Where do our intuitions come from?
Answer Podcast
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Where does intuition come from? Well, that was my third class, third strategy for self-destruction. There I’m going to talk more about this.
But briefly, there are three broad sources. Ultimately, all knowledge comes from Krishna. So even our intuitions come from Krishna.
Ultimately Krishna is the source of all of them. But at a more analytical level, if we are situated in a mode of goodness, if we are in a reflective mood, if we are calm, thoughtful, then there are often insights that are there at a subconscious level in our awareness. And they just bubble up.
So when our consciousness is very turbulent, we are very agitated, at that time often we are not even aware when certain thoughts come up. But when we are calm, then that calmness, that becomes like a platform, that becomes a suitable medium for insights to come up. So they are there in our subconscious.
And how are they there in our subconscious? It’s just that sometimes we may have heard something earlier, but it is at the back of our awareness. Suddenly it comes at the front of our awareness. So they can come through the subconscious mind.
Another is that, what we call as intuition can also be an inspiration. Inspiration means, it is something just that we are thinking of one thing and we are getting no solution, suddenly we get an idea that this is the perfect solution. That inspiration is coming from the supersonic.
So the intuition when we say that is, especially when there is a huge gap between what we know at one moment and what we know at the next moment. That is, that leap in cognition, that leap in understanding that is happening, that is coming from the super soul. One of Sri Prabhupada’s scientist disciples, Sadaput Prabhu, he wrote an article on inspiration.
And then he analyzes this mathematically. How many, how much thoughts can be processed in a moment. And sometimes the leap in insight that we get from one point to another, it is so great that it just cannot have happened by itself.
By a linear process of thinking, even if it is a subconscious level. So for example, there was a scientist, Gauss, who came up with some theorems in electricity. And actually, the mathematical proof of those theorems came four decades after he died.
But even before that, those theorems were accepted, they were working, they were being used extensively, but nobody had proof for it. So it took not just four decades of time, but so many other developments in mathematics to be able to come up with the proof for that. But he just got it at that time.
So it was not through a linear rational process of information processing that he got it. It was just a leap of insight that happened by some power beyond his own. Sometimes the intuitions can come even from our, from the super soul.
And thirdly, these are not really very different, but it’s just for analysis. They can also come from the subconscious churning of what we have been thinking about. So for example, if you think about a problem, think about a problem, and then we don’t know.
Like say, I’m a writer. I’m writing, and I think this word, this is not the right word. Maybe this word, this word.
No word seems to be right at that point. I don’t know what to use, and I just leave it at that, and after sometime I come back, or I’m doing something, suddenly I get, this is the right word, or this is the right way of putting it, the right sentence. So this is not just, this can sometimes happen even when I’m not really consciously thinking about it.
It’s not such a dramatic thing as it could not have come from myself, but when we get deep into a subject, or when we go deep into a field, we think about it sometimes consciously at the forefront. But in the background also, there is thinking of that happening. So intuitions can come that way from our own reflective consciousness.
They can come from the super soul, and they can come also from the subconscious processing of what we have learned consciously. And so in general, the intuition, usually the word intuition is used in a positive sense, to talk about something which we get, which guides us in the right direction. So those, that guidance from within can also come positively and that we see, if it comes positively, then we accept it as Krishna’s mercy.
We don’t have to bother too much about the source. But we use it in Krishna’s service. Thank you