“. . . broad diffuse attention facilitates creative insight.” 

John Kounios and Mark Breeman in their book The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain, p.213

The word "intuition" has many meanings. But in its popular, as distinct from refined philosophic usage, it is closely connected with the single qualitativeness underlying all the details of explicit reasoning. It may be relatively dumb and inarticulate and yet penetrating; unexpressed in definite ideas which form reasons and justifications and yet profoundly right. To my mind, Bergson's contention that intuition precedes conception and goes deeper is correct. Reflection and rational elaboration spring from and make explicit a prior intuition. 

John Dewey, “Qualitative Thought”

     Quakers have a way of understanding that is different from the way that we ordinarily think.  The technical term for this is holoscopic as opposed to merescopic.  Merescopic comes from a word meaning part.  In a merescopic way of understanding, we identify the parts of a situation.  Or in other words, accumulate information.  To understand someone, I can give you the facts of his life, when he was born, where he lived, what he did for a living, his marital status.  This is generally independent of any particular situation that the person is dealing with.  

     In holoscopic understanding I understand the person as a whole and contextually.  I might say in one context that the person is a pussycat.  In another situation I might say that the person is a real tomcat.  It’s the same person with a different focus and both could be true.  When Quakers say that they are seekers, they mean it in the contextual situational sense.  Situations are constantly shifting and in need of fresh understanding.  To apply old understandings to a new situation may mean missing the mark.

     The classic example of holoscopic understanding is the gestalt picture that looks like a young woman from one perspective and like an old crone from another.  The same lines but what we see depends on the sense of the whole, how we organize the details.  You see the same thing in two different news accounts of an event that have different foci and different emphases.  It could be the same facts but have different meanings.  Or when you focus a camera at a crowd.  It’s the same crowd, but what you see depends on the focus.

     We can know that we perceive things holistically but we generally don’t focus our attention at that level, at least not consciously.  For example, we get up to speak in meeting for worship and at some point stop in the middle of a sentence because we didn’t say what we wanted to say.  We search for the right words and continue when we find them.  But how did we know we weren’t saying what we wanted to say.  It’s not as if we were reading off of a script.  And how do we know when we get the words right?  Again, there is this sense of the whole in the background that guides us.  But we generally aren’t conscious of the sense of the whole.  Quakers like to quote something said by a Native American chief in John Woolman’s journal, “I like to feel where words come from.”

     So how do we understand holoscopically?  While there are books written about this, and I would invite you to read them, here is a simple formula:  What does the situation, event, or issue feel like?  Your response might be an image, a memory, a song, a quality, or maybe a sense or feeling that you don’t have words for yet.  That response might come immediately.  It might come when you first wake up in the morning.  Or you might have to wait in a more intentional way, going over the situation in your mind in a skimming kind of way until something coalesces.  It’s like when you go to an outdoor event and you scan the crowd, perhaps from an elevated spot to see if you know anyone at the event.  You sort of see a lot of people, but when you see someone you know you are affected in a whole different way.  And the event might then feel different and what is possible feel different.

     Sometimes when something coalesces it feels like an aha’ and gives you a new perspective.  Why is that important?  A new perspective can give you a new way to go on in a situation.  In meeting for worship, as we sit in silence, what often comes to mind are the situations where things aren’t working, where we don’t know what to do, are befuddled.  Sometimes maybe we need to gather more information.  But often what we need is a different way of looking at things, a kind of conversion or transfiguration.  That’s why this way of understanding is religious.  We can’t make an aha’ happen and we can’t predict or control what it will look like.  It comes by grace, like a gift.  And when we are stuck and new light comes, it can feel salvific.  Like the Old Testament paradigm of salvation - Moses and the Israelites stuck between the army of Pharoah and the Red Sea.  And then way opened.

     As I said, there are books written about this.  I come to this mainly from the philosopher/psychologist Eugene Gendlin.  A good place to start is his book Focusing and then read his philosophical texts, which are almost all available online at the “Gendlin Online Library.”  On the Quaker side, I came to this mainly from the letters of Isaac Penington.  For a modern take on Penington along these lines, I highly recommend the works of R. Melvin Keiser, particularly his half of the book, Knowing the Mystery of Life Within.  Another Quaker, Rex Ambler has been teaching something like this for a long time.  He bases it mainly on the work of George Fox.  A good place to start is his short book, Light to Live By.  Ambler has also organized internationally “Experiment with Light” groups to practice this way of knowing.  They meet both in-person and online.  For a non-Quaker practice similar to what Ambler is teaching, see “Twilight Imaging” in Ira Progoff’s book, At a Journal Workshop.  For a condensed survey of this way of understanding in Quaker history, here is a link to an online paper.

“Now what I feel my concern to be, and what I have long felt, and have been endeavouring to spread before this assembly, is, to gather our attention to God within, to the truth within, to the light within, to the grace within, or by whatever name it may be called, for it is the same thing.  For grace may be considered God, light may be considered God; and everything that gives a man a sense of his situation may be considered but as coming from God.  So Christ within may be considered but as other terms for God within; for was the Christ within anything but the grace of God?  For what was he without, in the personal appearance?  Within, he is nothing but the grace or favour of God unto the children of men.”

Elias Hicks, from a sermon, 12/20/1826.

The meaning of “God” to whom we become subject, upon which we become

dependent, as we slip away from our ego confines, and wait, is, in experiential

terms, a moment of revelation, the manifesting of divine reality in our present

experience.

Melvin Keiser, Seeds of Silence, p. 80.