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4. Understanding: we can learn to read another’s mind and understand what bothers us; and not deny it when we don’t.

We are confused when we believe what we’re told only to find it was a simplistic solution to a complex difficulty.

Our need to understand, and be understood, is essential to our wellbeing; we go to inordinate lengths to make sense of our world and experience; by the same token what we find incomphrensible is crazy making.

It is an immense task to understand a predicament; e.g. take your illness to a medic but he will ask you how you feel; your reply will take in all you know plus a whole repetoire of your belief system and your innate sense of what's going on, or what might be going on.

But our reasoning process is clogged up with a long history of not getting it right hence we are "imperfect judges of our own state"; then it is too easy to 'let sleeping dogs lie' and revert to a depressing fatalism; all this for the want of knowing what we do feel and thus know our own mind.

If we don't understand what bothers us we are automatically angry with a sense of injury, injustice and inhibition; we sense and know it in the same way as we hear see taste smell or touch.

Timid people may imagine they don't show their anger for fear of of upsetting someone or other; this becomes a worry with endless calculations of possible repercussions were that anger to be shown

The affect of suppressing that anger is real enough for we soon become ineffective and uneconomic; and compensate for that lack of understanding by trying too hard or we get depressed so that whatever commitment we bring is qualified or grudging.

The concept of incomphrensible is significant .. can be that we can't or even that others can't but to him who spoke it made a certain sort of sense .. might well be received wisdom which he has not understood etc

Our inability to understand what's
going on is traumatic; we wonder if
we can, or even want to survive in
that place.

When we can read the signs, or
get someone to translate, we
understand we can be good
news to friends and neighbours.

Beware what Wittgenstein called 'a
kind of general disease of thinking
which always looks for (and finds)
what would be called a mental state
from which all its acts spring as from
(its own) reservoir'.

To ask someone to translate or decipher
what we cannot read or understand is
imperative if we are to survive and even
flourish.

Our need to understand is biological; our moods reflect what we feel and
determine how we act; this is real, is not conjecture nor is it a matter of our
beliefs. So we act from the bottom up.

Top down actions are driven by beliefs of what ought to and what can be
made to happen. Imposed on a bottom up situation without regard to the
well being all concerned the effect is horrible, wasteful and uneconomic.

GC. Having never understood it I can see I've have wasted much of my life
chasing end driven top down ambitions and ideas which bore little relation
to realising the potential of my biological cum fundamental needs.

Paradoxically my compulsive even hyper activity was in fact driven by
the impoverishment implicit in qualified satisfaction of those needs; I
got by with a sort of sense of purpose which was ungrounded and, of
course, ultimately unsatisfying. Knowing no other way I eventually ran
out of credibility, and out from the social scene I knew so well.

Ack. this top down bottom up idea see Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species

Understanding is more than accepting proofs though what another hsows is his proof may affect us in other ways; we may see our world in

check on other needs
subsistence security, protection affection to understand to participate, share to create to reflect a sense of identity freedom to choose