If you indeed cry out for insight, and raise your voice for understanding; if you seek it like silver, and search for it as for hidden treasures—then you will understand [have reverence for] the Lord and find the knowledge of God.
—Proverbs 2:3–5
Spiritual understanding is the ability of the mind to apprehend and realize the laws of thought and the relation of ideas one to another.
—Charles Fillmore, The Revealing Word
The biblical prophet Daniel, of the lion's den fame, interpreted dreams for the non-Jewish kings controlling Babylon between 600 and 535 BCE. Writings about Daniel portray a dreamer and visionary, a man who regularly engaged in spiritual practices such as prayer, fasting, and acts of repentance. On one occasion while he was praying, “the man Gabriel, whom I had seen before in a vision, came to me in swift flight at the time of the evening sacrifice. He came and said to me, ‘Daniel, I have now come out to give you wisdom and understanding’” (Daniel 9:21–22).
Wisdom and understanding are two distinct spiritual abilities. Wisdom arises in the moment, as needed. Wisdom is our innate ability to know the way to go, based on spiritual judgment, discernment, and intuition. Wisdom is in the gut, centered in the second brain, aka solar plexus.
Spiritual understanding is comprehending, internalizing, and then living the truth we know. Understanding dawns over time and through study and reflection, or it can come in a flash—suddenly the light shines. The seat of understanding in the physical body is the brain's frontal lobe. The intellect is engaged in understanding, but intellect alone does not produce spiritual understanding.
If knowledge is acquiring facts, understanding is making sense of those facts and forming connections between them. Understanding ultimately goes beyond fleeting facts to settle on changeless truths. Preceding understanding is a desire to understand:
Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened (Matthew 7:7–8).
Desire may be conscious or not, direct or not. Daniel prayed and fasted in his desire for understanding. Curiosity is desire. Worry is desire. Confusion is desire. Doubt is desire. Desire summons understanding. Fillmore taught, “No one ever attained spiritual consciousness without striving for it” (The Twelve Powers of Man, 41).
Jesus' disciple Thomas, known as doubting Thomas, represents the power of understanding. Thomas, who loved Jesus and was in mourning after Jesus' crucifixion, doubted his friends' reports that Jesus had overcome death. Thomas told his friends, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25b). Later Jesus appeared in a vision wherein Thomas became convinced that his teacher was indeed alive.
Thomas stands for our doubts about the invisible truths in life. Jesus represents our Divine Identity, that aspect of our nature that consists of all divine capacities—our GODness/goodness. Our Jesus or Christ nature is eternal and independent of physicality. Our inner doubting Thomas seeks to understand our eternal divine nature.
Understanding is the power of comprehension, realization, and insight.
Comprehension is our ability to discover connections between thought and feeling, between the body's messages and our habits of thought, between accumulated beliefs and unadulterated truth. Through comprehension we make sense of seemingly incompatible or unrelated ideas. We learn about aspects of our own Divine Identity when listening to our life.
One day in December 1989, I handed my boss a letter of resignation. Conditions had become intolerable at my workplace, an insurance company where I managed a nationwide car rental insurance program. An underwriter who had joined my department weeks before was acting in bizarre, inappropriate ways. I would overhear her in the next cubicle violently cursing at our insureds over the telephone; she would berate my staff publicly, and snicker at me menacingly whenever she would pass me in the hall. She told an employee that she carried a pistol in her purse, emphasizing that everyone had better leave her alone, or else. Members of my staff were terrified of this woman, so much that many of them left the building at the end of each day with a buddy. I had been feeling unfulfilled in my work, and this unpleasant turn of events clinched my resolve. I decided that it was time for me to resign, so I gave two weeks, notice.
The next morning, the underwriter verbally accosted another of my employees, who came to me in tears. I finally informed my boss, the vice president of the claims department. By the end of that day, the underwriter was escorted out of the building. She had been fired.
My boss asked me if my resignation had anything to do with the recent trouble, and would I reconsider staying. I said I would have an answer the next morning.
Fact is, I had been thinking about resigning from my job for quite a while. I wanted to write a book about the triumphant healing between my father and me which had begun in 1987. I wanted to be at home when my children arrived home from school, as they were growing too old for after-school day care. My husband Giles and I had talked about it for many months, imagining how we could manage financially without my salary.
