What is a spiritual insight and how does it occur?
A spiritual insight is never the result of thinking about something.
An insight is food for thought.
That is,
It conditions your thoughts,
Changing their direction perhaps,
Or clarifying their subject or,
In the best of cases,
Completely changing how you think about something.
Even a good dictionary can tell you that insights never come from thinking.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines insight as,
Quote,
Immediate and clear understanding,
As seeing the solution to a problem or the means to reaching a goal that takes place without recourse to overt trial and error behavior,
End quote.
Thinking of course,
In the sense that it is a kind of behavior,
Is very trial and error in its approach.
No,
Insight is immediate and never vague,
So it's not at all like how thinking proceeds.
And in fact,
Its most frequent characterization is that it is a clear perception of something,
A recognition of something.
So it cannot arise directly from an analysis of conceptual ideas,
Nor can it be communicated through words,
Such as spoken instruction.
Whether while being taught something or listening to someone talking or reading books,
Insights can only arise from deep absorption in meditative imperience,
Which is the deeply felt presence of that which we perceive,
Think,
Emote,
Embody,
Remember,
And intuit.
And presence is different than meaning or character or even identification,
Which is to say meditative imperiences can only arise while you are not lost in thought about what it is or who it is or how it is.
Which is not to say,
However,
That you can't be deeply absorbed in watching your thoughts arise and pass away and suddenly have an insight.
The point here is that insights just appear,
Literally popping into your head,
In the clearing that occurs when thoughts are absent,
Neither in the process of arising nor as they pass away,
But only after they have passed and before the next thought stirs.
In that space,
That is just clear cognizance.
Another word that is often used for an insight is intuition,
Though technically an insight is what intuition provides you.
The insight being what comes and intuition being how it arrives,
But we often use intuition when we mean insight.
Intuition is defined by the same dictionary as,
Quote,
The power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.
So,
As I said,
An insight is never the result of thinking about something.
Where this can get murky is when we are absorbed in watching thoughts arise and pass away and realize that they,
Too,
Just show up.
This also involves intuition because reasoning about something requires the presence of intuition to carry the train of thought forward in sometimes surprising ways.
The alternative,
Which we steadfastly assume to be the case,
Is an impossible process that entails our thinking thoughts before we think them.
How,
After all,
Would you think a thought?
It's not like you know what you want to think and then think it.
So where do these thoughts come from?
They are intuited,
As I have already explained in my book Tranquility's Secret.
If they weren't intuited,
Then the necessary state of affairs would be that we form the thought before we actually think it,
And we can't escape this logical impossibility even by asserting that we are creating our own thoughts via subconscious processes.
As I earlier showed,
Pushing the process down into an unknowable subconscious process doesn't succeed in explaining how it overcomes the impossibility of our creating our own thoughts before we have them.
It just hides the problem so we can ignore it.
It is only after the insight,
Once it is recognized,
Is apperceived that an understanding is gained.
Apperception is the mental process by which a person makes sense of an insight by coherently assimilating it to the body of ideas he or she already possesses.
It is then,
And only then,
That an explanation can be given.
But by the very nature of these insights,
Only someone with keen discernment as well as skill in clearly communicating with language can do so.
An insight does not arrive via concepts.
Thus the need for discernment and skillful use of language in order to communicate it as accurately as possible.
Without those skills,
You would probably find yourself saying something like,
How do I know this?
I just do.
Or else you mangle the sense of the insight into something familiar that you already know.
Well,
It's like this.
Insights arise intuitively,
That is,
Spontaneously and without a cause.
Yet the possibility for gaining insights can be conditioned via making a heartfelt aspiration to achieve insights and following a meditative practice with dedication.
These intentions do not cause an insight to arise,
Nor does our failure to set an intention cause insights not to arise.
In other words,
Our heartfelt intentions help to create the conditions for insights to arise,
But insights always arise spontaneously when they do.
While discursive thinking does not exist in the more advanced meditative states,
So one might ask how insights can arise,
It is important to keep making the point that authentic insights never arise from discursive thinking.
In addition,
When discursive thinking is present,
We can confuse ourselves by imagining that a sudden thought that has come to us,
As they all do,
Is the result of having intuited an important insight.
Such insights as these are not authentic and are not apperceived into one's understanding,
And thus will lead to false conclusions for ourselves and miscommunication if shared with others.
They especially mislead the holder of such an imagined insight,
Regardless of how much bliss or joy having it might bring them.
Only an understanding that arises from the process of apperceiving,
Intuitively delivered non-verbal insights during absorbed meditative states are true spiritual insights.
Why is this?
Because insights derived from discursive thinking can only be about conceptual knowledge,
Which is based upon the error of believing that different phenomena are independently real as a result of having an inherent self-nature.
This does not mean that such insights are of no practical value.
It means that they can only be insights about conceptual knowledge and not about the nature of reality.
Even discursive thinking about insights gained during meditation can lead to completely false and misleading conclusions for the reason I mentioned above about the difficulty of even speaking of them.
And discursive thoughts are always conceptual in structure.
Remember,
An insight is a recognition of some truth,
Not a string of words and references to conceptual ideas,
An appearance of recognition must either come directly from within a state of deep absorption in the naturing of what appears or be confirmed by it,
If it is to be relied upon as a true insight.
