When I first met my teacher, I was sort of stunned by the information that I was getting and by his nature, by the way he was. In looking at things in the way that I was looking at them, after I met him it struck me that I was becoming more serious than I had been. So within a week or so of meeting him, I asked him “On this path do you lose your sense of humor?” He laughed and he looked at me and he said “I don’t know. I see some things that are pretty funny” and he began to recite my life. Then I understood that it was pretty funny when looked at by way of reality.
Now, what we do before we enter wisdom is we look at our lives by way of the intellect. We look at our lives by way of the world and we measure it by way of the world. If we measure things by way of the world, then we are measuring things by a certain standard… the worldly standard.
In measuring things in this worldly standard, we are trapped into using our intellect. Our intellect comes to certain conclusions. In the period of trying that we are trapped as far as our cognitive ability, in our intellect we can only see things and experience things in the way that the intellect sees things and experiences things.
If we are going to go beyond that, there has to be some kind of change. This is sometimes called judgement or discernment. This is the change that comes about when you begin to understand that your intellect has a very narrow perspective on things and can only see things in a limited way.
The is a word from Christianity, “epiphany”. Epiphany has a few meanings. One of the meanings is “a sudden burst of understanding of the essential nature of things, or a sudden burst of understanding of the Godliness within things, or a sudden burst of understanding about the reality of the essence of existence. We all have to go through an epiphany…
