What is insight?

From my book Opening to Insight (This extract ~4 minutes reading time)

Perhaps the first insight – or intuition – is that our suffering and the suffering we cause others has its root in the way we think, specifically in the basic view we have of ourselves and the world. We inherit this view as the cultural norm, and it is really a theory, a thought-interpretation of our experience. There are ways in which it doesn’t match our pure experience – the “cracks” which have the potential to “let the light in”. There is truth in this saying, and we observe, reflect and meditate in order to become aware of the cracks in our view, and to realign ourselves.

Suffering or insecurity of any degree – anything less than the bliss of Awakening – the Buddha called dukkha. Insight means letting light into dukkha and its cause, insight is glimpsing a truer way of seeing which brings some freedom from dukkha. This is the essence of the Buddhist path and its teachings.

Dukkha – the feeling of wrong-thinking

Tied up in this is the confusion about self: I, me, and mine. Where are we going wrong in our present way of seeing this? What is true and unchanging about us? What is our nature which can be revealed as “Buddha Nature”, that to which the Buddha awoke as being the same in everyone?

Change is everything

There is considerable insight to be gained from deeper appreciation of the impermanence of things, including the inconstant nature of our mind and body. This leads to experiencing the “emptiness” of things, the groundlessness of our concepts of objects and events. Emptiness here is meant in the Buddhist sense of them not being inherently the thing they seem to be, which becomes more obvious when we see their impermanence. Everything is made of something else, and is part of something else: we drew the lines to name them as we do and this becomes a way of seeing, one in which we are prone to believe too firmly.

Are we awareness?

What is the relationship between our world as we think it, and our direct awareness – meaning our whole world of senses and mental happenings like dreams, thoughts, imagination? Does awareness age or change its nature? Does it begin at birth and end at death – or are those more events which appear in awareness? Such matters may seem purely philosophical, just a matter of coming to conclusions through thinking deeply about them. But through meditation and guidance from experienced teachers we can approach these questions experientially and reap powerful insights.

Such questions lead us on to wondering about the nature of “beings”, conscious lives – ourselves and others. A profound understanding – an inexpressible vision – awaits discovery, one which irreversibly affects how we live in relation to others. And if we go for broke, we can even reach a new vision of time and space.

Empathy – not one thing feeling the suffering of another, but the fact that they are inherently the same thing

Spacetime is Here-&-Now

That sounds like attacking the very bedrock of our existence, yet if we reflect for a moment, space and time are excellent examples of cracks in our assumptions about the world. Space is clearly visible as the distance between objects and the place in which objects appear, but when we pursue this construct to its limit… well, we can find no limit. Where is the edge of space? What could it be? It makes no sense.

Similarly time seems recognisable in everyday experience, and yet we never experience the past or the future except as mental events: memories, thoughts. We only ever experience the present, and how long does that last exactly? We can find no beginning or end to it, so how can linear time explain this experience?

“…no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity”
John Donne, English Christian poet and preacher

The fact that everything is up for re-examination need not daunt us, it could excite us to begin the quest. Insight comes when we are ready, the thrust of this book is to help us ready ourselves to be taken on this journey.

Lightbulb moments?

For some people, changes in view, or more accurately glimpses of how the universe of experience really is, come in flashes. They are frequently the same flash over again but each time feeling clearer, more significant. Others would report that no change occurs, no exciting vistas open up for them – and yet gradually over time they come to quite a different place in their understanding, having dropped many of their previous foundational assumptions. It really doesn’t matter where we are on this spectrum, and we probably cannot change it anyway. The path is to begin, and to keep going. That’s all, just never give up. After all, if time does not exist and I am not what I thought, who is worried about speed?

“Rigdzin Shikpo Rinpoche talks about how insight arises from the play (rolpa) of the mind that has the creative ability or skill (tsal) that can be trained and developed to home in on and recognise beauty (gyen). Insight arises this way be it in mathematics, art or Dharma itself.”
Lama Shenpen, oral teaching

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