I wake up after a good night's sleep. As I do so, the following words flow into my mind: {{We are born to recognise the answer.}} The words came through clearly, calmly – and entirely unbidden, unconnected to anything I'd been thinking before. (Over the past year, I have started to use double curly brackets {{ }} around such intuitions that spontaneously come to mind seemingly from knowwhere – like this misspelling, which I just spontaneously typed!)
So, we are born to recognise the answer.
Intuition and purpose. Note 'recognise' – not 'understand'. Recognition doesn't carry the same degree of intellectual digestion as understanding. I can recognise something for what it is, not necessarily fully understanding it. Taking this to the ultimate questions of life, survival of consciousness, our place in the Cosmos – there's a suggestion here that while we may try to achieve understanding of our human condition, we may never truly do so, yet recognising it is our (second person plural) destiny. It is the purpose of our birth. And note: 'the answer' is singular – the one answer, not answers in general.
Both recognition and understanding involve the processing information by the mind, but they do so in different ways and to different extents:
I asked Google Gemini to summarise the difference between these two words more fully:
Recognise:
- Focuses on identification: you recognise something when you place it within your existing knowledge, matching it to something already present in your mental database.
- Doesn't require deep comprehension or full knowledge: you can recognise a song without knowing all the lyrics or recognising a face without knowing the person's name.
Understand:
- Goes beyond identification: grasping something's meaning or significance. More than just a superficial connection – a deeper interpretation.
- Requires analysis, explanation and prior knowledge: you understand a scientific theory when you grasp its principles; you understand a news article within the historical and social context, not just as isolated facts.
Key differences:
- Depth of processing: recognition is surface-level, while understanding goes deeper.
- Need for additional information: recognition often works with limited information, while understanding often requires more context.
A further insight came to me minutes later as I made my coffee. We recognise the presence of the metaphysical, but we don't understand it. Perhaps the unseen, immeasurable, forces, such as consciousness, dark energy, dark matter (even dark dimensions) are by their very nature ineffable, beyond our human mind to understand from the standpoint of our stage of evolution (both biological and spiritual) I wrote about the futility of using scientific enquiry to nail down paranormal phenomena in this post from 2021.
Science instinctively has a problem with the metaphysical, the paranormal and the supernatural because there's no theoretical framework to explain how it happens in terms that science is willing to accept.
Multiple experiments do point to a weak, irregular, yet definite effect of mind over matter, strong enough to be defined as statistically significant – indeed, as statistically significant as the discovery of the Higgs boson amid the all the data coming from billions of observations of neutrons colliding in the Large Hadron Collider. Whilst there were acres of blackboard calculations underpinning the existence of the Higgs boson decades before it was actually discovered – there's exactly zero solid scientific theory behind the phenomenon of mind affecting matter, or non-local consciousness effects such as precognition or remote viewing.
Science doesn't understand it, and so tries to deny it. But – in our lives, we do get the briefest flashes that we recognise as being manifestations of the metaphysical. And into that category, I'd place the appearance of that sentence {{ We are born to recognise the answer }} into my stream of consciousness an hour and half ago as I was waking up this morning.
Lent 2023, Day ten
Spirituality and neurodiversity
Lent 2022: Day ten
Where was God in Auschwitz?
Lent 2021: Day ten
The Sins that cannot be Purged
Lent 2020: Day ten
Those who have created their own religion
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