Quotes about Insight

Written truth is four-dimensional. If we consult it at the wrong time, or read it at the wrong place, it is as empty and shapeless as a dress on a hook.

Perhaps a great love is never returned. Had it been given warmth and shelter by its counterpart in the Other, perhaps it would have been hindered from ever growing to maturity.
It "gives" us nothing.
But in its world of loneliness it leads us up to the summits with wide vistas - of great insights.

The Buddhas, the World-Honored Ones, for one great cause alone appear in the world. The Buddhas, the World-Honored Ones, appear in the world because they wish to cause the beings to hear of the Buddha's knowledge and insight and thus enable them to gain purity. They appear in the world because they wish to demonstrate the Buddha's knowledge and insight to the beings. They appear in the world because they wish to cause the beings to understand. They appear in the world because they wish to cause the beings to enter into the path of the Buddha's knowledge and insight.

He who finds thought that lets us penetrate even a little deeper into the eternal mystery of nature has been granted great grace. He who, in addition, experiences the recognition, sympathy, and help of the best minds of his times, had been given almost more happiness than one man can bear.

There is neither unwisdom nor ignorance; neither bondage, nor liberation. There is but one pure consciousness.

To understand spiritual intention and insight is the knowledge of the rock people. Within each of us is the story of yesterday

Choose the World You See, and See the World You Choose.

Not the least of the problems in clarifying one's consciousness is developing the stoic determination to criticize one's own softness or sentimentality toward oneself. Ego, self-solicitous about its own tenderness, is the ultimate policeman over its own false consciousness, dementedly uprooting every healthy seedling of insight into the truth. As Kierkegaard remarked, most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, but the real trick and task of life is to learn to be just the very opposite.

Wisdom is the aristic craving for extraordinary insights, for incandescent revelations that have the power to burst through banausic and doulic ordinariness: wisdom is the lust to be transfigured, transvaluated.

Mais les yeux sont aveugles. Il faut chercher avec le couer. (But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.)

In the Oneness / Awakened state the insights and experience of all arising in and as the Divine, and the Divine being everywhere and everything (beyond consciousness, the Self, and the mindbody package) has been obvious. This has been consistently tested by life and the obviousness, and the freedom which this brings, fluctuated accordingly.

Despite the freedom of the Oneness state I was aware that the mind was still going, I was still buying into it and really when I felt into it I was still suffering in a way that I thought would have finished many years before. There felt to be lots of changes but essentially I was still the same mess that I had always been, albeit with a more mature stance and view of things.

A true insight occurs in a moment, a split second, and it brings a subtle shift in your perspective. The 'experience' which surrounds the insight is generally entirely superfluous and is merely the Self or mindbody package attempting to own and understand the insight.

It is essential that you examine with the eye of spiritual insight these faults … you tend to exaggerate them and thus interpret your way of living as foolish and evil conduct. You would imagine faults where there are none and see a disease in what is really a cure.
~ Ibn ’Abbad of Ronda, 1332-1390 ~

The first thing to do is to break the circuit between bile and brain by resolutely turning one’s thoughts away from the vexatious subject.  This does not means finding convincing arguments, but simply breaking off the contact by, for example, forcing oneself to careful observation of some object or another.  When the train of thought has thus been redirected, a few moments of mediation will prevent the reaction of the bile from continuing.

            This small act of control has the highest importance, for it ensures that when the anarchistic Automaton attacks the conscious self, victory shall go to the latter.

Not even the best teacher can present one with consciousness, or fill one with knowledge; but in a man suitably disposed it is possible to arouse reactions which will lead in the right direction.

            Often it is useful to prepare the ground by clarifying essential ideas in order to get rid of prejudices.  But the most effective instruction is that which leads the seeker to put his problems clearly to himself so that then he can find he answer for himself in meditation.

            However, if these interpersonal abilities are not balanced by an astute sense of one’s own needs and feelings and how to fulfill them, they can lead to a hollow social success – a popularity won at the cost of one’s true satisfaction.  Such is the argument of Mark Snyder, a University of Minnesota psychologist who has studied people whose social skills make them first-rate social chameleons, champions at making a good impression.  Their psychological credo might well be a remark by W. H. Auden who said that his private image of himself “is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.”  That trade-off can be made if social skills outstrip the ability to know and honor one’s own feelings: in order to be loved – or at least liked – the social chameleon will seem to be whatever those he is with seem to want.  The sign that someone falls into this pattern, Snyder finds, is that they make an excellent impression, yet have few stable or satisfying intimate relationships.  A more healthy pattern, of course, is to balance being true to oneself with social skills, using them with integrity.

