Why Follow Rules? Trust your Intuition by James Maberly
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book is not bedtime reading; it’s far too stimulating for the mind. It’s not a book I read at a steady pace either, I pretty much tangoed my way through it over a few months: slow, slow, quick, quick, slow. Sometimes reading with great speed and excitement, at others trying to slowly digest and apply the insights. As a steady consumer of the self-help genre and with long experience in coaching, mentoring and spiritual formation, I can say that this book certainly offers something a little bit different.
As it suggests in the title, the essential message of the the book is a call to trust and follow our intuition. This grand theme crystallises eventually and satisfyingly; however, it also comes with its matrix: a ‘mind dump’ of a lifetime of thinking and creating, researching and relating that the author has done.
Maberly builds his thesis, drawing from his experience in education, wide reading in psychology, friendships, current affairs – all becomes grist to the mill. Of course he has opinions and sometimes speculates, but you can sense ‘intuition’ at work in the early chapters, and that is the whole point. I’d recommend the reader just listen and keep an open mind. The elements do come together, like an impressionist painting.
After Part I, where he introduces what he means by the word ‘intuition’, Part II challenges us with ‘eight critical questions’. These may not seem immediately to be about intuition per se. It’s as if he’s let us peek through the window, and then taken us a circuitous route to the door, during which we learn what we’ll need to know about ourselves when we get into the house.
We begin to discern the small gestures of brush strokes in a generous distribution of quotes and anecdotes. The author uses stories very well, more with the pipe-and-scotch, here’s-my-pet-theory approach than the journalistic precision of, say, Malcolm Gladwell. However, as with Gladwell, there’s an incredible diversity of material hauled into the discussion. He doesn’t shy away from speaking unashamedly of the spiritual aspects of creativity or making certain assumptions about the cosmos. There’s a good measure of synthesis from the well-trodden paths of postmodernism and new-age philosophy, but it’s given with a refreshing naivete. Maberly is like a kid in a sandpit, building something completely awesome with whatever comes to hand.
Then, quite suddenly, I think he goes in for the kill when he comes to distinguish the ‘inituitive self’ from the ego. This was the moment in the book when my mind reached out and latched on for the ride and I felt I was about to see a new horizon. Like the greatest truths, it dips in and out of view like a ship on the swell but it is suggestive of a direction in which we might like to set our compass.
I’m a product of my generation. I’m suspicious of authority and I have no love for rules. Of course, I’m going to pick up a book like this and read it to reinforce what I believe. However, It has become clear to me that the second step of trusting my intuition is something I don’t know so much about. It doesn’t naturally follow. It’s easy enough to throw out the rule book and keep stoking the fires of the ego.
Part III of the book introduces five individuals who have ‘broken the mold’. In Maberly’s terms, they’ve followed an intuitive path and found freedom from the rules. There’s a good cross section here, from famous to relatively unknown in global terms: a millionaire, an artist, a musician, an educationalist. With the exception of Steve Jobs, these individuals are all known personally by the author. He allows them to speak with their own words, then mines their lives to show the outworking of the very things he’s discussed in the book so far.
This is an inspiring section. Each case study brings to light a story of overcoming diverse struggles. I suppose it’s inevitable that each reader will identify more or less with them, but there’s something for everyone here. For me, particularly, it was reading about the cellist and improviser Francois Le Roux that set off a magnificent domino rally in my soul: an invitation to go forward intuitively, drop the trappings and live freely. The insights here alone were worth all the words in the book for me.
To balance my gushy response to this book, I’m not sure if a skeptic would be completely persuaded. If you resist the thesis of the work, you’ll find plenty to argue with, and anyone with an aversion to pop psychology or new-age jargon will need to sit on it in order to finish reading. If that’s you, I think it’s worth trying to hear this on its own terms rather than deciding whether it maps onto your own concept of personality or the soul. I was pretty much in agreement with the ideas before I started reading, and I’ve got pages of journaling and copied-out quotes to keep chewing on.
In some ways I feel the author has made a mistake by disclosing a lifetime’s worth of wisdom that could have been eked out over several books. On the other hand, I’m grateful for such a complete agglomeration to be mined and somehow feel that his continuing journey through intuition and persistent curiosity in the future will unearth still more to share with the world. I very much hope so.
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