Madame Curie was working for three years upon a certain problem and was trying to solve it from many directions. Every direction failed. One night, utterly exhausted, she went to sleep, and she decided... The incident is almost like Buddha. That night she decided: 'Now it is enough. I have wasted three years. It seems to be a futile search. I have to drop it.' That night she dropped it, and went to sleep.

In the night she got up in her sleep, she went to her table and wrote the answer. Then she went back, and fell into sleep. In the morning she could not even remember, but the answer was there on the table. And there was nobody in the room, and even if there had been somebody, the answer would not have been possible. She had been working for three years - one of the greatest minds of this age. But there was nobody and the answer was there. Then she looked more minutely: it was her handwriting! Then suddenly the dream surfaced. She remembered it as if she had seen a dream in the night in which she was sitting at the table and writing something. Then by and by everything surfaced. She had come to the conclusion from some other door which was not reason. It was intuition.

Buddha struggled for six years to attain samadhi, but could not. One day he dropped the whole idea of attaining. He rested under a tree and by the morning it had happened. When he opened his eyes he was in samadhi.

But first the reason had to be exhausted. Intuition functions only when reason is exhausted. Intuition has no process; it simply jumps from the problem to the conclusion. It is a shortcut. It is a flash.

We have corrupted intuition. Man's intuition is almost absolutely corrupted. Woman's intuition is not corrupted as much - that's why women have something called a 'hunch'. A hunch is just a fragment of intuition. It cannot be proved. You are going to take a flight and your woman simply says that she is not going and she will not allow you to go either. She feels as if something is going to happen. Now this is nonsense. You have much work to do, everything is planned, and you have to go - but your woman won't allow it. And the next day you read in the newspapers that the aeroplane was hijacked, or it crashed and all the passengers died.

Now the woman cannot say how she knows. There is no way. It is just a hunch, just a feeling in the guts. But that too is very corrupted, that's why it is just a flash.