In my last article, I focused on the process of revelation, both as an interactive process with spiritual entities in the external world, and as an internalized process, relating to surprising revolutionary insights. In both cases, the person(s) generating the revolutionary insights were transformed by the process. In the first case, it was the explosive nature of the moment and in the second by the sudden internalized consciousness raising that occurred as a result of the impact of the insights.
There is another process for gaining insight that is somewhat distinct from revelation. I am talking about the process of realization. Unlike revelation, which is explosive and revolutionary, realization is gradual and evolutionary. People speak of coming to a realization. That is, having flowing blendable continual thought processes that eventually lead to an insight. This is very different from a defined discrete insight that appears very suddenly. For one thing, a revelation can be so overwhelming, that a person has to take time after it occurs to go over the revelation in his mind. With a realization, there is a period of time leading up to it where a person is mentally working it out in his mind. We can say that, with a realization, the mind is laying out the grounding so that the insight can be effectively absorbed.
This doesn’t happen with a revelatory insight. Now Moses, when he received the revelation from God of the Ten Commandments, it took forty days and forty nights, at least on one of his trips up Mount Sinai. This was a revelation that had some things in common with a realization. Moses had time to absorb the revolutionary insights, and Moses was able to integrate them a long with the other foundational information God was giving him, so that they could become a meaningful part of his life as well as those of the other Israelites. Nevertheless, what God taught him was too explosive to be just a series of realizations. Also, what God gave Moses was to be accepted on face value, and was not meant to be reworked, at least in terms of its basic ideas. Finally, although Moses had time to integrate the revolutionary insights that God was giving him, when Moses presented the Ten Commandments to the Israelites, it was not done gradually, but instead, all at once like a normal revelation. And because these revolutionary insights came from God, there was no elaboration or reworking of them by the Israelites. God expected the Israelites to accept them in the form that he gave them. Of course, a lot of time afterwards has been spent interpreting these insights, particularly in rabbinic writings, but that is not the same as changing them through elaboration and reworking.
This is, of course, very different from the way people accept realizations. When one comes to a realization, one spends a lot of time elaborating on it in his mind, before it takes the shape of a defined discrete insight or insights. Unlike with a revelation, when a person comes to a realization, he is subtly changing it at the same time he is integrating it. His flowing blendable continual mental energies are constantly at work on it. By constantly making these mental changes on the insight, he is changing it in a way that makes it more psychologically absorbable.
Again, we must ask if there have been any differences between realizations pre-modern technology and realizations during the modern technology era. It seems to me that modern technology, with its increasing movement towards processes that turn on and turn off is more conducive to sudden discoveries, sudden enlightenment from revolutionary insights. Realizations, which tend to evolve, move too slowly for people who are used to the processes of high-speed internet.
The notion of a realization is much more at home in a living environment where life moves according to more gradual organic flowing blendable continual rhythms of life, as it does in a more traditional natural society. We can say that the mental processes involved in a realization mimic the physical processes involved in primary experience in the external world.
Of course, just because revelatory insights seem to be more at home in modern technological society, doesn’t mean that realizations can’t be useful today. Perhaps, because of the gradual evolutionary approach that they offer, they can give people psychological grounding in their thought processes to compensate for the lack of physical grounding that they feel in modern technological living environments. Processes that evolve, whether physical or mental, are the ones that offer the best grounding.
By the same token, transformative revolutionary revelatory thought processes can offer people a kind of transcendent power and control that can serve to help people rise above the morass of undifferentiating organic stimuli, the passions and the strong emotions that are the other side of the grounding that traditional natural environments can offer. Hence, the significance of the great religions that developed in the Middle East and in Asia. We come to see that some healthy thought processes work best when they work against the grain of the physical processes that one is living among. This is what gives people emotional and mental balance.