Opening Our Mind To Intuition

Let me narrate to you an incident that actually happened:

In one of the THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM Spurana meditation programs that I conduct, which is the second level of meditation programs that we have after the first level of chakra energization courses called Ananda Spurana Program (ASP), we had a lady who was terrified of eating ice creams.

At the very thought of an ice cream, let alone eating one, she used to contract a cold. While speaking to her, I found that the basis of this trauma lay in her childhood.

When she was a child, her mother used to tell her that she would get a cold every time she wanted to eat an ice cream. This thought was embedded in her unconscious and even after she grew up, the fear was so powerful that she used to get a cold at the very thought of an ice cream.

This is the power of the unconscious. I advised her to eat an ice cream to her heart's content without any fear, and told her that I will take care of anything that happened. She followed my words and ate an ice cream. She found that after that, her fear of eating ice creams left her totally and she did not contract a cold either. She was simply thrilled. She felt she had overcome a large obstacle in life.

When the fear of the ice cream was brought to conscious awareness from the unconscious, it simply disappeared, that's all, nothing else.

As we saw earlier, our mind works at three levels; instinct, intellect and intuition. When working through instinct, our mind decides by negative memory, unconsciously.

For example, if as a child, we have had a bad experience in a hospital, we may associate that unpleasant experience with the white dresses of doctors and nurses. Every time we come across a white dress, say of a nurse or some other uniformed person in another environment, we would be disturbed without knowing the reason why. This is instinctive behavior.

When working through the intellect, we work at a conscious level but not energetically, not enthusiastically; we work as a computer, as a robot, running to logic for every small or big thing.

However, when working at the level of intuition, we suddenly know what is right. We may have minimum data, no precedence to support our decisions: but we know. We are presented with many choices and suddenly one pops up. Intuition not only gives us the power to decide but also the energy to implement the decision. When we work at the level of intuition, we will feel rejuvenated at the end of the day.

People ask me, 'Master, how do we know whether our decisions are instinctive, intellectual or intuitive?'

Be very clear: If you feel guilty, you are operating at the instinct level; if you are confused, you are operating at the intellect level. When you are in the intuition level, you will be very clear about your decisions and they will also provide you the energy to go ahead; you will feel light and blissful.

So how can we awaken this intuition? All you need to do is to give your conscious mind a rest. You may ask, 'how'?

We live between two levels of 'I' consciousness and two levels of thoughts. Just look at this diagram here:

When we are awake, we operate with self-awareness or 'I' consciousness and thoughts in us. In Sanskrit this is called the jāgrat state. This is the state normally referred to as the conscious or waking state, since we are seemingly aware of what we do and what is going on around us when we are in this state. Whatever decisions we take in this state are based on logic and rationale.

The second state that we operate in daily is one where we are not at all conscious of ourselves, that is the 'I' awareness is absent, but thoughts are there. This is the state we are in when we are dreaming in our sleep. This state is referred to as the subconscious state - the state with no 'I' consciousness but with thoughts. In Sanskrit this is called the swapna state.

A third state, which too is a daily occurrence, is the state of deep sleep in which we have neither 'I' consciousness nor thoughts. This is called the unconscious state. In Sanskrit it is called sushupti.

There is a fourth and final state which most of us are not familiar with. During this state of our existence, we have no thoughts at all. However, we are fully aware; the 'I' consciousness remains totally active. In Sanskrit, this state of the mind is called turiya or samādhi. This is actually a nomind state, where the '1' exists but with no thoughts. This is the state of enlightened Masters.

Modern psychology is not even aware of this state. This state of meditation or intuition or thoughtless awareness. If we can enter this fourth state, we can experience creativity, courage, confidence; we can take spontaneous decisions; we then take responsibility; we can decide based on very limited data with no precedence; we get the power and courage to do anything. Our relationships can change.

Often in relationships, we tend to make a judgment first and then collect arguments to support the judgment through our unconscious, reactive, instinctive level of the mind.

Two men were talking about their wives across the table having tea together. One man said. 'Whatever I do she always sees me through her pre-conceived notions. She never wants to see things as they are. She never wants to hear both sides of the argument. How is your wife, by the way?'

The other man replied. 'Well, my wife will listen to both sides of an argument. But only if the argument is on at the neighbor's flat.

We are all like this most of the time. We rarely see a person with a fresh perception. We see only those arguments that support our pre-conceived judgment of that person. If you scan your life and see how many times you have done this, you will understand what I am trying to say. This is what I call selective amnesia: just remembering the things that support your preconceived notions and judgments. Anyhow, this is how relationships suffer, when we act out of instinct or intellect.

