1. COMMENTARY: What is meant by understanding?
In this theory the word understanding is used in a broader and more technical sense than is customary in everyday speech.
Understanding does not denote merely a thought, an explanation or a mental insight. Understanding is the relational structure that arises when an experience has been interpreted and integrated into KNOWING.
When a qualia-experience is read through the Experience Circle, understanding arises. Understanding represents the local knowledge that experience leaves as permanent structure in KNOWING. It is simultaneously a part of KNOWING and enters as the basis for further experience, recognition, resonance and emergence.
Understanding is therefore not something that comes in addition to experience. Understanding is what experience leaves behind — the established relation between what has been experienced and what is already known.
In the Mechanism, understanding is therefore used as a technical term for integrated relational knowledge. Each new understanding expands KNOWING, and all further emergence occurs through relations between existing understandings.
In English the word understanding literally means “that which stands under.” In the same sense, understanding here may be regarded as the underlying — or preceding — relational foundation that makes experience, meaning, recognition and further development possible.
