ABSTRACT
The conversion to modernity relegated perception and intuition below representational thinking; the species animal was muted and the selfless saint ghosted for the erection of the human as a thinking ego. Yet, just as one cannot re-present sensory perception in words, so one cannot think affect. Nor can one name or follow a logic for intuition, as it is simultaneously too vast in gestation and uniquely particular in expression—just as one cannot re-say dreams without distortion. The immediacy in one’s affective sensorium and noetic intuition consistently escapes the most rigorous and vigilant of objective thinkers—as the subjective naming of an object is not the only mode of knowing it. In Sikh practice (or Sikhī one reforms ego-thinking by connecting it to animal perception combined with saintly intuition—and in their re-integration witness a transformed, even evolved human. Any alternative epistemology then reduced to merely thinking cannot avoid manufacturing myopic illusions. This epistemic misdirection occurs primarily because, following Nietzsche, in modernity the animal and saint are dead, and we have killed them. Alternative modes of knowing must engage, rather cultivate, alternative states of consciousness, beyond merely thinking differently. There is not only knowing from a distance (science), or knowing by association (religion), but also knowing via merger (mysticism). Only in the latter is subject-object duality transcended allowing the instincts of the animal sensorium and the intuitions of the saintly mind to decenter the modern thinking subject towards an affective understanding of the world as affective Word.
