Experience and Understanding

To experience a thing is one thing, to understand it is another. Experience is foundational, hence in mystical circles teachers belittle understanding, meaning concepts; instead they emphasize tasting or experience. But having tasted, did we understand? In Zen, Tao, or Sufi circles emphasis on experience arises because would-be disciples are impatient. They don’t want to waste time building boring foundations. They want to learn magic slogans. They want something. They, too, start with an experience, a desire; they just don’t understand what it is yet. Experience and understanding: an interesting couple.

Let me trace out the process whereby we understand experience. An experience takes place in time and has a sequence. We can take it apart, examine its causes, changes, intensity; we label these, discern their relationships, dynamics, and movements. But how does this actually happen? What are these parts? What are these concepts, these tokens that we use? We might see them as spiritualized or disembodied mental representations of perceptions or feelings. And it is in the examination of these mental entities (however labeled—thought elements, language) that a strange phenomenon takes place. At some point, as we examine these immaterial tokens, a strange phenomenon takes place. Suddenly we understand the experience. The insight we gain is, however, itself an experience—and as ineffable as any other. Thus the examined experience—a set of feelings, perceptions—is re-experienced on another level more accessible to the spiritual agent that we really are. And these feelings and perceptions may arise from a physical or from a mental stratum of our being. We can also understand and re-experience our ideas, intuitions, and abstract strata no longer linked to the physical. There is a layering here. We, the agents, perceive the physical—and then do so again using the more subtle medium of thought. And it is this second process that leads to understanding.

A fascinating aspect of human experience is that we need a tool by means of which we can chop apart the flux of experience into discrete meanings, each of which can be held apart and also seen in relationship. The tool for that is language. Until the means to stop this flux are available to us, we are stuck in a relentless flow. How we came to be here—that’s another matter. I’ve said more on this subject here regarding the experience of Helen Keller.

It is good to taste, but it is best to taste again. The mystical schools stop short of that second step. Their intent is initiation into the mysteries—to help disciples acquire higher experiences first. Once that has taken place, the teacher’s job is really done. The adept will go his or her own way after that—well qualified to do so by a mind that comes equipped for understanding anything.

Intellectual Grasp, Absence of Knowledge

Someone reached this blog by using the following search phrase: “intellectually understand but don’t know.” He or she got my post titled Understanding and Intellectual Grasp. In that post I argue the exact opposite of that situation, namely that a kind of wordless understanding is frequently present before we understand a matter intellectually. So what is the situation my visitor had in mind? He or she had in mind, I think, those situations where someone has successfully explained something at the conceptual level—but after we have “got it” we still haven’t got it; we still don’t know a thing.

A good example of this might be the explanation by modern physics of the electron supposedly circling the atomic core. We are told that the electron is “everywhere but nowhere.” It is a wave of probability. At the same time, if we wish to locate the electron we can set up an experiment to do so, and when we do, we can detect the electron (say on a photosensitive film). And this detection is then explained as the “collapse of the probability wave.” This is the sort of explanation which is intellectual graspable, but it doesn’t produce the feeling of knowledge. All we can do is repeat it to others, but we don’t really understand what we are talking about. When we seek a deeper understanding, we will be given the wave equation for starters. It looks like this:

Much of physics is of this character. The experiential base consists of experimental instruments, dial readings, and points of light on photographic film. The explanation is mathematical, the math derived from instrument readings. There is here a major disconnect between intellectual grasp and knowledge as we experience it. Okay. It is useful knowledge. We can apply it in practice in the design of electronic circuits, etc. Those circuits, however, are no more knowable in the core, in the gut, than the probability wave.

Let me now present an equally arcane counterexample where experience is involved. Let us say that you were mad enough to read the entirety of Dante’s Divine Comedy—in a version yet where the Italian text is in one column, the English translation in the other. And you arrive, at last, on the point where Beatrice, Dante’s great love, dead these many years, reappears to Dante on the portals of Paradise. She wears a dress di fiamma viva (of living flame), a green mantle over it, veiled in white, crowned with olive branches. The image shocks Dante, and he says: E lo spirito mio…d’antico amor sentì la gran potenza—And my spirit…felt the great power of the old love.

