Ever since the Quintessence Forum began, I have sensed a tension within our community. There seem to be two camps. The larger one says that we must see with the heart. It trusts intuition, deeper knowing, and direct insight that arrives before we have time to put it into words. The other camp, to which I belong, makes a claim that sounds colder: we must also be able to articulate what intuition reveals. Without reason, the heart wanders. It has no points of reference, while contemporary science and culture require ideas to be expressed in words.
I am writing about this without any desire to win the argument. The issue concerns the very purpose of the Quintessence Forum. If a new paradigm is to bring about a real change in how people see the world, we must first understand why this tension exists and what consequences it may have.
Words as a Vessel
The heart sees; reason holds on to what has been seen. Intuition gives us an image all at once, whole and concentrated. Without words, however, the image dissolves before we can grasp it. Words provide a vessel. Their purpose is to preserve intuition, allowing us to return to it, compare it with further experience, and communicate it to another person.
In one of his lectures, Yuval Noah Harari approached this from an evolutionary perspective. Language made human thought possible, and this became humanity’s decisive advantage. Language does more than transmit a finished thought from one mind to another. It is the instrument through which thought itself takes shape. Without words, even intuitive knowledge cannot develop into a structure.
Harari adds that artificial intelligence now excels in the realm of language, precisely because it is built on language models. A capacity we once regarded as exclusively human is proving to be a mechanism that can, at least to some extent, be reproduced.
The statement “without reason, the heart wanders” is therefore more than a metaphor. It is an exact description. To wander is to have no coordinates. Words provide those coordinates.
How Words Make Thought Possible
A word is a form of condensation. It takes a cloud of impressions and fixes it into a stable, repeatable unit. An impression in itself is unique and fleeting. It appears and disappears. Once it receives a name, we can call it back, retain it in memory, and compare it with something else. Without a symbol, each impression vanishes before we can do anything with it. A name turns it into something we can work with.
Words also free us from the present moment. An animal responds to what is immediately before it. Through words, human beings can think about what is absent: the past, the future, the possible, and the abstract. The word tomorrow opens time. The word justice opens something that has neither shape nor colour. Thought moves through a space created by words.
Third, no word stands alone. Every concept has a place within a network of other concepts. The word dog carries associations with animals, loyalty, barking, and warmth. To think is to move through this network of relationships. The number of words is limited, yet they can be combined into an endless number of sentences. Thought is creative. It forms connections that have never existed before.
This is why Harari describes language as an evolutionary advantage. Its importance lies not only in communication. Through language, we can think thoughts that would otherwise have no way of coming into existence.
What Artificial Intelligence Reveals
Artificial intelligence appears to confirm this. The large language models on which it is based learn a single task: predicting the next word in a text. From this apparently simple task, something emerges that resembles thought.
To make accurate predictions, a model must develop an internal map of meanings. Each word acquires a position within a space where proximity represents similarity of meaning. Relationships between concepts become geometry. The classic example is that if we take the concept king, subtract man, and add woman, we arrive close to queen. Meaning has become a position and a direction in space.
With every word, the model also assesses which other words in the text are relevant to it. In this way, it captures the fact that meaning depends on context.
This brings us directly to the heart of our disagreement. The machine has no body. It has no senses. It has never seen the world, touched it, or experienced anything. It possesses only language. Yet from language alone, it can construct a functioning model of the world.
Language is therefore more than a container for thoughts that already exist. It carries within itself a structure of reality. This is why that structure can be reconstructed from language.
The same fact also reveals the opposite truth, the one defended by the other camp. Artificial intelligence has language without a heart. It has structure without vision, thought without consciousness, and concepts without experience. It produces coherent sentences while experiencing nothing at all. Processing information is not the same as being conscious.
Were language alone sufficient for thought in its fullest sense, artificial intelligence would already be conscious. It is not. It lacks what those who defend the heart are trying to preserve: the direct seeing that precedes words.
In this sense, the dispute resolves itself. Artificial intelligence is a pure experiment showing us what language can and cannot provide. It can provide structure, reasoning, and coherence. It cannot provide consciousness or direct vision.
It therefore vindicates both sides at once. Reason and language are indispensable and extraordinarily powerful. Yet they remain insufficient, because the deepest element—consciousness itself—lies beneath them and cannot be produced from them.
The Way of Heart
Those who speak of “seeing with the heart” are protecting something real: a form of knowing that precedes words and is richer than anything that can be expressed. Homeopaths know this from clinical practice. We often grasp the patient’s whole picture before we are able to name it. This perception is real, and it comes first.
The danger of this position does not lie in valuing intuition too highly. The problem arises when intuition refuses to be tested by language and reason. It then loses the ability to examine itself. It has no way of determining whether it is genuine or merely a projection, a wish, or a form of self-deception.
The heart without reason cannot distinguish vision from impression. In both homeopathy and philosophy, this distinction is critical, because it determines whether we help or cause harm.
