Developing Insight

Happy Thursday!

I hope you are all enjoying life.

I had a lovely deadlifting session yesterday. I warmed up to my training weight of 405 lbs., then I did 3×3, 1×1, 1×3 at that load. I coupled my sets with reptilian crawling. I felt great.

I’ll have to scrub the calluses off before showing affection or I may not get a warm reception!just part of the joys of weight lifting!

I’m taking the rest of the day off today after I get a little play time in the gym. It’s my day to get a massage and have a long steam. Then I’ll go home and do some art, practice with my rattles and healing tools, and I may take a long hike in the hills behind my house.

My buddy Rory is coming to visit this weekend to celebrate the new Mayan long count cycle. We always look forward to his visits. Rory’s a fun guy to be with and he’s a deep well, so it always makes for interesting conversation.

We both love eating Vidya’s food too, so that’s always a highlight for us.

DEVELOPING INSIGHT

With the Mayan calendar long count cycle ending tomorrow morning, 12-21-12 at 3:10 AM PST (if I remember the exact time correctly), many are pondering what may occur. When an event like this approaches us, we have two ways of exploring it:

1. We can use our ego-mind to reach out to others and other sources of information to gain a consensus of opinion. This form of reaching out is based on information trading alone.

Any feelings you have will be based on the judgments you make based on the information alone. The information may, or may not be true. The information may or may not shake your idea structure.

The key aspect of reaching out is that all perceptions resulting from this method are the product of believing or not believing the information gained.

2. We can use the ego’s powers of perception to go inward.

To go inward, we must rely much more on our feeling nature. To feel what is rising within us in response to a request or question, we must cease from projecting our own thoughts or ideas or all we ever feel are the emotions and images we are projecting.

The inward mode of perception is called “insight” because our conscious use of vision turns inward. For most people, this is challenging because perceptual faculties are outwardly oriented.

This commonly results when children are given rules, or instilled with facts before they can integrate their left and right brain hemispheres, which occurs between age 7-12.

When a child is drilled with “facts”, such as you can’t get salt out of ocean water, their willingness to explore the possibility generally ceases.

Now, if stuck in a boat in the ocean without water, they are likely to die of dehydration without even meditating on ways of possible desalination.

To fully use insight, one must not be afraid of, or uncomfortable with the concept of the miraculous!

There is an old Buddhist saying that says, “Don’t look at the finger, look at the moon.”

This is a message commonly given by metaphysical teachers to make a key point. The word “meta-physical” means beyond the physical.

The point being that just as you can’t appreciate the experience of the moon and what the teacher is eluding to if you keep looking at his finger as he/she points to the moon, you can’t experience the metaphysical reality being conveyed by merely reading words on a page.

Insight means to connect to that which is beyond the physical within you.

Tips For Developing Insight

1. Practice reading poetry out loud. Pay attention to the feelings that arise in you from the words. Does the poem create a sense of heaviness, or lightness in you?

By reading aloud, the vibration carried by the words is magnified significantly relative to your thoughts alone. This makes it much easier to connect to the hidden messages in poetry.

To truly connect to the message in a poem, you often have to let go of your rational interpretation of the words.

For example, if you see a poem that reads:

Water is wonderful
Wild, and
Full of light
Dancing with life’s many colors
Flying in dragon wings
As the ocean sings

If a person’s idea of water can’t reach out beyond the confines of their own interpretation of water as a substance they learned about in high school physics, feeling what is being poetically conveyed as wild, full of light, dancing with life’s many colors and flying in dragon wings as the ocean sings becomes but words.

If one can’t fully embody the idea of a dragon, they will certainly be challenged by water dancing with life’s many colors, flying in dragon wings.

Rigid ideas about what words mean, circumscribing them, emanate from acts of judgment; water can and can’t do such and such, therefore, it could never dance with many colors because water doesn’t dance, and dragons are not real either!

To regain your potential for insight, in many ways, means allowing yourself to rekindle your childhood wonder within yourself again.

Before a child is told what water can and can’t do, or whether dragons are or aren’t real, reading such a poem to the child could ignite a display of inner visuals that would make anything by Disney seem like an old black and white comparatively.

The feelings that would arise in the open child would be so multifarious that it would be like asking a child to describe a grasshopper while standing the middle of a field with thousands of them hopping ceaselessly around.

To describe a grasshopper in such an instance, one would have to catch it, hold it still, and then begin making judgments that can be conveyed; a grass hopper is this long, this color and has this many legs!

Now, what just happened to the feelings within you when we switched awareness from the field with thousands hopping all around to holding it and describing it?

If there is a strongly palpable difference in your inner-experience, your faculty of insight is working well. If not, it’s time to find your inner-child and forget about your homework for a while.

2. Look Behind The Painting

Above, you can see a sand dune with footprints across it. Try looking at the wavy lines created in the sand by the wind.

Now, see if you can look at the signature (footprint of the wind) like you look at a human footprint and know that there’s been a human standing right there.

Let yourself feel as one with the wind spirits, as it lay their footprints upon the ground. How fast were they moving? What was their mood? Was there joy in their travels?

Try looking between the projections of things.

Look between the leaves on a tree and see what the negative spaces convey to you. Is there a feeling or feelings ignited when you see the negative spaces?

Does seeing them make a more complete image within you – the whole tree?

I hope you enjoy these little tips for gaining greater insight.

Have a lovely weekend and Blessings for the new Mayan long-count year!

Love and chi,
Paul Chek