What is understanding?
I finished a blog post I started yesterday where I said that you don’t need knowledge or training for anything in life, including all the worldly and professional activities you carry on and emphasized the need for understanding. So today I wanted to write a bit about what understanding is, how it differs from knowledge, and why we only need the former and never the latter.
All of you are familiar with knowledge. It is what everyone assumes is necessary in order to learn about something new. As a result, we have schools, colleges, education centers, all dedicated to the spreading of knowledge about various things. Unfortunately, all the knowledge in the world has not helped human beings live beautiful lives on this Earth. Still, to this day, even the most knowledgeable people are addicted to substances (e.g. coffee), live poorly in all the wrong ways (e.g. in big crowded cities), wear the wrong clothes, eat the wrong food (hence the allergies, sicknesses, etc.) and do the wrong things. Most people are employed in professions that do nothing but destroy the planet and diminish the soul’s power, while draining energy and causing them to fall even more deeply into darkness.
Take addiction, for example. Today there are a million addiction clinics world wide, tons of resources online on how to get rid of them, endless number of churches and holy men claiming to be able to exorcize or get rid of additions and public resources such as shelters for those who cannot take care of themselves. But the addicted rarely, if ever, fully come out of their addictions. Usually, people replace one addiction for another. For instance, you might replace a coffee addiction with say, running. But at the end of the day, you’re still unable to function without running. So why doesn’t all this knowledge help?
Narratives about physical/chemical changes
The popular explanation around these things is almost always the same. “Physiological changes in the brain”, some claim. “Brain chemistry irrevocably altered”, say others. Whatever may the narratives be, one thing is always clear: science has given up. Addiction is now considered something you manage, in the same way people think anxiety and stress are things you manage, rather than give up. In fact, medical science believes most diseases are only manageable, not treatable. There is no permanent cure for diabetes, dementia, allergies, asthma, PTSD, heart conditions, liver disease-you name it! Everything is permanent nowadays-but only when it comes to the disease, not the cure. And of course, our profit-driven medical industry absolutely loves the fact that people continue treatments and drugs for life. After all, neither death nor a permanent cure make much money.
Now, it is true that addiction produces both physical and chemical changes within the body. No doubt scars can be created within the body by various experiences, even at the spiritual, i.e. energy level. A traumatic experience leaves as many or more scars on a person’s energy system than it does on their physical body, and because most people have no idea that such a thing even happens, they do not look for a way to properly heal. Most people approach a therapist in order to heal from their traumas, but narratives cannot heal the body. Narratives only affect the psyche, which is the most superficial layer of the body. They do nothing to help the spiritual body even come to terms with what has happened, i.e. there is no recognition at the level of the soul that a traumatic experience has happened or what its affect was.
The truth about all life experiences is that every one of them leaves a trace within the energy system of a human being. It is the energy system that creates the physical body and the physical body creates the psyche. So ask yourself, if you really wanted to heal from something, would you start at the deepest layer, or the outer layer? Why would you try to fix only the psyche if the problem really lies in the energy system? The answer is simple: you simply don’t believe that you have a soul, or an energy body underneath your physical body or that it interacts with everything. This is fine, because you shouldn’t believe things you haven’t seen, felt or experienced in some manner.
“You don’t seek energy healing because you simply don’t believe there is an energy layer underneath. That’s ok.”
Or perhaps you don’t believe anyone human can do anything about it. Or perhaps it’s personal—you don’t think I can help you. All of this is ok. I didn’t come here to convince you that you need me, but I do want you to be convinced that your life isn’t going the way you really wanted it to go. Having looked deeply into millions of you, I know for a fact that all of you struggle, suffer and are confused in the same way about life in general and about very many things in particular. If you wish to continue as you have been, no one will stop you. And as far as I am concerned, I don’t ever approach people. I only work with people who approach me. In other words, I am only interested in people who’ve had some kind of experience that convinced them that there is more to life than they know. And now they are in search for truth. And this is the difference between knowledge and understanding.
