Korpo

Discernment is the ability to tell the difference between two things. In spiritual matters developing discernment is of utmost importance. It is the equivalent of insight, or rather the process by which one arrives at insight.

Some people cannot discern. They simply have not learned it yet. For them, all choices look essentially the same, and especially they cannot discern between the look of a thing and its actual nature.

Imagine a world where all food tasted, smelled and looked the same, regardless of its nutritional value. Would you care what you eat? Your senses work like they do for a reason. They tell you what is what and discern the edible from the nonedible, and assign the quality of "delicious" to those foods deemed most nutritious. (We come to the caveat later.)

But this is the world some people live in. Just as there are gluttons who almost have no care for what they eat as long as there is plenty, there are people who are fooled by the looks of teachers, by the sound of their message or the words they use. They have no discernment as of yet, so they cannot know it better.

The tragedy of this is that those people could be confronted with a teacher of the highest quality and learn no more than from a much lesser teacher, or maybe even none, as they have not refined yet the senses that tell them what they are being offered has quality and value. They pass it by because they cannot tell gold from brass.

(That's also why the teacher comes when you're ready. There's no sense in wasting a good teacher as a crier in the desert.)

But as we all know there is not only good food that captivates our taste buds, there's also junk food, but still we eat it even though it lacks in nutritional value. Economic constraints aside for a moment, junk food tries to fake the taste characteristics that good nutrition has to make us consider eating it instead. (It's another one of these fake need-fillers, see my previous blog entry.)

So there are less desirable teachers. If we don't have enough discernment, we might think the way they offer things might mean they have the same quality as teachers that are actually of a higher quality. They might use the right words, they might dress right, they might provide practices that are helpful. But we might not be able to see beyond that to find out if they are truly persons worth emulating.

Ironically this can pave the way to building better discernment. To tell a difference you need to be able to compare. Sometimes a bad experience can prove the base for comparison for recognising a better one. Building discernment like this is an ever-evolving process that becomes more intuitive and also more fulfilling (as you don't tend to fall for fakes anymore, only find higher degrees of refinement).

As any thing in the world, spiritual teachings comes in all grades of refinement and all kinds of quality. Some people are surprised by this even though it is true in every other part of their lives. Enlightenment is a quality that is revealed in a being gradually, though quantum leaps are possible. And it needs to be integrated. A spiritual teacher is not a perfected being. She or he is just enough steps ahead to point out directions.

All of this sounds like everybody can learn discernment and everybody could have it. And this is true, but only in the course of all our incarnations. Intuition and discernment are qualities that are greatly helped by our soul's ongoing development. They are the keepers of our existences and part of the essence of all our doings.

When the teachers of the East say "Neti, Neti" - "Not this, not that" - they also speak of discernment. Telling things apart is part of telling what your ultimate nature is. Developing discernment is essential in the course of your personal evolution as it helps you ever more know what you are, and one way to know that is to tell what you are not. Or not only, as you are more than that.

But to spot a quality, you have to be able to tell that it is there. You have to tell it apart from other qualities, and then you have to discern its characteristics, and sliver by sliver, by ever finer degrees of subtlety, you arrive at insights about things that look the same to others, but you can tell the difference.

As you can tell the difference you may be able to lay it out for others, and maybe teach them some discernment, too. And you may even tell those apart who are ready for the teacher you have become in the course of learning discernment.