How Can I Stay Happy With My Own Decisions?

A lot of us have faced similar questions at some point in time in our lives. There are times when vou just don't want to take up the responsibility of the decision and see the effects of it. A CEO will tell you how tough it is to make the decision of laying off people who have worked hard for decades for the company; but he has to make them leave because of the tough economic conditions.

Or there are times when you feel passionately about some cause and put in all your effort to make it happen but others don't seem to feel it is as important as you do and you struggle to make them look at it your way. Decisions evoke different reactions and mixed feelings in all of us in various situations.

A small story:

A young girl was shopping for dresses.

She carried a pile of dresses and walked to the trial room and found that it was locked. The salesgirl at the shop told her that they close the trial rooms 15 minutes before closing the shop.

To the salesgirl's surprise, the young girl heaved a sigh of relief and said, 'Thank you so much! You have just saved me from spending 500 dollars and the headache of having to make tough decisions!'

We are all like the lady with the pile of clothes, ready to heave a sigh of relief to know that the trial rooms are closed for the day. Most of us are so happy not to have to decide. Some experts even go to the extent of advising that not taking decisions is quite ok, since not taking a decision is also a decision!

But, life is all about taking decisions. At every point in our lives, we are faced with situations that loudly call out to us to decide, even if that decision means that we flow with what ever happens.

We make our decisions at three levels within our mind-body system. At the very basic level, we react instinctively, without awareness, just like animals. We act before we think. We react viscerally. We take our decision out of our unconscious instincts. If we are not aware of what we are doing and why we are doing it and afterwards feel guilty about it, we are at the instinct level. This is the animal level.

Animals do not feel guilty when they react instinctively since that is their nature. As human beings, we feel guilty after we act instinctively. This is a common cycle we all go through in our every day lives. We act before thinking, and then go on a guilt trip. Try to understand, except when our lives are in danger, instinct is not our nature.

By the word instinct. I do not mean the natural instinct that is there in us. I mean the unconscious superficial level decisions that we make, without allowing our inner instinct to guide us. Our natural instinct is to flow with Existence. This is the way we ought to be. It comes from a deep connection that we are capable of with Existence. When we act from this, we will never get into wrong decisions or guilt. But this deep level instinct has been marred by our conditioning and life style. We therefore operate not from our basic instinct but from instinct at the superficial level, devoid of the touch of the Existential energy.

Psychologists have studied and found that children under the age of 7, function with their basic instinct and therefore live life spontaneously and in tune with Existence. If we just nurture their natural instinct and allow them to evolve, we will make them beautiful beings. But we keep telling them what to eat and what not to eat, what to do and what not to do. By and by, they lose touch with their natural instinct and slip into unconscious and confused instinct based actions; actions that stem out of a confused and heavy data bank of information. This is instinct based decision making.

Take the example of animals. They operate purely out of their basic and natural instinct, their connection with Existence. Have you seen a cow consulting a doctor or psychologist for clarity on matters regarding decisions on diet, habitat etc.? No! They simply flow in the right way, that's all. This way of functioning will never get you caught in the turmoil of decision making because you will not treat decision making as a separate task! The problem comes because you are treating it as a separate task, as an arduous task that calls for your energy and time. No! It is actually simply the way the river flows, that's all.

So try to understand the difference between desperate instinct and basic instinct. Desperate instinct is almost suicidal; you simply plunge headlong into decisions and suffer because of that. Basic instinct is liberation! It liberates you from the clutches of the so-called decision-making. It elevates you and shows you that you are a spiritual being in tune with the Cosmos. The more you dissolve into the feeling that you are the Cosmos and not any separate entity, the more relaxed you become, the more decisions simply happen!

At another level, the second level, we analyze things with our intellect till we are totally exhausted, before taking any decision. We go through various plans, reject one after another and decide to go with some plan of operation. This process of decision-making makes us feel tired and almost paralyzed.

And the pain is not over with the decision. We constantly make multiple guesses, revisit the situation and start all over again thinking about what else can go wrong with all those decisions that we have already made. As long as all our decisions are conscious and we are aware of why and how we are doing something, why we are thinking this way, we are in the intellect level, which is the human level. As humans, we worry.

