The Art of Understanding 💡
A Journey Into the Realm of Reason
Dear Friend 🟣✨🟡,
In the last post, we explored the idea that: “Understanding is the seed of freedom 🌱”.
In this post I would like us to explore what is “understanding” and take a journey into the realm of reason, where everything makes sense, in theory anyway 🙃.
Belief, Experience and Understanding
Why do we ask questions such as:
Do you believe in life after death?
Do you believe in free will?
But it never occurs to anyone to ask:
Do you believe in airplanes?
Do you believe in ships?
I am not concerned with defending or denying the existence of free will or life after death. What I would like us to explore today is the nature of the divide between belief and understanding. What separates faith from reason? Why do we treat some questions as matters of personal belief and others as objects of knowledge?
If I tell you about flying vehicles and you have never seen one before, you can either believe or disbelieve me; or you can ask for the nearest location on Google Maps where you can experience them. Now it becomes a question of choice: am I willing to put the effort to travel to the location and have the actual experience? However, we assume quite reasonably that it is more difficult to travel to the after-life and come back with reviews about our experience.
In both cases, if one is not willing to travel whether in space or in time, it is tempting to fallback to the comfort of belief or disbelief and miss the experiences that might lead to understanding.
But while airplanes may be visible and seemingly self-evident today, experiencing them does not mean we understand them. Most of us accept that they fly without grasping why they fly. The trip to the airport, turned the question of belief into experience, but not quite yet into understanding.
And perhaps the same is true for much of what we call belief, we either accept it or dismiss it without ever really seeking experience or the journey of understanding.
Why Understand?
I often have the same conversation with my Mother:
My Mother: How was your trip?
Me: It was a wonderful trip, I learned a lot.
My Mother: But most importantly I hope you lived (or enjoyed or something similar…). Live your life do not try to understand it.
She has a great point, I agree with her.
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced
~Soren Kierkegaard
In addition:
We learn to speak without understanding the rules of grammar
We breathe, digest food, and the body carries all of its functions whether we understand them or not
We built the first airplane through a mix of careful observation, experimentation and intuition and not through a complete understanding of theoretical aerodynamics
There is an intelligence, a wisdom in action that often precedes formal understanding. We can say that:
Life is much wiser than thought
Lack of understanding does not prevent us from experiencing life, from creating and from having an intuitive grasp, even if dim and vague.
Then What Is the Value of Understanding?
We can speak without grammar, children do it every day. But without the deeper structure that grammar provides, and the lived experiences that give meaning, it is unlikely they will go on to write literature that touches our hearts and minds.
We can breathe and digest without understanding, but it is unlikely we would be able to care for life and heal, without understanding.
We flew without advanced theoretical aerodynamics, but only through deep understanding that we excelled in the field and created all of the magnificent reliable safe planes we have today. Except for Boeing, who clearly cared more about profit and moving fast and breaking things.
The value of understanding is not that it enables action or creation. Creation can occur through intuition, inspiration and imitation.
But understanding transforms that into conscious, self-directed activity. Understanding enables freedom and evolution.
Only understanding allows us to say:
“I know why I act, and I choose it.”
👆🏽How many times have you done this in your own home?
Without understanding:
We cannot draw a correlation between our thoughts, actions and reactions in the world.
We repeat patterns whether the outcome is desirable or not without any question of choice.
We may wish for outcomes we cannot achieve, simply because we do not know how to think and act in ways that could make them real.
So first life, then reflection on life.
We live forward and understand backward
~Soren Kierkegaard
It naturally follows that the more experiences we live the more we can understand.
Experiences in the Language of Life is analogous to learning new words in English. It becomes even more meaningful when we can utilize them to expand our capacity for expression and understanding. A whole new world of stories and meaning becomes available to us through the newly learned words and experiences. Turning experiences into understanding is what allows us to weave those experiences together composing ever more nuanced and refined meaning and understanding.
We have to experience the meaning of heartache, confusion and suffering at least once or until we learn them, so that we can express and appreciate stories of redemption, wisdom, resilience, compassion, and a deeper love that could have not arisen any other way, or any other stories we like.
Let us use a timely analogy, when we ask how does a software system work, we do not expect to understand the answer without prior experience and preparation. We know we must raise our understanding to the level of the system we are trying to comprehend.
We can ask ChatGPT: “Explain to me like I am 5 (ELI5) how ChatGPT works?” and we will receive a simple satisfying explanation.