Understanding changes behavior, permanently
The greatest difference between knowledge and understanding, is that while knowledge affects the psyche, understanding affects your very soul. Let me give you an example.
Say you are driving on the road. You have gone through training where they told you that if you need to swerve on the highway or get off the road, always move towards the right side (in the US, where people drive on the right). They told you that this is because if you move to the left, you may run someone off the road and towards oncoming traffic on the other side. But let’s say you are driving in the desert, off-road and you find someone coming towards you, which way do you move? Let’s make this more difficult. Say you are on a mountain, with rock on the left side and a drop-off on the right side, and there’s people racing in the opposite direction such that every lane is blocked. Now what do you do?
This is the kind of thing that people are facing in real life. And they’ve decided that the answer lies in more knowledge and more training. It seems more time exposed to more number of scenarios is supposed to alleviate the problem of what to do. But everyone knows that no matter how much they train, when it comes to real life, you just have to rely on your own intelligence. And when all else fails, then people begin to rely on God, at least in principle, not actuality.
The whole situation is laughable, because humanity has taken a wrong turn: towards knowledge instead of understanding. It is because of knowledge that our planet is a mess, our computers keep failing, our technologies don’t work properly, and we have so many addicts on the street. It is because of knowledge that human beings keep making mistakes, not because we are inherently flawed in any way. And no, the problem isn’t incomplete or false knowledge, but knowledge itself, because knowledge affects only your pysche, not your actions.
But in the scenario above, what would be the response of someone who understands? Whatever it should be! And that is the problem with understanding: you cannot codify it into law, put it into words and set them in stone, or write it down and distribute it on the Internet. Understanding does not come with words. It is a deep feeling, as if a switch has been turned on. Everyone has experienced what it feels like to deeply understandsomething or the other. It is not some alien experience. But once that happens, you are sure you will never go back to the way things were.
Addiction treatment
We can treat addicts extremely effectively, but only if they are willing to understand the causes of addiction. For those who are so far gone that they have no sense left and cannot even reliably recognize the world (i.e they live in their own reality), there is not much hope for a cure. But for those who are just starting to get addicted, or are addicted to something relatively harmless (e.g. coffee or porn), we can easily get rid of their addictions in months. I have to stress at this point that addiction treatment in the spiritual way is relatively painless. There is no forced behavior, no conscious slow tapering, no drugs needed to manage the condition, etc. We give you the tools inside yourself, by performing the energy cleansing we do. I say “we”, because it is the Divine Feminine that will do most of the work. I mostly only serve as Her conduit, channeling whatever She needs me to. Plus She has many helpers in the spiritual dimensions I won’t talk about.
Once you have been given the broom, so to speak, you will understand how to use that broom and keep yourself clean. This will not happen to you on day one, nor will you feel anything happening inside when I am working on you. So as far you are concerned, you’ll think nothing happened. This of course, will make you even more skeptical, because many of you are expecting some kind of explosive ecstasy on day one, or perhaps you expect to vomit your guts out (like those Ayahuasca retreats). But we’re not in the tourism business, nor do we want you to throw up. Everything will first happen on the inside, at a level you are not aware of. When those changes start to manifest in your world, you will notice. Guaranteed. There is a distinct possibility that many of you will quit your addictions cold turkey, as they say in the US. Your body will simply stop wanting it, no fight necessary.
What is really difficult though, is accepting the path.
The Abrahamic Test
I am not a fan of the Bible, but I once read a story written in the Bible about a man named Abraham who is asked to sacrifice his son, or so the story goes. The command is from God, who, at the last second, stops Abraham from sacrificing his son and provides an animal to sacrifice instead. The story is obviously written from the point of view of people living at that time, when presumably it would have been somehow conceivable that God would ask anyone to sacrifice their own son. God doesn’t do such things, no matter what the Bible may claim.
You will never be asked to engage in a heinous act, or a crime, or any act of violence, abuse or even punishment. You will never be asked to hurt anything at all, not even your little finger. I cannot prove this to you today, but neither God nor anyone in the spiritual realms is interested in your pain. None among the powers that be wants to cause you pain, nor are they able to save you from it. Pain is yours, depending on how much you resist the process of life. There is no escaping it.
