Four Intuitive Moments That Made All The Difference

How Are Such Things Possible? What Is The Source Of Such Feelings? And How Could They Motivate Me In Ways That Rational Judgment Could Not?

One problem with this human world is that we are never taught to listen to our inner voice; instead, we are always exhorted to listen to reason and rational ideas, forsaking that sense of moral truth within each of us. “Be reasonable!” “Don’t be so emotional!” We are told.

Over the course of my youth, I found myself confronted with perfectly ordinary situations that troubled me with a feeling of unease — enough so that I made a decision to change my trajectory in life. On the surface, there was nothing obviously wrong. But I had always been bothered by flashes of insight into the character of the minds of people I met. It wasn’t mind reading, and all too often the character I glimpsed was not reflected in the mirror of their faces and actions, making it hard for me to follow what I felt, rather than what I saw.

These were ordinary life situations of the modern world, ones that called for rational decision making, so that I could allay my concern with rationalizations for going along with the flow of things happening around me. This is how people ‘go along to get along’ in this world. But I didn’t take that course.

One might say that I had ‘chosen wisely’. But I didn’t feel particularly wise, and the decisions that I made were never ones based upon wisely choosing between the available alternatives. Instead, they were my way of being in the world — listening to my heartfelt feelings, and those were not always taken by others close to me as adequate explanations.

So instead of going along with the events that every once in a while would arise in my life, I had done what felt right, even when, as it so often is, in my life, something so ‘obviously’ wrong to others. Was that wisdom? Was it luck?

Perhaps, it is something else entirely.

I wouldn’t credit myself as being wise, nor having an unusual amount of wisdom — certainly not during my younger years — and I am loath to use such a non-explanation, a sweeping-under-the-rug concept, as “luck” is; and these course changes I made had unexpected reverberations in my life. So, looking back from late-midlife, I wanted to uncover how it is possible that my impulse to act in a certain way could be sourced in something other than wisdom, something other than luck, something, perhaps, not necessarily divine, but rather, some innate essential nature within me that has chosen wisely, or even more realistically, given me the ability to access an understanding of what was at stake, and what the contextual complications and probabilities were, that a young man would not otherwise have been cognizant of.

The following four events in my life, during which I took an intuitive leap, do not exhaust the times that I have changed direction because of a feeling, but these are the most important ones. And, interestingly, there is a common thread that runs through them — financial greed and flagrant malevolence towards others.

Bernard L. Madoff

I was never employed by Bernie Madoff’s company; instead I worked for my older sister, Liz. She had been working for a Wall Street securities trading firm when they bought a back-office accounting system from a guy in Chicago. This was in the ’70s, when you bought major software from “a guy” somewhere, because even Apple and Microsoft were still just “guys,” and not major global corporations.

Liz worked in compliance, and thus was called on to help oversee the customization of the new software. She had a two-year degree in software development. That was like a doctorate in the subject, back then.

This guy, whose full name I never knew, and whose first name I have forgotten, because I never met him, had sold his software to four companies in New York. In those days, everything was customized, because in those days, computers worked for humans.

The story, as Liz told it, was that this guy from Chicago couldn’t handle the out-sized egos, and Wall Street pressure of New York, and wanted desperately to go back to Chicago, so he offered his four customers and their contracts to my sister — if she would buy him out for $5,000. That was a lot of money back then. You couldn’t buy a house with it, though. A house would have cost six times that amount back then.

Well, she did buy him out, and called on me to help her handle the workload. I didn’t have the seventies’ equivalent of a doctorate in software development, but I knew accounting and that helped. That and we both seemed to have a “chip in our heads,” as people would sometimes remark, because we were so good at what we did. So together we picked up the customization work for these four systems, one of which was for Bernie Madoff. Liz and I worked together until ’82, and Madoff was Liz’s biggest customer.

