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The spiritualized power of Understanding goes far beyond intellectual knowing. We can know facts and gather information without really comprehending their meaning and we can fill our heads with information without it really changing our lives. It’s through gaining understanding that we transform how we view ourselves, fellow beings, and the world we inhabit.
Understanding is important in developing our spiritual nature because it is the faculty that puts feet under our prayers and gives our spiritual activity something to stand on. Blind faith, faith without understanding of the spiritual laws, may get results on occasion, but our spiritual growth demands a base that is more dependable. This can only be understanding that is grounded in spiritual Truth.
Winifred Wilkinson Hausmann: Your God Given Potential: Unfolding the Twelve Spiritual Powers
This is an amazing time to be alive. Humanity has developed incredible tools for gaining knowledge about the planet, ecosystems, and even solar systems. We have devices allowing us to see down to the molecular level and far outer space. We’ve learned how plants photosynthesize sunlight into leaves, roots, and branches and why ocean currents flow in certain patterns. We’ve learned how our own miraculous human bodies work and how to perform extraordinary medical feats of surgery and organ transplants.
Technology has led to miraculous-seeming advances in medicine, transportation, and all manner of tools and devices. We have in fact become highly dependent upon technology for nearly every aspect of modern life and over and over, every single day, we put our faith in technology to do everything from keeping our food cold to moving across town to visit a friend to typing out this very sentence.
As noted above, blind faith without understanding can indeed get results, however many times those results might not be all that desirable. When humans first began harnessing the power of fossil fuel they could not have known the enormous scale the global economy and transportation systems would grow to.
They did not have an understanding that pulling fossil energy out of the ground and burning it, would release gases such as carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. Doing so could literally change the climate and weather systems on the entire planet. It likely wouldn’t have seemed possible to them that plastics would make it all the way to the deepest parts of the oceans.
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In this modern age, we do indeed know that many of our human activities are causing harm to the planet that is our home. What’s needed now is to temper and enhance our ingenuity with a deeper understanding of how to shift course and consciousness to come into a harmonious relationship with all of Creation.
"We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” Today, we have tools, information, and access to knowledge at our fingertips that would have blown the minds of all previous humans. Ingenuity and intellect can help us use these tools to solve problems, but spiritualized understanding is essential to shifting personal and collective consciousness so that humanity and the rest of the natural world can heal and thrive together."
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Albert Einstein
In The Revealing Word, Charles Fillmore described the relationship between intellect and spiritual understanding:
Understanding - God is supreme knowing. That in man which comprehends is understanding; it knows and comprehends in wisdom. Its comparisons are not made in the realm of form but in the realm of ideas. It knows how to accomplish things. Spiritual discernment reveals that knowledge and intelligence are auxiliary to understanding. 
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. 
Intellectual understanding of Truth is a tremendous step in advance of sense consciousness, and its possession brings a temptation to use for selfish ends the wisdom and power thereby revealed. 
Spiritual understanding is the quickening of the Spirit within. Spiritual understanding is the ability of the mind to apprehend and realize the laws of thought and the relation of ideas one to another.
Gaining understanding isn’t something that can be forced and you usually can’t attain it just by reading books, no matter how profound. Myrtle Fillmore often encouraged students to put away books and listen within. Jesus demonstrated the importance of retreating from discussions and conversation to find times of silence for prayer and meditation.
"No one ever attained spiritual understanding without striving for it. Make your mind receptive to the higher understanding through silent meditations and affirmations of Truth. The earnest desire to understand spiritual things will open the way and revelations within and without will follow."
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Charles Fillmore, The Twelve Powers of Man
Getting out into nature can be a powerful catalyst for quickening understanding. We are quite literally connected to this planet, and great inspiration can flow when we take time to tune into that connection, to revel in the beauty of the natural world, and to stand in awe of all the magnificent creatures going about their lives.