Human Understanding

Any reflective work must be clear, from the outset, about certain processes. Few thinkers I have come across start from the simplest, most basic terms. Few of these thinkers are clear about their intentions and few of them form fresh insights. By fresh I mean free from platitudes and insipid ideological thinking.

I feel the ongoing confusions and divisions of human history need to be halted and everything, all the evidence, needs to be examined broadly and fairly. As far as I'm concerned we need to stop, pay attention, transcend the prejudices of the ego, dispense with preconceptions and, ultimately, find common ground.

Ideological autopilot needs to be switched off. We need to step outside and look within.

We can't change society until we personally develop. We can't personally develop until we are genuinely free of institutional conditioning and side-taking.

Human understanding must be viewed in light of two fundamental phenomena, language and naked reality.

In a broad sense language may be seen as the framework or context through which naked reality is translated and experienced. But language is ultimately derived, like everything, from naked reality.

The multiple elements of language are best seen as tools to understand, manipulate and cooperate with reality.

The urge to understand and attain clarity seems, with a number of people, to be a natural automatic process, an instinct. Arguably it is thus deeply rooted in biology and nature.

Understanding is about forming concepts, within the framework of language, that most accurately express naked reality, bearing in mind that naked reality is changeable. Accuracy can be determined through evidence and experimentation.

Human understanding is about aligning people and their conscious personalities with naked reality so that these phenomena move together in harmony.

Understanding is about consciousness and awareness. In this sense it is about receptivity and combating repression. Along with receptivity understanding must include attention and integration. To understand meaningfully one must be attentive and one must integrate information into consciousness.

To attain the most meaningful and rich pictures of reality it is necessary to take into account various forms of evidence, for example anthropological, biological, social, historical and cultural, to chart the development of understanding and consciousness and embed these phenomena in empirical and demonstrable contexts.