Understanding is more important than knowledge

If you are asking *Whether Understanding is better than Knowing, then yes. Knowing merely means absorbing information, you can know a lot about something without really understanding it- doesn't help in the long run. It is the Understanding that helps you develop insights and intuition that lead to wisdom. Not that knowledge has no value, it helps you score well in multiple-choice tests and I hope you get my point. Many people might know you, how many understand you? I read somewhere, “Knowing is comprehension; understanding is deeper because it comes from empathy or identification”.

Knowledge is like the spice that we use to make a eating dish more tasty. Hence it depends on our analysing the situation which could be better appreciated according to the Understanding we get as per our yardstick. Let us find out which of the two is better or more desirable, understanding or knowledge? Understanding, let us say, means comprehension or sympathetic awareness, while knowledge means facts, information, something which is acquired through experience or education, theory, conclusion, and so on.

If we generalise the term ‘understanding’ and look at its abstract essence, we can also say that understanding has qualities of intangibility, effervescence, subtlety, expansiveness, non accumulative, wise (or wisdom), and ‘cannot be gathered or ware-housed’, cannot be proved or established (It is not concerned about such things), cannot be verbalised, and cannot be documented or communicated through words or books and in classrooms. It is an outcome of inner intelligence governing consciousness and not an outcome of the brain, though in human life it acts through the brain or uses the brain as a via media. Understanding can never be stored in computers or even in the human brain. The conclusions of understanding, which means knowledge, is what is stored in the brain.

‘Knowledge’ on the other hand has qualities of tangibility, stagnancy, gross/definitive, limited/centre-oriented, accumulative, ‘can be ware-housed’, proof-based, can be proved, can be verbalised, can be documented and communicated through words and books and taught in classrooms. It is an outcome of the brain; rather, knowledge can be stored in computers and in the brain.

So the two are very different from each other. There was a need to explain these differences, because the two – understanding and knowledge – are considered synonymous by many of us. While they are completely different from each other, the two are somewhat inter-related, with one leading to the other. That is, results of understanding about something, is often dealt by the brain which then verbalises it and stores it in the brain as a data or hardened and crystallised knowledge.

And, to understand something, instead of directly understanding it (which we all can do) we often refer to previously known knowledge as stored in the brain. So we become dependent on knowledge to understand something, in just the way a lame person needs a crutch to walk (where knowledge is the crutch). What happens when a person with healthy legs begins to walk with a crutch? Gradually, he becomes used to the crutch and then dependent on the crutch. Thereafter, he cannot walk without the crutch.

In other words, a crutch makes person lame. That is what (almost exactly) what knowledge does to us. When we become more and more knowledgeable and become more and more dependent on knowledge, we become “lame”, or need knowledge to give us support. What we need is to “walk” and in this analogy, understanding means the ability to walk. Understanding, being a direct result of the inner intelligence of our consciousness, shows itself as an instinct, while knowledge which is actually driven by the contents of the brain, is dependent on what is stored and accumulated in the brain. So knowledge lives for a single earth-life and gets completely obliterated or wiped away at death. It is mortal and not eternal. Understanding on the other hand, is a direct manifestation of consciousness, is carried by us from one life to the next and so on. It is immortal and eternal.

What we need is understanding, but what we accumulate instead is knowledge. And, we all know, we cannot gather all the knowledge of the world. Even if we do succeed in gathering it, we have to discard it all at death. So knowledge has limited worth. Why do people meditate? What happens in meditation? Isn’t it an emptying of mind of all its contents to come upon a fresh understanding? I think you must have figured out the answer by now. What is better, something that is worth discarding or something that is worth treasuring and acquiring? So understanding is undeniably and clearly far better than knowledge. So both are complementary to each other. Cheers!