” Never confuse intellectual understanding for insight.”

 - Michael Langford, The Most Direct and Rapid Means to Eternal Bliss, Vol. 1

This Irish storyteller refers to insight as knowing.  Knowing is not the same as intellectual knowing. Intellectual knowledge is always ‘about’ something. It is dualistic. There is the knower and that which is known.

Insight is transformational.  It changes your worldview.  You see from a higher plane.  You get a larger, wider and more expansive understanding.  There is, however, a paradox with insight.  It will make you humble.  If it does not humble you, you have claimed it as your own and not as the gift of and from Love.

There is a difficulty here.  You must have a contrast in order to avoid confusion.  You have to have had the experience of insight to be able to distinguish it from intellectual understanding.  Most of us have had the experience of intellectual understanding.  Too few of us know and become the experience of the ‘insider.’

“Love is an inside job,” says Paul Ferrini.  Insight, as the word implies, is also an inside job. It is not seeing with the physical eye but is the experience of becoming a Seer.  A seer sees in a way that we ordinarily do not.   A seer experiences life without being an ‘I’ to experience.  This they know is the way to be in the world, the dying before you die, and the dying to a sense of separateness that keeps you anchored to death.

‘Your experience’ as you experience it is filtered.  This filter you call ‘me’ and ‘mine.’  You call it ‘your experience.’  You have it within the boundary called time and space.  When you have a particular experience you say now ‘you know.’

The now your know may be intellectual understanding.  It may change your life’s situation but it will not change the way you see the world.  Insight changes the way you see the world.  You become a seer beyond time.

What if you never experienced insight?  What if you have not seen for yourself with the eye of the Seer?

First, you need an intense desire to become the knowing of who you are or have the intense desire to put an end to suffering.  In the beginning, this desire can be for yourself alone.

The root of suffering is in your sense of separateness.  Insight allows you to recognise that this sense of separateness is created by your sense of attachment to the ‘I’ you call ‘little me.’  To have insight inoto this separateness of self means you feel  the connection to Oneness.  This gives you the ability to distinguish between knowledge and knowing.  More intellectual knowledge may assist you in creating a more comfortable lifestyle.  Insight will lead you to a feeling relationship beyond belief and beyond limitation called ‘my life.’  Instead of satisfaction one experiences joy.

Insight turns rags to riches and lead into gold.  Fairy tales invite insight.  They invite you to kiss the Sleeping Beauty within you locked away in the ivory tower of intellectual knowledge.

In the Hans Christian Anderson’s story The Ugly Duckling the farmyard can still be improved through intellectual and scientific progress. There is nothing wrong with this unless you get stuck in the upgraded farmyard.  You will still be the Ugly Duckling who has not had the insight that he is given when he goes to the lake and sees his true reflection and insight into the true Self.

The work of getting insight is something you do but do not ‘do.’  Insight is a grace.  When you receive it you will know that this is so.  You will know that you could never in a million lifetimes earn this.  You cannot buy it with effort but you need to make the effort. Consider yourself a gardener of insight.  All you do is plant the seed and tend it.  It is, as the word implies, already within you.  It requires practice and patience.

What is given to you through insight you will want to give away.  Only you will be disturbed.  Now you are the knowing of that no thing that is everything and this is the beginning of an endless becoming! You are now an outsider although you have also been  an insider. Now you have to choose which master you are going to serve. Insight?  Or separateness?

0
  • 0
  • 0
  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

No Comments »