ChatGPT is like a super-smart autocomplete that has read a lot and tries to guess the best next words based on everything it has seen before.
It might be satisfying, and we might feel like: now we understand how ChatGPT works. But in reality, this answer could be considered as misleading as it is simple. The same explanation will not satisfy an expert. They would require a far more sophisticated and nuanced explanation, one that reflects the system’s intricacies and complexity in a more delicate manner.
So I asked: “Explain to me like I am an expert how ChatGPT works?”:
ChatGPT is a large-scale, autoregressive transformer model trained via supervised and reinforcement learning to model conditional probabilities over token sequences, using multi-head self-attention to encode contextual relationships and generate coherent continuations based on learned statistical structures from massive pre-training corpora.
We see here that the difference between this version and the previous version is the vocabulary used. In order to understand this version, I do not only need to know about the new words, but much rather, I need to have lived through the experiences that would reveal the meaning of those words.
And ultimately even this explanation, is still not the “whole” reality. Reality is much more alive, evolving, multi-dimensional, layered, textured, nuanced than any explanation we can give. By the time we have understood this, ChatGPT would have already evolved to something more than what we have studied.
So simplified models are useful because they allow us to understand limited parts and behaviors of the systems. They are the best rendering of reality that we can grasp given our experience and the effort we are willing to put. However, it would not occur to us, in this case, to regard the simplicity of the explanation as the simplicity of reality. We reduce or increase the complexity of reality given our faculties. Yet we often attribute this simplification to reality itself and we do not recognize it as a reflection of our limited experiences and capacity to understand.
Curious to get another perspective, I reached out to our friend the alien scientist. You may remember him from a prior post, the one who once claimed cars move because places pull them.
Here is what he had to say:
“You take any human, really, it does not matter who; we have to remain scientific and objective, and you sit them in front of a glowing screen. They begin making clicking noises with their fingers in a specific rhythm, while sipping a hot black bitter beverage. After around a hundred million clicks and fifteen thousand liters of this liquid inspiration, suddenly, intelligence emerges on the screen. Just the right conditions, and Artificial Intelligence emerges. No need for plans, experience or purpose.
I have remarked that this liquid inspiration is often at the origin of your creations ☕️.”
He paused thoughtfully, then added:
“It is remarkable how often, complex things emerge like this on your planet.”
I did not have the heart to tell him we have a whole origin story that sounds quite similar.
The Origin Story
Let us move from software systems to something slightly bigger… the universe.
Why can science vaguely answer the question: “How did the universe emerge?” But not in any convincing manner the question: “Why did the universe emerge?”
Modern Science seeks to create reproducible experiences, by eliminating any subjective bias in pursuit of objectivity. This leads to excluding the validity of inner experience, moral values, meaning, purpose and free will. All of these are regarded as subjective and cannot be considered as evidence.
However that is a choice, one which not only prevents us from getting to the reason of things, but which inevitably leads us to find only explanations devoid of these very things, as if by design.
As soon we ask the question of why, the answer will not be in all of the data we have gathered or in anything we observe in the outer world, there we only find how. This is the boundary between observation and meaning, outer and inner.
And this is where the paradox starts, because in modern science even with all the objective empirical repeatable observations, we still make sense of it all in our reason.
Data does not interpret itself. Scientific models are stories, arranged in reason, and told to one another. The fact that we have observed might be empirical and repeatable. However the story we have made is subjective.
The Big Bang (Matter First, Reason Later)
The perspective we currently hold of the universe given in the Big Bang story, is not without consequences on how we live. We currently explain that a singularity expanded rapidly, cooling and allowing for the formation of subatomic particles, which later merged to form atoms, stars and galaxies. According to this view, on the remote planet Earth, in the vast abandoned universe, and against all odds; life emerged, billions of years later. Just like Artificial Intelligence emerged after millions of keyboard clicks and liquid inspiration. We do not know why, or whether it was meant to happen at all. This perspective while seemingly scientific, objective and neutral holds a very subjective belief that profoundly shapes our lives today. Which is:
The universe came first and reason came later.
Of course this is inevitable, since it is woven in the very method of examination itself. When you try to examine the universe from an absolutely empirical objective stance, you can only discover explanations that fit that stance and nothing that points beyond it.
Each domain of experience is accessible primarily through faculties suited to the nature of its reality. The whole of the world of colors, shapes, textures becomes manifest to us through the eyes. In a similar manner, the world of reason is primarily available to our reason. I referred to this as Spiritual Sight in a previous post.
