The First Step to Greater Insight

In some sense, the first step to greater insight involves realizing that the world will only gift us the insights we make ourselves ready to receive. Understanding this can change our life and our world for the better.
 
Taking this first step illuminates the profundity of the Socratic standard for education. Socrates warned us that, when we go to any teacher—most especially a teacher who claims they can help us live well and become successful—we must ask: “What are they, and what will I become if I spend time with them?” This applies not only to teachers, but to friends, coaches, colleagues, and more.
 
Intellectually, we might embrace this suggestion, but by deeply ingrained habit, we tend to operate on the basis of something like the exact opposite.
 
Consult your intuitions: Does it make sense to say the world just is how it is, and we engage in our scientific, rational, and other evidence-based, logically consistent practices, which then gives us knowledge? In other words, it doesn’t matter what kind of person the CEO, venture capitalist, scientist, economist, or politician is. If they know what they’re doing, they know what they’re doing.
 
Clearly that view has cogency. And yet the wisdom traditions propose that we must get beyond such a limited and limiting view. They suggest instead that knowledge depends on our way of knowing, which means it depends on what we are. As we make ourselves into the kind of person who can know profound things, then more profound and holistic insights arise—and not before.
 
In an ironic twist, the best science of the dominant culture has come to agree. Nevertheless, well-established science like quantum physics, cybernetics, & cognitive science shows us that what we can know depends on how we go about trying to know it.
 
In the quantum realm this comes across in shocking ways. A “particle” has a totally different style of being than a “wave”. But, depending on how we try to know it, an electron can presence as one or the other.
 
This already evokes some discomfort, such that many scientists try to waive it off. We have no grounds for doing so.
 
The discomfort can intensify if we look carefully enough to find ourselves implicated. The wisdom traditions tell us that knowledge depends on the knower, and not simply on some absolute state of the “external world”.
 
Not only have cybernetic science, systems theory, and cognitive science validated this, but the most successful forms of psychotherapy depend upon it. When a client begins to change, they can arrive at insights into themselves and others which could not arise as long as they kept clinging—however subtly—to their reified identity.
 
Rob Kalwarowsky & I discussed some aspects of this as it relates to leaders and to life in general. Links in comments you want to listen in.
 
Anyone have experience with this in their own life? How can we better handle the question: What will I become?

To listen in, and add your thoughts, on the dialogue with Rob Kalwarowsky, start with part 1 of 2:

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8zNDkwNDdkMC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw/episode
 
For a slightly longer consideration of this topic: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/world-only-gift-us-insights-we-have-made-ourselves-nikos/