insight

• power of prevision into future

12:5.10Un­spir­i­tual an­i­mals know only the past and live in the pres­ent. Spirit-in­dwelt man has pow­ers of pre­vi­sion (in­sight); he may vi­su­al­ize the fu­ture. Only for­ward-look­ing and pro­gres­sive at­ti­tudes are per­son­ally real. Static ethics and tra­di­tional moral­ity are just slightly super­an­i­mal. Nor is sto­icism a high or­der of self-re­al­iza­tion. Ethics and morals be­come truly hu­man when they are dy­namic and pro­gres­sive, alive with uni­verse re­al­ity.

• may be exercised prior to experiment

16:7.2The se­lec­tive re­sponse of an an­i­mal is lim­ited to the mo­tor level of be­hav­ior. The sup­posed in­sight of the higher an­i­mals is on a mo­tor level and usu­ally ap­pears only af­ter the ex­pe­ri­ence of mo­tor trial and er­ror. Man is able to ex­er­cise sci­en­tific, moral, and spir­i­tual in­sight prior to all ex­plo­ration or ex­per­i­men­ta­tion.

16:7.3Only a per­son­al­ity can know what it is do­ing be­fore it does it; only per­son­al­i­ties pos­sess in­sight in ad­vance of ex­pe­ri­ence. A per­son­al­ity can look be­fore it leaps and can there­fore learn from look­ing as well as from leap­ing. A non­per­sonal an­i­mal or­di­nar­ily learns only by leap­ing.

• grasping eternal goal-meanings in seemingly insignificant activities

43:8.106. Ad­just all of these var­i­ous so­cial­iza­tion tech­niques to the fur­ther­ance of the pro­gres­sive co-or­di­na­tion of the Par­a­dise-as­cen­sion ca­reer; aug­ment uni­verse in­sight by en­hanc­ing the abil­ity to grasp the eter­nal goal-mean­ings con­cealed within these seem­ingly in­signif­i­cant time-space ac­tiv­i­ties.

• humor can help achieve

48:4.18Hu­mor should func­tion as an au­to­matic safety valve to pre­vent the build­ing up of ex­ces­sive pres­sures due to the mo­not­ony of sus­tained and se­ri­ous self-con­tem­pla­tion in as­so­ci­a­tion with the in­tense strug­gle for de­vel­op­men­tal prog­ress and no­ble achieve­ment. Hu­mor also func­tions to lessen the shock of the un­ex­pected im­pact of fact or of truth, rigid un­yield­ing fact and flex­i­ble ever-liv­ing truth. The mor­tal per­son­al­ity, never sure as to which will next be en­coun­tered, through hu­mor swiftly grasps—sees the point and achieves in­sight—the un­ex­pected na­ture of the sit­u­a­tion be it fact or be it truth.

• stars best discerned from lonely isolation of depths

48:7.1513. Stars are best dis­cerned from the lonely iso­la­tion of ex­pe­ri­en­tial depths, not from the il­lu­mi­nated and ec­static moun­tain tops.

• only poets discern poetry in routine existence

48:7.2220. Only a poet can dis­cern po­etry in the com­mon­place prose of rou­tine ex­is­tence.

• unchallengeable consciousness of cosmic reality

112:1.10The fi­nite di­men­sions of per­son­al­ity have to do with cos­mic length, depth, and breadth. Length de­notes mean­ing; depth sig­ni­fies value; breadth em­braces in­sight—the ca­pac­ity to ex­pe­ri­ence un­chal­lenge­able con­scious­ness of cos­mic re­al­ity.

• precedes foresight

112:2.6In all con­cepts of self­hood it should be rec­og­nized that the fact of life comes first, its eval­u­a­tion or in­ter­pre­ta­tion later. The hu­man child first lives and sub­se­quently thinks about his liv­ing. In the cos­mic econ­omy in­sight pre­cedes fore­sight.

• consciousness of meanings of meanings

160:1.5An­i­mals re­spond nobly to the urge of life, but only man can at­tain the art of liv­ing, al­beit the ma­jor­ity of man­kind only ex­pe­ri­ence the an­i­mal urge to live. An­i­mals know only this blind and in­stinc­tive urge; man is ca­pa­ble of tran­scend­ing this urge to nat­u­ral func­tion. Man may elect to live upon the high plane of in­tel­li­gent art, even that of ce­les­tial joy and spir­i­tual ec­stasy. An­i­mals make no in­quiry into the pur­poses of life; there­fore they never worry, nei­ther do they com­mit sui­cide. Sui­cide among men tes­ti­fies that such be­ings have emerged from the purely an­i­mal stage of ex­is­tence, and to the fur­ther fact that the ex­ploratory ef­forts of such hu­man be­ings have failed to at­tain the artis­tic lev­els of mor­tal ex­pe­ri­ence. An­i­mals know not the mean­ing of life; man not only pos­sesses ca­pac­ity for the rec­og­ni­tion of val­ues and the com­pre­hen­sion of mean­ings, but he also is con­scious of the mean­ing of mean­ings—he is self-con­scious of in­sight.