6. Impact of samskaras on intuition and innovation🔗

Intuition is a wonderful subject. If you ask modern day CEOs, how they took major decisions in their lives, what caused the turning point in their lives, again and again their answer surprises us. Again and again they tell us that their success came from something beyond their intellect, something that gave them the energy or the guts to take the decisions. This is not just the case with successful CEOs, it is the same with scientists also.

The other day I had a chance to have lunch with Dr Charles Townes⁹. I asked him ‘Sir, how did your discovery happen? How were you able to do it?’ He answered in a beautiful way, ‘I was just sitting in a park in Washington DC; suddenly something happened. The conclusion was there in me. Suddenly the conclusion was revealed to me. I penned down what I experienced. Now I had a big difficulty. I had the conclusion but not the steps. I was not able to present this to anybody else because I knew only the conclusion, I didn’t know the steps.’

This happened not only with Charles Townes, it had also happened with Albert Einstein¹⁰. He says, ‘Whatever new happened to me, came through intuition and not through intellect.’ He summed it up beautifully, saying, ‘The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.’

Whether we believe it or not or accept it or not, there is something called intuition. Of course, even Albert Einstein says this is a gift, because we are not sure when it will come and whether it will come or not.

But yogis, the mystics, say again and again, you can work for it and you can be sure about it. You don’t have to think that intuition is a gift. You can work for it. It can become a part of your life. Whatever new things have happened, have happened only through intuition, only when something has happened beyond your intellect and your whole being is integrated.

When you are at your peak, something opens. You may call it revelation or intuition, which happens beyond intellect. Mystics have again and again said that it is a science. If you can tune yourself to this intuition or this energy, which is continuously available in your being, you can use this in your regular life. Mystics again and again say it is an incident, you can make it happen. They know how to make it happen. We will see how you can awaken that power inside your being. We will see how the intuitive skills can be linked to the workings of the mind which I discussed earlier.

Before we discuss intuition in greater detail, let us first dispel the myths that intuition is some kind of a ‘fluke’ of nature. I would like you to understand that intuition is a skill that can be developed just as any other skills that you acquire. It comes from you, from no one else! Because we have not experienced that zone, that part, that dimension of our being, we have forgotten it. Someone asked me in a meditation program, ‘I remember someone and the next moment the phone rings and he is there on the line. I remember someone at a party and next moment I see him.’ I asked the people in the program if this kind of an incidence had happened to them at least once in their lifetime. More than seventy percent of the people said this had happened! If it happens in one person’s life once, you can say it is a coincidence. But if it happens with seventy percent of people, it cannot be called a coincidence! There is more to it. There is some logic behind it.

We may not be able to know logically but we cannot brush it aside. When you know the logic, we call it an incident. When you don’t know the logic, you call it a coincidence. Nothing can happen without a cause on planet earth. It is always cause and effect. When you know the cause and effect link, you call it an incident. When you don’t know, you call it a coincidence. In trying to understand the process of intuition, let us refer back to the mind map we discussed earlier. We talked about how the process of taking information from a sense such as the eye works through chakshu (Digital Signal Processor), chitta (memory), manas (mind) and then takes a quantum jump to the ego where the decisions are clouded by samskaras or engraved memories.

The process in the gap between the eye and mind is conscious. You are aware of this process. It happens with your awareness. But you are not aware about the mind to ego process. Many a time, the process happens without your awareness. You decide against your logic. You decide against your thought process. For example, according to the data that you have collected, you know that smoking is injurious to health, it is not good for your body or mind. But when the mind takes an unconscious leap to the ego, you simply take the decision to smoke!

The conscious process says, ‘No, it is not good for health.’ But the unconscious process says…it doesn’t even say, it just takes the decision and you execute. These decisions are not under your control because the unconscious is very powerful.

