We, either conscious or unconscious, witness today, look for tomorrow, think about the past and introspect within. These habits of our mind tend to guide our views of our world and also seem to guide our behaviors. We can suffer from illusions and delusions and sometimes fear one as the other. Yet we continue daily, watching ourselves be the actors in our own movie.
How do we know that our perspectives are the ones to listen to? Does your best friend have the answers? Does your walk with the dog bring out your best thinking? Why did Howard Schultz know that coffee would bring people together and form an entire industry so many years ago at a time when we brought our coffee into our homes and cooked them! How does it all happen anyway?
Well, I don’t really know and, frankly, realize the futility of this search for meaning behind the things we see. But let me try to parse this experience anyway.
The mind is a terrible thing to waste as they say. Well, are you wasting yours with random self-talk or are there better things to think about . It all comes down to your life to live and your decisions to live it the way you chose. But is it really you choosing or is someone else in your mind choosing for you?
I suggest that when we finally find the graceful end to our lives, that we hope we don’t see someone else’s life passing by us. That would be a shame to live a life of others and not ourselves. To live without a taste of what you really can achieve or believe while still breathing the same air that greatness has breathed.
Our minds (I am no psychologist but I can play one of TV), seem to bring us value in so many ways but these four techniques can assist us in finding if it is us thinking or others thinking for us. Take these four ways into our true self and use it to triangulate (wait there are four, how can we triangulate?) our self in them. Well you may ask how four can triangulate but be patient and we can engage on that mathematics of insight.
Vision is said to be the sight of the mind targeted to the future we imagine. Insight is the sight of the mind targeted within. Both outside and inside form the picture of who, why, where, and what we are to our world and beyond.
But for us to see the future we imagine, we must first be able to understand the present. That’s when eyesight is important – the ability to actually observe what you are seeing. Eyesight is in the present tense always. It is what you are witnessing today. As eyesight is today, hindsight (which is always 20/20 as they say) is about the past. Foresight is the ability to predict the future before us, not what we imagine but what we believe is the future.
With eyesight, foresight, and hindsight, we are now ready and prepared to gain insight. Insight is the ability to have a clear deep and sometime sudden understanding of a complicated problem (Cambridge English dictionary). Another way to express it is the act or result of apprehending the inner nature of things or seeing intuitively (Merriam-Webster).
Many want and crave insight but have yet to begin their journey through eyesight, hindsight and foresight to be prepared to dive deep into themselves to find insight or rather, to have insight greet their prepared mind.
The practise of insight is one many engage in automatically but many form incomplete narratives of their lives because of the lack of tooling from the three very important preconditioning factors that bring truth. Insight is not granted or earned – it is realized. However, this realization is a practise and a patient, sometime torturous, journey through eyesight, foresight and hindsight.
Happy journey.