Jim wrote a comment on my last piece, Human Animal. My response grew into this post. Thanks, Jim, for spotting what was missing!
My piece for what it’s worth was partly a spontaneous outpouring though I admit a temptation to think of it as philosophy.
I am glad you mention good and bad, Jim. These are part of the baggage that I don’t believe in. Judaism, Christianity and Islam see good and bad as absolutes and objective realities, but I see them as effects of perspective, which depend on where you are standing. Good is what smiles on me, bad is what threatens.
In your third paragraph you envisage the deadly war between intellect and instinct. Who will enslave whom if they are left to fight it out? How can the outcomes of this war be mitigated and regulated by laws which will ensure that each keeps to its own territory?
In this you are not at all missing the point, but dealing with an issue which I did not even cover in my brief piece.
Are intellect and instincts at war with one another? No, but you’d think otherwise from the media and personal conversations. People want to buy things they cannot afford; have a love affair with someone who will not be good for their life; eat things which will make them fat or damage their health. Their lives are battlegrounds of “instincts” versus “good intentions”.
But these wars are effects of perspective, not absolutes. The human animal is stuck in a cage. Pacing back and forth in this reduced space, he cannot exercise his instincts though he vaguely remembers them and tries to find substitutes within the cage. This is what domesticates him. He remembers the joy of finding wild honey deep in the forest; so he drinks Coca Cola.
Instincts are built in to procure what every animal needs. The bird builds its nest and the bee gathers nectar. Instinct is design. It makes the tree grow tall and the sunflower turn its face to the sun.
Seeing graffiti on a wall, I rejoice in evidence of instinct. Planners and real-estate moguls have seized the right to create an urban environment in their image; the alienated youth, excluded from these activities, defy one-sided laws to make their mark in the only ways they can.
From birth the human animal is placed in civilization’s cage and taught to overcome instinct. But Nature fights back and it’s funny as well as sad that “feral children” are reported as terrorizing parts of our cities.
We can trust our instincts. They are not broken, merely buried in accretions of civilization, that messed-up city that has sprawled over the face of the earth. We can recover them intact, and discover that they have all we need including conscience and a sense of oneness.
I would not be surprised if what we call the spiritual is part of our bodily instinct.
a wayfarer’s notes 
Vincent, as a person who has always “thought too much” (though not necessarily well), I finally realized and accepted that intuition and instinct are always superior to reason. I think of “instinct” as the innate programming that makes a creature what it is and makes it behave according to its design, while I feel that “intuition” is access to additional information beyond the programming. In either case, instinct and intuition spring up without reasoning or word juggling, and our first impulse is always the correct one.About your blasphemy, good for you! Assuming that a creator God is omniscient and omnipotent, It is a cruel or uncaring monster by the standards of compassionate and justice-loving humans. I'm drawn to the Gnositc idea that the creation of this world was well and truly botched by a demented creator god, and that the highest God, the Source, is working to sort out the mess. Of course a perfect God would not only be unable to create hellish messes, but also would be unable to create lesser gods (or humans) who create hellish messes.But what do I know? I'm the defective result of a defective creation.
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It seems to me as though we play our part in life more faithfully when we follow our instincts. We're more diverse. We're more resilient.
Taking a stab at “educating” myself just brings me back to what I “instinctively knew” already. The effort could be self-reinforcing frustrations of pacing the cage.
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Ah yes, as one who thinks too much too, and finds myself tortured mostly by over-thinking, and knowing that just feeling (if instinct is included in feeling) has so long been beaten down as unacceptable or unrealistic or simplistic…and yet, feeling is where I am most comfortable, where I don't feel this constant drive to change myself, this incessant chatter that I am not good enough. My cage is my thoughts and everything I let them tell me and I believe what they say, my freedom is when I feel.
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“From birth the human animal is placed in civilization’s cage and taught to overcome instinct.”That is so true Vincent! I like the picture you chose to place in this post. “Territorial markers.” to me graffiti is no different than all the other “Territorial markers” that are out there…Billboards plastered all over the place, buses, ect. junk mail, spam. call it art…or call it bullshit!!!
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