The Power of Intuition

Interpretation comes to man naturally only because he has allowed it to flourish. It is a matter of habit to judge, assess and claim. You are denied the privilege of an empty mind. An empty mind is like a reservoir without fluid. It isn’t something to be achieved. To attempt to attain it would lead to an illusion of conceptualizing emptiness. It is rather self-defeating. You will do to look at it as a concept like nothingness or maybe infinity in the sense that you can’t quantify it. Only in that sense will it serve as a specimen or an object of analysis. The analysis would no doubt prove futile if we build a revolving thought process on it or should I say obsess on it. There is nothing to consume in the first place. What can thought derive out of emptiness? You may only experience it. Mind cannot be empty. Either mind persists or there is emptiness. An empty mind qualifies nothing. What is the purpose of this article then? It is certainly not about negating thought. I stand to view the root cause of its meditation. The root cause is the habit of interpretation. You learn to interpret by the scientific method that you are taught to employ, right from the day you got initiated into education. Science does not teach us telepathy. You are left to guess the thoughts of the other individual. But why is it then that we still tend to interpret in the dark horizon of uncertainty when science cannot penetrate into it? The answer lies in the belief that life is predominantly logical. We rely on logic so heavily that in our quest to find solutions to metaphysical puzzles, so to say we perceive and study it the way we study material objects. Our dependency on logic is one of the reasons for our interpretational tendency. The other strikes me quite obviously to be an emotional dependency on science for answers to the mysteries of the unknown and probably even the unknowable. By unknowable I simply mean that it is not in the realm of knowledge.
Other people’s impressions of us matter to us a lot. It puts tremendous pressure on man when his survival is dependent on the opinions of his superiors or authorities; let us say in the work place. What your boss thinks about you seems to you to be vital to your growth. Every message that he conveys to you, every word that he utters however vague it may be affects you and you tend to catch on to it and correlate it to yourself. You take personal meanings of ambiguous statements that he makes apart from the direct statements he makes about you. Let us suppose he doesn’t talk to you much in a particular day, your anxiety about whether he may be angry with you may manifest in your mind in the form of doubts. You will not be content with doubts. You are desperate to reach conclusions. You then take the worst probable case and believe it as though it were the truth. You assume therefore that he is upset with you, which you think is the reason for his silence. You know rationally that you cannot conclude based on one of events, so you tell yourself ,”My intuition tells me that there is something wrong and I have to stay on guard.” You may even go to the extent of preparing for the worst possible outcome. When your boss calls you, your anxiety haunts you. You are in a temporary spell of the fear of what might happen. He surprises you by saying, “I had a meeting; it didn’t go off well. That has sort of spoilt my mood. You appear to be worried today. Do you want to share anything with me?” Your anxiety transforms into exhilarating relief. What you call intuition here is the signals that you sensed through external behaviour which you perceived. You then draw conclusions based on the signals because you cannot escape the discomfort caused by your emotions. It is a crisis of emotions and not intuition. The problem with intuition is that it is vague. Intuition is helpful in certain circumstances where our experience comes to our aid when we are dealing with difficult problems. It gives us the confidence in times of uncertainty but it is really your habit of interpreting a present experience with some experience in the past and you think that it may yield the same results. It may not always be the case. But the heart connects where the mind decays and you feel that there is something in it for you. This is an eager anxiety to escape uncertainty. So what would be confidence in a situation where we have nothing to lose gets converted into signals of danger when you get into a situation where a loss may be costly. We need to remind ourselves in both the situations that by verification we can arrive at certainty. Then after confirmation of our doubts we will be favourably disposed to act accordingly.
Emptiness is the result of complete thought. When a thought is incomplete the mind cannot be empty.