The unconscious can be used in three ways – at the instinct level, intellect level and intuition level. As long as the unconscious is filled with negative memories and restlessness, it works at the instinct level. You decide just instinctively. You don’t even know why you are angry. Suddenly you burst. Sometimes, when you see some activities or some words that you speak, you feel it is not me. You do something and then you think, ‘This is not me, how did I do it? How did I allow this to happen?’ This happens because the unconscious is working in the instinct level.

Many times, you just associate things without even any logical connection. For example, if you have been disturbed by somebody who was wearing a white dress, the moment you see somebody wearing a white dress, the past memory comes up and you feel the anger. This is the instinct level. Without your conscious mind, without even you understanding, just like that it happens.

If your unconscious is loaded with samskaras, if your unconscious is restless, you will be at the instinct level. The next is the intellect level. You are conscious but you don’t have enough enthusiasm. You just go with a conscious mind but you are not creative, not innovative. You don’t take big steps, you don’t grow. It is just like a faithful servant as Albert Einstein says. The intellect is a faithful servant. You can be a servant throughout your life. You can be just a servant, but nothing more or big can happen through you. You will be collecting the data, processing it and delivering it, nothing more than a computer. If you are standing only at the intellect level, you are not using your potential to the maximum, to the extent to which it is supposed to be used.

The next is intuition. To understand intuition you need to go deep into the whole science. Only then you will be able to understand what I mean by the word ‘intuition’. Intuition is something which happens to you beyond your intellect. Suddenly you know for sure that this is the right thing and you have enough energy also to do it. But you don’t know the steps how you came to the conclusion but you know for sure this is right.

This energy is needed whenever you are faced with a situation where there is no precedence - when you are stuck with minimum data and you need to take decisions or you have a lot of choices and you are not able to decide what you are supposed to do. In these types of situations, the intuition energy can help you. The intuitive power can give you the courage or give you the right choice. Intuition again and again gives you the energy not only to decide but to execute what you have decided.

People ask me, ‘How do I find out whether I am having intuition or I am just intellectual? Sometimes I am confused about whether it is intellect or intuition.’ I tell them, be very clear, if you are confused, it is only intellect. The very confusion shows that it is only intellect. When you experience intuition, not only you get the intellectual clarity, the answer, but you also get enough power to execute it. The potential power which is inside your being is just unleashed. You open up and just like that you start expressing it, executing it.

Now the next question: How to awaken the intuition? How to awaken the intuitive power? If you can consciously give rest to it for a while, the energy which is in that unconscious level will open up. Usually when the unconscious level energy opens up, first whatever we suppressed will come out. Next, a pure energy which we call intuition will start to express.

When pure energy starts expressing from the unconscious level, you don’t use the unconscious at the instinct level or intellectual level. You use it for intuition. The higher level energy starts happening in you. And of course, above all, the mystics demonstrated to us over thousands of years that the higher level energy heals you physically, mentally and emotionally. Apart from healing, this can help reduce the stress and help decide spontaneously.

Spontaneity has nothing to do with data which you collect, it is something to do with the way in which you process the data. The same data, same information can be processed in many ways. Intuition is all about how you process and how you come to the conclusion beyond your intellect. We can prepare ourselves, we can tune ourselves to this intuitive energy through techniques and methods which we call meditation. In the East we use the word ‘meditation’ to tune ourselves with the higher energy, which is in our being, which continuously invites us again and again to experience it. Whenever you find time, sit by yourself. You can always see, we give appointment to everybody, but never give appointment to ourselves. If you have given appointment to yourself, you can always see that some part of your being wants to express, wants to do something more, but we never give chance or time to that part, to that portion of our being. We are so caught up with our intellect. We think that our intellect is the ultimate, but again and again mystics prove something more than intellect is possible.

In any discovery or invention, you can see that the role of intuition is always there. Whether it is Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton¹¹, they have had something beyond intellect. Something beyond intellect has happened in them. This same energy exists in all of us. This energy can also express in all of us if we can tune ourselves to that energy. Tuning ourselves to that energy is what I call meditation.

