What is understanding?

[Gesundheit]

Totally clueless here. Any thoughts? Perhaps consider which perspective(s) you're deriving your answers from. I would definitely love to hear especially from the spiritual perspective as well as the materialist perspective.

What is understanding?

[caspex]

I think it's when you become something and are able to observe it carefully to be able to put it into words and explain it

[tsuki]

To understand something is to have a raw unmitigated encounter with it. It is possible to understand understanding. Understanding is primary, it is not expressible in terms of anything else.

[Adamq8]

I would say that awareness is knowing/understanding.

 

[Cosmin_Visan]

Well... Understanding is everything. I cannot give you a definition, but I can point to you some things that might shed some lights on Understanding. Each moment of our lives is a glimpse of understanding. Qualia themselves are forms of Understanding. And for this, I would recommend you my paper "Is Qualia Meaning or Understanding?": https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan

I like to give an example to illustrate how qualia are understanding. Let's take first a rational example of understanding. Let's say you want to understand how to build something, like a car or a computer program, or debugging a computer program. If you don't understand what you are doing, you will just randomly tap on the keyboard and you will wonder why is not working. You keep pushing all keys, making all sorts of combinations, and is still not working, and you don't know why. Then let's say you understand what the problem was, you have an "aha" moment. Then after that, everything runs smoothly. Now let's take an example from visual qualia domain. Let's say that you want to find an object in your room in the dark. You will just randomly touch the floor, touch the walls and you will wonder why you don't find it. Then you turn on the light and you immediately see the object, and everything runs smoothly. In vocabulary we say that we "saw" the object. But what is actually happening is that we "understood" the object. We have an "aha" moment. So visual qualia, and by extension all qualia, are actually forms of understanding. We don't "see", "hear", "touch", etc., but we "understand".

Edited November 18, 2020 by Cosmin_Visan

[Leo Gura]

A hell of a question.

[Shunyata]

Watch Shunyamurti's interview at  buddha at the gas pump 

 

[Inliytened1]

9 hours ago, Gesundheit said:

What is understanding?

It's mystical 

it's Magic.

 

[Someone here]

@Gesundheit it is exactly what it is. 

You can't get more direct than direct. 

[Corpus]

Understanding, under-standing ie what's it standing on; the underpinning or the ground of whatever is approached, without which there is no standing.

[Mvrs]

9 hours ago, Gesundheit said:

Totally clueless here. Any thoughts? Perhaps consider which perspective(s) you're deriving your answers from. I would definitely love to hear especially from the spiritual perspective as well as the materialist perspective.

What is understanding?

Understanding is an illusion. It’s the universe pretending it didn’t know something that it itself created. Being created the movies of things being alive and understanding things. This is what you are apart of .

[Inliytened1]

2 hours ago, Corpus said:

Understanding, under-standing ie what's it standing on; the underpinning or the ground of whatever is approached, without which there is no standing.

I like that.  So can you get under understanding itself? Well one can become conscious that reality is groundless so it's like asking where Infinity came from.

[Moksha]

Conceptual understanding is the accumulated conditioning of your sensations, perceptions, thoughts, actions, and experience. It has nothing to do with reality, and is the opposite of reality. 

Spiritual understanding is the direct realization of Consciousness as the transcendent unitive field, infusing every dream form with its essence. It has everything to do with reality, and is the opposite of illusion.

Edited November 18, 2020 by Moksha

[Corpus]

2 minutes ago, Moksha said:

Conceptual understanding is the accumulated conditioning of your sensations, perceptions, thoughts, actions, and experience. It has nothing to do with reality, and is the opposite of reality. 

Spiritual understanding is the direct realization of Consciousness as the transcendent unitive field, infusing and defining everything with its essence. It has everything to do with reality, and is the opposite of illusion.

But isn't conceptual understanding a part of reality? Does reality have an opposite? Isn't conceptual understanding, for most, a pre-requisite to even becoming aware that it might not be complete, akin to a preliminary method of approach?

[Breakingthewall]

13 minutes ago, Corpus said:

But isn't conceptual understanding a part of reality?

Conceptual understanding is finite, can't catch the reality, it's an obstacle. The other understanding, the openess, is a mistery. Is that we are trying to be , the pure conciousness 

Edited November 18, 2020 by Breakingthewall

[Corpus]

5 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

Conceptual understanding is finite, can't catch the reality, it's an obstacle. The other understanding, the openess, is a mistery and it's magic. I think it's the pure conciousness 

Obstacles, and ignorance, are still the Absolute "doing what it does".

[Breakingthewall]

@Corpus yes , sure, we could stay unconscious all life that it's the same, but I prefer to be the most concious possible because it's much more pleasant...only practicity, the other is suffering, not a good business

[Moksha]

1 hour ago, Corpus said:

But isn't conceptual understanding a part of reality? Does reality have an opposite? Isn't conceptual understanding, for most, a pre-requisite to even becoming aware that it might not be complete, akin to a preliminary method of approach?

Consciousness is the only reality. Everything else is part of the dream, including all concepts. If you conceptualize illusion as the opposite of reality, that would create a duality. It's more like Consciousness is real, and dreams arise out of and dissolve back into Consciousness.

The challenge with conceptual understanding is that it is based on a fundamental misidentification with the mind. As long as you are trapped in conceptual understanding, you can't bootstrap yourself out of your mind. It takes a higher Consciousness to make that leap, which is the process of spiritual awakening, and the realization of spiritual understanding.

Edited November 18, 2020 by Moksha

[Corpus]

8 hours ago, Moksha said:

Conceptual understanding is the accumulated conditioning of your sensations, perceptions, thoughts, actions, and experience. It has nothing to do with reality, and is the opposite of reality. 

Spiritual understanding is the direct realization of Consciousness as the transcendent unitive field, infusing every dream form with its essence. It has everything to do with reality, and is the opposite of illusion.

 

6 hours ago, Moksha said:

Consciousness is the only reality. Everything else is part of the dream, including all concepts. If you conceptualize illusion as the opposite of reality, that would create a duality. It's more like Consciousness is real, and dreams arise out of and dissolve back into Consciousness.

The challenge with conceptual understanding is that it is based on a fundamental misidentification with the mind. As long as you are trapped in conceptual understanding, you can't bootstrap yourself out of your mind. It takes a higher Consciousness to make that leap, which is the process of spiritual awakening, and the realization of spiritual understanding.

Do these quotes, the first of which has been edited, not demonstrate how defining stuff causes vertigo by its circularity? Language at work....

 

8 hours ago, Corpus said:

But isn't conceptual understanding a part of reality? Does reality have an opposite? Isn't conceptual understanding, for most, a pre-requisite to even becoming aware that it might not be complete, akin to a preliminary method of approach?

 

"Using a thorn to remove a thorn" seems like an apt bit of language to add.

[Moksha]

@Corpus Concepts, labels, and language are unavoidably dualistic ? They never quite capture reality. Very thorny. The more you struggle with them, the more bloody and entangled you become.