That evening, I reflected back to earlier job resignations. Every time I had left a job, it had been because of something I declared intolerable. I had waited for something to go wrong before giving notice in past jobs. As I looked at my life, I could see a pattern of staying too long, staying beyond the point of satisfaction, or staying because I had not had the courage to leave without provocation. Even when I had a positive reason for leaving, a next purpose to fulfill, I would not permit myself to release the job until conditions became unbearable.
Bolstered by a fresh awareness, I realized that I was eager to let go of this job, not because anything was wrong with my work or the company but because I had a next purpose to achieve. Giles and I affirmed that we would do whatever was necessary for me to have a year off to write and be at home. I left that job honoring the work, my colleagues, and myself. I affirmed my essential worth and my capacities for order, wisdom, and understanding.
Comprehension comes from listening to your life. A life review, a hallmark of recovery programs and other personal development systems, shines a spotlight on our long-held beliefs, patterns of thought, and habits of behavior. Activating our innate power of understanding, we see the past in a context of wholeness. We discover the spirit of our own being, what we know of our self. We engage with our deepest longings and sense of purpose.
Charles Fillmore taught, “There are two ways of getting understanding. One is by following the guidance of Spirit that dwells within, and the other is to go blindly ahead and learn by hard experience” (The Revealing Word, 201).
Taking the time to reflect and listen to my life, I was able to comprehend aspects of my Divine Identity. Learning, studying, reflecting, and meditating all reward us with a growing sense of spiritual comprehension. These practices result in our claiming of our “Daniel” nature assured that “I have now come out to give you wisdom and understanding” (Daniel 9:22).
Realization is either a flash of understanding or a gradual dawning of awareness. Realization comes as a result of growing comprehension; where comprehension can be effortful, realization is effortless: “It came to me!” “Suddenly I knew what it all meant!” “It was revealed to me!”
A full 40 percent of Bible stories are written in the form of visions or dreams. An effective method for teaching spiritual principles, storytelling through visions or dreams appeals not only to the intellect but also to the heart. Take, for example, this story about the patriarch Jacob: “Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak” (Genesis 32:24). This, the first line of a short story, reveals that Jacob was dreaming. Otherwise, how could Jacob be both alone and in the company of another person?
Jacob was disturbed when he went off by himself on the night of this story. His history was catching up with him. He had betrayed his brother Esau many years prior, stealing his inheritance by trickery. He then had fled his brother's fury, settling with extended family and working in his maternal uncle's livestock business. He had married his beloved cousin Rachel, but only after Rachel's father tricked Jacob into marrying her eldest sister Leah. For many years, Jacob had prospered in business and family life. Now, however, he learned that his brother Esau was searching for him with an army of men. Jacob had issues! He felt fearful. He felt guilty. He felt remorseful. In this state of mind, Jacob wrestled with his own spirit, his true Self. The finite self grappled with the Infinite Self, seeking understanding. Jacob insisted, “I won't let you go until you bless me” (Genesis 32:26).
Jacob awoke from his dream with an understanding of his responsibility to his family and ready to shine the light of his true nature after years of hiding.
Early one Saturday morning, I awoke from a dream I recalled in detail. I was in a luxurious, enormous spa containing a bathtub the size of a large room. Bright blue water was flowing over the top of the pool and spilling onto the floor. Concerned about flooding, I wanted to turn off the spigot, but the only way to get to the spigot was through the water. I ran, so to speak—I experienced it in slow motion—and found after turning off the spigot that water was still running. There was another spigot. And a third spigot.
Lying still in bed that early morning, I sensed importance in the images of my dream. At the time, I was feeling overwhelmed with work and neglecting physical and spiritual practices. I knew that water represents baptism, or cleansing of emotion. The three spigots spoke to me of body, mind, and spirit—my need and desire to harmonize my life and experience wholeness of being. In the dream I was in a spa, an environment in which to relax and rejuvenate. I understood that I had been longing to reconnect with all of my magnificent self and that by slowing down I could relish the gifts of my body, mind, and spirit.
