THE TRIAD OF BECOMING #4

 

UNDERSTANDING VS. WISDOM

Do not let learning distort your knowing and remember that wisdom is not dependent on either, although she will show herself respectful of both. Wisdom know the necessity of information and the value of knowledge but she is not confused by the former or mistakes it for the latter. Nor does wisdom confuse knowledge with knowing. She recognizes there are ways of knowing other than the brain.

Truth (the next blog) resides in Understanding's correct interpretation of information and knowledge provided to Her and from Wisdom and sources outside of ourselves. 

Understanding is Verbal, Differentiated thought which differs from the Non-Verbal, Undifferentiated thought of Wisdom. 

A deeper sense of knowing is contained in Non-Verbal, Undifferentiated thinking. 

The power of “seeing what seeing eyes cannot see” and “hearing what hearing ears cannot hear.”

The shadow side of Understanding is our Monkey (Narrow) Mind which is balanced by Spacious Mind in Wisdom.

 

Temper wisdom with love and compassion.

When the heart is muffled, the soul shrinks.

Wisdom without Love (the central Triad on the Tree) is the shadow side of Wisdom and Understanding and is an empty shell. Hence the Ancestors affirm;

You will come from Doubt to Belief, from Belief to Understanding, from Understanding to Knowing and from Knowing (Wisdom) and Seeing 

to Feeling (being heart felt.) 

This is the way.

Information is not to be equated with knowledge,

knowledge is not to be equated with understanding, 

understanding is not to be equated with wisdom 

 and wisdom is not to be equated with virtue, holiness 

and heart-feltness

UNDERSTANDING

Information is not to be equated with Knowledge,

and Knowledge is not to be equated with Understanding, 

We have a huge amount of information available to us on our smart phones. That does not mean we know any of it or even understand it fully. That's why we need to be tested during our schooling.

We can know a lot and understand little. Many are denied the faculty of Wisdom. 

In my medical school’s preclinical years there were straight A students who many of us believed would make the best doctors. This was not always so. The could regurgitate huge amounts of information but sometimes had difficulty making correct clinical judgments later in the wards. Also, some of them lost or never had the heartfeltness of having a “calling” rather than just a job.

Being aware of the lesson differs from learning it.

Knowing the path is different from following it.

 

If you say that there is much that you have never heard of,

 you should consider more importantly how much there is that you have not encompassed.

WISDOM

Understanding is not to be equated with Wisdom and Knowing

Wisdom is not to be equated with Virtue, Holiness and Heart-feltness

Wisdom without Love will not get us to Keter.

LOVE

If the law does not serve love, do not serve the law.

If information and knowledge do not serve justice and compassion they are but a conceit and a hollow sound.

Many sages, from different traditions, because of greed and power lose the heart-love component and the way.

"Kabir says; Friend there are very few who find the path."

"The gates are wide but few will enter."

That does not mean we should not give it our best.

UNDERSTANDING 

Understanding embraces the element of fire. Without Understanding we would all be living in the stone age. Understanding with the imaginative power of Wisdom has allowed us the miracle of science and technology. 

However, our educational system seems biased on the side of Understanding and of mathematics, science and computer codes at the expense of music, art, poetry and prose. Wisdom is put on the back burner in favor of data, the scientific method, evidence-based medicine etc…

Understanding and Wisdom each have their shadow side – Truth lies in the middle and Will decides what action we take if any. 

The only real truth and the greatest mediator, is love.

WISDOM

“People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind – imagination and intuition.” W.B. Yeats

Wisdom, whose element is water, flows best in the non-verbal and undifferentiated world of our imagination - in Spacious Mind’s, fantasy, magic, mystical inner knowing, and seeing. 

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rationale mind a faithful servant.We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift" A. Einstein

To think like God is to imagine.

Einstein wanted to understand the mind of God. He also said that his powers of imagination and fantasy meant more to him that his cognitive abilities.

Wisdom should be humble and acknowledge that it has limited understanding. It should enjoy and be in awe of the mystery. The shadow side of Wisdom is arrogance.

There are truths that go far beyond the cognitive understandings of all of us.

Nature is our most powerful teacher in terms of awe and respect.

 

“Nature hides her secrets with consummate modesty and speaks usually in an unintelligible tongue” Charles Huggins

 

The reality we can apprehend with the senses is only one percent of the universe. …nature has hidden most of the matter in the universe and hidden it in a form that cannot be readily detected.” The Zohar

 

“Miracles happen not in opposition to nature but in opposition to what we know about nature.” Augustine of Hippo

The saddest and most impoverishing notion human beings cling to is that we are limited by laws of the natural world (those laws we have contrived as to how the universe works.)
There is a crucial difference between being subject to, and being constrained by.

 

We limit ourselves when we believe that science has all the answers. The natural laws of the universe that we have been taught are incomplete and usually in the process of developing. As science and medicine evolve these laws keep changing. They are rarely absolute.

 

The San Bushmen hunter-gatherers are (or were when they had their habitat) nature bound. They are able to live beyond the five senses and are incredibly intuitive. They see what seeing eyes cannot and hear what hearing ears do not. They understand the laws and the truth of nature beyond what we can comprehend with a Western mindset. 

 

The intuitive is the closest to “I am that I am (the Infinite One.)”

 

The Force of the Primal manifest as love is the glory of God.

 

The hunter gatherers were not limited by our educational dogma. They knew Nature's laws more intimately. They did not know the laws we have created for ourselves about how we think nature works, which are deficient. 

The San had and have an inner knowing of things much like the spiritual masters we admire. 

Sadly, in each successive aboriginal generation that comes under Western influence there is an ongoing dilution and pollution of these original truths that should never change. We have paid a huge price for our amazing technology and few of us realize how much has been lost. Science can be arrogant and rarely admits to its ignorance. 

Quantum physicists do admit that anyone who thinks they understand quantum physics does not really understand it. We live in a one percent universe and have little idea of the other 99%. We need to respect and be in awe of the unknown.

The value of information is in its use for transformation.

  

There is so much information available to us now through the internet. We should be careful of not losing ourSelves to truths that have little to do with our personal core strength, destiny and mission on the planet.

 

The most dangerous distraction is the lure of beguiling but essentially extraneous information – be it false or true. More important, is it useful to you, does it inspire, support, advance and enhance who you are and your relationship with God or is it merely speculative, and appealing to your curiosity?

Are you nibbling on the apples of the Tree of Knowledge or are you nurturing whatever proud plant or humble weed is your present entrustment?
It is that which you are to make glorious.

Anything or anybody who does not make you more of who you are, makes you less of who you are.

Perfection can be the shadow side of Understanding. Excellence resides in Wisdom since She knows that seeking perfection is folly and unhealthful. There should always be, a sufficiency of excellence unto itself.

It makes no sense spending an inordinate amount of time to make a tiny difference in a task you have already accomplished well.

The fallacy of perfection is in thinking that there is a point of such completeness beyond which there is no place to go, improve or strive for. This is very different from excellence which is achievable, always desirable, and often necessary but in varying degrees for varying tasks and purposes.

Striving for perfection is more a quality of misunderstanding.

Excellence a quality of Wisdom.