The order that makes sense is simple. The heart comes first in time, and reason must follow immediately afterwards. Intuition opens the way; language tests, preserves, and stabilises what has been seen.
Those who stop after the first step may possess a rich vision, but it leads nowhere. It can neither be verified nor communicated. Those who skip the first step and begin with reason produce empty formulations without content. I do not oppose the heart. I insist on the second step.
Faith Seeking Understanding
This also reflects my own inner experience. I cannot believe unless reason gives me permission to do so. I need a clear conception of the world, a paradigm that allows me to believe in God and in a consciousness that transcends the reality I perceive. For a long time, I regarded this as a weakness in my faith. Today, I see it as the way in which I believe.
This approach has a long tradition. Anselm of Canterbury expressed it in the phrase fides quaerens intellectum: faith seeking understanding. Faith does not replace reason, nor does reason replace faith. Faith seeks to understand itself.
Earlier still, Augustine wrote credo ut intelligam: I believe in order to understand. The principle also has its reverse: intelligo ut credam, I understand in order to believe.
For some people, reason follows faith. For others, it precedes faith, preparing the ground and opening the gate. I belong more to the second group. I need at least the outline of a conceptual framework before I can enter. I do not require complete proof, because that would no longer be faith. I need coordinates on which I can rely.
This is why I am drawn to Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, the Pythagorean tradition, Paracelsus, Jung’s work, and Scholten’s system. These are structures that give transcendence a form. They allow me to believe in a consciousness that extends beyond perceived reality without having to abandon reason.
A paradigm is not a cage for God. It is a window through which someone like me can see Him. Without the window, there is only a wall.
Reason Does Not Judge God; It Prepares the Ground
Here we need a distinction that protects us from slipping into rationalism. I do not ask reason to prove the existence of God. Such proof does not exist, and I know that. I ask reason to provide a coherent framework within which God, consciousness, and transcendence are no longer absurd, but have an intelligible place.
There is a difference between saying, “Prove to me that God exists,” and saying, “Show me a world in which belief in God makes sense.” The first demand is impossible and expresses the arrogance of reason. The second is a legitimate and deeply honest need.
Reason does not sit in judgement over God. It prepares the ground on which faith can stand without contradicting itself.
Kastrup and the Language of Mainstream Culture
Bernardo Kastrup has expressed a similar idea. He argues that if we want idealism, consciousness, and transcendence to enter mainstream culture, we must address that culture on its own terms. And its language is rational and scientific.
Kastrup is not an esoteric thinker. He holds doctorates in both philosophy and computer science, worked as an engineer at CERN, and defends analytical idealism—the view that consciousness is the foundation of reality. Yet he does so in a language that mainstream culture cannot dismiss as fantasy. His arguments are logical, precise, and framed in the concepts of academic philosophy.
That is precisely why he is heard even by people who would ignore a homeopath or an intuitive healer.
Rationality is not inherently more truthful than intuition. It is, however, the only language that contemporary culture trusts. Those who cannot speak it remain within their own community, where they may be praised but will rarely be heard beyond its boundaries.
A Bridge Between Insight and the World
This changes the meaning of the entire disagreement. My work is no less spiritual than that of others. I simply carry it one step further. Many people receive a vision and remain with the vision. I perceive something and then carry it out into a world that will not listen without words.
This is neither a betrayal of the heart nor a form of coldness. It is part of the same mission. If a new paradigm is to bring about a genuine change in how people see the world, it will happen only through a language understood by those beyond our own community.
The misunderstanding I encounter has a specific cause. To someone who sees with the heart, the request “say it precisely” sounds like distrust. It may seem as though I am questioning the person’s insight. They experience this as an attack on the most precious thing they possess, and naturally defend themselves.
They may not be unwilling to understand me. They simply hear something different from what I am saying. I say, “Let us preserve this and pass it on.” They hear, “What you feel is not enough.”
Once this misunderstanding has been named, some of the tension may ease. I do not question the heart. I want to give it a vessel so that what it contains is not lost.
The sense of isolation may not disappear entirely. Yet Kastrup, Harari, and the entire Anselmian tradition stand on the same side. I do not think that I fail to understand spirituality. I am trying to preserve a bridge between insight and the world. Without that bridge, the heart’s intuitive perception would remain a private possession forever.
The Model as a Resolution of the Dispute
The four-level model of reality on which I am working—the monad, dyad, triad, and tetrad—is itself an example of what this disagreement is about. It takes an intuition concerning the structure of reality and gives it language, numbers, concepts, and connections: to the Pythagorean tetraktys, Kabbalistic cosmology, Aristotle’s four causes, and clinical practice.
This is not a betrayal of the heart. It is the second step.
The disagreement between heart and reason cannot be resolved by choosing one side. It is resolved through work in which intuition receives a precise form. The heart brings the image. Reason gives it coordinates. Only then does knowledge become something we can experience inwardly, preserve, examine, and pass on to others.