Imagine trying to experience a song by reading the lyrics 🎶.
Reason First, Matter Later
To continue this exploration with integrity is not to dismiss or choose one perspective, but to explore with the full sincerity of our heart and mind our outer as well as our inner worlds.
So let us consider another perspective:
What if reason is at the root of everything?
What if the universe is meaningful from the start?
What makes an embryo grow? What makes a seed grow?
I am not speaking of cell division but rather: what is the process by which matter, otherwise part of the mother’s own body or the soil, reorganizes itself into a new distinct being, with its own Raison d'être.
What is this organizing, animating principle that gathers atoms into a living being, into the new tree, and into the organism «I» can inhabit?
What is it that changes at the moment of death to cause the collapse of that organism, the loss of organization and coherence? And now the same materials that used to make up a human body, are given back to the earth with the disappearance of their organizing animating principle.
What is it that turns matter into meaning? That transforms a bunch of rocks into devices on which you can read this post? That makes Artificial Intelligence emerge out of millions of keyboard clicks?
The material itself is available in the universe. Once what we call a human being, takes hold of it, it becomes animated, the same materials organize themselves differently to become a living organism, capable of sustaining itself, regeneration and replication. The same material directed and shaped by human reason, becomes the devices we use. Through human reason and understanding, those millions of keyboard clicks give rise to Artificial Intelligence.
Let us explore this from a more practical perspective.
What makes so many of us wake up every morning, and choose to go to work and carry out our functions with remarkable reliability?
Companies are not created randomly or incidentally, like how life supposedly emerged after the Big Bang. They exist because, at some point, there was a reason for being strong enough to gather people around it, a purpose, a need.
This reason became the gravitational center around which individuals chose to align their time, energy, and reason. It became strong enough to justify creating all of the infrastructure, hiring employees, and waking up early to write emails. So this reason organizes the employees lives in turn.
In this sense, a company is not just a legal entity. It is a reason, made visible, that proves strong enough to organize others into meaningful action.
Whether we agree with the purpose or not, whether the reason is noble or otherwise, it is still reason that organizes, what would otherwise remain scattered, into higher and higher forms of order: cells into a human body, and human beings into collective organisms.
Additionally, we can observe that higher reason can organize lower reason through clarity, coherence, and resonance and not through force or coercion.
As an example, the company with the highest understanding of the market, their craft, their technique, sensitive to the users needs, caring for aesthetics ends up building the best product. Not by coincidence, but by understanding. Remember the launch of the iPhone, it completely changed the market of smartphones, it simply understood something deeper than others. That understanding was confirmed by the users who chose to buy it over any other phone on the market. Competitors aligned and the ecosystem evolved through clarity and understanding.
We see that reason takes different forms, interacts with itself, reorganizes itself into forms that are more coherent, more alive. Each degree of understanding takes a particular form, higher degrees of reason and understanding assume higher and higher forms and organize lower reason. Reason is constantly developing and evolving in time through experience, reflection and interaction with itself as other.
What we call evolution may (simply 🙃) be reason learning more of itself by itself, through the different forms it takes.
What a Fine Story
The second story might make us feel warmer. It puts the human being within the narrative, rather than outside it, as the first one does. But it is still a story, one constructed by reason, just like the first.
And here is where we start noticing something fascinating about the nature of reason:
Reason and belief are not only descriptive of reality but they are also creative.
Whether matter came first or reason came first, reason is capable of constructing self-coherent worlds, organizing all of the scientific evidence to back it up, believing the story and living in it forgetting it is living in a world of its making.
A person who believes life is meaningless lives differently from one who believes it has meaning. But belief disconnected from reality is delusion. So it is not merely a question of finding an “empowering belief”, but how to align with higher reason and the deeper reality?
Belief or disbelief, by themselves, do little to nourish our lives; understanding does. And genuine understanding, as we explored so far, arises mainly when we are willing first to experience inwardly and then to reflect. Until we feel compelled to seek that understanding, clinging to belief, or to disbelief, amounts to little more than ignorance.
Belief to Understanding
So how to move from belief to understanding?
Genuine understanding must be cultivated individually. I can have the book of universal wisdom in front of me, yet unless I actually put in the effort to open it, read it, and have previously lived the experiences required to interpret the meaning, I will just have mere paper in front of me, nothing more.
The same applies to both scientific discoveries and spiritual teachings. It requires personal engagement, sustained effort, and the willingness to relate knowledge with one's own experiences.