We were responsible for customizing a software solution for keeping track of customers’ holdings and transactions, as well as reports for tax authorities, compliance, etc. You have to understand that back then, most of Wall Street was still doing their accounting with adding machines and specialized mechanical trade recording machines that looked like very busy adding machines because they had long columns of letters and numbers repeating in a grid across the sloped surface of the machine. You pressed buttons in for all the relevant info for a securities trade, the CUSIP number of the security, a buy/sell indication, the price, commission, taxes, and net, and then you pulled the big handle back and it would print the transaction on big stiff ‘account cards’. This manual system was being replaced by a computer system that basically did the same thing — and this is important for the story — and Bernie’s later Ponzi scheme.

Back then, stock exchanges weren’t automated themselves, and they certainly weren’t tied together with any kind of network. I actually saw one of the old stock exchange paper tape ‘ticker’ machines under a glass bell-jar once in the office of one of our clients — and it was still working, “chuga, chuga, chuga, chuga” as it punched out stock transactions from the NY Stock Exchange or the American Stock Exchange.

So the system that we customized for Bernie was basically a manual accounting system, using computer disks instead of the old cards, but nothing else really changed that much. It was more efficient, and accurate, etc., so it made sense. Everybody was starting to move into such software at the time.

But there was something else going on, as well. People were advocating for the exchanges to become automated themselves — and interconnected. The rationale was that they would be more efficient — and more accurate. And one of the primary advocates was Bernie Madoff. Out in the public, he was all about the benefits to the investors, but in house, he had different plans; but they weren’t, at least as far as I knew, to create a Ponzi scheme. That came later. But first, he wanted to create the first automated ‘quant’ trading firm that would use computers to play the market.

His wife, Ruth Madoff, explained it to me one day, when she came in with a special project for me to do for Bernie. He wanted me to build a system — a very basic system — that would take in a tape of all of the previous day’s stock transactions and print out a report showing how much money he could have made by buying and selling shares in the common and convertible preferred stocks in the same company, on different exchanges at the same time.

There would be time-lags between these shares’ values during the day, and if he could have a computer that knew the current pricing, and could execute the trades automatically, he could make some money. It was all pie-in-the-sky then, but it creeped me out. I did what Ruth asked me to do, and there were revisions along the way, but it was clear that they were looking for a way to take advantage of the “modernization of the markets” that Bernie was advocating. I became more-and-more uncomfortable, and my inner sense was telling me that I didn’t want to be a part of that. The disconnect between the arguments for the ‘advances’, and the in-house efforts to profit from them, was just a way to game the system — to the disadvantage of the proverbial ‘little guy’. The problem was, no one ever left the employ of Bernie Madoff, and I was a special situation since I didn’t actually work for him.

My desire to no longer be involved with Bernie’s adventures created a real problem for my sister. The woman who was the head of his computer systems down at 110 Wall Street — it was too early to call such a position ‘the head of IT’ — literally fell under a bus one day on the way to work, and Bernie asked Liz to take over managing the systems as an employee of his company. Liz was afraid that once he learned that I didn’t want to work for him, there would be a big problem. Our initial plan was for Liz to give me her company, and I would continue supplying services to Liz’s other customers. She and I had a number of conversations about it that got increasingly heated, as I felt that Bernie & Co were ethically challenged and I was insistent that I didn’t want to do any work for him anymore. But Bernie had offered Liz a lot of money, as was his way, and she didn’t want the opportunity to be jeopardized.

So I left, and Liz made it clear that I was going to have to leave totally, and not just select which clients I wanted to work for, so it was a hard break. Bernie insisted that if he ever found out that she spoke about anything related to his business with me, he would fire her, and sue her.

What we did for a living was one of the few subjects Liz was comfortable talking to me about — she was difficult to ‘crack open’ — so when Bernie shut that down, the silence between us grew longer over time and we became increasingly distant, and finally completely disconnected. I was so estranged from my sister — not by my choice, since she had been my ‘fill-in mother’ big sister after my mother’s death — that when she died, I wasn’t even listed as a surviving sibling in her obituary.

