Understanding and Comprehension
Knowledge of Life 2
(1.19) “Understanding is a revealing energy that makes realization possible. In the deepest sense true understanding means an increase of your participation in the cosmic total consciousness. What is said hereby is the foremost of what has ever been said hitherto.” Understanding involves a process in the scientific sense, a process in which the energies of all the seven departments are consciously utilized for the realization of evolution within our planet. It brings about enhanced possibilities for the centres of the human envelopes to assimilate existing energies.
Knowledge of Life 1
(4.11.44) Comprehension is a result of the new brain in the new incarnation. Understanding is a result of the self’s own achievements in past incarnations. You can comprehend without understanding and understand without being able to explain why.
(7.4.37) Understanding is the sum of your experience of life in lives past.
(7.4.35) You can fully understand just what is part of your own experience. Everything else is, after all, something uncertain.
Way of Man
(1.21.4) Many years of esoteric study are required in order to attain the requisite level of knowledge, the basis of further study and enhanced power of perception. It also takes many years before all the new things that have sunk down into the subconscious have been worked up and vibrations from the esoteric reality concepts have been able to affect the superconscious, so that a contact with the world of Platonic ideas may be reached. For without such a contact esoteric study cannot result in true understanding, at best only comprehension. The many abortive occult sects are as many hard-earned experiences and proofs of that truth. They have led millions astray.
(1.33.5) The self’s understanding of reality is dependent on consciousness in the monad’s envelopes and the ability of activity of that consciousness. That is an axiom.
(1.47.1) If the knowledge of reality were a mere working hypothesis, it would not be any true knowledge. Knowledge becomes knowledge when you have realized that it accords with reality. To those who have in previous incarnations reached the third degree of an esoteric knowledge order, the mental system of Pythagorean hylozoics is immediately self-evident. It is true that in the third degree the system was not elaborated in such detail as it was for those of still higher degrees. The essential principles were explained, however, so that they were able to comprehend the system. Add to this the fact that they were given the opportunity to experience the processes of manifestation in a graphic way similar to our modern film showing. They experienced reality in such a manner that any theoretical doubt of this reality was precluded. Thereby the knowledge was once and for all indelibly engraved in the subconscious. “Knowledge is remembrance anew” (Platon). When the esoterician contacts the knowledge in a new incarnation, his understanding of it is immediate. Thus it is no more a matter of “working hypothesis”. If understanding is not immediate, then the individual concerned has not been an initiate of the third degree.