Most wisdom traditions hold two insights. The first is that change comes slowly, gradually, through practice, learning to sit and “go slowly” as Anthony learned in the desert. However there are also teaching of insights and conversion coming in a moment, through hearing a word as in Anthony’s case – and frequently in the Zen tradition – or in seeing something, as in this text. In a moment we get a direct experience of the fact we are two things at once and consciousness is transformed:
The first time I saw Brother Lawrence was upon the 3rd of August, 1666. He told me …of his conversion at the age of eighteen.
It was winter, and he saw a tree stripped of its leaves and yet knew that within a little time the leaves would be come again and after that the flowers and then the fruit would appear. In that moment, he got a sense of the care and power of God, an inner awareness which has never since left him.
This sense had given him such freedom and kindled in him such a love… that he could not tell whether it had increased in the forty years since it had happened.
Brother Lawrence, 1693, The Practice of the Presence of God
Mindfulbalance 