Can that flash of insight be directed?
I've experienced those insightful moments before. Those moments when a "pattern" appears, and for a moment you can see that "pattern" down through your own understanding, then on through "places" that may not be so well supported.
The tracks it leaves through your own understanding may linger, but that only serves to wet your appetite, as more and more you find what you find there useful.
Those tracks quickly fade where it crosses into "unknown". Your sure there is an "answer" just beyond the remaining "light". The quicker you look the quicker it fades.
If you accept that it is random, and look at whats around when it happens (mentally, physically, and any other ...ly you want to throw in there). Can you recreate the environment in which insight seems to occur, and push it's randomness into if it happens and have some say in the where?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Mark Kusek on
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Everyhing we know is always relative to what we do not.
Insight can illumine the territory of the known and shine it's light upon the unknown in dependance on causes and conditions.
These flashes need to be integrated and anchored with the contents of the known in order for their energies, substances and meanings to remain consciously available.
The process of integration (whetting the appetite, finding useful applications, etc.) is each individual's responsibility to put into practice.
Each act of integration or anchoring is like a bonding of the light of illumination to existing contents of the "known of your experience". The contents of what you know are changed thereby in a transformative process.
Find the source of insight or even ignorance, and throw or pitch both the focus of attention as well as the entire contents of the known into it as a sacrifice. Especially the new transformations of understanding and meaning brought about by conscious integration efforts.
Feed it your mind and heart. Then next time insight occurs, watch what happens to the territory then illumined.
Some insight is progressive revelation, pulsing like a quasar.
Use you latest integration to have another look at a term like "kensho" as used in Zen for some further clues on what you ask about.
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Permalink Reply by David Allen on
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Thank you for your response.
I would agree with what I get out of your response. I didn't understand the reference to sacrifice though. Most likely my issue with it is my belief we don't have to sacrifice anything (at least nothing of any importance).
In my experience, the actual flash, is caused by everything connected or related to the subject, or object (context) of the insight all light up at once. Where our experiences or understanding align more closely with the insight, the connection linger because they are better supported (you have been there before, and have at least some understanding, or awareness).
So yes, I agree, look to how it fits with our current understanding, recognize the connections (even within our current understanding), that we may not have fully realized yet. Absolutely utilize what you find useful and expand our understanding (our belief).
Given all that, just as it illuminates things already "known" to us, it usually highlights new connections that we had missed, overlooked, not understood: It also sheds some light into the areas not so familiar.
The level of detail may not match the resolution, so the specifics of whats there remain unknown, Any connections we can make, gives strength to it, making the "unknown" a little more familiar.
I have found this a useful tool. Having even a little influence on the frequency, or the context, it's usefulness would increase (by at least an order of magnitude).
Can we, or do we, have an influence we could begin to access that?
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The sacrifice part is sort of like certain aspects of the buddhist practice of Chod for dissolving ego, for example, or any ritual of renunciation to reduce attachment.
In my view, what I meant was a kind of spiritual practice where you give your own mind and experience and conscious abilities back to the universe, so that when fresh insight arises, it can use the contents of consciousness in new creative ways which push the limits of the known and give new bonding properties to what was not illumined before.
If you don't attach to tightly to it, then not only is it still available to you to use, but pitched below or beyond the sphere of consciousness it is then offered freely back as refined material, potentially to be recombined.
To increase frequency or influence context, perform your own version of this ritual of this sacrifice.
I'm not saying that you can consciously control it, because in essence you are relating consciousness to the unconscious in a ritual way, and they don't call it the "unconscious" for nothing. We simply cannot see that far into it before we lose all ability to see at all.
Feed the uroborus your own existence and it will come round in such a way that the distinction between you and it eventually dissolves. Tat Tvam Asi.
NOTE: the uroborus is related both to notions like gankyil as well as to the motion turning the wheel of Bhavachakra in Buddhism.