            Social chameleons, though, don’t mind in the least saying one thing and doing another, if that will win them social approval.  They simply live with the discrepancy between their public face and their private reality.  Helena Deutsch, a psychoanalyst, called such people the “as-if personality,” shifting personas with remarkable plasticity as they pick up signals from those around them.  “For some people,” Snyder told me, “the public and private person meshes well, while for others there seems to be only a kaleidoscope of changing appearances.  They are like Woody Allen’s character Zelig, madly trying to fit in with whomever they are with.”

            Such people try to scan someone for a hint as to what is wanted from them before they make a response, rather than simply saying what they truly feel.  To get along and be liked, they are willing to make people they dislike think they are friendly with them.  And they use their social abilities to mold their actions as disparate social situations demand, so that they may act like very different people depending on whom they are with, swinging from bubbly sociability, say, to reserved withdrawal.  To be sure, to the extent that these traits lead to effective impression management, they are highly prized in certain professions, notably acting, trial law, sales, diplomacy, and politics.

            Another, perhaps more crucial kind of self-monitoring seems to make the difference between those who end up as anchorless social chameleons, trying to impress everyone, and those who can use their social polish more in keeping with their true feelings.  That is the capacity to be true, as the saying has it, “to thine own self,” which allows acting in accord with one’s deepest feelings and values no matter what the social consequences.  Such emotional integrity could well lead to, say, deliberately provoking a confrontation in order to cut through duplicity or denial – a clearing of the air that a social chameleon would never attempt.

Life is a Strange School.

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom; mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

People who turn to philosophy expecting to harvest a crop of formulas of wisdom or understanding do not understand--philosophy has such things, but they are merely incidental, not the essence of the matter.  Philosophy is about subtilizing and tuning up the coherence and acuity of one's seeing, it is about opening new dimensions for insight, learning to think about what one is doing when one thinks instead of just blundering through the processes of putting thoughts together.

Like the priestly cult of the Middle Ages, the modern priestly cult of "scientific" psychotherapists exist overwhelmingly to stultify or blunt a too-acute insight into the powers benumbed in our personalities by our prevailing culture.

Ultimately the most profound problems with psychotherapy have always been that instead of possessing any contrarian or transcendent values to enable it to produce insights countervailing against our dysfunctional and incoherent and humanly destructive culture, its "therapists" have been virtually all shills or agents for this culture, trying to accommodate their patients to a fundamentally unhealthy and insane way of life.

Commercial interests with their advertising industry do not want people to develop contentment and less greed.  Military interests in economic, political, ethnic or nationalist guises, do not want people to develop more tolerance, nonviolence and compassion.  And ruling groups in general, in whatever sort of hierarchy do not want the ruled to become too insightful, too independent, too creative on their own, as the danger is that they will become insubordinate, rebellious, and unproductive in their alloted tasks.

"An essential part of seeing clearly is finding the willingness to look closely and to go beyond our own ideas."

Within the categorical syllogism, ordinary language represents the ordinary flow of inference. Two premises are given; there is a plash of insight, and one step undertaken. The mind hops right along, not quite knowing where it is going but getting there nonetheless. On the right, a checklist does its work. The logician's clamp retains its force of old, but the inferential steps involve no more than the substitution of symbols for symbols, with the anchor of inference embedded in identities. Inference now proceeds from one identity to the next; no plash of insight is involved, only the solid satisfying ratcheting sound of symbols being substituted for symbols.

Hold fast to one principle and all the others are identical. On seeing one thing, you see all things. On perceiving an individual’s mind, you perceive all mind. Glimpse one truth, and all truth is present in your vision, for there is nowhere at all that is devoid of the Truth. When you see a grain of sand, you see all possible worlds, with all their vast rivers and mountains. When you see a drop of water, you see the nature of all the waters of the universe.

Becoming a real researcher has been the ultimate humbling experience for me. Nature is the examiner from hell; if you find new things at all, you always find them the hard way, with sweat and tears. Only then do you notice that there was a really easy way to find them. But this insight rarely arrives before you have been utterly humiliated and reduced to despair.

"Within you is great power, as well as, the source."

It occurs to her that she should record this flash of insight in her journal - otherwise she is sure to forget, for she is someone who is always learning and forgetting and obliged to learn again...

Express yourself completely,
Then keep quiet.
Be like the forces of nature;
When it blows, there is only wind;
When it rains, the is only rain;
When the clouds pass, the sun shines through.

If you open yourself to the Tao,
You are at one with the Tao
And you can embody it completely.
If you open yourself to insight,
You are at one with insight
And you can use it completely.

If you open yourself to loss,
You are one with loss
And you can accept it completely.
Open yourself to the Tao,
Then trust your natural responses;
And everything will fall into place.

Most people don't do what they believe in; they just do what's most convenient, then they repent.