How can we differentiate between intuition and instinct? When we act instinctively, we feel drained. For instance, when we react in anger, we feel guilt. But when we act intuitively, out of just resonating with Existence, we feel energized. We are in command in a very enjoyable way.

People ask me, 'Master, how do you have so much energy? You heal so many people but at the end of the day, you have the same energy that you started with. "

Let me tell you: If you operate from an intuition level, you will have access to boundless energy. You will not feel tired after doing something; you are totally in tune with Existence and the energy of the entire cosmos opens up to you. When you do something whole-heartedly, you don't feel tired or for that matter, proud of having done a great service or sacrifice. You accept and welcome everyone and everything in life with a deep sense of gratitude. You realize that life itself is a great gift to you from Existence and that humility makes you do everything with love and compassion.

You may ask: Where does intuition come from?

It comes from you, from within you, from no one else, from nowhere else.

How many times you have experienced it yourself! When you hear the phone, you suddenly remember someone and she is there on the line. You think of some one at a party and then you see him that very day in some other place.

In many of my audiences, such experiences happen to over half of the people. When we know how something happens, we call it an incident; if we don't know how some thing happens, we say it is a coincidence. There is never a coincidence in life. It is just that we don't understand the cause and effect of the events and so we call it a coincidence.

What happens is, knowingly or unknowingly, we fall into this fourth state of thoughtless awareness whenever you are really rested, when you are really in bliss, for just a few seconds. When you fall into this state, for those few moments, you are at the intuitive level. This happens to us more often than we realize. The problem is that we just do not encourage this in us and so we don't fall into this state consciously at all; we fall into it accidentally. It is something like this: If you do not encourage a child to speak, it will stop speaking. Whenever we experience this intuition in us, we have fallen into a meditative state just for those few moments. But we discard it as a coincidence or call it a miracle and move on; that is the problem. Most of the discoveries of scientists have happened when they simply fell or stumbled into moments such as these.

In the waking state you can control your thoughts, though it may be difficult. You can divert your thoughts from unpleasant to more pleasant thoughts. It is always your choice to be with thoughts or not, and what kind of thoughts you want to be with.

In the dream state, if you try to control your thoughts you will wake up. If you dream that you are being chased by some one with a knife, just at the point when the attacker reaches you, you will wake up, perhaps screaming. Dreams are a catharsis. Catharsis is a process of letting go of your suppressions. Suppressions need to be let off. Dreams are the let off mechanism.

Modern day psychologists talk of the harvesting power of dreams; these are very dangerous practices. If you do not rest in your dreams, you will be in trouble. Sometimes you wake up in the middle of a dream with a solution to a problem you went to sleep with. If you feel energized at this point, then go with it; your solution is intuitive. If you feel drained out, you are damaging your dream process. So stop this practice.

Let the energy at your unconscious level emerge. When this opens up, whatever you suppress will come out and then pure energy will emerge. This process of thoughtless awareness will activate your intuition. This higher-level energy heals you physically, emotionally and mentally. It helps you to decide spontaneously as to how to process the data without using your intellect. This process is called meditation. It tunes your intellect with this higher energy.

Whenever you find time, give an appointment to yourself; some part of your being wants to express itself more. We never give our being time. We are always ready to give appointments to other people, but never ready to give appointment to ourselves. The moment I ask you to meditate for 30 minutes, those thirty minutes become the most precious, most unaffordable time in your daily life. Until then, you would have been wasting so much of time, much more than 30 minutes on other useless things. But when I say that you have to sit down and meditate, you will come up with the excuse that you don't have time. This is because we are so ignorant of what we really need. Meditation is a basic need for us.

One man asked me the other day, 'Swami, can we use intuition in a corporate team environment? '

You can certainly use intuition in a team environment. It can work very well in a team environment. Intuition will always be complementary. You do not have to worry about creating any conflict. There is conflict only when you cannot look another person in the eve, when you cannot be honest. When you are intuitive, you have the power to be honest. You have the power to create the path to reach others. Your intellect gets sharpened to express yourself intelligently.

Normally we do not trust our own being. From a young age, we are not allowed to believe in ourselves. We do not trust ourselves. It is said that the strength of a chain is determined by its weakest link. You cannot apply the same thing to yourself. We always judge ourselves by the weakest moments of our lives. This is not the right way to treat ourselves.

Only because we do this, we lose faith in ourselves. Only because we do this, we don't have enough courage to explore the intuition hidden in us. Why not measure yourself with the strongest experience you have had? After all, your strongest experience has already proven and given you a glimpse of the immense potential that you have, is it not? So why settle for anything less? Be courageous and don't set any limits on your capacity.

