The Gut Response

Dear Jack,

It’s a shame I can’t be on the phone link, because I would have certainly ‘challenged’ Rinpoche’s statement regarding trusting intuition, when you invited it in the phone link-up. I can’t get up at 2:00 a.m, for the call.

Rinpoche’s general point is a good one, on the way that people use the concepts of  ‘intuition’ and ‘trust your feelings.’ That is usually an appeal to sentimentalism (the accumulation of the past transmitted via the senses + mental).

What doesn’t fit with (what appears to be) Rinpoche’s  blanket rejection of the body (or feelings) as a source of knowledge, is the ‘felt sense’ as defined by the work of Eugene Gendlin. This band of embodied human consciousness certainly doesn’t produce complacency, or the sentimental re-cycling of the old. It is a creative relationship with the unfolding edge of knowing, which always opens something fresh and surprising (from an implicit and unformed order).

This may not end up materially changing Rinpoche’s reasoning in this chapter, but I think the creative  aspect of the felt sense has to be factored in somewhere. (I notice that Arthur Egendorf writes about Gendlin’s work and TSK  in the first chapter of ‘Dimensions of Thought.’)

For anyone wanting to follow up on this work on the ‘felt sense,’ see www.focusing.org

Regards,
Christopher.

About Christopher

I first read TSK in 1978, and have enjoyed exploring Rinpoche's (printed) work ever since. I'm an insight meditation teacher in Sydney, Australia, and I live in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. I'm also a psychotherapist and a Focusing trainer (Gendlin).
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