Understanding…
Understanding is more than knowledge of the world.
Knowledge about something requires the conscious experience of the thing that produced that thought, ideally gained first hand or from another party’s trustworthy, second hand account. Knowledge requires a faithful memory of at least the basic details of that experience going forward. All else posing as knowledge is simply hearsay or fantasy.
The truth about that thing is more than just the fidelity of the recalled experience as some phenomenon of personal history or the veracity of a related second hand source. Recognition of Truth requires an understanding of such experiential knowledge, and understanding requires the application to that knowledge of some Essential Principle, also learned from living, concerning the necessary and sufficient conditions required for that experience to occur.
That Principle is Life. If we were not living—awake on this planet or in some dream realm in which we might be aware—we would have no experience nor knowledge nor understanding of any thing. All knowledge and understanding is predicated on being alive, on being aware of pleasure or pain, or since sentience is a spectrum of awareness and not a digital condition, of being somewhere in between the extremes of pleasure and pain, so it is incumbent upon each and every one of us to come to some understanding of Life as it is and not just as it seems to be based on the Appearance of any passing Physical Phenomena.
Understanding applies both to the physical forces governing the interactions within the world of living beings, places and things and to the motivations governing the emotional, mental, and intuitive interactions between those beings as they navigate this world, this living earth. That understanding is of one piece, like the reflective front and opaque back of an illusive mirror; if the reflective side is well made, the image detail will be faithful, though logically reversed, only to vanish when we switch our gaze to the rear side of the mirror, before reappearing once again when we switch back to the proper reflection of the view it might encompass.
Understanding of the physical world and its laws is based on the fact that the multitude of various seemingly unrelated objects and non-living things are found with ever more thorough investigation and reflection to be inherently and inextricably intertwined and activated, emerging from one universal source as a function of the cosmos as a whole. Understanding of the metaphysical world of souls and its principles is based on the fact that all living beings appear to consciously navigate this world according to an organized and well-defined manner from the very beginning. All understanding proceeds from the same logic of mental reflection.
We are here on this planet and at this moment in time to realize this understanding, driven to it by the loving insistence of One Life. Regardless of the starting point of each and every journey, one noetic compass directs us forward to the beat of one Living heart, to the necessarily individual realizations that are a flowering of compassion—of un-self-centered love and wonder of all that Life Is. Such awareness of love is not a weak and timid thing. It is ferocious and commanding.
The pleasure-pain nexus, the knowledge of what is good and harmful for us in whatever garb it may be dressed, grounds our understanding of these known facts of life from the start. The Quality of that knowledge has resulted in the various current states of Political Economy around the world. If we are free and able, it moves us toward what is pleasing and away from any pain not rooted in perception of a greater happiness. And it binds us in alliance and reliance on whoever or whatever shares and is deemed to assure that solace and guarantee of life.
Despite any apparent guarantee and seeming assurance, however, Life is Change, and we are forced at many junctures, individually and in affiliated groups, to weigh the Risk & Opportunity that we face. Such decision making controls the quality of our living, through a mix of individual private and communal public initiatives and their outcomes, which in turn give rise to yet another set of risks and opportunities. Understanding these risks and opportunities before life’s changes force them on us unprepared has been a motivation for as long as I can remember. Be prepared was the Boy Scout motto, which I learned but not always practiced from an early age.
Expertise and understanding gained from the experience of living as outlined here in the UniServEnt website is unfortunately not always clearly or easily conveyed. What started out as a statement of the conclusions from a logical study of my own experience has morphed in the absurdity of current world events to the perhaps more absurd–enlightened notion of Ergodidiocy for a new world view, and so we, UniServEnt and myself, have created the companion website, Truth & Ergodidiocy, or just Ergodidiocy for short.
Based on a common axiomatic approach, we can undertake a journey of untangling some of the threads of the common experience of these topics, in order to better understand this Principle of Life, with hope for each us, individually and together as a group, to master the art and science of living.
