Suffer the little children...

[BlueSky_TheMan]

What happens internally when I feel/see/understand/experience (pick a word you like) these moments of insight or correct knowledge? Intuition is not far off. It’s that feeling you get when searching for the answer to a question someone has verbalized. In your head you run thru a list of possible answers, and you can get suggestions from others too. You grade each answer…. That’s pretty close, No that’s not it, maybe, that doesn't sound right etc, but you keep looking for another possible answer. Why keep searching? You keep searching because the light bulb hasn’t come on yet. That moment when you know beyond any doubt that you just received the answer. You feel lighter than air you feel peaceful. If you’ve never experienced that, I don’t know how to explain it to you in a manner that would do it justice. And the knowledge I’m talking about here is not “ oh that’s right, his name was John”. I’m talking about in depth questions that require deep answers.

I have no doubt that there is something chemically going on similar to your explanation. My question then becomes which came first the insight or the chemical reaction? Did the insight cause the chemical change or did the chemical change cause the insight. Do you know of any studies or empirical evidence that sufficiently proves this one way or the other?

[Pangloss62]

My question then becomes which came first the insight or the chemical reaction? Did the insight cause the chemical change or did the chemical change cause the insight. Do you know of any studies or empirical evidence that sufficiently proves this one way or the other?

Whoa. I have to work right now, but I'll get back to ya on this one.

Originally Posted by Pangloss62

Well, maybe all those people I saw going to that Heinlein session had "something in common." Whether they were victims or perpetrators of incest, I could not tell; maybe neither.

What is special about Heinlein; in a sentence.

You can't really do that with an artist... he was years ahead of his time, great artists today still pay tribute (copy) to him.
The Heinlein thing with "incest" is that he deals with issues that are common to many in his books. Many siblings close in age go through a "curiosity" period with each other and the Oedipus complex is a real thing for many, even if for a very short time... in some of his books he touches on these things.
Problem is that the sickness of the Victorians is still, very much, with us.

[Jordon]

Tell him he's a lunatic. Everyone knows that dead babies go in the blender; baptized babies go first.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Pangloss62

What is special about Heinlein, in a sentence[?]

A sentence? I think a better, far more complete answer would be to use a whole novel.

I found Starship Troopers a seminal experience in my early teens, but I think I would recommend the even thicker Time Enough For Love, his masterwork, as the what's-special. Like most Heinlein prose, it's transparent and reads easily -- we're not dealing in Frank Herbert epigrams here, but a prose style that doesn't look like a style. It's a speedy read.

It's also probably the work that led rkzenrage to put out that incest teaser -- though a subtheme running through this book is how hard a normally-fertile man who lives eight hundred years has to work to avoid incestuous contacts, by his stern standards, with his remote descendants. It's the avoidance of incest that's the theme, not incest.

The story's almost like something Roger Zelazny might have done -- many of his heroes and villains seem very ordinary people on the surface, but underneath they have something so remarkable as to render them well-nigh freakish. Heinlein's transparent prose, though, isn't the Zelazny near-poetry.