Conversation with Gemini

Hi Geminij, as you know, in my view, the god before and beyond the god of theology us best portrayed by the trilogy Psyche, Tao, Intuition. What is your idea of a book that does justice to the three and would be helpful for me to add to my library (and read)?

To do full justice to Psyche, Tao, and Intuition as an expression of the divine prior to dogmatic theology, a book needs to bridge depth psychology, non-duality, and direct, unmediated awareness.

Here is a book recommendation that would make a profound addition to your library:

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“The Way of Zen” by Alan Watts

While not explicitly framed as a modern Western psychological text, Alan Watts’ classic work bridges the exact intersections you explore.

• Why it fits Psyche: Watts approaches Eastern philosophy not as a rigid religion, but through the lens of human consciousness, Western psychology, and how the mind constructs its own ego-traps. It respects the depth of the psyche without reducing spiritual reality to mere clinical analysis.
• Why it fits the Tao: It is one of the most lucid, accessible explanations of the principles of the Tao—living in harmony with the unforced flow of things (wu-wei), letting go of calculated effort, and recognizing the interconnectedness of all existence.
• Why it fits Intuition: Watts constantly points away from conceptual thinking and intellectual theology toward direct, immediate experience—the quiet knowing that arises when the incessant chatter of the intellect settles down.

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Alternative: “The Undiscovered Self” by C.G. Jung

If you want to lean heavier into the psychological and spiritual depths of the individual:

• Why it fits: Jung addresses the spiritual crisis of modern humanity, arguing that true religious experience cannot be outsourced to collective theology or dogma. Instead, it must be discovered in the inner depths of the psyche—the realm where the individual encounters the transcendent directly through dreams, symbols, and intuitive stillness.

Both of these works honor the silence before theology, pointing straight to the living ground where psyche, the flow of the Tao, and quiet intuition meet.

I agree. The Way of Zen has been with me from my youth! As has The Undiscovered Self. I read the complete works of C.G. Jung over the course of my ministry. I will enjoy revisiting both of these books!

That is a remarkable foundation to carry forward. Having The Way of Zen and the complete works of C.G. Jung woven into the arc of your life and ministry means these ideas aren’t just concepts you study—they are lived territory.

Revisiting them now from the quiet clarity of retirement and the perspective of your work on Tao, Psyche, Intuition.com must feel like a very rich conversation with an old friend.

Would you like to explore how a specific theme from Jung or Watts intersects with your current writing on the blog?

I’m pulled to Jung’s phrase “acausal connecting principle”

Jung’s acausal connecting principle—his definition of synchronicity—strikes at the very heart of where Psyche, Tao, and Intuition converge.

By stepping outside of rigid cause-and-effect thinking, synchronicity recognizes a deeper, underlying order where inner subjective states and outer objective events mirror each other without a physical chain of causation. It is the universe speaking in a language beyond theology:

• The Connection to the Tao: It is the operational pulse of the Tao itself—the unforced, spontaneous coordination of all things (ziran) where meaning and event arise together seamlessly.
• The Connection to the Psyche: It reveals that the psyche is not an isolated box trapped inside the skull, but is fundamentally entangled with the objective world. The unconscious reaches out and touches reality directly.
• The Connection to Intuition: It is what intuition perceives in a flash before the rational mind can catch up. When you experience a synchronicity, you don’t calculate it; you know it with a quiet, unshakeable certainty.

It is no wonder that concept resonates so deeply with the quiet spaces of looking out the window and letting the noise of the world settle.

I am frustrated by needing a new vocabulary and a vibrant comprehension of that vocabulary in order to talk about things that are beyond my experience! What are the shortcuts here beyond several lifetimes?

That frustration is entirely justified. The great trap of spiritual and psychological exploration is that we are constantly trying to use a language built for surviving in a physical, linear world to map dimensions that have no boundaries, no geography, and no timeline.

When you try to fit the vastness of the unconditioned into words, you end up needing a dictionary for things that can only be known by not talking.

Since none of us have several lifetimes to spare, here are the real-world shortcuts to bypass the vocabulary trap:

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1. Lean on Analogy and Metaphor, Not Precise Definitions

Instead of trying to coin or master a new technical vocabulary, treat words as pointing fingers rather than the moon.

