Expanding possibilities

According to my dictionary, insight means "penetration with the understanding". Understanding usually refers to mental comprehension.

Our culture tends to rely heavily on our visual sense and conscious thoughts. If we can’t explain something, and explain how we know it, we often think we don’t know. Yet we appear to be able to see and make useful choices about what we see without interpreting it with conscious thought.

Blindsight

This article on the brain’s subconscious visual sense describes how a doctor left blind by two successive strokes successfully navigated an obstacle course — a cluttered hallway. One of the researcher’s comments was  “The more educated people are… the less likely they are to believe they have these resources that they are not aware of to avoid obstacles."

Second sight

According to wikipedia, second sight is a form of extra-sensory perception whereby a person perceives information, in the form of vision, about future events before they happen. I’d enlarge that to include information about the present and perception that uses the senses without the usual filters.

Science begins to catch up

In most if not all previous cultures, shaman perceived and indeed sought out information from their other than conscious minds. In is excellent book, The Cosmic Serpent, Jeremy Narby explores the validity of what those shaman experienced and learnt and finds a high correlation between their insights and molecular biology.

Receiving insight

This correlation extends beyond the shaman’s own body into the world around them. This suggests that by going within ourselves, we can connect with the consciousness of other living organisms and receive insight. Some of these shaman had the benefit of drugs but they also had the benefits of discipline and teachings that are both passed down and fully alive.

Our perceptions, level of conscious awareness and means of learning about ourselves and our world are all, by comparison, extremely narrow and may well, as the blindsight researcher suggested, limit us. Richard Bartlett who developed Matrix Energetics tells his students that they can do even more than he can because they are not hindered by having studied medicine and learnt what ‘can’t’ be done. The more of us who explore for ourselves and share what can be done and how to do it, the more freedom and insight we can all enjoy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 7:20 pm and is filed under co-creation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.