What Is Understanding?

[Phil]

What’s been seen, heard, etc?

What is the experience of, the witnessing, the observing of, understanding? 

What is it?

[Loop]

The wind is blowing, the sun's light is warm. 

[Zeroguy]

46 minutes ago, Phil said:

What’s been seen, heard, etc?

What is the experience of, the witnessing, the observing of, understanding? 

What is it?

Love.

[Orb]

@Phil Understanding is the collecting of more and more knowledge and feeling a sense of novelty out of it. This eventually transforms into confusion, then a hunger for more knowledge comes, then the absorbing of more knowledge gives a sense of relief, and so on goes the cycle. 

[BlendingInfinite]

Understanding understanding is an infinite regression. Therefore, the answer can only be found without understanding and thus cannot be put into words, because it is infinite.

Edited March 13, 2022 by BlendingInfinite

[Faith]

From learning or not understanding, to understanding, is a connecting of one concept or experience after another, to get to the ah-ha moments. Where the light bulb goes on 💡  

[almond]

hmm.. 

Edited March 13, 2022 by almond

[Sethv]

Eating pudding and watching The Matrix 

“there is no spoon”, for the spoon, there is only chocolate pudding, everywhere the spoon turns there is only pudding….

 

[Nowt]

@Sethv 😆🙌

[Sethv]

“what is understanding”

From “Alice in wonderland “

Alice talking for the first time with Cheshire

• “- What do you call yourself?
• -   Alice
• - The Alice!?
• -   There has been some debate about that 
• - I never get involved in politics.
• You best be on your way.
• -   What way?
• All I want to do is wake up from this dream.
• - Fine. I’ll take you to The Hare and The Hatter
• But that’s the end of IT.”🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Sethv]

Can I change my nickname from Sethv to Cheshire?❤️🤣🤣🤣🤣

[karkaore]

Understanding is Knowing. True Knowing comes from Not-Knowing. Not-knowing comes from questioning. True questioning comes from curiosity.

Where does curiosity come from?

On 3/13/2022 at 4:34 PM, Phil said:

What is the experience of, the witnessing, the observing of, understanding?

Itself.

[Isomorphic]

What if the distinction between witnessing and understanding is itself limited or purely academic?

That all witnessing truly unfolds in an absolute cohesion, that antithesis produces synthesis by itself and therefore is just a dream.

[Isomorphic]

1 hour ago, lxlichael said:

@Isomorphic So a little thing I did to solve this for myself is the following:

1. close my eyes

2. notice the breath

3. I notice that anything from here that I can truly grab onto is purely the heart, everything else is a mental creation, ideally for me, I want to be of my greatest hearts creation, the greatest war to be won in this life, the greatest heroic love, not fixated in reason nor lost in heart but a heart that is aligned with mind and mind that is grown by the heart more and more each day to reach its ultimate potential. 

The heart is the visionary space by which the mind is to fully enter, in doing so, the mind reaches its maximum life vision, relative to our potential in this human form.

Feel free to add any corrections.

Casual is as casual does.

Now when sight is gone and breath comes and goes I notice that the ideas that also comes and goes that we in alignment denotes "mental", follows each other and are all presentable in space thus subject to the boundaries of time, space and causality.

And just like I can truly grab onto the experience of the heart I can grab onto the limitations themselves of my thoughts, I can not grab onto the thoughts themselves of course, in the sense you mean it so.

So the only thing i disagreed with is the claim that one can not grab onto the scenery of the play, while the thoughts by which the scenery may be presented is always water under the bridge. The maximum life vision is pure heart, though cancelled totally without a use of reason.

[Joseph Maynor]

I tend to break understanding up like this which is just a useful model (which I created by analyzing the mind vs. body duality):

Masculine mind = Intellect/philosophy/spiritual theories.  Study/practice: reading/audiobooks/watching YouTube videos/the upper chakras/mental intellect.

Feminine mind = Consciousness/awareness.  Study/practice: mindfulness/meditation/psychedelics/focusing/mental being.

Masculine body/extension* = Science/practical theory.  Study/practice: pursuing theory that has practical aims/results/"bodily (extension) intellect."

Feminine body/extension = Being in the world/Dasein (Heidegger).  Study/practice: getting out of the mind and into the emotions (and feelings)/intuitions/the lower chakras/bodily being.

*Extension is Spinoza's preferred term for body which I find useful in certain contexts especially when we're taking about body as going beyond what we think as our body.
 

Edited March 18, 2022 by Joseph Maynor

[Indisguise]

On 3/13/2022 at 5:34 PM, Phil said:

What is the experience of, the witnessing, the observing of, understanding? 

What is it?

How could I understand what understanding is? It must be a mystery.

[Isomorphic]

9 hours ago, lxlichael said:

On a scale of 1-10 how well have you learned to discriminate between the modalities of experienced subjectivity?

For example, on a scale of 1-10 how well does your normal default consciousness operate on the balance that arises from the output of good differentiation between:

1. Nervous system experience (felt experience - from various areas within the body in various ways i.e. from electrical feelings around the body to the pulsating of feeling from the heart to the solidarity to flexible feelings around the mind (let's avoid unnecessary discrimination between mind and brain for now, though perhaps even separately, the brain too).

2. Sense experience (i.e. sight, sound, etc)

3. Mental experience

4. All exclusionaries (i.e. kinaesthetic experiences, felt to mental inclusive and their combinations)

All of these of course have both simultaneity, overlap and distinction between them. 

First of, that I can distinguish these modalities in any kind means they are unified and one from the beginning.

Though it would be detrimental to all human endevours not to admit the inevitable distinction between all things that unfolds in experience, I can easily class thoughts and sensation in two divergent camps though see an equally great distinction between different thoughts on the one hand and different sensations on the other. 

When I now close my eyes and feel the way my back hurts due to exercise yesterday, it occurs with my sensibility of space, and I can not imagine for the best of me how it is any different for anyone else.

All these things are mind, to class them from 1 to 10 would be trivial, everything which is experienced is inherently a 10, and in relation to other things they are all both 10 and 0, 10 for they constitute my consciousness all, and 0 for they are in any sense different.

Edited March 18, 2022 by Isomorphic

[Winter]

On 3/13/2022 at 12:34 PM, Phil said:

What’s been seen, heard, etc?

What is the experience of, the witnessing, the observing of, understanding? 

What is it?

If I am to observe a neural network externally, the neural network being in a state of understanding in relation to a particular problem that is attempted to be solved is the local maximum of the fitness function, that is the solution that is (locally) the best at solving an issue. "Best" defined as the least energy expensive and functional.

So I think understanding is just a thought that works out to solve something and it feels good because it works. I think it differs from knowledge by the fact that it is knowledge directed at problem solving, whether that problem is communication or something else.

While thought is not observable you can clearly see whether someone understands something or not though. Problem solving can be tested. If I give you a rubix cube I can test you on whether you understand the techniques to solve it or not. But both understanding and thought can only be observed in external behavior. I have never observed my own understanding.

When it comes to nonduality however, there is nothing to understand, because there is no problem in the first place. Recognition of that fact is sometimes labelled as "understanding" or "enlightenment" but those labels imply either a problem that was understood or something which wasn't lit. Implications that are false.

Edited March 19, 2022 by Winter

[Ges]

Thoughts.

[Joseph Maynor]

19 minutes ago, Ges said:

Thoughts.

Is consciousness a thought?