I took the GMAT yesterday. I got a decent score, but less than what I had hoped for. I was disappointed, but not surprised. Disappointed because I got lower score than I’d hoped for, and yet not surprised because I “knew” this was the score I was going to get. This exact score. How did I know? Intuition. Something in my head told me this would happen, I grasped on to it, and since this wasn’t the first time I got this “inner voice” speaking, I did not ignore it. Sure enough, it turned out to be uncannily accurate, just as it almost always has been. It’s interesting isn’t it, this ability to see ahead in time?
Normal perception of the world is guided by the six senses – sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and thought. However, these senses only allow you to perceive the world in restricted three-dimensional space i.e. these senses signal to your mind those entities or phenomena that are presented to you in your physical vicinity at that particular instant of time. Intuition supersedes these senses by allowing your mind to perceive entities and phenomena that are separated from you in space as well as time. Think of it this way: when you walk down the street, you can see the vehicles on the same street but not those around the corner; on the other hand, intuition can show you vehicles that wait around the corner!
It is important to understand what intuition is and what it is not. If you’re running late and hope that your flight got delayed and it is, that is not intuition, that is coincidence. If you dream you could fly away jumping from the roof of the Empire State building, that is not intuition, that is fantasy. Intuition is an insight, a thought, that arises from your subconscious mind. This thought in the subconscious mind is based on the experiences the conscious mind has gone through and the knowledge it has gained, and so is based on only what can be explained by the conscious memory. Intuition can not be forced by the focus of the conscious memory (like hope), nor can it account for impractical or unreasonable thoughts (like fantasies).
The ability to intuit can be a very handy asset. By allowing you to look into the future, it allows you be prepared for it. Forewarned is forearmed. Intuition can not be explained by science. It is not quantifiable or tangible, it does not follow reason. Human intuition derives from the most fundamental sense of perception of any animal – instinct. For this reason, intuition is not a skill that can be acquired, instead it is a capacity that resides inherent in every human being. It only needs to be acknowledged, nurtured and utilized. Based on my experiences, here are a few tips that could help.
Look at yourself from outside
Intuition is a form of instinct, and instinct is the natural reaction of the subconscious mind to external stimuli in the environment. To tap your intuition you need to understand your environment, and your position in it i.e. you need to look at yourself from a third-person perspective. Doing so allows your mind to follow a potential chain of events and track external stimuli, and pre-emptively generates reactions to them. For instance, my intuition of the GMAT score came when I pictured my emotional state after writing the exam – this led to the realization that I would be in this particular emotional state due to making this particular score.
Keep your mind relaxed and clear
Intuition is the result of the focus of the subconscious mind on one particular chain of thought. For intuition to function optimally, the subconscious mind must function optimally. For the subconscious mind to function optimally, the conscious mind must function optimally. Chaos, confusion and lack of clarity hamper intuition by dissipating thought energy in different directions, thereby preventing its focus. Intuition best occurs when the mind is relaxed and clear.
Listen to your inner mind
All humans have the capacity for intuition, but only some manage to tap into it. This is because only some people manage to be conscious of their subconscious mind. Think of it this way: intuition is a thought process that occurs continuously in your subconscious memory. It bubbles up into your conscious memory only fleetingly, just for an instant of time. My intuition came to me in a flash, and it was gone in a flash. This flash of insight does not stay on top of your memory – you just have to catch it before it disappears.
Try this experiment: close your eyes and think of an object, any object, for 30 seconds. Allow your mind to follow any train of thought related to that object. After 30 seconds, write down every particular thought that occured during that time. Repeat the process. You will notice that with every repetition the amount of thoughts you write down increases. This is not because you are thinking more, but rather because you are grasping on to your thoughts better i.e. you are able to notice the thoughts in your subconscious memory more thoroughly. This is the list of thoughts I came up with just an instant ago when I thought of an apple:
apple, red, yellow, stem, root, tasty, seed, tree, apple tree, apple tree in my friend’s home, friend, call friend about weekend plans – flash!
Act on its advice
Having listened to your inner mind, the next obvious step is to act on it. I learnt this the hard way: sometimes when stepping out of home I would feel that I’d missed something. But I’d think that I hadn’t and so would ignore this feeling and carry on. Once well on my way outside it would hit me that I’d missed my wallet or cellphone or keys etc. Getting an insight allows you to see things you would otherwise not see, but the more important thing is to act on that insight. If intuition tells you there’s a monster lurking around the corner, what good could it possibly be if you just keep walking straight into its waiting mouth? The key to utilizing intuition is to not allow the flash of insight to fade away or be ignored. When you feel a flash of insight from within, take a moment and act on it.
Plan to your intuition, but not excessively so
So I knew I was going to make a particular score. But what good would it have been if I had not planned to it? Planning to your intuition does not mean you need to suspend your life and focus exclusively on the turn of events this has revealed. Instead, it just means that when you make plans, modify those plans to account for these insights as well. I had already made plans to apply to certain colleges before I got my flash of insight, the insight just made me change my plans so as to include colleges that would be suitable to that particular score. Also, it is essential that you plan for a backup in case your intuition fails you: this prevents you from excessively hoping for and obsessing over the insight. This is especially true when you are not fully confident of your intuitive abilities.
Do not obsess over it
It is great to have the ability to intuit – but it is important not to let this rule your life. Intuition is meant to be a thought that arises naturally from within your subconscious mind. Forcing your mind to artificially focus on a particular thought changes its very nature: it ceases to be an intuition, and instead becomes an obsession. And then, all bets are off. Intuition happens when your mind is allowed to think freely, obsessing over something restricts this freedom significantly. When a flash of insight occurs to you, do not get hooked on to it, simply grasp it and store it for later use. Be aware of it and take corrective action, but still get on with your life. Do not try to game it either – there is no particular plan of action that will give you an intuition, or give you an intuition that will be true for sure. It is just a thought that must arise naturally, and it surely will at the right circumstance.
Track its performance
Some people get an intuition every minute of the day, others’ have hardly ever experienced this phenomenon. Some people’s intuition works all the time, some others’ hardly ever. It is not surprising that there will be large variations person-to-person: after all, intuition is a capacity that resides within the mind, and every mind works differently. Just as with everything else in life, the ability to intuit can also be judged based on performance. The performance of your intuition in the past can predict its performance in the future. In other words, intuition can itself be intuited. Observe what has worked best for you: when do you get your intuitions – when sleeping or when awake, what kind of intuitions do you get – about events or entities, about yourself or about others, how accurate have your intuitions usually been, etc. Tracking the performance of your intuition also gives you the confidence to plan to it: I was earlier very skeptical of this phenomenon, but with time I repeatedly observed that these flashes of insight were almost always exactly accurate.
Follow its evolution
Intuition is a form of instinct, it is a consequence of the process of evolution. And intuition can itself evolve – into conviction. When you repeatedly get an intuition about a particular phenomenon with a large degree of success, it gives you the confidence that that phenomenon will pan out in that particular way every time in the future as well. What this means is that after a certain amount of time you wouldn’t need intuition to tell you that something in particular will happen – you will simply know it for sure.
End note: I think of intuition as both a boon and a bane. A boon because it lets you look ahead and so plan for what is in store, a bane because it frustrates you that you can not change the future even though you can look into it.
