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Using Your Intuition as an Idea Generator

by Paul Chika Emekwulu

Intuition, through dreams or other psychic experiences, is at the core of many breakthroughs in history. Shouldn't we learn to trust it more? Here's some advice from an author who was inspired to write a book by a dream experience.

In wartime England, as the Prime Minister headed for an important meeting, something told him not to get into the waiting car. Moments later, the vehicle exploded.

In the late Nineteenth Century, a teenage Physics student in Zurich, West Germany, imagined himself to be riding along a light beam. This marked the birth of the Theory of Relativity.

In 1960, a Chicago businessman ignored the advice of financial experts. Instead, he trusted his hunches and purchased a small chain of hamburger stands.

When Archimedes ran out of his bathtub naked shouting "Eureka, Eureka", he was not crazy, he was not possessed by the evil spirit. It was as a result of intuition. It was as a result of inspiration. Archimedes today is remembered for his famous Archimedes principle in Physics.

Mozart claimed that he received his inspiration from within. Socrates said he was guided by his inner voice and so did Einstein, Edison, Marconi, Henry Ford, Luther, Madame Curie, and other Nobel Laureates.

The Neglected Power

Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Churchill's hesitation to enter the waiting car, Archimedes' inspiration in his bathtub and Ray Kroc's acquisition of McDonald's are all examples of the power of intuition.

Intuitive experience has been described in many ways: inspiration, sixth sense, hunches, insight, to name just a few. Many of the greatest world philosophers, artists, writers, musicians, and scientists such as Einstein owed their accomplishments to intuition.

Yet, since intuition is beyond scientific explanation, it is both the most powerful and the most neglected of all human mental faculties. All along, intuition has been part of the instruction of most mystical schools and organizations.

Their emphasis is on the development of the higher self and on the awakening of our creative potentials so that we can be all we can be. Unfortunately, people are busy looking for empirical evidence of intuition. The end result of this search is disappointment.

Yes, disappointment, unless the search is genuine and not out of skepticism. According to Perspective on the ABC News TV program, such genuine researches are now currently in progress at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and at the University of Nevada in the United States.

Intuitive ability is a potential, but some of us make a conscious effor to either block, repress or deny its existence and consequent manifestation.

Intuitive Dreaming

Dr. Frederick Banting, the Canadian physician, discovered while in a dream the basis of insulin.

Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing machine, worked for years at its design, yet one thing always remained before he could achieve his goal. One thing!

One night he dreamt he had been captured by savages who were pointing spears at him, and he noticed that at the tip of each spear was a hole. Howe woke from his dream with the solution: put the hole at the tip of the needle. That key unlocked the invention of the sewing machine.

Dr. James Watson had been working hard trying to decipher the molecular structure of DNA for many years, but all to no avail.

One night, while in a dream, he saw two snakes coiling around each other. Instantly, he woke up exclaiming, "I wonder if that’s it... I wonder if DNA is a double helix twining around itself" This led him to understand the genetic coding for which he was later awarded a Nobel Prize.

A special dream experience

Intuition is real, not a fantasy. I believe in intuition. Why? Because it exists, and proofs of its existence abound. I even wrote one of my books, Fibonacci Numbers For Research Mathematicians & AI Applications, ispired by a dream experience.

Before I continue, let me offer some explanations. A set of numbers like 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 (geometric series), increases uniformly in twos. Therefore, it exhibits a pattern. A set of numbers like the one above is also called a sequence or series. A sequence can take other forms other than the example given above. Having offered this explanation, let's go back to my dream experience.

On the night of March 30, 1993, I had a dream where I saw a partial floral representation of the Fibonacci sequence. For those of us not familiar with Fibonacci sequence, it runs like this:1,1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, x, y, x + y...

This sequence was discovered by an Italian mathematician named Fibonacci, and each of the numbers in it is called a Fibonacci number. One outstanding property of this sequence is that the next term in it is a sum of the two preceding terms, e.g. 1 + 1 = 2, 1 + 2 = 3, 2 + 3 = 5, 3 + 5 = 8.

The following morning I took up a piece of paper and a pen. Initially I thought it would have been an article of about 20 pages. I was wrong. As days passed by, the more I played with those numbers, the more I discovered properties of the sequence. The properties are as exciting as they are interesting. So I ended up with about 150 pages of material out of sheer inspiration.

Numbers of the Fibonacci sequence have many properties. Fibonacci numbers appear in nature. They have applications in arts, architecture, artificial intelligence, and other fields.

Anyway, discussing these and other properties is not the objective of this article. What was exciting to me in this dream experience was the transformation of consciousness. During and after the dream experience, I was extremely calm, peaceful, and serene.

I am short of words to describe my actual experience, but have never, in my forty-something years of existence on this planet, attained that level of consciousness. It was amazing!

Learning to Listen

One of our weaknesses as human beings is our continued tendency to believe that reality can only be perceived through the five mundane senses of sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing. To some people, it is a matter of seeing it before they believe it. They want to smell it, to touch it, to taste it, to hear it.

This kind of thinking makes me uncomfortable. These people believe that any knowledge not gained through a conventional classroom should not only be questioned, but outrightly rejected. This kind of thinking is not only dangerous, it is inimical to human progress and development.

We can experience intuition anywhere -- at home, in our workplace, on the street, while driving or shopping.

Powerful thoughts and ideas that have contributed to human progress and civilization haven't always come to people while they were in a conscious state. Often, they've come while they were in altered states of consciousness, such as dreams or out of body experiences.

Such thoughts and ideas, in more or less logical forms, need to be captured and written down, otherwise they could disappear. And even if they were not entirely lost, they might lose their original flavor.

Therefore, in order ot maintain the present level of civilization, and encouragel further human progress, we have to keep our minds open to these kind of experiences. We all have an inner voice. We just have to improve our listening skills.

Copyright © 2000 Paul Chika Emekwulu