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Having a mentor enables you to talk through your experiences in meditation and reflection. This brings those experiences out of the subjective and enables you to see  what is going on, as it were, more objectively. Talking these things through with someone who understands, is an invaluable part of the process of integration and assimilation.

On a recent MIG forum, we were in a general discussion about people’s experience of insight and someone (apologies, I can’t remember the name of the person who it was), asked what about love?

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.