September Newsletter

We have a view of correspondences between engaging in micromastery and some of the basic elemento of practical wisdom. Also the first part of a series of looking at 'allowing intuition to emerge'

Correspondences between micromastery, polymathy and practical wisdom

There are some interesting parallels between engaging in micromastery and with some of the basic ‘building blocks’ that some practical wisdom traditions insist on as requisites for progress. Whilst set out here as a series of points, each is, in reality, bound up with the others. Engaging with micromastery has the potential to develop engagement with practical wisdom but this is not necessarily guaranteed as other factors can be necessary. The purpose here is to highlight some of the correspondences so that someone interested in practical wisdom can make the best of them, and, also to begin to find further ones themselves.

Firstly, micromastery is practical activity in the real world. Although it could be applied to academic subjects, the emphasis on practical activity is there for several reasons. One of the parallels that you can learn to understand from the experience of engaging in these practical activities is the point that not everything can be learnt from stringing together a number of words or just by thinking things. Or even focussing a very limited range of things. In the last example you have the chance of experiencing that often the material you are working with or the craft makes its own demands on you. This also can be extended into an opening to learn to differentiate between the stance of submission and servitude which is equally important when engaging with practical wisdom.

In the first two points, one daily sees examples of deluded or distorted thinking from people whose learning has been overwhelmingly in manipulating words or abstraction - theorists. However, engaging in micromasteries gives one the opportunity to experience the limitations of such thinking directly in our own life. Practical wisdom traditions assert that you need to allow or engage with these experiences for yourself. These traditions are interested in the shift to the Real world, but starting from the real world, but the point remains, both involve doing as well as thinking - practical engagement, as in an art or craft.

Closely related to this is, that engaging in micromastery allows one the opportunity to directly experience the balance between knowledge and practice (and eventually effective action). From the practical wisdom perspective there are several aspects to this. Both the physical and mental need balancing as we are embodied (not just brains in vats like the ex-presidents in Futurama!) The theory and practice need balancing if we are to learn the limits of both. Often developing mastery of concepts and skills in day-to-day things and practical wisdom to a sufficient degree is – sufficient. Development is not just narrowing down the focus but focussing on understanding different levels or perspectives simultaneously.

Micromastery also gives us the opportunity to observe how we acquire knowledge for the micromastery. In both micromastery and practical wisdom, the focus is on looking for knowledge you can apply. Associated to this is the opportunity to learn to differentiate one’s useful curiosity from curiosity without the context of prior knowledge and the foresight of where you might be able to make use of new knowledge.

Another aspect of the balance between knowledge and action is the practical wisdom practice of discontinuity. Engaging in micromasteries (with the emphasis on the plural here) gives one opportunity to switch between them and to experience the usefulness of periodic detachment, particularly in the ability to detach and attach attention and to avoid a lopsided development. For example, practical wisdom traditions have various practices, of say introspection as an example, but stress the need for these to be interspersed with being in both reality and the mundane. There

are more facets to discontinuity in the context of micro-mastering and practical wisdom than the above and we can look at timing and energy as examples.

Related to discontinuity is the application of timing in practical wisdom – the understanding that there are times for action and inaction. This is based on the experience that action can only be effective if the time and circumstances are correct. When working with certain materials in micromastering for example, one soon learns there can be stages where the material must be left for a while before further work can be done on it. In practical wisdom, the same applies in both the learning and action phases. There is also the aspect in practical wisdom and practical skills, that wisdom or the skill is not always needed in every context, in which case it can remain latent.

An important aspect of micromastery is developing what might be termed, confidence, agency, volition, motivation, and energy. These are not exactly the same when parsed psychologically but within the same range in a practical sense. Engaging with micromastery can help develop a more reasonable sense of one’s capabilities in these areas and the potentiality to develop them. There is a further connection, in that some practical wisdom traditions have highly developed techniques in this range. By engaging in micromastery one has circumstances for experiencing some of these for yourself, particularly if you explore the fullness of ‘background support’.

One aspect of practical wisdom that can quite often be overlooked is that development of the individual should be in a balanced way upon the rest of humanity. One way that engaging in micromasteries can contribute to this understanding is that one has the possibility of understanding other work than one’s own specialisation. From this one can develop empathy with, and respect for people in other walks of life and reduce the risk of a potentially solipsistic individual specialisation. Additionally, one can observe that one’s ‘hobby’ interests have to be balanced with one’s obligations to self and others on a simple day to day level.

If one is interested in developing your practical wisdom and are looking for things that can, and in some cases which must be done by oneself, it might be useful to reflect on some of these correspondences whilst engaging with various micromasteries and how they may be impacting on your ability to perceive and learn more widely. There are more and we may well follow with another newsletter that describes these and develops some (such as the difference between submission and servitude) which have been described briefly. However, by engaging in micromasteries, one has a very good chance of finding them for oneself. Being able to experience these correspondences or analogies in micromasteries and take note of them, doesn’t necessarily in itself mean that one will automatically transfer the skill and understanding to the context of learning practical wisdom (though it can sometimes) but at the very least it may keep them highlighted so that they are ‘at hand’ when the situation arises.