She was the head of Madoff’s IT department until her death in February 2008 from cancer, and she had made a lot of money working for Bernie. When she died she was living in a large house in Greenwich Connecticut. One of the last times I saw her was when she got remarried after her first husband passed away. Bernie paid for her wedding reception at the Greenwich Country Club and I was invited to that. I was surprised to see all the old “runners” that I had once known back in the early ’80s, whose job was to carry sacks of checks and stock certificates around lower Manhattan, between securities trading firms, to settle trades at the end of the day, after the markets closed — for that was how it was done back then. These runners were, for the most part, without any advanced education. At the wedding reception they told me that they were all now working as traders on the trading desk now, and they were probably making themselves fortunes. As I said, nobody ever left the employ of Bernie Madoff…

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis

In 1998, my decision to end my association with a group of individuals who were planning to capture the lion’s share of the financial benefit that would come from the efforts of their political associates to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act made no obvious sense at all — especially given the many millions of dollars that I would be receiving from it.

I had been enlisted by the group — at the suggestion of the lead IBM salesman to Wall Street at the time — to create the software that would be provided to every bank in the country to enable them to sell securities and insurance products to their customers — once the Glass-Steagall Act’s prohibitions were out of the way. That finally happened in 1999. It was the single most important operative condition that paved the way for the global financial collapse that occurred in 2008. That and greed, of course.

The group consisted of some senior people from AIG (American International Group, Inc.) which is an American multinational finance and insurance corporation with operations in more than 80 countries and jurisdictions, Bear Stearns, a New York-based global investment bank, securities trading, and brokerage firm that failed in 2008 as part of the global financial collapse, and Solomon Brothers, which was one of the five largest investment banking enterprises in the United States until it failed during the 2008 collapse.

I met the full group only one time, and only by first name. The head of the effort was a man named Brian and I had several meetings with him, including a couple of lunches together where I got a strange feeling from him that was belied by his demeanor towards me. It was the first warning sign.

The group met together in Orlando, Florida, where I was to be ‘vetted’ by the group. Afterwards, Brian took me to a ‘titty’ bar, and then for a visit to a ranch outside of the city that belonged to a very high political figure in Florida at the time. The ranch included a large hangar, that we visited, in which there was a collection of military stuff, including a modern tank, armored personnel carrier, and several jeeps, at least one of which had a 50-caliber machine gun mounted — and a ‘fucktorium’ (as I called it), with a few bedrooms tucked away in a corner facing a large liquor bar. I got the impression I was supposed to be inspired by the tits and the fucktorium. I was invited to stay for “happy hour” later that day. Luckily, I had an early flight home.

There is a common myth now about the Glass-Steagall act that says its repeal didn’t have anything to do with the 2008 collapse of the world’s financial systems. The basis of that myth is that it wasn’t risky ‘loan‐​financed securities speculation’ that caused the collapse. Instead it was because “commercial bank failures were largely driven by credit losses on real estate loans. The banks that failed generally pursued high‐​risk business strategies that combined nontraditional funding sources with aggressive subprime lending.”

In other words, the banks didn’t fund their speculative securities investments through standard loans, they used their depositors’ money to engage in aggressive mortgage loans to hopeful house buyers who often did not have the financial means to pay those mortgages — and to protect themselves, the banks would package up many mortgages together and sell them as profitable ‘investments’ to securities firms, who provided funding for more risky loans. The only losers were the home buyers, and those pension funds and municipalities worldwide that ‘invested’ in the packaged securities.

This is exactly what the Glass-Steagall Act was meant to stop, even though, at the time it was introduced in 1933 during the height of the Great Depression, the modern games of speculation hadn’t been invented yet. That the Glass-Steagall Act wasn’t prescient enough to see the future, gave the manufacturers of consent — i.e., the financial press and mainstream news agencies — a way to blame the whole 2008 debacle on its victims.