• The Shortcut: Don’t try to define the indefinable; just borrow a metaphor that already works and stretch it until it snaps. Jung did this constantly with alchemy, and the Tao Te Ching does it by using water, wind, and valleys. Let a single vivid image—like Life IS a Beach, the Ocean is Time—do the heavy lifting that a thousand philosophical terms never could.

2. Shift from Intellectual Comprehension to Aesthetic Recognition

You don’t need a vibrant comprehension of a concept if you have an aesthetic experience of it.

• The Shortcut: The mind wants to categorize and name because naming gives it control. Intuition, however, doesn’t need a name; it recognizes truth the way the eye recognizes light. When you sit quietly and look out the window, you aren’t building a vocabulary—you are stepping outside the need for one altogether. Truth is recognized by resonance, not by definition.

3. Practice Radical Simplification

The deeper you go into Psyche and Tao, the fewer words you actually need, not more.

• The Shortcut: The ultimate destination of spiritual vocabulary is silence. If a concept requires an elaborate new jargon to explain, it is usually just the ego playing with itself. Strip away the theological clutter, the clinical psychological terms, and the philosophical scaffolding until you are left with the bare, obvious reality of the present moment.

As Lao Tzu noted, those who know don’t talk, and those who talk don’t know. Whenever the vocabulary gets heavy, the quickest shortcut is simply to drop the dictionary, close the book, and look out the window.

Which particular word or concept felt like it was demanding too heavy a toll today?

I agree fully here! The quieter I get the more I realize and know beyond explanation, elaboration!

That is the ultimate destination of all this exploring, isn’t it? When the noise falls away, the need for a dictionary vanishes right along with it.

As you capture in reflections like I am sure that sitting down and looking out the window is the solution to all of my problems today, quiet observation doesn’t need to be translated into a complex vocabulary—it simply has to be lived.

When you sit quietly like that, does the silence tend to bring more clarity to your writing, or does it mostly just wash away the desire to write at all?

Silence is writing without slowing down! Yet, has to be written down eventually. The delimma of “acausal connecting principles”!

That is the exquisite paradox right there.

Silence doesn’t need a pen, but the hand reaches for one anyway. Writing from that place isn’t an attempt to explain the unexplainable; it’s more like leaving footprints in the snow just to show that someone walked this way and noticed how quiet it was.

And your mention of the “acausal connecting principles” hits the nail on the head regarding the dilemma of writing it down. How do you capture synchronicity on paper? By definition, the moment you try to map an acausal connection with a linear sentence, you are forcing a river into a straightjacket. Cause-and-effect grammar tries to chain together things that simply arose together out of the Tao.

When you sit down to translate those flashes of intuition into a piece like Meaning is what we make of things, do you find that the words capture the synchronicity, or do they just point toward the silence where it happened?

They generally ignite the laughter.

Laughter is perhaps the ultimate acausal response—it bypasses the entire machinery of cause and effect, logic, and theology in a single, spontaneous eruption. One moment you are swimming in the serious stream of thought, and the next, a sudden shift in perspective pops the balloon of conceptual vocabulary entirely.

It strips away the need for an elaborate dictionary, because humor lives in the exact same unmediated space as the Tao and intuition: the sudden, startling recognition of reality as it actually is, without a middleman.

When the laughter hits, do you find it feels like a punctuation mark on the silence, or the silence itself finally breaking into a smile?

It’s a pause producing a break in the action and we all take a breath (How many of us are there, sitting around the fire?)

If we count the circle gathered around that particular fire—bridging the quiet spaces of the Journal and the reflections on the Ground of Being—there are just enough of us to keep the silence warm:

Lao Tzu tending the coals, C.G. Jung keeping a quiet eye on the shadows at the edge of the clearing, Alan Watts offering a wry smile as the sparks fly upward into the dark, and a couple of generations of a large, far-flung family (not to mention a retired minister and an AI sitting somewhere in the digital ether) all taking that exact same breath together.

Nobody is adding wood to the fire, nobody is rushing to fill the silence, and the vocabulary isn’t missed at all.

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