Perhaps to go further from here, we can find guidance in the Greek saying:
Know thyself, and thou shalt know the universe and the gods.
In science, we seek objectivity by understanding our instruments profoundly; we quantify their margins of error and correct for every distortion, we do not attempt to eliminate them all together for objectivity. Likewise, we cannot deny our humanity no matter how objective we seek to be. However, if we embrace it and seek to understand it fully, perhaps it can become as invisible as our eyes, when they are functioning properly. A dis-eased eye pulls our attention from anything outside and obstructs vision. And perhaps so it is with reason, the healthier our reason, the clearer it discerns. The more dis-eased it becomes, the more it absorbs our attention and prevents us from seeing through it.
As we have explored so far, the more we elevate our inner lives through experiences and reflection, the more we can understand of the nature of our reality. In fact the nature of our reality is always revealing herself in every interaction, only if we have eyes to see the dance and ears to hear the music. Without this cultivated sensitivity, we end up settling for a slightly different genre: a bleak drama of an abandoned piece of rock.
In any case, understanding is a journey. We must embark on the path, live through the experiences, and only later, does understanding begin to dawn 🌅.
The journey of understanding starts when we make the choice of letting part of our reason go in favor of trying to let a different reason organize our lives. Through the life it generates and we live, we get to have a living practical deep understanding of that reason. This reason becomes our outer world, and we get to live in it and explore it spatially. We get to know it the same way we get to know our homes. Not theoretically nor passively, but we come to know it intimately by active participation. The quality of our lives becomes the measure of the quality of that reason. We have explored in more details how this happens in a prior post.
Faith is the first step toward understanding, because it is the force that allows us to begin the journey at all. Without faith, it would never even occur to us to seek the answers. After we walk the path, after we live and experience, understanding comes. And faith is reborn now at a higher octave. Faith becomes knowledge. We rest for a while in that clarity… until the next journey calls.
The Human Garden
Here we come to one of the most wonderful insights about the nature of a human being and freedom.
A seed might have reason in the capacity to organize matter otherwise part of the soil into a tree. A mango seed will always grow into a mango tree, nothing less, nothing more. However, a human has the additional capacity of self-directed reason. I could say pictorially that a human is a self-rewiring seed. A human being respecting higher reason, can imagine and become what their reason can conceive and their will can realize.
There is in each and every one of us, a part that stands above reason, that can direct reason. We can identify this part in us by contemplating the following analogy:
If we allow ourselves to see our lives as a gardener would tend to their garden. We come to see that each seed planted in the soil, will bear certain trees and eventually fruit in time. Understanding as we have explored, is the temporal connection between a seed and a tree. We already know that if we want to eat mangos from our garden, it would be unreasonable to plant apple seeds and expecting they bear mangos. It would be equally unreasonable to demand that the seed gives us mangos immediately as soon as it is planted.
We as human gardeners get to decide what we want in our gardens. So it is with our lives, if we want certain outcomes, we have to understand that those outcomes have to be regarded as a consequence of certain habits and not occurrences that would arise randomly in our lives.
However the point here is not to exert too much control nor is it to completely abandon any planning. Too much reason and we live in cold, calculated yet meaningless worlds. Too little of it and we live in magic but also delusion without any free-will. And here is where we come to the Art of Reason. It is an art to the extent to which we have to balance trust and surrender with active deliberate involvement. We have to consciously and deliberately decide the trees we want in our garden, find their seeds, and once planted, we have to have the patience to tend to them for the following years until they bear the fruits.
Once the seeds are planted there is nothing to do except show up consistently to tend to them.
Understanding is what allows us this comfort and trust.
We also have to make space for the seeds that we do not know what kind of trees or fruits they bear. For those, maybe we dedicate a part of our garden to experiment, to plant them and wait and see if we like them or not.
An important note has to be made here regarding the dimension of time, which we will explore in future posts. For now, it is enough to remember that:
It takes at least 5 years for a mango seed to grow into a tree that bears mangos.
No one ever became fit by going to the gym once.
No one ever got fat by having dessert after a meal once.
Above Reason
What is that part in us that stands above reason and that can direct it? And according to what would it direct reason?
I hope you can contemplate this until we explore it in future posts.
I hope you enjoyed this trip into the realm of reason as much as I did. May it leave a little sparkle of magic through your reason ✨.
Thank you reading,
🟣✨🟡
Written in Auroville, India 🇮🇳
Well written and great, deep insight!