Your instincts know more than you think
Ignore them at your own peril
It’s become too common these days; too regular. It’s become a fact and a truism. We shouldn’t even be saying it out loud, but we have to. Sometimes themes must be repeated and emphasized lest we forget.
What are we talking about?
This: Talking well about things is not at all relevant to doing and being. Not at all.
In fact, talking and being can reside on two distant islands, if we make it so. Quite often, especially today, they’re easily divorced.
How do we know that? Well for one, you can easily study every book on business, entrepreneurship, and give good talks about them — without ever running a business, without being what those books and talks speak about.
You can talk about great aspirations and dreams, while barely coming anywhere close to actualizing it today.
You can talk about what a good parent should be and do, without facing those challenges yourself.
You can and will deceive yourself into assuming that by talking well about a subject, you have progressed in it or understood it properly. Even the talks you give to yourself.
This is happening all around us because we sapiens are the great deceivers. We’ve got a mighty armament of tools under our belt — speech, intellect, language, and communication. But sometimes the tools overtake us, and we pursue tool over the goal, talk over being, mistaking the two to be one and the same. That’s blunder #1.
There’s a divorce pattern here we need to study now, before too late. This is a case for demoting all talk, internal and external to a stature beneath something more primary, the one that propels genuine growth.
We have had enough talk. Too many of us are roaming around with it, holding it high up as a trophy, in the assumption that just because we talk, we know. That’s the idea to blast apart.
What if I tell you, there’s a thing, a being within you that already knows stuff, whether or not you ramble about that stuff. The thing that provides clues, and propels us forward if we let it; talking, for the most part, distracts that force. It’s the force that shows real progress, drives evolution and innovation, and makes us hungry for more. Talk, on the other hand, is the post-show news reporter who comes and records the event after it has already occurred.
Let’s zero in on that force.
Instinct — the great knower of things
We have all had that moment(s), when our decision making was pure and simple, for just that once; when we made that one choice out of all available options, without holding back, while going all in, somehow already knowing that it’s the right one — in the face of a lack of any assurance. We clicked with it and we acted, and it turned out beautiful.
Recall a time when you were cornered and terrified, your circumstances opposed to you as you cried out. Now recollect in detail how you got out of it, through that brilliant course of action and decisiveness you never thought you had. Notice how you fought back when trapped; not by talking or calculation, but by responding to instincts. You just acted mindfully.
We all have known this, and that is where we need to dig for some gold. What is that thing which nudges us into bold action, before we get time to “plan and talk”?
It’s called by different names — gut, intuition, but let’s stick to one: Instinct.
Instinct implies something scary at first. That there’s a thing within us that knows stuff we ourselves don’t.
Sound crazy? Not so much. Let’s re-phrase that.
There’s a thing or being within us that knows stuff we haven’t articulated yet.
And the articulation of all that it knows, could take a long, long time, perhaps because what it knows wasn’t built to be dissected into words and speech. What it knows, it just knows. It’s a mining field of knowledge. What we talk about it, is a secondary shadow.
In a way, as if our talks are not of much consequence to its’ life — the life of our instinct, which speaks through action, not words — because words are a human creation, limited and approximate at best. But action and being — can these not be a language in itself? Could it be a way for our instincts to speak to us, and offer us health, vitality, and wisdom?
Of course, this is not to say, that all instincts are good. Certainly, we have some dangerous ones that can topple us. Nor are they a call for thoughtless action disguised as instinct. We’re talking about a knowledgable instinct, not stupidity, not the looting and burning of public property on a whim.
So let’s call them better instincts, higher ones that propel us forward, not downward to disaster. That’s a work of discernment for us individually.
This is the hypothesis to act out and observe: That our instincts know shit (deep shit) that we can’t comprehend immediately through talk. And we might be successful and happy to the extent we act them out, without getting in its way. That’s the nature of our brother instinct.
He’s not interested in talking. What he wants is to actualize, to act, to be, while talk is something left to us — a tool he’s not bothered about.
This is where his younger more naive brother comes in, who follows him around — Speech and talk.
