Intuition

a natural ability or power that makes it possible to know something without any proof or evidence : a feeling that guides a person to act a certain way without fully understanding why…Merriam Webster

Have you ever felt the inner voice that tries to talk to you before you undertake a significant task in life? It tries to explain to you whatever you are doing is right or wrong; how you should/shouldn’t be taking that step. It tries to prevent you, sometimes even instigates you to do something. It gives you a spark of an idea to start a fire within you. It tries to possess you and wouldn’t even leave you till you do what it demands of you. It can be stubborn and it can be patient yet forgiving. However most of the time, you wouldn’t forgive yourself for not listening to its voice. The ancient people believed in the intuitive insights from the seers whom they referred to as the voice from god. Buddha taught that intuition, not reason is the source of ultimate truth and wisdom. Alberta Einstein was a strong believer in the intuitive knowledge and once famously remarked: ‘I believe in intuitions and inspirations…I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am’.

Frederich August Kekule spent years trying to perfectly describe the aromatic structure of benzene. Being a hydrocarbon, benzene couldn’t be described a simple or normal paraffin structure. He spent years if not decades of his life researching unsuccessfully about the same till there came a day when he dreamt of a snake gobbling its own tail. As the ouroboros form (also represented in the figurines of Shiva Nataraja) whirled mockingly before his eyes, he describes the eureka moment as a flash of lightning which awoke him in the night. Bedazzled he spent the rest of his night working on his life’s worth of calculations. Eventually he came up with the ring structure of benzene that is so common today. It changed the world forever with a marked effect in the field of pure and applied chemistry. Of the first 5 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, three of the winners were his students. I do not have to explain the effect it had on the hydrocarbon age and us understanding the properties of hydrocarbons.

Let us think for a moment as to who gave Kekule that idea or intuition? What made him dream about that snake? Is it the voice of God? Is it the spirits of the world as claimed by Aboriginals or natives? The whole premise about the movie Interstellar is based on how the future humans build the tesseract for Cooper to reach out to his daughter. Any ordinary viewer of that movie would try to shrug off the strange happenings in the library that the young girl witnesses in the beginning of the movie as cinematic liberties being used to tell a story. The same viewer would be dumbfounded in the end when it turns out that it was her father who was trying to communicate with her supposedly from the future in the tesseract about the impending doom to humanity. The concept explained in the movie is Vedic in nature wherein it is mentioned that all human life is connected like the Indra’s net and there is a universal consciousness which transcends time and space.

The very concept of human understanding being directed by our future-self or even of our descendants is something very astounding. Even in the Bible there is a mention of this concept where Jesus claims to the people that Father Abraham knew about him and was glad about him. Was he the one that spoke to Abraham just as he was about to sacrifice his son Isaac? This concept bewildered the poor Israelites and could be one of the significant reasons to why they crucified him because it was blasphemous. Anything that went against their realm of understanding and/or if not was written in the religious texts was considered blasphemous at that time. A similar tale is also mentioned in the Isra and Miraj journeys by Prophet Muhammad. Did it influence the benevolence shown to the Ishmaelites by the Jews back in the Biblical times? We may never know.

Our bodies are composed predominantly of carbon. Many of the elements that comprise the cosmic matter can be found in our own bodies. Our existence on this earth is also guided by the same cosmic rules like gravity that guide the stars, planets , etc. If we think that we are matter, so we are also energy. Frances E. Vaughan in Awakening Intuition describes the vibrations of energy or vibes that extrude from people as a form of emotional intuition. It is believed in Hinduism that meditation and a disciplined control of mind provides intuitive insights and one of the main aims of Yoga is to develop that intuition. Our intuitive feelings can be strengthened if we know what we need to do in life. Just like we love to learn from the mistakes of the past, we should be able to see our future and try to develop our present through our intuition.

Intuition (is) perception via the unconscious. The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, “divine.” Carl Jung (1875-1961)

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