Knowledge & Understanding

To be purposeful and meaningful, Data needs a Story. For Knowledge, that Story and context comes through Understanding.  Knowledge is based on the convergent acquisition and mastery of data; Understanding is based on the divergent perception of patterns and relationships.

Knowledge is incremental and progressive; Understanding is integrating and expansive 

These qualities are symbiotic: Knowledge is the Intention; Understanding is the Journey. 

To “know something” is an intellectual process that is often recognized as “truth.” Empirical Knowledge exists in the abstract, awaiting application.  Understanding activates Knowledge in context, engages the individual in activity that supports (i.e., literally “stands under”) the relevance and purpose of Knowledge.  Understanding is embodied Knowledge in motion; Understanding is revelatory; it engages all aspects of human experience in space and time. 

Understanding requires the surrender of certainty in favor of thinking, reflecting, imagining, and ultimately arriving at your own realizations. You must be vulnerable and remain open to critique and the possibility that your thinking may be presumptive or incomplete and surrender, however challenging, to the process. This demands boundless curiosity, critical thinking, conversation, courage, empathy, and tolerance. Activating these qualities enables us to gain insight into the moral, spiritual, and intellectual order of our point of inquiry, revealing a balanced appraisal of what it can teach us about value and Understanding in our own time. 

Encountering a statement of Knowing that is not understood and summarily dismissed, or attributed to the ignorance of the author, is the most damaging kind of intellectual hubris.  Obstacles are always opportunities, gateways to new and greater Understanding. Learn to love this moment and seek it out; treat it as a portal to wondrous delights and personal discovery. 

It creates connections among multiple variables, illuminates systems, recognizes nuance, and increases fluency and navigability when moving from one subject to another. And most important: it is not binary or transactional; the applications of Understandings are limitless. 

Understanding, and its more intellectually severe cousin, accurate Understanding, appears and takes shape only in the light of aesthetic conversation and visual ideation. Our imagination serves as the crucible of visual and literal conversation inspired by imagination that reveals Understanding as a shaft of light illuminates darkness, bringing security, presence, peace and catharsis … “now… I see… and understand..”