“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer”

—Albert Einstein

[More information on our upcoming Poetic Reasoning course is here]

For three hundred years, western culture has limited knowing to linear reason and observation. Outlined in John Locke’s “A Doctrine of Epiricism,” scientific reasoning excluded intuition and imagination in favor of experimentation and observation using the five senses. Empiricism not only prioritized left-brain cognition, it eliminated right-brain cognition such as intuition and creative imagination. Initially, this predilection defined scientific discovery as the application of logic, rigor, and objectivity.

Leaders in politics and religion applied it also to faith and culture, relegating religious experience, mysticism, poetry, art, and storytelling to dark corners far from the divine light of reason. Empiricism’s champions rationalized colonization and genocide of any culture that prioritized superstition over science–in short, the world– under the flag of liberating humanity from a demon-haunted world.

This campaign currently recognizes intuition, insight, and creativity, which together accomplish poetic reasoning, as the superior means for advancing discovery and knowledge in the sciences when applied to rudimentary data-collecting. In short, there is a reality that scientific observation describes, and there is a deeper one immeasurable with numbers and unobservable beyond what neuroimaging’s lights and lines.

While neuroanatomical science sorts itself out by seeking neuroanatomical answers, I invite you to skip that part. We don’t have to put water under a microscope to know it quenches thirst. Similarly, we don’t have to know why clinical medicine is currently undergoing a full paradigm shift in the form of Narrative Medicine or why after three centuries of scientific research we can’t locate consciousness in the body. We’re in that place where everything is changing, and all evidence suggests everything always has been changing and always will be. Dwelling in such a shifty world requires poetic reasoning.

Poetic reasoning is a creative process rather than a scientific one. Whereas the scientific method insulates the subject of study from imagination and progresses incrementally toward a conclusion, the creative process starts with intense imagination regarding the subject and omnidirectionally guides both us and it through time-space toward deeper understanding of everything.

Whereas scientific reasoning values control, poetic reasoning values connection. Whereas scientific reasoning accumulates evidence, poetic reasoning explodes in the heart and deepens throughout a lifetime and beyond.

Despite its being the newest, most amazing figure on the scientific stage, poetic reasoning dates back 37,000 years at least, that being the age of the oldest known story in the world. I have been teaching Creative Writing for thirty years and Narrative Medicine to clinically trained therapists and doctors for over a decade. I never used scientific reasoning ever, even in science class. In Gordon’s Improv-for-Gifted-Adults and People Who Get Me offerings, I have come to appreciate the role my neurodivergence plays in helping me navigate my worlds along poetic paths.

Knowing when to move, when to jump, when to leap, and when to run have proven critical to my survival and success. Poetic reasoning allows me to maneuver in in-between spaces and work some pretty stunning multi-step operations to attain multi-faceted impact in the world, or just to spend a day with Jude Law because I wanted to. I use it for everything even while everybody I know stands by and shakes their head and wonders how?

Poetic reasoning isn’t guesswork. Nor is it woo-woo. In three centuries of linear reason, western culture’s empiricism has broken the planet and the world it supported for 50,000 years. Poetic reasoning sustained us prior to that in our global indigeneity. Even throughout the Holy-Roman grip in the Middle Ages, poetic reasoning such as Thomas More elucidates in The Care of the Soul defined human experience.

Cultivation of the self got left behind when The Enlightenment declared us all beyond emotion or working on it. Poetic reasoning engages emotion restored to factory settings as intelligence so powerful it can alter the properties of matter and even heal it. This is why clinical medical practice is in a tailspin over storytelling and why physicists are calling themselves post-empiricists.

The self is part of the world, not an objective being jotting observations on a clipboard outside it. What is true for the universe is true for us, says Stephen Hawking. Without our direct and indirect engagement, it won’t help us either survive. When we do engage it–and we do this with our hearts- we enter it as it enters us. This intersubjectivity and interpenetration change everything. It teaches us how to use what we know efficiently. It shows us that every experience good and bad shapes us into exactly what the universe needs and even helps us heal from the things that prevent from providing it.

This isn’t a skill-building course you’ll leave with something cool for your toolkit. The healing effects of poetic reasoning are instantaneous and ongoing. The experiences we will have together will rewrite you then show you how you’re rewriting your world. Poetic reasoning was once called magic, and it was never magic. It is nature in its natural state. It is us in our natural state. It isn’t spirituality either since there is really no spirit in spirituality. There’s only nature, and nature has two very real aspects that make it whole, that make us whole.

Three centuries have passed without our wholeness. And as scientific evidence shows, it’s time to return. I will support you as you relax into wholeness. Things will occur that unnerve and surprise. The other day, a thought that emerged from my own poetic reasoning (honed in five decades of practice) unnerved me and sent me to sit by the Davidson River in Pisgah National Forest after sunset, then I could integrate it into my initially resistant worldview. In terms of your practice in community and healing, when one of us steps inside the universe, which we do with even our first baby step into poetic reasoning, the benefit begins. One way to think of it is through the metaphor of fermentation. Generative sourdough starter with proper tending nourishes thousands of generations.

This is what we are talking about when we talk of poetic reasoning. As is true for fermenting grain, food, and people, there are some good basic tips, and once you have them, you’re good to go, forever. That said, once you have those tips and begin your practice, there’s no telling where your path inside the inside will lead. I can guarantee your world will be different to you while remaining to same to those around you, and that you won’t ever feel alone in it. It’s that beautiful and meaningful. Forget mindfulness. We’re going full Mind. Even better: we’re going Soul.

I have had students, doctors I should add, call me from the inside of a sudden whirlwind of synchronicities letting me know how wild it’s become. One Midwest-based student drove to the North Carolina coast to just burn an item on the beach, visit a friend, have lunch with me on the way home, and experience wondrous goodness soon after. I even know a pediatric cardiologist who joked with me that he nearly had to shutter his practice because using one three-minute exercise in poetic reasoning heals his kid-patients and their families so well. Thousands on thousands attend his weekly online writing sessions, and it’s evidence-based. And that whirlwind student? Since then, his friend circle of grown men and practicing physicians are all building grottos and taking up guitar after leaving it behind ages ago. Life.

You don’t have to like poetry or poets. Like I said, this isn’t magic. Nor is it a restrictive spiritual path. Eat what you like. Dance. Be goofy. It isn’t cultural appropriation and isn’t what we’ve been told is religion, though after a bit all that, you’ll see, is this. It’s life as it is meant to be lived and as it was lived by our ancestors–from the heart in deep collaboration with the earth. No massive moves. Little moves in balance with the seven other billlions of moves everyone is making. That way, nothing goes wrong. A little bit wild and bumpy at times, but never, we come to realize, wrong. I’m not exaggerating. It reveals the answers. We listen and integrate. It even shows us the next steps and creates passageways. Curious? Ready to get real? Join the class!