It's love or it's not
give all that you got
back to the heart
that gave it to you
it's round make the circle
round make the circle
of love
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"in essence you are relating consciousness to the unconscious"
would this equate to "increasing the % of the brain being used" or "expanding our awareness"?
I've looked at ritual before. What I found there was that the ritual part was about setting parameters, adjusting the perspective, so when the integration part came you would "view" the information a particular way. This was used in an effort to add consistency through time. What it showed me was that it was possible to set up the environment (in my mind), and in this way influence how I saw the connections.
It's the same concept as looking out at the stars. The brighter or stronger ones overpower the dimmer (possibly the more distant) ones. To see what is less bright, you have to filter out the strong ones. Your setting the parameters that you want to view the universe through.
I could easily be out in left field here. My experience has been that "truth" simplifies, it has too.
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As one apprehends and then works to integrates unconscious contents into consciousness, there is an expansion in a way that was not apparently present before.
But it also depends on what those contents are. That was one of Jung's points, for example, about individuation as a process, and about potentially finding more authenticity for your life.
When you integrate unconscious shadow contents for example, your light (i.e. your ego consciousness) becomes a little more darkened thereby, but more authentic as well because your darkness (i.e., the shadow contents) which used to be hidden from view, now surface and through evaluation and integration with consciousness, of what you do not again reject, can become a little more illumined thereby and bond with ego.
Jung called it "finding the hidden gold in the shadow." Reclaiming it's rejected energy and import for a more healthy, integral and authentic life.
I agree that our expectations and initial assumptions condition our worldview and how we both apprehend and interpret experience.
Changes to expectation and assumptions can bring about a transformation of view.
I like your analogy too, about looking at the stars. I think what you are saying there also applies to how we interpret meaning based on particular discernments we focus on in a similar way.
What we focus our attention on tends to push what is not focused on out towards the periphery of awareness. It becomes occluded. The more concretely we focus, the more definite our perceptions of the focused object can seem, but this seeing of definite "things in themselves" often comes at the expense of maintaining a view of the whole or of recognizing the interdependence of the parts within it to each other as well as to the whole.
The "heresy of separateness", arises along with the notion of their being different, individual, subjective observers, including ourselves, who are seeing these apparent things.
It's that same quantum mechanical dependency on the observer and the effect that their act and instrument of observation has on what is apprehended.
What you say also reminds me of certain buddhist practices like "sky gazing." They do it as a way to be mindful of the basic space of phenomenon i.e., shunyata or emptiness.
Just think how many times you've looked up at the blue vault of the sky, skimmed it's colored dome and then brought your attention "back down to Earth" at the human scale. We gloss off the "surface" of the blue like it is an object, when the truth is that it is the void itself and we along with every other relative phenomenal thing are floating in boundlessness. Heaven is right there. If you want a sense of awe and wonder, you don't have to go off in flights of fancy or overly complicate things: just get a telescope. Contemplate basic space.
I often wonder about the fact that we cannot conceive basic space, but rather have to rather clumsily regard it by positing it as an object related to all the other objects that have arisen within it, and their respective relationships, along with us as participants, observing them.
Truth filters in
on sunlit beams
and drops
like a leaf.
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"I think what you are saying there also applies to how we interpret meaning based on particular discernments we focus on in a similar way."
I have to apologize, I'm not ignoring the rest of your post, I have to do this before I can continue. Sorry, it's a me thing.
I brought a quote from your post in on top. If you understand how to filter out to be able to see past the more "obvious" and pick up the more subtle influences.
those more subtle influences are often (I'm just one guy, often is best I could do) what the more energetic (that your filtering out) is built on.
Add to this "as above so below"
and what you have is a template or pattern that repeats itself. Each repetition adds complexity. So the pattern will manifest differently (because of the higher degree of complexity, or even a different perspective).
Now look at that tool again.
now you can recognize a pattern, look at it down through the past, and project it into the future. Just don't place more faith, than the reality of the day can support, in those projections.
p.s. and prediction becomes prophecy.
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Understood. Thanks David.
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