Intuition is the right thought at the right time – Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Albert Einstein popularly said, "The only real valuable thing is intuition." Coming from a man of his stature, one can imagine how important it is to develop intuition. Yet, as a society we have not included the development of intuition as part of our mainstream education. Moreover, the research around this is still at a nascent stage and comes in the realm of parapsychology which is sometimes termed as pseudoscience.
Successful people across the world agree to a very large extent that intuition plays a role in the journey to success. The importance of intuition in idea creation is evident in the famous quote from German philosopher Immanuel Kant, “All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.”
Nevertheless, intuition is an integral part of human life. There are glimpses of intuition that we experience in our daily life; hearing from someone you were thinking about the same day, and the global phenomenon, déjà vu. Globally, and in India too these recurring phenomena are simply brushed aside as just coincidences.
Interested to learn Intuition Process
Notwithstanding its widespread occurrences in our daily life at the personal level and its importance given by the eminent and successful, two features have been a challenge. First, a consistent methodology to invoke the latent intuitive abilities in individuals and second, research to back the results based on scientific principles and analysis. On both these counts, the Art of Living Prajñā Yoga has made some impressive inroads. The 2-day Prajñā Yoga program aims at opening the intuitive mind for children between 5 and 18 years of age through a process established by Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. And, the results have been phenomenal. To back it up and endorse the findings, The Art of Living has followed the rigors of scientific research methodology for documentation, both independently and in collaboration with leading Institutes of science and research in the country and abroad. The statistical evidence with regards to the efficacy of the method is incontrovertible even though the mechanism and workings of intuition are unknown at this moment of time. It is so because science is still in the embryonic stages to be able to explain this incredible phenomenon bordering the sciences of psychology and parapsychology.
To give a perspective, as far as physical science is concerned, according to NASA, roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all the instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be called "normal" matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the universe”: in a nutshell, we know only 5% of the universe, the rest 95% is simple mystery. One can imagine after 3 centuries of research in science, if we can explain only 5% of the Universe, it would require at least a few decades of study if not centuries to explain the mysteries of the mind.
The Prajñā Yoga course has been conducted for the last 5 years across the country and abroad. Amongst many others, some of the benefits the regular practitioners of Prajñā Yoga have mentioned are:
- Improvement in behavior: more open mindedness, self-discipline, self-confidence, kindness, leadership
- Enhanced concentration
- Sharpened skills: creativity, curiosity, imagination, and reasoning
- Removes fear of the unknown
- Increases confidence, leading to better decision-making
- Improvement in academics, sports and other co-curricular activities
- Helps in keeping the mind relaxed yet sharp
- Sharpness and clarity in thinking, for e.g.: get the right thought at the right time
- Removes fear of examinations
- Practitioners become internally guided and therefore more disciplined
- Effective communication, as the practitioners don’t rely only on spoken words for comprehension
- Better interpersonal relationships
One of the notable results of Prajñā Yoga is the ability to perform blindfold activities where practitioners can identify colors, shapes, people etc. blindfold. This ability is clearly demonstrable and is a testimony to the fact that children can access the intuitive space. Through various testimonials shared by both, the children who have attended the course in past as well as parents, it has been a common observation that Prajñā Yoga has helped them to excel and improve their studies, music, sports, career decisions, helped them to overcome fears, heightened creativity etc. Participants also report an overall increase in the sense of wellbeing and enhanced positivity.
In hindsight, in our remarkable human history, we have leveraged and used natural processes and other phenomena to our advantage for a very long time before we got a scientific explanation to its occurrence. One example that stands out is the use of fire, which was discovered about 4,00,000 years ago, but its most widely accepted scientific explanation was given by the renowned scientist Antoine Lavoisier around 1770. As it stands now, the advancements in Neurological Sciences are at a very nascent stage to understand the process of thought formation and we will need a few more decades of research on intuition to come up with a plausible explanation. Till such time, humankind would have to harness the power of intuition much like we have used fire in our glorious past.
Written by: Vivek M. Kulkarni
The writer is a software professional with an MNC in Bengaluru; is also an environmentalist and a social scientist at heart.
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