs. But that it is independent of facts does not mean that it is free from methodology, free variation. It doesn't mean it's free from factual knowledge or from ideal intuitions. We don't discard these things, we use them. The phenomenologist is forced to make the knowledge of facts his point of departure. He then applies a certain methodology. He varies the nature and specifications of the studied object to reveal its essence. This methodology relies entirely on ideal intuitions such as the rules of logic for example. Phenomenology in other words is an idealistic form of rationalism. It applies reason to discover platonic idealistic essences idealism, it's a marriage. Marriage of idealism and rationalism, my kind of of relationship. Like rationalism, phenomenology is not empirical. It is not based on sense data. Actually it is anti-imperial. It brackets the concrete and the factual in its attempt to delve beyond appearances and into essences. Phenomenology calls for the application of intuition, unshowing, to discover essential insights. Wesenzeitzichter. Phenomenology is that which is known by consciousness and that is in consciousness. Phenomenology is regarding intuition as a pure, direct and primitive way of reducing clutter in reality. It is immediate, the basis of higher level perception. We spend life hoarding things, hoarding emotions, hoarding information, hoarding. And here comes intuition cuts through. Cut through the thicket declutters our lives, our minds. A philosophical system built on intuition would, perforce, be non-speculative. Hence, Phenomenology's emphasis on the study of consciousness and intuition is justified. They don't study reality because reality can be deceiving. Appearances can be deceiving. It is through Wesenzeitzichter, intuition of essences that one reaches the invariant nature of things by applying free variation techniques. So, Phenomenology is your way to go if you are dating a narcissist or a psychopath. Ignore appearances, home in to the essence. And when you home in to the essence, don't be shy, don't feel reduced because you're forced to use intuition. Knowledge won't get you far. Reasoning won't get you far. Logic won't get you far. Narcissists and psychopaths are rationalizing, calculating machines. They're better at this than you. You have one advantage over narcissists and psychopaths, your empathy, your intuition. Empathy is a form of intuition. Use all forms of intuition. Listen in, don't listen out. I repeat this, listen in, don't listen out. Observe in, don't observe out. We draw retreat into your mind before you open your mind to someone else. It could be dangerous. The world is not what it used to be. You may wish to be self-reserving and self-protective. Nature has given you the tools, categories, ideals, empathy, and above all, intuition. Use it.