Nadene Goldfoot
The famous Maimonides or the Rambam: (1135-1204)Philospher, Halakhist, and medical writer; Left Cordova, Spain when 13 with family to escape the Almohade persecutions. Championed a highly noetic approach to thinking, viewing human intellectual perfection as the ultimate goal. He argued that the highest form of worship involves the intellect directly grasping divine truths.
Reached Palestine in 1165. Wrote paper on Jewish calendar, intercalation in 1158 and works on logic and the 613 precepts of our Mosaic Law. Unable to settle in Palestine, suffering from Crusades, went onto Egypt in 1167, then became spiritual head of Cairo Jewry. After 1170 became physician to the Viceroy of Egypt. Died in 70th year, buried in Tiberias. Wrote on much more.
Noetic is a formal adjective that means of or relating to the intellect, mind, or rational thought. It describes knowledge that is apprehended by reason rather than sensory perception.Jewish thinkers engage with noetic concepts through several distinct historical and mystical lenses: There is an intelligence threshold people must reach before being highly creative after this threshold is reached there is no strong relationship between creativity and intelligence.
Creative innovation is heavily dependent upon disengagement and divergent thinking as well as subsequent convergent thinking and productivity. The mean by which a person's brain functions is dependent upon both nature (genetically determined) and nature (learned). In regard to nature, from their earliest age many Jewish children are encouraged to question as well as taught that disobedience in the pursuit of truth and justice is not only justified but is also desirable. Thus, disobedience in this regard is not the cultivation of insolence, but rather gives rise to disengagement and divergent thinking, the critical elements of creativity. Training can also alter the brain, and the Jewish people success in creativity may not be related to their genetically determined IQ, but rather the learned propensity to earnestly question and seek better alternatives.
1. The Noetic Turn in Jewish Theology
In late antiquity and the Middle Ages, Jewish philosophers translated earlier prophetic and apocalyptic visions into noetic categories. Others besides Maimonides:
- Abraham Abulafia: A 13th-century mystic who developed "Ecstatic Kabbalah," utilizing noetic techniques of letter combinations and breathing to induce altered states of consciousness and achieve prophecy.
- Philo of Alexandria: Blended Hellenistic philosophy with Jewish scripture, arguing that the divine mind (Logos) and human intuition are the highest forms of apprehending God.
- The "Noetic Turn": Later medieval and Hasidic thinkers re-conceived concepts like angels, heavenly realms, and God's throne as noetic perceptions rather than physical locations or visions.
2. Kabbalah and Meditative Noesis
Jewish mysticism relies heavily on the belief that the human intellect can reach higher spiritual dimensions.
- Hitbodedut: This meditative practice, popularized in Hasidism (especially by Rebbe Nachman of Breslov), involves quiet, contemplative isolation to achieve a noetic connection with the Creator.
Peter Hurkos was an unusual man I read about long ago. Born Pieter van der Hurk in the Netherlands, he was a house painter who claimed to have manifested extrasensory perception (ESP) in 1941 after surviving a four-story fall from a ladder and suffering a severe brain injury.
Hurkos later relocated to the United States and became a famous "psychic detective" who consulted on high-profile cases, including the Boston Strangler and the Manson Family murders. How can this be? This was a mystical experience. Wasn't this an example of a noetic science? Hurkos became a popular entertainer known for performing psychic feats before live and television audiences. With each reading of people's future, he would be drained. It was very tiring for him.
Despite many proofs that he was a fake, Hurkos remained famous. There have been several television specials about him, including: the fact that Hurkos is mentioned in the 1979 Stephen King novel The Dead Zone. The novel seems to imply that Hurkos actually did have psychic powers. Uri Geller was another Mystic. Uri Geller Hebrew: אורי גלר; born 20 December 1946) is an Israeli-British illusionist, magician, television personality, and self-proclaimed psychic. He is known for his trademark television performances of spoon bending and other illusions. In standard vocabulary, "noetic" describes processes that are intellectual and driven by logic and reason. For example, evaluating a math problem or using deductive reasoning represents noetic thought.
2. Philosophy & Psychology
In philosophy, noetic concepts refer to the action of perceiving or "pure thinking." Philosopher William James famously used the term "noetic quality" to describe mystical experiences, defining them as states of insight into depths of truth that the normal, calculating intellect cannot reach.
The word gained public recognition through the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), a California-based research institute co-founded in 1973 by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell. It broadly explores the intersection of objective science and subjective inner experiences, such as intuition, consciousness, mind-matter interactions, and human potential. Edgar Mitchell In his dialogue with Walter Link, we learn more about Edgar’s Mitchell’s epiphany in space, and consider the science of consciousness – are our current paradigms adequate for studying consciousness, which is at the root of all human experience?
Edgar Mitchell: As we were coming back, I had the realization that perhaps the story of ourselves as told by our science was incomplete and perhaps flawed. And the story of ourselves as told by our religious traditions were archaic and perhaps flawed. And that maybe now that we were spacefaring, beginning to be a spacefaring civilization, we had to re-ask these questions all over again from a modern point of view.
Edgar Mitchell: When I got back I immediately wanted to try to understand what was this experience of ecstasy and overwhelming feeling of accomplishment and joy at seeing the heavens like that. I could find nothing in the science literature, and I could find nothing in the religious literature. So I turned to some anthropologists and paleontologists over at the local university and asked them to help me, if they could find it.
Edgar Mitchell Studies Map
And they came back a short time later and said they had found in the Sanskrit of ancient India, 5000 years or so ago, a description that might fit what I was talking about. And I said, what is it? They said, it’s called samadhi. I said, well, what does that mean? And they said, it means to see things as they appear to the eyes but experience them internally, viscerally and emotionally as ecstasy and and joy and wonder. And a sense of oneness with everything.
And that was the point. I had experienced a sense of unity, of oneness with the universe itself. And I realized from my training at MIT and Harvard when I got my PhD and studying astronomy there that our understanding is that the matter in the universe is created in star systems. The stars are furnaces for creation of matter.
- Math Competitions: The Noetic Learning Math Contest is a well-known biannual problem-solving competition for elementary and middle school students.
- Cybersecurity: Noetic Cyber is an enterprise technology platform that helps companies manage and control digital assets.
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