Why blame the victims? Because not having the Glass-Steagall Act’s protections in place still leaves open the possibility of doing it again — and so it is happening again, today, in 2022. That tumultuous collapse of economies in 2008 swirled around those same organizations and men; but no one within those firms suffered in the least — only the victims did.

It was clear to me that this group of individuals would make me rich beyond the ken of anything that I could imagine. It wasn’t because they were going to pay me to create and maintain the software, I learned, and the software was going to be given to the banks, so no cashflow there. Instead, as an emissary of the group explained to me one evening at my local yacht club where I was a member — so that we could have a ‘private’ conversation as it was put to me — I was going to receive a per-transaction fee. And if that makes no sense to you, as it didn’t to me, your inner-sense is working correctly. It was explained to me that the group members would share in my fees — not their companies, just them.

I realized immediately that it would destroy my soul. This whole scheme was extreme greed made manifest — and surely felonious. And it had been explained to me by a lowly emissary, who was not a member of the group, only a messenger — plausible deniability.

I wrote a three page letter to Brian the next day, declining any further involvement with the group, explaining to him what had transpired. I put a copy of it and all the emails, receipts, and my proposal, and gave them to a priest for safekeeping.

I never heard back from Brian, and was never again contacted by the group. And the tantalizing future bounty of millions of dollars vanished in the wind. Was this a rational decision on my part? In 1998, the future results 10 years later were unknown. And if I had ‘gone along to get along’ I would have become a member of the very rich elite. But I had a feeling…

Listening to One’s Heart

In late 2000, I decided on the spur of the moment to walk away from a lucrative job that I had no replacement for at the time — and like most Americans, I was drowning in debt — just because, in that moment, as I looked out of the window of the office where I was working, I realized that I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be at the ‘beach’, I wanted to be doing something else with my life, and as I left, my employer told me in starkly clear terms that if I left it would be permanent. I hardly hesitated. I paused for but the briefest of moments and then I just left, risking everything I had and potentially destroying the life in which I was responsible for supporting my family. But that single insane decision put me on the direct path to this point in my life.

Because I was now free, I was able to go back to college to finish my undergraduate degree that I had started in the late 70’s. I had dropped it because of my sister’s invitation to work with her at Madoff and her other clients. At that time, there were no experts in computer programming, and Liz and I (and my brother), all had ‘chips’ in our heads… After I finished my undergraduate degree, I managed to be accepted into a doctoral program in Philosophy at the age of 50.

Why I Don’t Have My Phd

I never submitted my PhD thesis to my university. I had returned to Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York, at the age of 47 to complete my undergraduate degree, and then entered their Doctoral program in Philosophy at the age of 50.

I was terminated by the university while I was working on my thesis. I had successfully completed all my course work and other requirements for my ABD (“All But Dissertation”) doctoral candidate status, and was teaching at Stony Brook’s Southhampton campus in their Sustainability Studies programs focused on ecology, sustainability, and environmental ethics and justice.

I helped the students there bring a lawsuit against the University, its President, and its Provost, for having illegally agreed in secret to shut down that campus and close the programs offered there — a decision that was leaked to the press by a whistleblower.

They made this decision without any public hearings on the matter, where they would have had to show actual evidence of a need to take this action — the campus and many of the buildings were brand-new ultra-ecological constructions that had cost taxpayers close to one hundred million dollars — nor did they comply with any of the regulations of the New York State University system — it was, after all, a publicly-funded university.

Another leak, this one after the students had filed their lawsuit and I had taken my public stance supporting the students, came from a source privy to what was actually the reason for the closure: that the university had been offered upwards of $200 million to build a gleaming ‘center’ of glass and steel dedicated to “advanced geometry and physics” by the local billionaire, James Simons, who was the partner of Robert Mercer at nearby Renaissance Technologies, less than a mile from the main campus. According to the whistleblower, in their emails to me, Simons and Mercer didn’t like all that airy-fairy environmental stuff we were teaching in Southampton, and they wanted the university to focus solely on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) in order to get the money.