Intellect can never give rise to whole and intelligent decisions. Intellect itself means fighting between the various fragments within ourselves in trying to reach a decision. Just imagine: if we tied four people together with a rope giving a little leeway, at the day, would any of them have achieved any fulfillment? If one tried to scratch his head, the rope will cause the other to stop what he was trying to do! If the other decided to take a few steps forward, another one will be stopped abruptly in what he was trying to do! It will be just a push and pull of things and finally, nothing concrete will get accomplished! But all four of them will be exhausted, is it not?! They are exhausted without achieving anything!

This is exactly how the intellect functions. All possibilities, all dilemmas, all so-called choices in decision-making stall the progress, and the decision that emerges may appear to be correct for that moment, but at the expense of much repentance with time.

When you are in the level of intellect, under the push and pull of emotions and thoughts while taking decisions, any decision that you take causes repentance is some form. For example, if after considerable contemplation, you take a decision to stop your education for a year and take up a job, you might excel in your job, but there will be a lingering regret that you stopped your education.

Your friends who are continuing to study will tell you are missing because you discontinued studies.

Your relatives will tell you that you are doing something totally wrong in not following the conventional routine of studies that has been laid out after deep study in earlier days.

When you listen to all this, your mind will start to waver. You will feel that you took a wrong decision. You will start shaking in fear that you have done something drastically wrong in your life.

But supposing, you had taken the decision to continue with your studies and not work, if someone came and told you how much work experience will open you out before continuing to study, you will repent then also!

You will feel, 'Oh God! What a golden opportunity I have missed. I could have learnt the nuances of work and then continued to study; then I would have been able to absorb education better' and what not.

Both ways, you will repent! Both ways, there is a push and pull. If you did one thing, the other thing will haunt you and if you did the other thing, the first thing will haunt you.

You will stop repenting only when you take a total decision. A whole decision. And when does this whole decision happen to you?

When you drop the divisions, when the four people become one and the rope vanishes, when you become integrated and get a clear vision from within, guided almost by an invisible but strong space within, whole decisions will start to happen in you.

When you decide through your intellect, you are deciding from the mind, superficially; when you decide from within, you are deciding through an expanse of space that does not hold any opinion, which does not know any binding words, which is not fragmented, which is not limited by any preconceived notions as to which is better or which is worse, which is pure love, which is pure innocence, which guides through a deep connection with ocean of Existence of which you are part.

This leads us to the third level of decision-making, what we call intuition! We go past the intellect, go past memory banks and delve into our innermost being in order to decide. Such decisions are

of the highest quality. When we are in this mode of decision-making, we don't feel tired or exhausted; we feel happy. We feel energized with such decisions. Whether we are doing anything or not. if we are continuously aware of where we are and what we are doing, and if we are continuously in a blissful state, we are in the intuition level. This is the super conscious or divine level. This intuitive state is our true nature, which is why it makes us blissful.

With intuitive decision-making, it not only makes the right decisions for us, it also gives us the energy to take it through.

People ask me, 'It is so important in corporate life to decide correctly. Otherwise we cannot succeed. How can we be perfect in our decision making?'

It is said that to be successful, all you have to do is to be correct more number of times than your opponent, that's all! So it is not such a serious and perfect thing that is impossible to achieve. It is perfectly possible to make the right decisions with your pure inner intelligence.

A small story:

Three nuns were walking in a forest.

They were returning to their monastery in the evening.

It was getting dark.

They heard running steps behind them and a man's voice shouted at them to stop.

The nuns were sure that the person following them had bad intentions.

They whispered to each other and one nun ran away to the left leaving the other two on the path.

The footsteps behind them continued to follow, but were now a lot closer than before.

Now, one of the two nuns ran away to the right through another path and the third one continued running straight.

After an hour, the three met up at the monastery gate.

The third nun had just reached there panting furiously and the other two asked anxiously, 'What happened, are you all right?'

She said. 'Yes. I am ok.'

They asked her fearing the worst, 'What did you do, what did the man do to you?'

She replied. 'Oh. nothing. He caught up with me all right and told me to take off my clothes. So I told him to take his pants down, while I lifted my skirt.'

'Then what happened?' the other two nuns screamed in unison.

The third nun continued, 'It is simple. A woman can run a lot faster with her skirt up than a man can with his pants down, so I escaped!'

