Question: What is intuition? Can you please explain if it is an aspect of the spiritual path?
Sadhguru: What is intuition? Everything that a human being does is happening from the information that he or she has gathered. Information does not mean you read a book or a newspaper. The five senses constantly gather information through what you see, hear, smell, taste and touch. This continues to happen even when you are fast sleep. Experiments have been done where a person was fast asleep, and ten sentences were spoken to him in a language that he did not even understand. In spite of that, much later, they could hypnotize him and he would speak those ten sentences again. He was not conscious but all of it was recorded as good as on a tape-recorder.
So there is a phenomenal amount of information that you are not conscious of. Just look at the fact that you can walk. Walking is so simple. But if you analyze the process of what it takes to walk on two legs, it is an extremely complex process. How the weight shifts, what happens in the muscles and how the whole thing happens is a phenomenally complex process. If you have to logically understand this, you will go crazy. You will not get it even if you study it for a lifetime. That’s how complex it is, but all of us can walk. We know this intuitively not intellectually.
A better analogy would be driving. When you were first learning to drive a car, you turned on the ignition, then pressed the clutch, then the first gear, and you slowly released the clutch, but the damn thing would just jump and stop no matter how many times you tried. But now you have been driving for ten years, and you could be talking on your cell phone and still everything happens right. And even today after ten years of driving, if you sit in the car and think, “What should I do properly? First, ignition, then clutch, then first gear, then clutch…” again you won’t know how to drive.
If you go intellectually, for every little thing that you do there are ten steps. Instead of going through these ten steps from one to ten, if you jump, that is what is intuition. But intuition is not a different dimension of perception, it is just a different dimension of computing. You are computing it faster, but still it is the same information. If your brain becomes more intuitive, you can use what you know better. To move from a “dumb” phone to a smart phone and from a smart phone to an iPad, we did not discover anything new. We are just learning to use it better. It is the same thing with your brain when you are intuitive. But that is not another dimension of perception.
If another dimension of perception has to happen, you have to enhance your perception beyond its present boundaries. That’s what spirituality is – to enhance your perception. Essentially, to be spiritual means to go beyond the physical. If a dimension beyond the physical becomes a living reality for you, you are spiritual. When I say physical, it is not just the body andmind. Everything else that you perceive through the five sense organs is physical. If you transcend that, or if your perception transcends the limitations of the five senses, then you are spiritual.