How often have you awakened in the middle of the night with a flash of knowledge, a clear revelation, an answer to a pressing question? How many times have you read a billboard's message and found the hair on your arms raising in ratification of your sense of direction? A mystical divine visitation, a sensed voice of God, a sudden absolute knowing all relate to realization—our innate capacity to understand. Whereas comprehension engages our intellect, realization arises from our heart, which Charles Fillmore considered another brain—the center of the spirit of truth:
In its beginnings this seemingly strange source of knowledge is often turned aside as a daydream; again it seems a distant voice, an echo of something that we have heard and forgotten. One should give attention to this unusual and usually faint whispering of Spirit in man. It is not of the intellect and it does not originate in the skull. It is the development, in man, of a greater capacity to know himself and to understand the purpose of creation . . . (The Twelve Powers of Man, 39).
Insight is our capacity to employ realization in particular circumstances—applied understanding. You can cultivate insight, for example, into your conflict with your boss or your child's sudden withdrawal. The more you have comprehended and realized spiritual truths, the more likely your insights will be accurate and useful.
Insight is not cold calculation, but spiritual intelligence arising in both the head and the heart, as Jacob Needleman suggests:
The mind, the intellect is not simply the logical, analytic, or even intuitive organ located in the head. The real mind, the real instrument of understanding, is a blending of at least two fundamental sources of perception—the intellect and the heart; the intellect and genuine feeling . . . that genuine feeling is not the same thing as emotional reaction (Needleman, What Is GOD?, 54).
What if, in daily life, we were accompanied by a film crew to whom we could signal at any time, “Stop! Take two!” In the grocery store parking lot one day, I observed a woman move her bags from a cart into her car and then leave the cart next to her car as she drove away. My inner girl scout started twitching. My dutiful citizen persona reared its judgmental head, and I blasted this woman, in my own mind, for her selfish and rude behavior. “Imagine if everyone left their carts anywhere they wanted in the parking lot! I'd bet you wouldn't be too happy to drive onto the lot and find no place to park for the carts left like litter in all the stalls! I'll show you what it means to be a good citizen! I'll take that cart and place it where you should have placed it, in the designated cart slot! Bah!”
Stop! Take two! Activating my innate power of understanding, I sought to comprehend some of the benign reasons why someone would leave a grocery cart in a non-designated spot in a parking lot. I listened to my own life, remembering times when I was in an inordinate hurry perhaps with an ill child waiting at home for medicine; where a few more footfalls would seem exhausting at the end of a long day; or when I was mentally fixated on a problem such that I was in a state of non-awareness. Had I ever disregarded the rules—or had I ever wanted to disregard the rules?
My reverie led to a simple realization: Compassion is the fruit of understanding. I could think, feel, and act with compassion. Insight led me to kindly take that cart into the store, free from judgmentalness and blame, grateful to have a cart and blessing the woman who left it for me.
Insight is my sense of understanding, deeply, that my neighbor and I are cut from the same cloth—that we are one. Insight is my awareness of how to respond rather than react—how to behold the inherent good in others as well as myself, and then how to behave in light of the truth. Insight is not psychologizing another person. Insight is present awareness of others'—and my own—divine humanity and Divine Identity.
Asking/seeking leads to study, meditation, reflection—comprehension. Comprehension supports realization and realization thinking/acting. Comprehension and realization facilitate insight—the ability to see the truth in the midst of circumstance.
Centering my awareness above my brow and inward to the front of my brain, I locate the physical seat of spiritual understanding. I inhale and exhale intentionally, drawing breath into this area of my brain responsible for logic, mental association, planning, and impulse control. I shine the light of understanding, precious golden threads, throughout my frontal lobes, cleansing my brain and clearing foggy thinking and misunderstanding.
I AM the power of understanding, listening to my life and making meaningful connections between my experiences, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. I comprehend my essential eternal nature as I pause in this moment of stillness.
I sit in silence for a little while. I call forth from within my realization ability, at ease knowing that flashes of awareness may come as I arise from the silence or as I move about my day.
I AM spiritual insight, seeing beneath the words and actions of others their true spiritual nature and my own. Compassion is the fruit of my insight. Understanding oneness, I act in ways that foster unity.
Divine understanding is my spiritual name and nature. Through my complementary powers of understanding and will, I am willing to understand. I am willing to suspend judgmentalness about others and myself, and to understand the divine intentions underneath each appearance. I AM divine understanding.
By the power of understanding, I learn from my life. By the power of understanding, I learn from the One Mind through which I realize eternal truths. I AM divine understanding.