Now in this case the reader—if ever that reader has experienced genuine love, the kind we fall into, the kind we cannot help but feel, the kind that makes us remember our first love with a kind of numb and inarticulate awe—a person like that will not be puzzled by this magical appearance, by the fantastical procession that comes first, nor by the seemingly inaccessible assertion that this takes place in earthly paradise. All those concepts were at least felt to a tiny degree in our own first encounter with the magic of love. This is understanding based on experience—and later translated into intellectual concepts. The story of the electron’s sudden flash-up as its probability wave collapses—why that is intellectual grasp without understanding—unless, by a little magical trickery, we imagine that the beautiful electron, perhaps, is alike to the beautiful Beatrice, and that the wave’s collapse is like love’s crashing arrival on our own arid, sandy beach.
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Wave equation courtesy of Wikipedia. Dante reference is to Purgatory, Canto XXX, 31-33 and 40-42, translation by Charles Williams.

Understanding and Intellectual Grasp

At bottom understanding and intellectual grasp are really one and the same thing. Or are they? I ask the question for a reason. The understanding of something often dawns in my mind before I’ve actually articulated it, thus taken it apart into pieces and realized, in detail, how everything fits together. But even before I do that, I’ve already understood the object. Conversely, understanding may also arise suddenly from the puzzled handling of details, looking at them this way, that way. All at once I understand.

This is a peculiar experience. What is this feeling? What actually happens? Mysterious. A man will say: “Well, I just knew.” If then you ask him how he knew, you may sometimes trigger a retrospective inspection of the process; the account of it will depend on the ability of the person to see into his own innards. The speaker will begin to trace a process backward. We usually call it a process of thought, but the point I’m after is that thought is often not involved at all.

The man in this case will begin his account by examining slices of the process one by one, isolating them from one another. Put another way, the speaker reviews his stream of experiences over time and notes his reactions one by one, almost second by second. When this process originally took place, the speaker did not engage in conceptualization—did not use tokens, words. The process worked beneath the level of speech or its equivalent, thought. The speaker nonetheless absorbed the events and his reactions to them. Translating that process into speech (spoken or silent) is really what results in intellectual grasp. But we know the thing, we understand it, before we ever proceed to its mental formulation into concepts. Like many other people, I often don’t know what I know until I write it down, but, paradoxically, I knew that before I wrote it. But after writing I possess it more fully and completely. But what is it that I possess? It is a structure of symbols in meaningful relationships. And I’m persuaded by my experience that the meaning and the relationships preexisted my grasp of them. Hence the world is intelligible. Some disagree. They assert that no meaning exists out there, none whatsoever. We impose it by using speech. How we act on our understanding may, of course, depend on which fork of this divide we take.

Experiential footnote: I grasped this process years ago once when our washing machine broke down. I disassembled it enough to expose its pulleys, blocks, and belts. I stared at it for at least half an hour totally absorbed, fingering this lever, pushing that belt. I wasn’t analyzing. I examined the assembly by looking at it, now this part, now that; I was letting my mind absorb the picture by focusing on it in great detail. Suddenly, with a flash, I understood the damn thing. I just knew. Then I trusted myself to proceed to the next steps of disassembly—because I now had a feel for how the thing actually worked. The conceptual process began only as I proceeded. In two hours I had the thing running again.

Now putting things this way may seem to support the modern line of thought that intellect and consciousness are the consequence of language, that language could and did simply evolve by accidental changes in our throat so that simple grunts could become much more elaborated sounds. Etc. I take exactly the opposite tack. I think that our innate endowment, what I call soul or self, has hierarchically overlaid powers each seeking expression and realization as soon as it has the modes to actualize itself. Thus understanding is the foundation; the symbolizing intellect is the next higher layer; above the intellect yet other powers await unfolding. In the species homo sapiens nature managed to implement the means by which intellect could function, but it did so because a fierce energy within the self sought expression and exploited the accidents of nature. It is the intellect that creates language, not language the intellect. Same facts, different interpretation.

One corollary of this view is that understanding—in a pre-verbal sense—is present in animals, indeed in all living things, as well; so is, I would assert, the potential for our kind of consciousness. This view is consistent with my experience with Winston, our much loved labrador in Minnesota, who certainly possessed much understanding. I would also point those interested to the fascinating story of Helen Keller, a person whose physical defects prevented her exercise of an innate facility until rescued by Anne Sullivan. This is a fascinating and highly illuminating case. I’ve written it up—its here on this computer somewhere. This post suggests that I ought to find that analysis and present it in the future. It makes my case.