Allowing intuition to Emerge

‘While you live you are learning. Those who learn through deliberate effort are cutting down on the learning which is being projected on them in the normal state. Uncultivated men often have wisdom to some degree because they allow the access of the impacts of life itself.  When you walk down the street and look at things or people, these impressions are teaching you. If you try actively to learn from them, you learn certain things, but they are pre-determined things.’[1]

It would be counterproductive to ‘unpick’ this quote, other than to say, I don’t think the person speaking is totally against deliberate effort (he was a teacher, after all). One of the purposes of this writing is to survey what might help in ‘allowing the access of the impacts of life itself’ in the development of intuition and in learning more widely and comprehensively.

It should also become apparent that seeking to develop intuition as a long deep ‘stand-alone’ project may not be the best way of using one’s time and that it may be best approached more obliquely in a more balanced micromastery way.

What do we know about intuition?

It would be useful to get a couple of practical working definitions of intuition at this point. To begin with let’s try –

‘The ability to know or understand something that is outside yet alongside conscious reasoning. An embodied perception from sensory input.’

‘Intuition is the awareness of subtle information outside the focus of attention.’

The productive use of unconscious information for better actions.’

What we think we know about intuition currently –

·      It is less erroneous than one might assume and as described by some researchers. It is not infallible and can be subject to delusion like conscious thought. (There is a link here with point 5 below which will be outlined in more detail later.)

·      The unconscious is taking much more into consideration than the conscious. Perception is multi modal (using all the senses.) learning can take place without being aware of it.

·      The body responds to the stimuli before the conscious mind often with changes that can be ‘felt’.

·      Certain emotions if overly pre-eminent, such as greed and fear (or the perception of presence of reward and punishment in the situation), depression and even strong positive emotions, can interfere with its operation. They confuse the source of the emotions that would normally be specific to the situation. Also, fixed preconceptions and ‘addictions’, over emphasis of conscious will and groupthink or peer pressure can often seem similar to intuition.

·      As we learnt from the actively micromastering intuition newsletter, having a degree of mastery of basic patterns and responses allows for intuitive responses. The unconscious associations have to be learned consciously or unconsciously, and you need experience of situations or contexts and some degree of mastery before you can start expanding your intuition beyond instinct. So, there does seem to be a contextual element which has implications that we can explore.

·      A concentrated yet global attention rather than a specific featural close attention, can be helpful to its development and use. Verbalising during the process disrupts it so an attention where verbalising is stilled is also useful. Sometimes having to operate quickly can enhance it, yet it can also emerge more slowly. These two manifestations often depend upon the context.

·      The conscious and unconscious are not totally distinct – there is two-way communication between the two, and particularly what we eventually notice, is from the unconscious.

·      Part of the power of the unconscious is its ability to deal with numerous elements simultaneously and to see their interconnection.

·      It needs to be distinguished in the mind, from confused ideas about bias (which is built in to pattern matching) and prejudice.

·      It need not be confused with heuristics and rules of thumb which are best thought of as quick ways of conscious thinking.

·      Some decisions, detection and other tasks and creative acts require deliberate conscious thought and focussed attention. Intuition and reason are complementary, and one aspect of mental flexibility is to learn to use an appropriate admixture of the two.

·      We could perhaps conceive intuition as a range of processing, starting perhaps after pure reflex and reaction to stimulus, but from the point at which we might describe as ‘instinct’, leading to understanding that we also hold unconsciously from experience and cognition too. Some practical examples possibly nearer the instinct end using the senses of sound and smell are: Firstly, when as adults we realise that something could be amiss when the children playing in the next room go silent. You don’t need a qualification in child development to have that reaction or indeed possibly that much experience of children - it is the change that we notice, initially. Secondly, a case that happened to us a few years ago when we had a fish like smell coming from a cupboard that just held pans. It took a while for the awareness to get through to consciousness. At first, we thought it was perhaps something organic underneath the cupboard, so we looked and there was nothing there. We left it for a while, but the smell kept alerting us and it was only when we by chance touched a socket at the back of the back of the cupboard and felt its heat that we realised that there was an electric short and the smell was from the warming plastic!

I would suggest that we think of a position between thinking that intuitions are supernatural, unreliable, and dangerous on the one hand and ‘the answer’ on the other. But rather, that they are capacities that we have, and which can be developed like any other and are probably best developed and used in concert with one’s needs. This approach of learning skills in a timely way, rather than a ‘just in case’ sense is a part of the micromastery approach and has the potential to stop one getting over enthusiastic, going overboard and developing capacities to an exaggerated extent.

There are some of propositions worth exploring over the next few newsletters. Could it be that culturally we often over-rely on conscious cognition (particularly that exemplified as ‘left brain’, literacy, mathematical representation etc.) as our route to understanding the living world? Over relying in the sense of giving too much attention to, and thus ‘numbing’ in a sense our capacity to perceive those more ambient sensory impacts (particularly those that could be regarded as feedback) from life itself? As well as not allowing enough attention to the sensory inputs are we also over relying on a limited range of sensory inputs (for example over focussing on the visual)? Also, are we focussing this limited sensory attention on a limited range of sources? For example, are we missing out on information about ourselves (our state which, as we will see, influences our perception), as well as limiting the range of information from ‘outside’.

Having set these propositions, we will also explore the possibilities of what can do and how.

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[1] From the Seeker after Knowledge (page309) in The Sufis by Idries Shah 1964