I know that the answers that I am seeking are not to be found in books, or in ratiocination, but in experience. That, like thought processes, is not available on demand. Meditation – from which I once had such great hopes, continues as a struggle against wayward thoughts and distractions. I do not seem to be getting anywhere. So I continue to read and make notes in a haphazard fashion.
I am reading Teilhard de Chardin seriously for the first time. His mystical experience informed his thinking and I think this is the way it should be. Experience is our contact with reality. It passes through the filter of the discursive mind where it is interpreted – not always correctly. I was interested to come across this by Bernadette Roberts this morning.
I learned that a single insight is not sufficient to bring about any real change. In time every insight has a way of filtering down to our usual frame of reference, and once we make it fit, it gets lost in the milieu of the mind – the mind which has a tendency to pollute every insight. The secret of allowing an insight to become a permanent way of knowing and seeing is not to touch it, cling to it, dogmatise it, or even think about it. Insights come and go but to have them stay we have to flow with them, otherwise no change is possible.*
Perhaps it is a good idea to call these experiences insights. We tend to consider the tangible encounters with empirical reality and with other people as real experiences. Insights, intuitions and altered states of perception are not in the same class. They are put down as vague feelings, or all in the mind, and not really considered to be in the same class as empirical experiences. Sometimes these insights and intuitions of being can be overwhelming, but other times – more usually, perhaps – they are very, very gentle, quiet intimations which are easily overlooked, or drowned by the cacophony of the material world.
*[Roberts, Bernadette; The Experience of No-Self, SUNY Press, Albany 1993 p. 30]