Yogi: I feel that some of my insights are worldly insights like there is a problem and some thoughts come to relieve the suffering. I look at it more like solving worldly problems. It is not the kind of wisdom that understands reality, the more spiritual type of insight.
Sayadaw: If you understand that something is cause and effect, if you understand that the mind works this way, if you understand that the body works this way, if you understand that the mind and body work this way and therefore are interacting this way together, therefore there are these causes and effects, therefore this is the way things are, that’s a spiritual insight, a lokuttara nana because it is about mind-matter cause and effect.
Those insights can come in very ordinary ways, for example, in seeing, there is a nature that can see, and there is not a person that sees. You can either understand this in a very isolated spiritual insight way or you can understand that this is how it is. If you see some affliction and can see that this nature is at work, and you’re not caught up in the grief of it, that is also an insight into that nature.
Because we glorify these ‘wow’ moments, we undermine all the ways that our ordinary insights are important.