Insight!

The power of insight and how to strengthen it – part 1

It is insight that allows us to suddenly see something in a different light and, therefore, to think, feel and behave differently about it.  We are all subject to institutionalising forces (see here) that have shaped our responses over time, not to our agenda but to someone else’s.

To break these learned responses, we need to bring insight to bear which needs two things: a practice that encourages insight (and Inquiry is such a practice) and practices that strengthen insight - concentration meditation and mindfulness meditation combine to do this.

But how?

Consider the short phrase in this figure:

We will immediately read ‘THE CAT’ and interpret the same symbol as two different letters. But how do we do that? It may seem obvious, but it is not so simple.

We do the above with the capacity we have to scale our attention down to look at the letters (features, f) and then scale our attention up to see the words (gestalt, g).  We do this scaling up and down multiple times, and very quickly, so that, without any obvious effort, we read ‘THE CAT’.  This dynamic scaling up and down allows us to frame what we are seeing in a way that makes sense.

The better we are at doing this scaling then the easier it is for us to find the most intelligible framing for whatever we are sensing.

But this is not the only mechanism in play.  Next week I will look at our capacity for ‘opacity and transparency’ and then how these two mechanisms link to the two forms of meditation which strengthen the capacity for insight.

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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