Watt’s Thoughts: How to Make Decisions Using the Power of Your Intuition
A friend of mine recently sent me the link to an iTunes recording of Alan Watts (Being in the Right State of Mind). I texted back and said, “Where are all the modern-day Wattses?” and he said, “Watching cat videos on youTube.”
But I digress. This post is not about cat videos on YouTube. It’s a quick tip from Watts on how to let your intuition do the heavy lifting of decision-making for you, from an analytical angle.
Part of our cultural barrier to accessing our intuition is the collective feeling that it’s “woo” or imagined, made up, right brain thinking, and totally lacking in logic. In our logic-based society, anything that falls outside of that spectrum is …. well, lacking in credibility, to put it mildly.
Alan Watts, that bastion of wisdom, didn’t think so. In his talk, he explored and compared Taoist, Buddhist, and Western concepts and methods for thinking. And of course, he touched on intuition.
To Watts, intuition is a basic tool within all of us. And instead of calling it “woo,” or imagination, he called intuition “the most amazing logical analyzer which exists within the known world.”
To him, intuition is logical — it’s just that we don’t understand quite how it works, so it seems illogical. This begs the question: Do we need to understand how it works? But that’s a post for another day.
The point, he says, is to get that logical analyzer to work for you to help you make decisions.
Most of us try with our conscious minds to reason through a decision in front of us. We logically analyze each option and might still come up short — and we don’t know why we’re coming up short. The reason? We cannot logically calculate or take into account all of the factors that could occur in a situation, which leaves us feeling like we have incomplete information, which makes us feel uneasy about any decision we might make.
Our conscious minds just can’t grasp all of the possibilities that are available.
But our subconscious minds can, according to Watts. He believes that within the human brain, the unconscious or subconscious brain has the immense capacity to grasp what our conscious minds will NEVER grasp.
All we have to do is learn how to let it work without interfering with it. After consuming all of the logical information available about the situation, let your brain work on the decision while you go do something else. Sooner or later, it will deliver you a decision.
Note that he says “deliver us” the decision, not give on demand. Meaning that we can’t demand and force an answer out of ourselves. Forcing an answer out of ourselves is like wringing blood out of a turnip — pointless. And maybe a little gross, right?
The point is to let the brain go to work on the problem while you do something else, and sooner or later it will deliver its answer.