Speech — The follower of things
Speech has always been shadowing his older brother instinct, trying to copy and imitate him but never succeeding. He’s limited in his means, as words are all he has. Any articulated communication is speech, so we’re not talking about the spoken word necessarily. By speech we refer to the realm of conscious communication, where we pull words out to describe an experience — a conscious effort — that is speech.
Speech is too slow for his brother and tries hard to keep up, always nagging for an explanation. Since he only understands if explained. Pure being is outside his comprehension.
Speech really admires instinct and tries to replicate his movements, so he talks a lot because that is all he can do. Speech replicates and approximates the real thing, the realm of being, and instincts. That’s the gold here, stop and reflect on this. Nietzsche was among the rare philosophers to dig into this; he attacked speech vigorously at a time when it started being overrated. This is what he says:
“Man thinks continually without knowing it; the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all this — the most superficial and worst part. Whatever becomes conscious to us becomes by the same token shallow, thin, general and relatively stupid.” — Nietzsche, The Gay Science
“The thinking that rises to consciousness” — That remind you of something? Speech! Aye.
Nietzsche here speaks of the iceberg effect. Speech is the 20% of our life we see above sea level when its roots, source, and powers lie below; unseen and unacknowledged as the 80%, the vast realm of our instincts. The 20% won’t exist without the 80%!
Although speech has a sincere intent; to want to understand instinct and being — which are too vast — but that’s only the beginning because slowly speech starts wanting the upper hand. We mistake him for the real deal, the ruler and driver of things, the decision-maker. That’s where the blunder begins, and the game begins to turn.
Slowly, he forgets his place as the younger, less wise brother and tries upping his status and reaches for the throne to start ruling. Instincts then get chained and imprisoned underground.
And so when our speech becomes insincere, we start talking more than we know. We start talking about entrepreneurial dreams without ever having run a lemonade stall. We start talking as a cover-up for a lack of acting out primary instincts — which is what the point is, which is where courage is needed.
As speech takes over, we start claiming to be life coaches when we’ve barely lived a maximal life.
We start claiming to be teachers without having lived the content we teach.
Before we know it, we crown speech as our ruler to lead us through life’s chaos. Brother speech is now happy, but he forgets where he came from. He neglects the original ruler who always led, and who now lies chained underground.
What happens when the untrained follower is crowned king? Confusion and breakdown.
This will be seen in one who tries to navigate his path through the unknown, purely through reason and dialect. The unknown being vast easily overwhelms our words unless they’re led by an instinct to direct and pull us through. The instinct towards certain decisions, certain risks, certain hypotheses over an endless array of conjectures.
Speech is the one grappling for an explanation after you miraculously and heroically save a dog from being overrun on the road — that action performed in obedience to a better instinct that knows before you can articulate how.
Speech is the one grappling for a ‘why’, when we exit a business partnership sensing something is off, even though everything looks good on paper.
This is one of the reasons why some of the great artists can’t explain where they get their inspiration from but still create, in contrast to talking props who can speak about inspiration but can’t channelize its power.
Maybe we know some deep shit already, without knowing how to speak about it. But do we know how much we know? Do we let our instincts teach us? Most importantly, can we dare to act on it?
Friedrich Nietzsche sums it up beautifully:
“ There is more wisdom in your body, than in your deepest philosophy.”
Precisely. The “deep philosophy” he speaks of is our brother speech! Whereas instinct is already with us, it’s part of us and it’s blocked and choked by our own sewage; what if our greatest health lies in unclogging that drain and in getting connected to our instincts?
So, how do we get our instincts back onboard?
How about starting here: Assume that your body and being already know, but it’s you who’s blocking the way through mental clutter.
Watch yourself carefully. Watch out for when your instinct acts without blockage and observe what happens, track those clues. If you sense an instinct nudging you in a direction — Act it out! And observe yourself as you do so. Assume that you barely know yourself in the conscious realm.
Ask yourself whether some of the best decisions come from this place, without calculation or incessant reasoning?
Can you get out of your own way?
Can you communicate with your instincts — without words?
A lot depends on that ability. Your historic contribution and value could count on it.