This is an example of the ‘corporatization’ of universities that Noam Chomsky complains about, because, as he says, it is destroying American higher education. In a conversation with him, when he visited my department, he mentioned that universities — because of selling out to large corporations with an agenda — were being run like organized crime rackets. Indeed.

Robert Mercer was the man behind the Cambridge Analytica scandal and its efforts to sway the Brexit vote in the UK, and also put Trump in the Whitehouse, by using stolen Facebook data to send AI crafted messages to voters. Both efforts were successful.

James Simons was the former chair of the Mathematics department at SBU. Together, Simons and Mercer founded Renaissance Technologies, a “quantitative trading” firm located a mile from the main campus. Quantitative trading grew out of the automation advocacy efforts of, among others, Bernie Madoff and his plans to skim easy profits via automated online trading.

The $200 million was lunch money to them, but the programs being offered at the Southampton campus represented the living hopes and dreams of several hundred students, some of whom had passed up full scholarships at major universities to take part in SBU’s programs.

Those programs, and the new campus facilities, were in a startup phase, having been the brainchild of the previous university president. The construction had been undertaken as part of a plan to create a model facility for a program focused on preparing professionals with the knowledge to help deal with the accelerating destruction of our planet.

After the students’ lawsuit was launched, and the need arose to justify closing the programs down — without mentioning the monetary inducement by the local billionaire to close them down — the university apparatchiks began spreading the idea that the campus was too costly on a per-student basis, and so, to be fair to all the other university students, the programs there needed to be shutdown.

Apparently, everyone but the students accepted this account without critique; but as the students pointed out to no avail: first you build a campus, then you hire professors and staff, and then you gear-up your programs, so of course the per-student cost was high during the 2009–2010 academic year, when there were only a few hundred students. But the incoming class was 800 strong for the Autumn of 2010. Those programs were a success, but that wasn’t the point: the university wanted the money — and the prestigious new “Simons Center” (Mercer shuns publicity for obvious reasons).

As I said, their secret decision was leaked to the press — just two weeks after it was announced that I had been awarded that year’s University President’s Award for “Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student.” It had a large monetary award attached. I helped the students fund their lawsuit against the university’s illegally made decision, by publicly pledging my award money to the students’ legal fund — symbolically taking the University’s award money and giving it to the students of Stony Brook Southampton to sue the University president.

I didn’t do this because I wanted to embarrass the university president. I did this because no other faculty member publicly stood up for the students, and I realized what a terrible lesson that was for them: “Go along, to get along.” The faculty, other than myself and one other professor who supported the students in the background, were afraid for their jobs. Absent my support, I felt that the students would be traumatized for life by the injustice of the antidemocratic, and indeed misodemotic, power of those two billionaires, and the short-sightedness of the university administration’s actions. I knew that it would end my employment by the university, but I underestimated the malevolence of the president and provost of the university.

Of course, I wasn’t allowed to attend the teaching awards ceremony, so Gary Mar, my thesis advisor, accepted the check in my stead. I received my termination letter just a couple of weeks later.

Mary Pearl, the dean of the Southampton campus, called me into her office one day, while the students’ lawsuit was just being initiated, to tell me that she had just returned from a meeting on the main campus with the university president and the provost. She said they had had my campus email account “hacked,” and they confronted her with printed copies of my emails with my students, about the lawsuit, a march, demonstrations, a press conference with State government leaders, and a large gala event at a local aquarium to raise money for the lawsuit, organized by one of my students. They were demanding that she “get rid of me.”

She said she laughed at them, saying something about my academic freedom¹ and their violations of it, and walked out. She was ‘allowed’ to quit her own position, being well-known and respected in academia, later that same semester.

