developed the ability to anticipate the most highly prized but often embarrassing-to- say longing for a particular sexual act without being asked. She told me that she had to “empty out my personal sex manual” to feel the cravings of her clients. What the john most wanted appeared suddenly in her mind in the form of a cartoon. A university criminologist later explained that the word “griv” was probably derived from what pick pockets call grift sense, the ability to intuit who was likely to have enough money in their billfold to justify the risk, even if they appeared in the worn clothes and dated cars of old money.
In his 1913 Dernieres Penses, Henri Poincare’, France’s seminal theorist in nonlinear dynamical systems theory, described intuition as a mental faculty which allows us to “...immediately see the end from afar...” In the context of mathematical epistemology, the instantaneous images of a geometer contrast with the labored sequential logic of the mathematical analyst. Poincare’ claimed that inclinations toward one or the other of these two cognitive styles and their associated mathematical tools arise from different kinds of minds. He contrasted the 19" Century German mathematicians, Weierstrass, who he said reduced his general
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theory of functions to “...a prolongation of arithmetic...without a single (pictorial)
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figure in any of his books...” with Riemann who called geometry to his aid in describing functions. He created “...an image that no one can forget... once he understood it.”
Experiencing the behavior of others, we create a set of anticipations about whom and how they are that align with parts of ourselves. Aware of one aspect of a person, we imagine the others. With a small amount of initial information, we connect the dots, fitting features we have seen and heard to personality configurations stored by informal category in our brain files. Our conclusions about them “being one of those” can both facilitate and impair our perceptions. Eastern metaphysicians, Western mystical religionists, socially liberal secular humanists, Shannon information theorists and today’s students of dynamical systems in brain and behavior can, in different ways, make the case that the content of these stereotypes reflect a pattern of constraints, our personal limitations resulting from
the rutted roads of worldly experiences. Baba Muktananda, the Hindi Saint from the
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