Ways of understanding

[Magical Realist]

Like it or not, understanding something is a very subjective and intuitive experience. There are no clearcut steps or methodologies for it. There was no handbook telling you how to ride a bike. Or how to swim. Or having a girl or boyfriend. Or sewing a dress. Or typing on a keyboard. It just required you to jump into it and figure it out as you went along. Trial and error. A garden of forking paths as it were.

The understanding of anything generally takes time and interaction and a lot of course corrections, reaching the point where we have a stable "feel" for the thing we are understanding. The point of understanding generally seems to be all about adaptability of ourselves to a thing or situation--of becoming able to deal with it in a constructive and fruitful way such that maximum benefit is achieved all around.

Ofcourse HOW we understand it is always a crucial question. What intuitively-felt metaphor are we employing? Understanding it as a machine or system of operation designed to output us predictable results? Understanding it as an organic and evolving process in itself? Understanding it as another intelligence to be empathized with and cooperated with? Or even understanding it as a transcendent mystery or enigma that we can only tentatively know about?

Feel out what you want to understand. What metaphors hit home best for you? Eventually you will understand it well enough to live it and to navigate by it and be with it comfortably. To eventually know it/them as part of you, and yourself as part of it/them.

[C C]

I suppose the most universal concepts are those basic to survival. What gets categorized as "food", what gets classified as "shelter", what gets classed as "dangerous", what gets slotted as materials for making tools, and so-forth. Hard to say if those general forms of understanding are still installed in our brains (like with other animals), or if our "operating system" has degenerated to where our caregivers and surrounding culture have to condition us with such fundamentals.

Regardless, once beyond the basics, pretty much everything is relative to the local culture. We learn to interpret the surrounding environment with that community's presuppositions or background theories, strategies, etc. Ancient Egypt and the modern world would yet share a few items in that department, but after that it's two different worlds being generated by their cognitive dispositions. One through the filter of mystical beliefs, and the other through the approaches of science and elaborate technology.

Farming took hundreds of thousands of years to arise, but once it did, all agrarian societies had to look to the sky to measure time and the advent of spring for planting. There were some totally new apprehensions that still got independently, globally synchronized with each other.