So all you have to do is to out think your opponent. Your decision needs to be better than his, that's all. It does not have to be perfect! Just try to understand this logic. Then half the pressure of having to make perfect decisions will leave you. When we start aiming at perfection in our decisions, we expend our energy in it and don't achieve what we are aiming to achieve. Instead, if we allow a playfulness, an intelligence, a totality to prevail, the decisions will emerge effortlessly and they will also be the proper ones.

The mistake managers make is to think through their intellect. They exhaust their energy in thinking through their intellect. If you ask any of the great scientists and researchers who have invented and discovered great theories, again and again, they say that their success came from something beyond their intellect, something beyond logic and facts, something they are not able to place their fingers on, something that gave them the intelligence and guts to take effective decisions.

Descartes proudly declared, 'I think, therefore I am', and millions have echoed him over the centuries, equally proudly and equally blindly. We fail to realize as Descartes did, that the gift of intuition that transcends the intellect is what links us to the Cosmic Consciousness and therefore, makes us truly what we are.

What we need to imbibe is the truth of Vedanta - Hindu philosophy, that states: I am divine when I have no mind. When vou transcend the mind. transcend thoughts, and connect with the inner Self and are truly aware at all times, you are automatically in the state of intuition.

What scientists call serendipity, which is a natural happening without verifiable cause, is in fact, intuition. Almost all inventions and major discoveries are serendipitous. The scientist may have embarked upon a path that is logical and rational, but somewhere along the path there are revelations that are not part of the original script. We can make an endless list of them: The laws of gravity discovered by Newton when an apple fell on his head, the discovery of penicillin, the invention of the telephone and many other such discoveries and inventions without which our lives would not be complete today. They were all based on serendipitous accidents that were not part of the scientists' game plan.

One of the famous examples is that of Kekule, one of the scientists who were working on trying to explain the properties of a certain class of carbon compounds.

He was trying to make out the molecular structure of the chemical benzene, which had properties that could not be explained by the traditional molecular structure models that were available then. One night, he had a dream of a snake putting its tail in its mouth.

When he got up in the morning, he had deduced the molecular structure of benzene as a ringshaped structure!

This opened the doors for organic chemistry, which deals with a whole class of this type of compounds that have a ring structure, a molecular structure that had been unheard of till then.

Only intuition can enable this quantum leap in any field. With the rational, logical mind, you can only extrapolate from your past experiences because it cannot comprehend anything that is not already present in its database of experiences, in its familiar pattern of things.

How many times have we ourselves not experienced a strong gut feeling towards a decision but at that point find there is no logical explanation for it? You follow the decision and it takes you to the solution of the problem but the start of the path was not in rational and logical thinking.

It is not only the scientists; whether we believe it or not, whether we accept it or not, whether we understand it or not, we all have the gift of intuition. Ancient sages of Bharat, the great yogis say that we can all have intuition if we work for it. They have demonstrated that intuition happens beyond intellect. They are all living examples to prove the statement also.

These vogis say that intuition is beyond science, beyond rational thinking, beyond traditional logic. They insist that we can tune into intuition as a part of our regular lives; that it is not a gift for a chosen few. In the modern society, intuition is an accident we stumble upon it. With the vogis, it was a natural happening. The question, therefore, is not if we can all be intuitive, but merely how we can exercise our intuitive nature.

Many of the postulates and results in Vedic mathematics also fall into this category. Since they came out of tapping intuition that enables a direct quantum leap into the results. many of the results seem to be virtually impossible to be derived by rational thinking. Intuition is always a quantum leap, never a sequence of logical steps or any process.

If you look around, there is continuous intelligence and energy that is there to solve your problems. If you have lived for 50 years and still have problems, in spite of the experience you have, you are just disturbing yourself. You can live another 50 years based on your experience without worrying. This is the truth.

A small story:

A boss holds a meeting to organize for a farewell for one of his retiring staff members. He says. 'Here we have an employee who does not know the meaning of disloyalty and tiredness. What should we give him?'

A voice from the back resounded, 'A dictionary.'

If you want to solve problems you can try with logic, with your intellect. If you wish to dissolve problems for all times you need intuition.

Someone asked me. 'Is intuition an evolution of instinct?' I say: No.

Darwin's evolutionary theory breaks down at the human level. If Darwin's theory of evolution were to be true, all monkeys would be humans by now and humans would have evolved into something better like superhumans, is it not? But there are so many monkeys still remaining and man has been in this latest state of evolution for such a long time! He has not become a superhuman!

