Insight is Not a Supermarket

July 2, 2018 General Insights No Comments

Lots of people are kind of lost. They are searching it here and they are looking for it there and they cannot find it anywhere, so they create it themselves…

based on some bits and pieces that they glue together into something that looks like a house to mentally live in.

But is that house actually stable? Unfortunately, that is often absolutely not the case.

You can readily feel this. The construction already appears to be ramshackle at the slightest breeze. One desperately tries to hold everything together, with one’s head in the sand for each possible storm.

The fact is: one cannot simply ‘get a piece of the pie’ in order to build up a mental working model or worldview, for the sake of convenience. One has to invest a large dose of personal commitment:

time, effort and above all lots of personal courage in order to not avoid any challenge.

In the best case-scenario, at some time one will bang with one’s head against the wall with little hurt. Or one is leaning against a wall and then all of a sudden that wall isn’t there anymore. The latter has happened many time to me… It’s better to build a solid insight-home by removing walls rather than by putting up walls. A solid insight-house is not a bricolage.

A bricolage is not a synthesis. It’s just a simulation of a synthesis.

One is often wrongly mistaken because of the similarity. And it is quite a difficult mistake to escape from.

What forms a real synthesis, is that you yourself are going again and again all the way through each insight,

that you imbue it and that it imbues you. A synthesis is another dimension. Only in that other dimension something new is being created and at the same time it really begins to emerge: a synthesis of insight.

Lots of people are kind of lost. They cannot find themselves in what exists. They bump against it like one billiard ball against another. There is no imbuing. And in that case, many people create something themselves… just as well without imbuing, without warmth and with only the glue from a tube bought in the supermarket. Preferably a tube on sale of course, it’s okay to them as long as the word ‘glue’ is written on it.

Shopping.

No foundations.

A bricolage is not an insight.

It is even less than the outset of insight. One is just bringing together what comfortably fits the own mold. As long as it is ‘something’ without being anything. What’s more: as long as it’s an awful lot of ‘something’… without being anything. It is the intention of superficial thinking: trying to come to nothing with an awful lot of ‘something’. Unfortunately, people manage to do this all too often. Sadly enough, this often seems to be quite ‘normal’.

‘Normal’ is not a magic word making something unreal becoming real all of a sudden.

These movements are in any case more horizontal than vertical.

In other words, the result is a construction, not a natural landscape in which a free wind can blow. In other words: one wants freedom of responsibility, but one does not want responsibility for that new freedom. In other words, to be blunt: one wants his own malleability without meeting oneself. One ‘wants the sea in a glass of water’. What’s more: one personally wants to put the sea in that glass of water. A mild form of hubris*?

According to me, this is a powerful momentum towards depression for many people.

The level of similarity to an ancient Greek ‘punishment of the gods’ is, in fact, suspiciously striking. In both descriptions one finds hopelessness, despondency, futility etc.

It is not possible to gain ‘insight’ without really looking terribly well at things, without being oneself, even if it suddenly isn’t that obvious anymore.

Many ‘insights’ belong together only if they all, through you, are you.

You make your own ‘insights’. Nothing or no one does it for you.

A prism takes in light and turns it into all the beautiful colors of the rainbow… when it is itself. Fully itself and itself completely.

And of course at the same time: anything that’s human is not ‘complete’. It is also about the perfection of the imperfection, the beauty of what just does not fit, the harmony of the inequality, again and again the little ‘light’ that know its own shadow.

Obviously this is even more important for a coach/therapist.

It goes without saying why this is the case. Insight: watching soul with eyes of soul. This assumes real openness. Windows with lowered blinds give neither view nor insight. The real coachee is invisible then. Instead of this, there is a glass of water that ‘suffers’ because it is too full and at the same time is looking for more…

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*hubris (‘υβρις): ancient Greek term for the ‘pride’ of man trying to emulate the gods in a simplistic way… but who was mostly terribly punished for it, until the end of time.