More insight!

The power of insight and how to strengthen it – part 2

Consider the following.  Imagine closing your eyes and using a pen held in one hand to investigate the shape and texture of an object that is sitting on a desk in front of you by tapping around the object.  In your mind you are building up a sense of the object.  The object is opaque (o) to you, you cannot ‘see’ through it, but the pen is transparent (t) to you, you are ‘seeing’ the object, not the pen.

Now, continue tapping, but imagine shifting your attention from the object to your pen.  The pen is now opaque to you, you are ‘seeing’ the pen rather than the object.  You can do this again by shifting your attention to the sensations in your fingers as they are holding the tapping pen.  These sensations now become opaque to you, you become aware of them.

Another way to look at this is, normally, I would look at the world through my glasses, they are transparent to me, but occasionally I take my glasses off and look at them, they become opaque to me.

Last week, we looked at our ability to see the features (f) and the whole, the gestalt (g), when reading an ambiguous set of letters.  We can combine these two capabilities together as shown in the image.

We can now also note that concentration meditation helps us to flex our attention in one set of directions and mindfulness meditation helps us to flex our attention in the opposite set of directions.

By following both practices, we can strengthen our ability to frame situations quickly and plausibly and then, as rapidly, reframe them if we detect errors.  This keeps us closely matched to reality and helps us to avoid self-deception.

Insight is one of the powerful ways that we can use our intelligence (which is largely fixed) in increasingly more effective, and wiser, ways.

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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