The students won their case. The University, taking the loss in stride, merely agreed to take all the legally required steps that they had ignored in making their decision, but the decision was made, they said — like a thief who is caught in the act of shoplifting and offers to pay for what he was trying to steal after he is caught.

My campus account was then deleted, and my ability to access any of my teaching reviews, emails, even student’s grades, was cutoff.

But that wasn’t the bad part.

After I was given my ‘walking papers’, while searching for a new teaching position, I was surprised that no one was willing to employ me. Even those that showed an interest in hiring me, begged off after contacting the Stony Brook provost, who is in charge of academic affairs. I learned that when they inquired for a reference for me, the provost informed them that “I was a troublemaker and that they would rue the day if they ever hired me.” Given the warning, no one was willing to take the risk.

I know this because I had been a police commissioner on Long Island, and the dean of a very small college there that I had applied for a teaching position at confided in me what occurred when she contacted the SBU provost, because, as she explained to me, she too was from the “blue (police) family.” The quote in the last paragraph was from her verbatim. She explained to me that since the private college was small, the board felt that they couldn’t take the legal risk of hiring me after what the provost said, even though they wanted me.

When I was terminated from the university, my wife, who had advanced metastatic breast cancer, and I, lost our health insurance. As this was before President Obama put an end to the practice, any new private insurance that I could purchase would treat her cancer as a “preexisting condition” and not cover it. The administrators knew this. Everyone in the US knew that.

Although I was able to maintain the university coverage for a year under a Federal law (COBRA), after that we had to move. My wife had been born in France, so we moved there because she was entitled to health coverage.

I still could have submitted my thesis to Stony Brook, but given the provost’s actions, I felt vulnerable, and decided that I could not give the university the opportunity to deny me a PhD. Not having a PhD because I had not submitted a thesis was bad, but having been denied one because my thesis did not meet the academic standards of the university said something else about me, which I felt was worse for my reputation.

My feeling of vulnerability was not just because of the provost’s actions however. I had already experienced the lack of academic freedom in an early conflict that had occurred in my department while I was doing my coursework for the doctoral program. I had written a paper that criticized the modern understanding that our ‘lived presence’ and our corporal body were two separate things. The paper was the outcome of both my meditative experiences and my attempts to come to an understanding of what they meant, and it foreshadowed this work, as evidenced by my main point of the paper:

By assuming a structure for the world, we are engaging the phenomena directly and imprinting it with a form — pre-conceptual perhaps — but a form nonetheless. Thus we fail immediately in our attempts to put in place ‘the reduction’ wherein we do not engage the phenomena, but rather study its essences. Instead, what phenomenology studies are the structural essences of human cognitive psychologisms.

What apparently was worse though, was that I had quoted the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty when he said:

The world is precisely that thing of which we form a representation, not as men or as empirical subjects, but in so far as we are all one light and participate in the One without destroying its unity. (Merleau-Ponty, “Phenomenology of Perception” pg xiii)

The professor could not countenance a reference to the “One” and suggested that if that was what I was going to propose — that reality is a nondual whole — that I “should put down my pen.” He refused to grade my paper and insisted that I write a different paper.

There is an academic body at Stony Brook that you can take such conflicts to, but you need a faculty member to bring your complaint because a student, even a graduate student, cannot do so on their own. The department chair was quite clear — in writing — that if I insisted on doing so, it would not go my way, and it would put my success in the doctoral program in doubt. I didn’t press the point, but the lesson was clear: “say what you like, but don’t rock the boat.” I did not write a new paper, and took a failing grade in the course, destroying my otherwise summa cum laude status.

