Great basketball players like Bill Russell have an intrinsic understanding of the principles, rules, strategies, and mechanics of their game, but their play is dictated by what is required in the moment, often without conscious thought on the part of the players. The Art of Insight is the same way.
A sports analogy for finding the "sweet spot:' "It is the championship game. Your team has the basketball with fifteen seconds left on the clock, and you are down by a point. Do you want to be wound up and tight or loose and confident?"
Great players always want the ball in these situations, and they are always loose and confident--present in the situation, open to whatever happens, and able to integrate many hours of practice into the immediate unfolding of the game. Lesser players get tight and try too hard to find the "right" action to take. Their breathing gets labored, and neither their brains nor their muscles move with the fluidity necessary to make the shot. They get so locked up in "over-thinking" that we use the term choke to characterize their efforts.
Bill Russell, star center for basketball's legendary Boston Celtics, describes a quiet mind in a very fast setting:
"Every so often, a Celtics game would heat up so that it became more than a physical, or even a mental, game and would be magical. That feeling is very difficult to describe, and I certainly never talked about it when I was playing. When it happened, I could feel my play rise to a new level. It came rarely, and would last anywhere from five minutes to a whole quarter or more. Three or four plays were not enough to get it going. It would surround not only me and the other Celtics, but also the players on the other team, even the referees.
At that special level, all sorts of odd things happened. The game would be in a white heat of competition, and yet somehow I wouldn't feel competitive--which is a miracle in itself. I'd be putting out the maximum effort, straining, coughing up parts of my lungs as we ran, and yet I never felt the pain. The game would move so quickly that every fake, cut, and pass would be surprising--and yet nothing could surprise me. It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion.
During those spells, I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken. Even before the other team brought the ball into bounds, I could feel it so keenly that I'd want to shout to my teammates, "It's coming there!"--except that I knew everything would change if I did.
My premonitions would be consistently correct, and I always felt than that I not only knew all of the Celtics by heart, but also all the opposing players, and that they all knew me. There have been many times in my career when I felt moved or joyful, but these were the moments when I had chills pulsing up and down my spine.
Sometimes the feeling would last all the way to the end of the game, and when that happened, I never cared who won. I can honestly say that those few times were the only ones when I did not care. I don't mean that I was a good sport about it--that I'd played my best and had nothing to be ashamed of. On the five or ten occasions when the game ended at the special level, I literally did not care who won. If we lost, I'd still be free and high as a sky hawk."
Obviously, a quiet mind does not necessarily mean that you are quiet. You might be mentally quiet but also very physically active, like Bill Russell operating "in the zone."
The Insight State of Mind doesn't include a lot of internal monologues. It is not a state where you stop thinking, but it is a state where you are not working hard on your thinking. Techniques aren't necessary to reach the Insight State of Mind. You simply pay attention to the presence or absence of the feeling you associate with your best state of mind. Although your proficiency may have fallen due to neglect, none of this is new. You must simply reacquaint yourself with this natural, inborn capacity.
Source: Charles Kiefer: The Art of Insight: How to Have More Aha! Moments