The underlying truth is that humans are the only species with consciousness. Buffaloes cannot become Buddhas or enlightened beings. however long and however much they try! Only human beings can become Buddhas and this is because they are pure consciousness. This has to be understood. It is because of our clear consciousness that intuition is possible.

The human brain stores memories and skills of our entire past: therefore, we actually know how to fly and to swim. Even if we do not know how to fly and swim in this birth, just by virtue of these stored memories and skills in our depths, we actually know these skills. It is just that we are conditioned to limit ourselves and have therefore forgotten our potential to fly and be free. We have lost both the instinct and the skill.

We have become thinkers. We know to execute any action of ours only by thinking first. The moment you think, you limit yourself. Thoughts connect the past and future. Thoughts are a sump between the past and future. If one of these, either the past or future is removed, all thinking stops.

The future is just a collection of our past. That is why, we do not have the intelligence to even make new mistakes; we just repeat our past mistakes! When we are in the present, the here and now zone, all that we are aware of is the present. Our mind stops when we are in the present. But it is not happy. The mind, just like any other being, has an instinct to survive. So, it comes up with all kinds of reasons why we should jump to the future because only then can it exist.

When we step into the present, we step out of time bound awareness. We step beyond tension. Our body stops producing adrenalin. Time bound awareness is mass, which is solid. Non-timebound awareness is pure energy, liquid, dynamic, bubbling and creative. We step out of our boundaries. We become free. We become intuitive.

When our thoughts reduce to zero, when they stop, our present vision extends into the past and future. We become free of time and space constraints.

The great sages of ancient Bharat measured time through the concept called kshana. Kshana is not chronological time. It was not measured as the amplitude of a pendulum or the frequency of an electronic chip. Kshana was not generic time, but individual time. Kshana is the time between any two thoughts in an individual. When I use the word individual, I mean that kshana varies from person to person; my kshana and your kshana are different.

In the case of the average person, in whom the mind is constantly active, desires and thoughts pour out without a stop; the time between two thoughts is very, very small, so small that you can't even make it out! In the case of an enlightened being, who is in a no-mind state, in whom there are no thoughts, kshana is infinite.

Kshana is the time between two thoughts. It is the space between two thoughts. This is time and space that Buddha referred to as shoonya, and what Sankara referred to as poorna. It is the no-mind zone, the mindful zone, in which you touch base with yourself. It is that present moment in which you come face to face with the divinity in you, when you recognize the cosmic energy that you are a part of.

When you are in that kshana, you are truly aware: you are energized and refreshed. The more you fall into that kshana, the more intuitive you become. Most often, we only accidentally fall into the kshana, and when this happens, we find miraculous revelations to us like what we discussed earlier. Meditation takes you into the awareness of this kshana.

When you are in front of an enlightened Master who is in a no-mind state, without thoughts, your own thought level comes down, and your kshana becomes longer. Without even trying you become calmer, more peaceful, and more aware.

The same experience occurs when you are in the energy field of an enlightened Master who is no longer in his body, but is in a Jiva Samadhi - where he entered into final resting and where his body has been placed and covered. Many of the great temples in Bharat such as Thirupati, Thiruvannamalai, Mantralaya and Palani are built around the burial spots of enlightened Masters and that is the reason why we feel such sanctity and peace in these locations.

They say that the idle mind is the devil's workshop. The idle mind meant here is very different from the idle mind we have been discussing. The idle mind that they talk about is a mind that is listlessly engaged. The idle mind that we are talking about is the mind that is empty of all thoughts, that has transcended thoughts, that has seen the Ultimate Truth and has died in its efforts. It is God's own workshop! They are two ends of the same spectrum. Of course, extremes always look alike!

Scriptures state that spending 11 kshanas in this zone of no-mind, without thoughts, enables one to alter the future and 22 kshanas in the time shaft zone leads to enlightenment. When we relax into our Aina chakra, our third eye energy center that is present between the brows, at zero

thoughts per second, we become intuitive, and can harness the Cosmic Intelligence or attain to enlightenment. We can then write our own destiny and become masters of our lives.

When we move into the present, into this intuitive state of no mind and no thoughts, and allow decisions to happen by themselves, choicelessly, without forcing them through logic and rationale, decisions will always be correct; because these decisions are driven by the cosmic energy.