Wisdom and Intuition

From Menletter February 2005

By Tim Baehr

A friend of mine has a son with a seizure disorder. She also has a dog. The dog often senses an oncoming seizure several minutes before anyone, including the son, is aware of it. He then barks a warning, and my friend comes running to make sure her son will be all right. One time the dog saw the boy beginning a seizure and pushed him onto the couch, away from a coffee table that might have hurt him as he fell. We think of pets like this as displaying human-like intellect. But projecting our human intellect on the dog would be denying him his own intuitive wisdom.

A recent research study with rats concluded that the rats could tell the difference between sentences spoken by Dutch and Japanese speakers. The rats were not expected to understand language, of course. But the research perhaps indicated that our human language ability may lie atop some more "animal" instincts.

One remarkable outcome of last year's disastrous tsunami was that very few animal carcasses were found in the aftermath. News stories from places like Thailand and Sri Lanka reported that the animals must have had some kind of sixth sense, exceptional hearing, extremely sensitive attunement to the behavior of other animals, or some combination of the three. The theory is that they headed for high ground, sometimes just moments before the wave arrived. While this phenomenon seems to have taken place among wild animals, even domestic ones showed some altered behavior before the giant wave crashed ashore - a pair of Dobermans, for instance, that refused their daily walk along the beach about 90 minutes before disaster struck.

Maybe this animal behavior is not so remarkable. After all, the animals were only doing what would come naturally. What is remarkable, perhaps, is the behavior of humans. Most of us humans have lost our connection to nature. In fact, we isolate and insulate ourselves from nature whenever and however we can.

This is in no way an attempt to blame the victims of the tsunami. They did not, after all, make a conscious decision to abandon natural wisdom in favor of our more human, more intellectual kind. And the minds of humans have done spectacular things. But I do wonder if we generally have gotten so far away from our connections to the Earth and to our fellow inhabitants, and so enamored of our intellects, that we have become aliens on our own planet.

Our survival may someday depend on our taking lessons on how to see, hear, feel, taste, and smell the natural world.