I grew up in a small hill town in northern India. In my limited Thinking, that was the entire world. As I travelled and got my degrees that perception changed – there was so much more to the world than what I could possibly imagine. I landed myself well-paying gigs, but each time I found myself in a stable position, I ended up hitting a wall. Boom! I was successful by definition, then why was this happening to me?

In modern society, most of us are going about life shutting out emotions, living only with our heads, Focusing on performance and disconnecting with ourselves. As such, we are outsiders in our own lives. Not being able to look inside ourselves is limiting our greatest capability – intuition. Although focusing on rational thought is emphasized all around us, our utmost decisions are in fact intuitive. The media and businesses today are based almost solely on analytical tools and logic, endorsing a culture of an 80 to 100-hour work week. This is not only unhealthy but also unsustainable in the long run. On the contrary, we are coaxed into believing that it is a virtue indicative of hard work.

The dangers of a culture dominated by the left hemisphere of the brain are evident: wisdom being replaced by knowledge, knowledge by information and information by mere chunks of data. We must be able to relate to the world before trying to manipulate it. It has become hard for most modern people today to go out in nature and experience it without thinking. Instead of focusing on the here and now, we find ourselves looking for stuff outside of us. Our awareness has drifted from the world around us to strategy, milestones, goals, endpoints and deadlines – the world that we built. 98% of our brain does not use any of these concepts, it only creates them. This is the relational mind. The remaining 2%, the linear mind, receives those concepts and transforms them into actions, such as applying for jobs, going to the grocery, doing laundry, etc. This portion of the brain is equivalent to about two tablespoons of tissue. Shouldn’t we be concerned about letting 98% of our brain’s potential go to waste?

Over time, we have been conditioned to cut out feelings of intuition, thinking of them as unimportant because they are not around us, but subconscious. But the fact is that 99% of our processes are not conscious at all. Subtle cues like having a feeling about something or someone, or having butterflies in our stomachs have a profounder meaning if given deeper thought. In her work ‘The Artist is Present’, Marina Abramović demonstrates the power of non-verbal communication and being in touch with ourselves, almost poetically.

Our ancestors exercised their intuition and awareness to gather food, navigate, tell time and survive without any of the modern tools currently at our disposal. Polynesian navigators mapping out thousands of miles of open ocean, using just their senses sounds nothing short of a miracle in today’s world. In contrast, modern society has continued to face the same concerns over centuries – war, poverty, corruption and lack of education. We have also continued to do what was done for the last two hundred years to tackle these concerns. There has been no creativity or diversity in the thoughts of people making decisions at the global level. Columbus took on an unknown journey despite the fear of falling off the surface of a flat earth in his search for India. Instead, do we as a people want to make the same mistakes and live the same life over and over again?

Many Eastern cultures revere nature and have very good reason to do so. Nature opens our inner eye that enables us to capture multiple dimensions outside of us. Scientists have had eureka moments under a tree on matters that have eluded them for days inside their labs. So, what’s blocking us out? It is the noise and distraction that we call entertainment. All this interconnectivity is making us disconnected from ourselves, from each other and the world around us. Schools teach math, science and economics but not feeling or empathizing, which are just as hard to learn as any of the other subjects.

We have been looking for answers in the world outside, naïve to the fact that the most important ones lie within. We only need to be more receptive and observant of the signs manifested by the universe. In Rabindranath Tagore’s words,

“I traveled miles, for many a year.

I spent a lot in lands afar.

I have gone to see the mountains.

The oceans, I have been to view.

But I haven’t seen with these eyes,

Just two steps from my home lies,

On a sheaf of paddy grain,

A glistening drop of dew.”