One cannot practice or do anything systematically to bring about or conjure insight. True insight, if you are fortunate, is what always comes uninvited. You cannot “make it happen.”
Insight and intuition are entirely different phenomena. Intuition is the unconscious or semi-conscious ability to create links between (or involving) information. Insight involves — without conscious reasoning — understanding holistically (perhaps beyond the parameters of ordinary sequential time and space).
Although one cannot do anything deliberately and directly to bring about insight, some attributes in one may encourage it to perhaps occur (or set the foundation for it to more likely happen). Being a mind that intelligently perceives things holistically, beyond run-of-the-mill fragmentation, robotic labeling, and accepted separation may be beneficial. Additionally, eating and exercising properly — keeping the body excellent physically — may indirectly be very beneficial. However, there is nothing that one can do to cause it to occur; it is beyond the parameters of time and ordinary causation.
If one is holistically entwined with (and “as”) the whole… truly being at one with the animals, plants, and universal order, then that order may be more inclined to protect and reciprocally care for one. Then real magic may happen (beyond the limited domain of time and space).
Tom's Nature-up-close Photography and Mindfulness Blog 
Lovely post. For me, I suppose being still, receptive and observing the world around me is my chief way of happening upon insight. I agree, you can’t force it.
Yes, being still, but such stillness can’t be a made or forced stillness. 😉
Hope you don’t mind my trivial observation. When I looked at the picture I thought I was looking at a row of ladies’ stiletto shoes at first.
That put a smile on my face! 😊
Absolutely PERFECT photo for this post Tom! @0 thousand fruiting bodies of a mycelial network that stretches across the earth where it hasn’t been damaged and who knows why so few fungus choose to fruit above ground – total mystery! just like insight that pops up out of the whole uninvited! Can you imagine trying to force it? Yikes an oxymoron if there ever was one! Wonderful Post!!!
20 thousand mushrooms/fungi – BUT we know almost nothing – there could be more. merlin Sheldrake says these networks qualify as one of the wonders of the world
Thanks, Sara! 😊 And wind is a wonderful distributor of mushroom spores.
Wondrous post and pic .. but why ‘Ouch”?
Thanks, Harini. 😊 The Ouch is because some of the mushrooms are being inadvertently poked by strips of wooden mulch.
Those blue things? I was wondering what they were
No, not blue… it’s the little, thin toothpick-like tan-colored more vertically facing strips of wood. 😉
Very cool Tom! #GoodWorks
Thank you, M.T.! 😊
You’re very welcome my dear friend Tom! #LoveYourWorks
A beautiful post!
Thanks, KK… one hopes so! 😉
Very insightful Tom. P.S. – Ouch indeed … that mulch is definitely going to stab the mushroom any moment now!
Thanks (and we hope so), Linda. 😊 And i think that some of those mushrooms are already in the process of being stabbed. (Mushrooms do so much underground that we “above ground organisms” do not see.)
That’s interesting about the mushrooms Tom. I know they grow pretty quickly, those white ones with the brown speckles double in size day to day. A former coworker loved to go Morel mushroom hunting – it was a passion of his.
Nice
Hi Tom,
You’ve captured the elusive nature of insight beautifully. It’s fascinating how it arrives unbidden, often when we least expect it, and how it differs so profoundly from intuition. Your reflection on being holistically entwined with the world resonates deeply when we align ourselves with the broader universe, where true insight can emerge beyond the limits of time and space. It’s a reminder to stay open and connected, allowing those rare moments of understanding to find us.
Thanks for sharing these thought-provoking ideas!
Best,
Mike