Later, there was another event in which my first book, “An Introduction to Awareness,” was anonymously savaged on Amazon. At least the author of it thought he was anonymous, but the idiot visited my personal website just before posting the negative review, so I had the IP address from which he posted it. The IP address was in the area where one of the department’s faculty lived. The thought that it might have been one of my ‘colleagues’ that wrote it really bothered me. So I took to the department’s “listserv’ — and early form of ‘chat’ — and I explained what happened and threatened to reveal the perpetrator since I had the IP address and, as a former police commissioner with connections, I could have the actual name of the owner of the computer. I was lying about the access, which would be illegal of course, but no one knew that.

The backlash was unified outrage — at me for threatening to expose one of my ‘colleagues’. Not a single person was seemingly troubled by the anonymous trashing of a colleague’s work, as evidenced by the absolute silence of anyone speaking up against it. Once again, it was as if “academic freedom” meant nothing at Stony Brook University.

The owner of the Amazon account, one of my fellow graduate students, finally acknowledged that it was his account that the review had been posted to, but he blamed the actual act on ‘a friend’ who was just engaging in a little ‘rowdiness’ while they were at the faculty member’s house partying. I was so put off by this event, I dropped off the listserv and out of the department’s ‘community’. I was totally disgusted by the behavior of one and all. At least on Wall Street, you knew where the knife was coming from.

While the trashing of my acts continued without my presence, finally one member of the faculty stood up and wrote a long email condemning the actions of those who had tried to anonymously trash my book, and then me for having threatened to expose them. I was very grateful to read what she had wrote, when she sent me a copy her message to the listserv, but I was already gone.

I loved teaching so very much. But without a PhD, that is not possible. So I developed my innitial thesis into Tranquillity’s Secret. It’s now much too large, and groundbreaking for a thesis anyway. And it would never be countenanced by a system that talks about academic freedom but acts otherwise, while insisting on compliance with the whims of those in power.

The realizations that led me to take the forks along my path that I did, in my life, were just feelings, not actual reasoned decisions. These feelings went against every shred of common sense, given what I actually knew at the time they arose about these men — for it was always men in these vignettes, and their political machinations that they were undertaking to shape our future.

How could I feel the way I did? It couldn’t have been any kind of wisdom because I was in uncharted territory that was totally unfamiliar to me in each of these cases — and for which I had nothing that could be called wisdom to help guide me through the difficult terrain. It couldn’t have been luck either, because the feelings I had were overpoweringly certain, and not just a hesitant guess.

How are such things possible? What is the source of such feelings? And how is it that they could motivate me in ways that rational judgment could not? Overriding every logical criteria for judgement?

This book is my attempt to explain my solution to the riddle. It is the result of the many moments in my life that I have spent contemplating the obvious presence in myself of something other than wisdom and other than luck. Something that is present in everyone’s life — intimately — but which we explain away, if we acknowledge it at all, ignoring the blatant difficulties of such lame explanations.

And I am attempting this because I believe we will never strike a balance with our world that will allow us to live harmoniously with the rest of Nature, and that means also each other, unless we reorient ourselves away from rational decision-making that ignores the precious gift that we humans have been blessed with: an intuitive understanding of what is morally correct, even if not rationally correct, at every moment of our lives.

The metaphoric mind is a maverick. It is as wild and unruly as a child. It follows us doggedly and plagues us with its presence as we wander the contrived corridors of rationality. It is a metaphoric link with the unknown called religion that causes us to build cathedrals — and the very cathedrals are built with rational, logical plans. When some personal crisis or the bewildering chaos of everyday life closes in on us, we often rush to worship the rationally-planned cathedral and ignore the religion. Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.⁠²

There must be a reason why I am not in prison today, or living a gluttonous life with the rest of the pigs at the trough of financial embezzlement of public wealth. Or why I own a house in the Southwest of France amidst a thousand castles, rolling green hills, and prehistoric caves, where I feel so strongly that I am ‘in my own skin’. I know, with the clarity often associated with important events that have occurred in one’s life, the intuitions that saved me from the first fates, and gave me the latter. Intuitions, not reasoned judgements. And intuitions that went against every rational basis for what I should have done.