Reflections on my conversation with Tiokasin Ghosthorse
In my recent conversation with Tiokasin Ghosthorse, a Lakota elder and musician, we explored a way of understanding reality that is quite different from the one most of us have grown up with. One aspect of our conversation has stayed with me in particular: his understanding of intuition as something fundamental to life itself. It made me wonder whether intuition might ultimately be what distinguishes living intelligence from artificial intelligence.
We are witnessing an extraordinary development in AI. Machines can now reason, recognize complex patterns, write, create images, compose music, and perform tasks that we considered uniquely human only a few years ago. For a long time, creativity was thought to be beyond the reach of machines. That assumption has become increasingly difficult to defend. So I find myself wondering what, if anything, remains fundamentally different about human intelligence.
Tiokasin’s understanding of intuition offers an interesting perspective on this question. In his Lakota worldview, we are not separate beings living on Earth. We are Earth, emerging from her, living through her, and eventually returning to her. Everything exists in relationship, and intuition is intrinsic to these relationships. It is not exclusively a human capacity. Nature itself is intuitive.
He described how, when he steps outside and notices a tree, the tree has already noticed him. We may question what it means for a tree to notice us, but the underlying idea is fascinating. Living organisms continuously respond to their environment in extraordinarily complex ways. Nature has developed forms of responsiveness, adaptation, and coordination over billions of years, much of which happens without anything resembling conscious reasoning.
But Tiokasin is pointing to something beyond biological processes. For him, intuition is a form of knowing that arises from being in relationship with life. It cannot be separated from our participation in the living world.
One of the most interesting moments in our conversation was when he told me that his mother had said that one cannot speak Lakota without intuition. He explained how the older Lakota language expresses relationships, movements, and energies rather than primarily identifying separate objects. This made me reflect on how deeply our language influences our experience of reality. Our modern languages tend to divide the world into subjects and objects, while the Lakota understanding he described emphasizes the continuous movement of relationships.
Perhaps intuition is precisely this capacity to perceive and respond to reality before we divide it into separate objects and concepts.
This brings me back to artificial intelligence. AI can process enormous amounts of information, recognize patterns, and produce responses that appear remarkably intuitive. And much of what we call human intuition may indeed be unconscious pattern recognition. But is that all there is to it?
I wonder whether there is a deeper dimension of intuition that comes from being alive, from participating in the relationships that constitute existence itself. A form of knowing that is inseparable from our direct experience of reality.
We don’t know whether artificial intelligence will ever develop anything comparable. We don’t even fully understand consciousness or intuition in ourselves. But I think it is worth considering that intelligence and intuition may not be the same thing, and that increasing computational power does not necessarily bring us closer to this deeper capacity.
Tiokasin also emphasized that intuition cannot be controlled. He was critical of our tendency to turn everything into a method or technique, including our attempts to teach intuition through workshops and structured practices. His concern is that the moment we try to control intuition, we may already have moved away from what makes it possible.
I find this particularly relevant to our modern civilization, which has become extraordinarily successful at understanding and manipulating the world, but perhaps less capable of listening to it. We increasingly approach reality as something to analyze, predict, and optimize. Artificial intelligence is a remarkable extension of this capacity. Yet the more powerful our technologies become, the more important it may be to cultivate a different kind of sensitivity, one that allows us to recognize what is actually happening and respond appropriately.
From my own perspective, grounded in Evolutionary Enlightenment, I see intuition as closely related to the meeting of Being and Becoming. When we are deeply present, less identified with our personal fears, desires, and assumptions, we can become more sensitive to the movement of life itself. We may recognize possibilities that our rational mind has not yet understood, or sense what is needed in a particular situation before we can fully explain why.
This doesn’t make intuition infallible, nor does it diminish the importance of rational thinking. We need both. But perhaps intuition allows us to participate more consciously in the unfolding of reality, rather than approaching it exclusively through our ideas about how things should be.
Towards the end of our conversation, Tiokasin suggested that perhaps the Third Attractor is already here. We don’t need to create it; we need to become aware of it. I am still reflecting on this, because my understanding of evolution includes the genuine emergence of something new, and I believe our conscious participation matters. But I also recognize that meaningful participation requires a sensitivity to the larger process of which we are part.
Perhaps intuition is one of the ways through which this sensitivity becomes possible.
And perhaps this is also where the distinction between artificial and living intelligence becomes most interesting. AI may eventually surpass us in many of the capabilities we currently associate with intelligence. But the capacity to be deeply present within the living process, to sense our relationship with the whole and respond from that awareness, may be something fundamentally different.
I don’t know whether this dimension of intuition can ever be reproduced artificially. But I am increasingly convinced that it is something we need to rediscover and cultivate in ourselves.
If we want to consciously participate in the emergence of a different future, perhaps our greatest challenge is to develop our extraordinary intellectual and technological capacities without losing touch with the intuitive intelligence of life itself.
