What is Understanding?

Truth is simple, but understanding is complex. The tremendous, essential realities lay in front of our eyes at every moment. But our eyes are shut, and our heads are twisted away. We live on the surface, perceiving reflections and images, reacting to events, striving to make sense. The simple and obvious reality lies outside of us and inside of us at all times, but it is elusive. As we advance, it retreats. Our perception itself distorts what we see. The tools we have at our disposal are blunt.

Understanding is a simple, universal, and under-utilized capacity, which we all have. There is no continuity between ignorance and understanding. Ignorance is the domination of a single truth, which subjugates all others. It holds tight to its minimal and narrow conceptions. Understanding liberates from bondage to appearances. It breaks shells, reveals secrets, creates possibilities. A single inspiration is a resolution of an enigma, and knits together the torn fabric of our experience.
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Education: Untaught, Unrewarded, & Elemental

    There are two kinds of education: learning about practical matters, and learning about life. The former is a body of knowledge that can be taught. It can be organized in complex systems and institutions, and imparted in systematic ways to large populations. The latter is not so easily quantified. A different kind of school is required.
     Most schools impart practical skills, and offer practical rewards. They prepare students for a job or a profession. They serve society. They make society go. But they are not suited to help find out where society ought to go. For this, we need more subtle skills. It won’t help much to learn to build a bridge or alter a gene or win an argument. We must know why, and unless we do, we are shallow and mediocre creatures, and so is society.
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Topics to Understand

Self --- Love --- Good --- Truth --- Beauty --- Sacred --- Society --- Humanity

Interactive activities or brief meetings to investigate a topic, question, situation, or event.

Preceded by brief reading selections, film clips, poems, or audio tapes. There are several basic forms of spiritual perception: prayer, meditation -- and understanding, which seeks to comprehend a subject in all its dimensions, including the spiritual. Let's create forums for this little appreciated type of perceiving!

Included here is an example from each category of the process of understanding we are engaged in, including fundamental questions, activities to relate to one's own self, alternatives and challenges.