Understanding

Understanding, or insight, refers to new ways of seeing ourselves, or the world, or our inner lives, that can emerge from sustained meditation practice.

A meditative exploration of our direct experience can reveal that many things we previously took to be solid realities are, in fact, not so solid. For example, a common insight that arises from meditation is the understanding that thoughts are not facts, they are simply a kind of experience, no different from the sound of traffic outside, or the rumbling of a belly.

Note that these introspective insights are not intellectual ideas - we can probably all agree that a thought is an experience, but we may continue to treat thoughts as serious, real things until we have thoroughly watched them arise and pass in meditation. Meditative insights can soak into our bones and should affect the very way we experience things.

Most of the insights that we can move towards in meditation are really a dismantling of deeply held views, many of which we didn't even know we were holding. It is not so much replacing one set of beliefs with another, but moving towards a place where we are able to experience life in a fresh way, less constrained by prejudicial views that assume things must be one way or another.