At the end of this chapter I have given you a simple technique to cleanse yourself of the samskaras and awaken this dormant energy just after a few days of practice. When I say a few days, I mean just 2 or 3 days. This is more than enough to tune yourself with this intuition. As of

now, we are using this unconscious energy either at the instinct level or the intellect level. It can be tuned and you can use it at the intuition level to make the decision.

Let me give some more information on the subject of intuition since it is very important for you to convince yourself that:

Your mind works through instinct, intellect and intuition. Through instinct, your mind decides unconsciously by negative memory and restlessness. If you are disturbed by a white dress, a nurse would disturb you unconsciously. Through intellect you work at the conscious level but not energetically, not enthusiastically. You work as a computer, as a robot. In intuition, you suddenly know what is right. You don’t know how, but you have energy. You have minimum data, no precedence. You have many choices, and suddenly one pops up. Intuition gives you the power to decide and implement.

Let me explain this in another way.

We have two levels of consciousness and two levels of thoughts. In the waking state you have ‘I’ consciousness and thoughts (conscious state, called jagrat in Sanskrit). In dreams you have thoughts but no ‘I’ consciousness. The frequency of thoughts is more than the frequency of ‘I’ consciousness. That is why in the dream state (subconscious state, called swapna in Sanskrit), you cannot control your dreams. The dreams will happen as they want.

But in the waking state, you can control your thoughts. In deep sleep you have neither ‘I’ consciousness nor thoughts (unconscious state, called sushupti in Sanskrit). There is a fourth state which you have never experienced, what I call intuition or meditation. In this state, you have ‘I’ consciousness but no thoughts. There is no term in the domain of psychology to describe this state. In Sanskrit this state is called sushupti . This is what I call meditation or intuition or thoughtless awareness. This state is also called the state of Samadhi. If you can experience this zone, this fourth state, you can experience the consciousness, what I call beyond intellect. It is the state where there is bliss or peace or intuition.

The practical use of this fourth state is it can give you so much of creativity, courage and confidence, you can decide spontaneously. The ability to take spontaneous decisions is what I call responsibility. The more you are able to decide spontaneously, the more you become responsible. There are so many situations where you cannot work with just data. First of all, data will not be available, or very little data will be available. There will be no precedence like decisions taken by your elders etc. So in these type of situations, you need something more than what you call intellect, you need something beyond just your data. You need what I call the ‘thoughtless awareness’. If you experience just a glimpse, not only in your life at office or at the corporate level, even in your relationships, it can totally transform you.

There are so many other benefits when this state is experienced. You will see tremendous improvement in your relationships at all levels, in the organization and in your personal life. Relationship failures happen because of our unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is sometimes also called the reactive mind. In the reactive mind we are always collecting arguments and then passing judgments on some person or a particular incident. You decide he or she is wrong, then you go around collecting some arguments to support your judgment. It means you are only working at the instinct level.

Sometimes instinct and intuition look the same. People ask me how to differentiate. In intuition, you will be tremendously energetic and alive. With instinct, you will feel tremendously drained. Whenever you use your intellect and feel drained, be very clear you are working at the instinct level. Many times, when you work from anger and other emotions, you just decide instinctively, then you understand and think: why did I do this? Then you feel guilt. Guilt is the gift from the unconsciousness or the unconscious decision-making.

If we can experience this fourth state what I call meditation, surely we will be able to harness the energy, which is in our being, what I call intuition. This fourth state was not explored by the modern Freudian system of psychology. But this fourth state of sushupti or Samadhi where there is thoughtless awareness is the space where intuition and intelligence is expressed. It is an untapped state in most people and organizations. Those who can consciously tap this state can get tremendous personal and organizational benefits.

In conclusion, being a true leader is to be able to function from the plane of intuition rather than logic, to have complete clarity in decision-making, and thus to make decisions and execute efficiently, accurately and in a stress-free manner.