Don't be a prisoner of the past; be the architecture of your future. Make your own destiny because vou are the only person who can and will make it. I always tell people: Don't come to me to predict your future. Come to me if you wish to change your future! I can guide you to change your future. Always remember: When you give incentive and inspiration to the sparks of possibility, they will grow into the flames of big achievements.

You do not trust your being, your body intelligence. For example, the moment you have a headache, what do you do? You simply take a pill. You do not even try to see the underlying symptoms, the signs that your body is trying to give you about what the problem is. You don't have the openness to try to relate with your body and watch the headache disappear on its own. The headache can disappear on its own; it is perfectly possible. You do not have to believe what I say. I am not asking you to believe; I am just asking you to be open and to trust.

If you receive with an open and inquisitive and curious mind, you will experiment with these ideas and see for yourself. To know the taste of an apple, even a thousand words will not be sufficient to describe it completely and accurately. All you need to do is to have a bite. You don't have to believe that the sun rises in the east; you see it everyday with your eyes. Similarly, experiment with these ideas and know for yourself.

Too much questioning makes us schizophrenic. Jesus says, 'Love thy neighbor as you love yourself". However, we do not love ourselves. We need to first love ourselves. Only then, we can integrate ourselves.

The peak of intellect is intelligence. The peak of intelligence is intuition. Our conscious mind works against intuition since it poses a risk to the mind and intellect. Mind is always counterintuitive. You need to jump before you think; otherwise you will never jump. You have to stop thinking before you can jump intuitively.

A successful CEO's book becomes a Bible, a law. Not always are his words intuitive, they are mostly informative, coming from intellect and not replicable by others. Yet people believe, because it appeals to logic. Life is not logical. The benchmark of intuition is totality, real happiness, inside as well as outside, not logic.

There is no separation between the inner and outer world. It is the inner world that is projected as the outer world, whether you believe it or not, accept it or not, want it or not. Your being is the only world. You start creating and you forget you are creating. When your desires come true, you say they are not yours.

Before inviting, you don't realize whom you are inviting. Till things come up at the conscious level, you don't realize what you are asking for at the unconscious level. Accidents are created by us. They do not just happen. You are tuning into incidents, possibilities of your life.

Just like the antenna attracts the satellite waves, your mental setup attracts the life incidents towards you.

If you are blissful, people with similar attitude will be attracted towards you. If you are dull, lethargic and depressed, the same type of people will be attracted towards you. You will fall in line with the people who have the same mental setup. You attract the same incidents.

In fact, this is something that has been gaining ground and visibility even in the field of science. Some of the laws and observations of quantum physics are proving that the act of observation itself plays a major role in the result, in how the object is seen.

In the same way, in life, at every moment, we are presented with infinite possibilities. We don't seem to see all of them though because we are the ones who have restricted our vision to this small keyhole made up of our past experiences. We choose to see the present through the lens of the past; so we don't see the present as it is. We see it distorted by the filter of the past.

We accumulate from birth, or mental attitudes from previous births, desires, beliefs and value systems without any logic or awareness. Studies on children have shown that till adolescence, their brain wave patterns are in the theta, delta and alpha modes, which are all the sub conscious modes of high suggestibility. In fact, memories start getting collected in the womb and parental activities influence the mind of the infant.

Whatever we do in adult life is influenced by these carried over memories, which are emotion filled and highly influential, which is what we refer to as samskara. Samskara rule our lives, not our rational thinking.

Our perceptions of the future are all based on our conclusions of our past. It is all distorted by our experiences of the past. These memories of the past that are stored and retrieved by the subconscious and unconscious mind simply put their signature on whatever we see around us continuously. As a result, we see what we want to see rather than what is there in reality.

In a fish-tank, the bubbles arise continuously from the bottom of the tank in a vertical fashion, but at the surface, you see a number of bubbles floating around near each other. These bubbles have no connection horizontally or vertically; all they share is the source from which they arise. Similarly, in our mind, any two thoughts are absolutely independent and have nothing in common between them except their origin. We, however, connect our experiences and create a nonexistent shaft of random thoughts. While connecting, depending on whether we seek pain or pleasure at that moment, we try to make a shaft of pain by correlating all random painful thoughts or make a shaft of pleasure by connecting all random thoughts that give us pleasure. This shaft is purely imaginary but we give it so much life and allow it to control us.

We need to understand and internalize the fact that these thoughts, memories and desires have no substance. They are not real in the present moment. In the present moment all that is real is what happens to you at that moment; not what happened before or what will happen later. This is the only way to take control of your life. Just be in the present.

Whether you believe it not, life is totally under your control. Intuition through meditation is the way to bring it under control. So, take charge of your life because you are the only one who can live it!