However, you will be asked to go through the Abrahamic test over, and over again. You will be asked to do something, and then, at the last minute, you’ll not have to go through with it. This may be as simple as say, getting on stage to overcome your fear, walking down a dark alley when you have ideas about what awaits you there, eating a piece of chocolate when you’re convinced that it will awaken your chocolate addiction and so on. The powers that be don’t want to test you, but to show you that you’ve overcome something. That’s all.
“On the spiritual path, life does not test you, but it will show you how far you’ve come.”
Experience does not provide understanding
From all this, perhaps you’ve come to the conclusion that experience, is what matters, and that experience is what leads to understanding. This is not true. There are many people (most people actually) in the world who have many many experiences on a daily basis, but have no wisdom or understanding. Why? Because they are not paying attention.
“Understanding comes from paying attention. You do not need a variety of experiences.”
All those people you’ve seen in commercials, especially for travel websites, the hospitality industry or worse, yoga retreats, who keep talking about how it is important to travel and see many cultures in order to broaden your mind, are simply shills (either willingly or unwittingly) for the businesses that benefit from such stupid behavior. You do not even have to leave your home in order to gain enlightenment, broaden your mind, expand your heart and so on. Tourists in general tend to be some of the stupidest people on the planet, wasting their money that would be better spent on things in their own community, especially service. If you have a lot of money and you decide to jet set around the world to entertain yourself (or others), you are a criminal in the eyes of our universe.
Pay attention instead to your own body first and it will reveal to you just how much is being taken care of that you don’t even know. The miracle of life will begin to unravel within your own body and you will come face to face with the magic that is creation. The sense of wonder that so many are craving, is not induced by some external source, but by your own body coming to terms with itself. Once you begin to see that the whole world is in fact, an extension of your body, you will not want to close your eyes ever again—your spiritual eyes, i.e. Ever greater mysteries will begin to be revealed to you and you will go deeper and deeper into the nature of reality, uncovering things that only you can, because you are unique.
Your need for understanding will grow, and as it does, other things will fall away. This is how addictions disappear, btw. You will be addicted to life itself, which is harmless, but even that will drop off one day, leaving you utterly free of all dependency. But then, you will understand that to live, you need a physical body and so you will accept the little bit of dependency that comes with it, such as eating, sleeping, etc. How much you depend on such things will be up to you—no one else can decide—but the decision will be yours. I, for example, sleep only a few hours a night (no more than 4), but I am able to survive just fine.
The level of understanding you have is what decides how skillful you are at managing life, actually. The deeper you go and the more you understand, the more crazy your life may seem to others, as you live in ways that seem impossible. There have been times when I hardly ate anything all, living off of water and sunlight, like a plant, times when I sat still for hours without moving a muscle, completely absorbed in something within me or read a book and felt like every sentence was obvious, like the same truth being spoken over and over, throwing me into a state of bliss that I cannot describe. I have visited meditation centers of other gurus and known exactly how their disciples worship them (down to the specific physical actions), without ever having met any of them. Heck, I’ve even known what would happen in the future sometimes, although I don’t like that kind of thing at all. Unnatural things make me cringe.
I tell you all this because I have had enough of people pretending that these kinds of things never happen. Well, they’ve happened to me and there is a good chance they may happen to you, even though such experiences don’t mean anything. Existence is very vast and everyone discovers something crazy about it that no one else knows. To me, all it says is that we can never know it all, that life will remain mysterious even a million years from now.
The point of gaining understanding on the spiritual path isn’t to impress people, but to live beautifully on this Earth. Understanding leads to right action, which means you will never make a mistake. You will not destroy the planet or use more resources than you need. You will not be unkind, or lack compassion, even for the murderers. But at the same time, you will not lack for wisdom and will lead a life of balance and poise. The spiritual path is a path of understanding and it is the only path worth following as a human being.
It is a path for people who wish to live beautiful lives and create a better world.
