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One of my own perspectives around these very interesting and pertinent questions, is related to the experience of interconnectedness and what that means in my life and practice.

I'm not sure exactly when this was established as a certainty for me, but it remains a fundamental part of my way of being now. That certainty that I am not separate, apart from everyone else or from anything else, that everything I do connects me one way or another with everything else, is just now a given. I can no longer understand my practice as being just about what I do separately from all others.

Those who know me know that even at the start of my spiritual life I experienced a lot of Jhana and Samadhi, and that this really guided me and was at the centre of my spiritual life.

The path of insight opened up to me spontaneously and rather dramatically, thanks to reading the Diamond Sutra at Vajraloka a few weeks after I first encountered the Dharma. This meant that I never really went through a phase of practice uninformed by insight, and I don't have any first hand experience of what may be more or less effective in bringing about that initial opening, or "first insight". 

However, the challenge I faced was - what, if anything, should I be doing with this insight? 

For a teenager like me in the late 60s seeking insight, the best option was probably Orange Sunshine.  In a wild way, acid completely revealed the truths of emptiness and compassion. My heart opened with love and my world became radically impermanent: any attempt to mentally construct it melted immediately.  It was a union of form, emptiness and bodhicitta and I knew it without knowing those words.  I know them now.  These days, I advise people to try meditation first.  I did that myself after that, following the Beatles, but TM and the Maharishi didn’t work for me. 

I hadn’t worked with any particular method of insight, when realizations broke through my ordinary way of seeing and experiencing the world. It actually started on the first meditation lunch time class I attended at the LBC.  When as the bell sounded my mind just seemed to know what to do, which also freaked me out a bit, as I had come along for what I thought would be some relaxation! This opened the whole of the Buddhist world with  sound, lights, many visionary encounters and tasks or understandings I needed to make. This continues nearly 30 years later.

For the March 2023 edition of the Upadesha Magazine: The Variety of Insight Practice in Triratna

Background

How insight experiences have affected my practice of ethics is, in some ways, a bit obscure, to me at least.. That is I find it hard to be precise about how it has affected me, though I know it has affected me.  In general then, the main thing that I know insight has done in my life is to make me very sure about the truth of the dharma.  In other words there is much more sraddha - confidence in the dharma - now, and confidence in further stages of the path.  I also have a lot more confidence in what I did in the past.

This article was primarily intended to clarify some issues around ‘insight inquiry’ for Order members taking part in the current pilot project which is exploring how it may be incorporated in our system of practice. The fact that this article is an exploration of ‘issues’ means that it’s not offering a balanced view of insight inquiry and its outcomes, but is largely exploring what might be perceived as some of the ‘downsides’, not just of insight inquiry but of insight (spiritual death, vipashyana, prajna) generally.