Nurturing Intuition

Zen Buddhist and Japanese nationalist Master Nissho Inoue started a group popularly known as "Blood Oath Corps" in the early 1930s, with a purpose to restore the degrading national character of Japan by resorting to violence against politicians and rich business owners. One of the members of the group assassinated the Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai on 15 May 1932. Many attributes this assassination as one the defining events that eventually led to consolidation of power which emboldened Japan to enter World War II. Though the core teaching of Buddhism is compassion to all, what caused a committed Zen master to resort to violence and murder.

In his trial when asked about his political ideology behind his actions, he replied: "It is more correct to say that I have no systematised ideas. I transcend reason and act completely upon intuition." 

As a fan of mindfulness and Zen, I was bewildered while reading this insightful Aeon article on "Zen Terror". We were discussing about the power of intuition and this case shows, acting completely upon Intuition, even for a seasoned Zen master, could result in terrible outcomes.

Acting based on pure reason may be impractical, that is the reason all of us resort to intuition to make quick decisions. And many glorify the intuitive decision making. I think, while we use intuition all the time, we need to be careful about it. Intuition is essentially informed by reasoned analysis. In his book “The Power of Intuition” , Gary Klein suggests we should not be depending neither on analysis  nor on intuition alone and rather we should use a blend of them. His model of intuition as shown in the picture below involves having a mental model and quickly rapidly simulating the scenario in the model and taking decisions upon the action script that passes the model. 

Illustration - https://readingraphics.com/book-summary-the-power-of-intuition/

By constantly reviewing the decisions and adjusting the mental model with reasoned and analytical inputs we can nurture the intuition. Considering intuition as a natural or divine gift and making intuitive decisions without regular reviews would lead to a toss of coin situation eventually.