Intuition

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Intuition, Merriam Webster defines it as “the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference” I was pondering on this topic after analyzing some of the past events in my life. I now believe that ‘intuition’ is the most powerful faculty that all of us have. Our intuition is never wrong and if one follows it, one can always see through things.

We all know that it takes least effort to open a door if we push or pull farthest from the hinges, or a triangular structure is most rigid one, as evident from the trusses. Of course both of these can be proved by laws of mechanics but we didn’t solve any equations to come to above logic. Our intuition is what gives us ideas like this. Do you remember some incident when something inside you was asking to act otherwise to what you did, and ultimately your inner voice was proved correct? Have you ever met someone, and knew that this person is going to cheat me, yet went ahead? Have you ever been asked something, and you got the feeling that the person was intending to ask something else? Have you had friends in life, whom you knew beforehand are not true friends? All this was our intuition.

The question is, if we all have intuition then why don’t we follow it, and not let unfavorable or undesirable things to happen to us. The answer is - most of the time we let our intuition to be clouded by several other earthly or materialistic feelings. We start doing deductive thinking or an analysis of probabilities; we get overwhelmed by feelings, which might be due to our desires. This can also be proved by the fact that, we can always gives excellent suggestions to our friends for some situations, though we might fail ourselves, if confronted with similar situation. In the case of our friends, our intuition is not clouded or not modified, as we are thinking objectively then.

Some people have higher ability of intuition than others, for there are several reasons when you ‘intuiting capability’ can go weak or ‘rusty’. Some people have to take decision in life and death scenarios under extreme stress, like in war field or fire-fighting. Most of the time, their decisions are correct even when odds are heavily stacked against. They don’t do any reasoning or deduction, they simply rely on intuition.

If we can hear our intuition, then trust me, no decision of ours would be wrong or regretted. But alas! We are average human beings.