“Before illumination, carry water, chop wood.
After illumination, carry water, chop wood.” [Zen saying]
The content of the preparation and verification stages is primarily routine, straightforward, and mechanical, requiring different skills than are needed for the insight stage. Courses and books (including this one) usually devote much more attention to these skills than to techniques for enhancing insight.
The advertising industry often uses a technique known as anxiety/relief: first create an anxiety, and then offer your product as a potential relief. Today part of the success of this technique is attributable to its strongly conditioned pattern. Why do people like myself get addicted to high anxiety jobs? Perhaps it is because the solutions, when found, are that much sweeter. Problem solving may fulfill a similar role in science, as a non-threatening pattern of anxiety and relief. And the intensity of the thrill of insight may depend partly on the duration and intensity of the quest that preceded it.
Characteristics of Insight
Insight occupies a continuum from conscious to unconscious, from minor problem-solving to mystical experience. Always it involves a leap beyond the available evidence, to unforeseen paths. Almost always it brings a sense of certainty, a dangerous conviction of the truth of the insight.
Poincaré [1914] describes insight’s “characteristics of conciseness, suddenness and immediate certainty.” Another typical characteristic is joy or exhilaration. We will return to the characteristic of immediate certainty in a later section on insight pitfalls. The following descriptions of insights illustrate both their variety and some of their common elements:
“He who has once in his life experienced this joy of scientific creation will never forget it; he will be longing to renew it.” [Kropotkin, 1899]
“The joy of discovery is certainly the liveliest that the mind of man can ever feel.” [Bernard, 1865]
“It came to me in a dream and it’s money in the bank. It’s so simple it’s ridiculous. . . Read it and weep.” [1990 fax from a colleague who is an electronics technician, describing a new equipment design]
Alfred Russel Wallace [1853], who discovered evolution independently of Charles Darwin, described his walks in the Welsh countryside: “At such times I experienced the joy which every discovery of a new form of life gives to the lover of nature, almost equal to those raptures which I afterwards felt at every capture of new butterflies on the Amazon.”
Albert Einstein, in a 1916 letter [cited by Hoffmann, 1972], described his discovery and confirmation of general relativity after an 11-year search: “Imagine my joy at the feasibility of the general covariance and at the result that the equations yield the correct perihelion motion of Mercury. I was beside myself with ecstasy for days.”
Of course, insight is neither limited to science nor always best described by scientists:
