Levels of Understanding
There are many things in the world to understand. This understanding pertains an examination to the very fundamental crux of the thing being understood. This is possible because everything has a truth, and once that truth is understood the individual knows what it is.
In my view I see 3 levels of understanding that a human being is capable of about a particular subject.
- Experiential Understanding.
- Intellectual Understanding.
- Intellectual and Experiential Understanding.
Experiential is where one experiences something and therefore understands it viscerally. e.g. when one tastes of something and therefore they know that it tastes such and such a way. The might not know how to explain it to another or even to himself but they know by experience.
Intellectual is when an individual only knows the concepts, or the theoretical part of the thing and has not experienced the thing. This level of understanding has its place — which is a build up to experiential knowledge. In school there is theory and the practical parts of learning.
Both intellectual and experiential understanding is when the individual truly understands something, the theory and the practical or the experience have merged. The concepts or intellectual understanding becomes a tool of communicating the thing that now he knows.
If I were to rank I would put experiential understanding at the top and intellectual at a distant second. To understand viscerally or experientially is to truly understand; to understand only intellectually isn’t. Intellectual understanding cannot be an end point of understanding something but a bridge, a bridge that needs to be examined if it truly leads to the true understanding of something or just more intellectualization. More intellectualization is often the case, especially in domains such as spirituality where things are very conceptual and not real, where non-things are made into things and a human being is sentenced to a lifetime of chasing that non thing thing.
The reason I write this article is because I have been a victim of chasing ghosts, of bowing at the alter of shiny concepts, of prostrating at the feet of very well designed ideas, because they were ‘spiritual’, or holy, or the lingo of a certain domain. What I have come to realize is that all sources that try to explain something whose fundament is an Idea and not reality are a scam, an Idea is not a thing, it is a concept, if the concept is standing in place of a conceptual reality and not reality itself it is false. It cannot be truth and therefore it does not cause the human subscribed to them to arrive anywhere, but only to make circular chases.
Ideas in spirituality such as reincarnation, or afterlife, or heaven, or hell, or the holy spirit, or enlightenment, or the devil, or even God etc. If they are not in the experience of the human being they will just be meaningless concepts, when a word is connected to a certain object or a specific experience then there is meaning, but when words are connected to a non object eg soul or spirit etc. they are just meaningless words because the thing, the object is not truly known.
If a human being is interested in truth he will realize this and hence realize the error or falseness of domains such as religion and spirituality because the thing that is being talked about is not truly known. It is just concepts on top of concepts, and this dissection will go on ad infinitum and no truth will be realized because the movement towards concepts when the thing is not known is like enhancing the power of microscope magnification and expecting to see and end point, a whole new world of concepts will arise and the individual is lost in a conceptual world and never with the understanding of the thing because the thing is not known.
This is the trap of spirituality and intellectualization. It is a trap that only a few people realize. There are a lot shiny concepts in these domains that are very well articulated calculatedly so as the individual understands intellectually and instead of seeing for themselves that they don’t fully understand, they instead subscribe to faith, and belief, and hope which sinks them even deeper. Therefore the individual remains forever blind but convinced that he sees.
Everything begins with seeing the end point, the destination. If there is no destination or a definite arrival there is not a journey, to start a journey without a destination or whose destination does not fundamentally exist is to be lost from the beginning. The subscription to hope, faith, belief, techniques, intellectualization are the straws that a lost human tries to grasp at because deep down he knows he is not going anywhere. He is lost, and wants to grab on to something shiny to make his lostness palatable and because of this he is doomed, he lives a zombified existence, where anxiety, doubt, insatiableness are his day to day companions and bed fellows till his very last second of existence…
