Having insight means to see things for what they truly are, to understand them on a deep and fundamental level. In particular, it means having an understanding of who we truly are, both our narrow self and all its peculiarities on the surface, as well as the infinite and interconnected reality that we are part off; and that is part of us. By digging deeper into our subjective experiences, through observation and reflection, we uncover new truths about ourselves that will help us to live better lives, in harmony with ourselves and the world around us.

The goal of the insight phase is to enable us to get this deeper understanding. It’s arguably the most important phase in the Circle of Growth but unfortunately also the one that get’s the least amount of attention. There’s a few reasons for this. The first is that developing insight is highly subjective, meaning that only the person experiencing it will truly know what they know. This makes it hard for people to proof the value of insight, especially in the straight forward way that we’re used to in western culture.

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Take the analogy of learning to ride a bike. Someone can teach me all the theory on how to ride a bike, but unless I spend time and effort trying to actually ride the bike, I will never be able to succeed. I need to embody the theoretic learnings through practice, before I’ll be able to do the thing. Let’s add another layer. Imagine someone wants to teach me how to cycle, but they’ve never even shown me a bike. They might say it’s amazing, the most fabulous form of transportation you could ever imagine, much more efficient than simply walking. But ultimately, I have to take their word for it, because there is no way for them to show me the benefits of cycling without having a bike.

Then we add another layer. I have listened to their teachings carefully and started practicing how to cycle in my mind. At night I would lay in bed, kicking my feet in the air as if I was pedalling on a bike. I practiced how to keep balance, how to use the brakes, and I’ve even learned how to cycle without hands. Convinced that I’ve become a master cycler, I go up to my teacher and tell him the good news. He can ask me questions, test my movements, and put me through all sorts off tests, but there is no way for him to know if I have truly learned how to cycle until I step on a bike to show him.

This is the nature of developing insight. It’s like learning to ride the bike of the mind. There are different techniques, practices, and philosophies, all with their own pro’s and con’s. Just like there are teachers and schools that can help you apply them. But they all run into the same limitation, namely that only the person applying the techniques can truly know if they’ve made progress. As an outside observer we can validate parts of the experience, which is the purpose of social sciences, but doing so is extremely difficult and wildly inaccurate. Once again, if someone tells me they know how to ride a bike, all I have to do is give them a bike and ask them to show me. However, if they tell me that they’re happy, there’s no way for me to know if what they’re saying is true, nor what level of happiness they’re experiencing.

A side effect of this subjective nature of insight is that we can never fully capture our experience using language. Essentially, language is our ability to communicate things with each others. We do this by using words to describe something that we see or experience. For example, there’s an object laying on the ground between us. I point at that object and say ‘stone’. You nod, point at the object, and say ‘yes, stone’. We’ve now created a word for this object and whenever one of us says stone, the other knows what we mean. Now imagine doing the same with an experience. I’m feeling a surge of happiness flowing through my body, I point at myself and say ‘happy’. You study me for a moment, trying to find visible characteristics of this thing I call happy. Perhaps you think the smile on my face means I’m happy, so you nod point at the smile on your own face and say ‘yes’, happy.

It seems as if we’ve now created a word to describe this experience, but in reality we did not. We created a word that captures a narrow physical reflection of that experience, leaving out much more than it takes in. Perhaps I felt a warm tingling in my face, a calming flow of energy in my belly, both accompanied by thoughts of a loved one. That would already broaden the definition of happiness by a lot. But even then, that would only capture part of it, owing to the enormous amount of nuance and details in our every experience. The result is that we will never be able to fully describe our personal insights in words, and any attempt at doing so will be highly abstract; especially as we get deeper and deeper into the truth of our lived experience.

Because words are so inaccurate at describing felt experience, we’ll spend a good portion of this chapter exploring the most foundational words when it comes to living a good life; words like happiness, meaning and purpose. These words require extra care because they are used in many different contexts, meaning many different things. To one person happiness might mean eating an ice cream, to another person it might mean a deep meditative state in which there’s only peace. Having a broader understanding of what these words mean, and the depth of experience that is hidden behind each of them, will help us develop better insight.

The first reason that developing insight get’s so little attention is because its outcomes are hard to measure. The second reason is that the benefits of developing insight have a long feedback loop, meaning that it takes a long time before we see the results of our actions. We might have gleaned a profound truth about ourselves which will alter the direction of our lives, but it won’t be till years later that we experience the results of this insight. You can imagine why people in a culture geared towards quick and measurable results seem to have little interest in a long-term and hard to measure quality like insight. In the Review phase chapter we will explore all the challenges these long feedback loops pose and how we can overcome them.