There is much we cannot understand because we don't have the energy, quantity or quality, to properly engage with it. This makes it clear that to travel deeper into understanding we need to practice something that will improve our energy. If you were to look at the general sweep of a meaningful life you would see a gradual increase in wisdom as that being's energy strengthens (up to a point) and then continues to refine as it inevitably declines in strength with the onset of old-age. If you were to look more closely – microscopically – you would see that the life contains relatively short moments of real brilliance and intensity when the spirit of that life is really engaged, charged and learning, followed by longer periods of seeming calm when the body, mind and energy of that being slowly come to terms with the preceding gains of their spirit. Everything lags behind spirit. When the spirit makes big breakthroughs the health can often suffer as the body struggles to catch up.
A consequence of understanding depending upon energy is that if your teacher has better energy than you, not necessarily stronger but more refined and better connected, then they cannot really be reasonably argued with because the place they are trying to bring you to through their teaching they understand but you have absolutely not a clue about. The teacher's job is to wrench the student out of their understanding and into the whirling spiral of the natural process. If one's energy is always improving then one's understanding is always changing – each day things have to be reassessed, and every so often even one's basic and fundamental convictions will shift. It gets to the point where understanding is a matter of connexion rather than knowing – one comes to terms with the world by connecting with it rather than by digesting or assimilating experience. One understands not by processing through the catalogue of one's own experiences or even through the range and depth of one's own energy but simply by emptying and then becoming what is before.
A consequence of understanding depending upon energy is that if your teacher has better energy than you, not necessarily stronger but more refined and better connected, then they cannot really be reasonably argued with because the place they are trying to bring you to through their teaching they understand but you have absolutely not a clue about. The teacher's job is to wrench the student out of their understanding and into the whirling spiral of the natural process. If one's energy is always improving then one's understanding is always changing – each day things have to be reassessed, and every so often even one's basic and fundamental convictions will shift. It gets to the point where understanding is a matter of connexion rather than knowing – one comes to terms with the world by connecting with it rather than by digesting or assimilating experience. One understands not by processing through the catalogue of one's own experiences or even through the range and depth of one's own energy but simply by emptying and then becoming what is before.
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Henry David Thoreau
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