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One of the greatest benefits of spiritualized understanding is that it can help us make sense of challenging experiences. Learning to make space for a deeper perspective and a bigger-picture view can help us find meaning in the messes.
"There are universal laws that live and operate whether we are aware of them or not. If our thinking and responding to life are in alignment with these laws, life works. We find that in the midst of the greatest difficulty, there is an ineffable sense of clarity that leads to beneficial action. Spiritual understanding gives us the vision to see through the mists of our experience to the highest, most life-enhancing Truth. It helps us find the miracle and meaning in the mess. In this awareness, we can make informed decisions about our responses to people and life’s circumstances rather than reacting.
In our willingness, spiritualized understanding redeems our losses, failures, and fears. "
Sharon Connors: Adventures in Resilience: Ignite the 12 Powers in You to Create a Radiant Life
Certainly, spiritual understanding can help us make sense of our personal challenges. Importantly, it can also help us navigate collective problems and the predicament humanity now faces due to the damage we are causing to the natural world.
We are witnessing the collision of a global system of industrial growth-based production and consumption with non-negotiable ecological limits. There is an urgent need to make informed decisions rather than fear-based reactions.
Climate anxiety and eco-grief are increasingly widespread conditions. A recent study of more than 10,000 young people aged 16–25 years old, living across 10 countries (including the United States), revealed that more than half (59%) reported being very or extremely worried about climate change, and 84% were at least moderately worried. Nearly half said that their feelings (sadness, anxiety, anger, powerlessness, guilt, and helplessness) negatively affected daily life and functioning, and more than three-quarters find the future frightening and feel a sense of betrayal by adults in general and governments in particular.
Parents, teachers, ministers, and spiritual leaders (all of us actually) will be of greater service if we can empower people, young and old, to cultivate spiritual understanding and resilience.
Understanding that God / Source / Creator is a principle and force in and through all things, always in the process of supporting the extension of creation can help buffer the pain of those of us who grieve the loss of nature in this earthly plane. Spiritual understanding can help us see past appearances, and open to the possibility that positive evolution in consciousness can arise from the seeming chaos and loss before us.
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Another of the extraordinary developments of these times is the scientific validation of spiritual principles through quantum science. More and more scientific evidence is showing that there is an inextricable connection between the physical / material plane and non-physical/consciousness. Moreover, a fundamental law of physics is that matter is never destroyed but merely shifts form. This suggests that in a very real way, God/Source/Divine Mind and everything that it has ever created is eternal.
"More open-minded scientists, those not wedded to scientific materialism’s beliefs, accept that matter-energy interactions alone do not explain all observed phenomena; they have been willing to explore nonmaterial alternative theories, ones that look to thought and intelligent consciousness for answers. We have seen that the expanded vision of these open-minded scientists leaves ample room for religion's most universal claims – miracles, heavenly realms, life after death, personal transcendent experience, and the immortality of the soul, …"
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Joseph Selbie, The Physics of God
Understanding can be confused with the faculty of wisdom but there are subtle and important differences. In Revealing Word, Charles Filmore defines wisdom as intuitive knowing or spiritual intuition, while understanding is defined as, “[T]he ability of the mind to apprehend and realize the laws of thought and the relation of ideas one to another.” In other words, wisdom involves knowing and understanding involves knowing why.
"The new field of quantum biology – which surprised everyone with its discovery of chlorophyll’s entangled, phased, and synchronized dance when transferring sunlight energy – has encountered indefinitely sustained states of entangled interaction bridging between the non-local energy-verse and living systems, an interaction known as quantum coherence."
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Joseph Selbie, The Physics of God
Understanding can be confused with the faculty of wisdom but there are subtle and important differences. In Revealing Word, Charles Filmore defines wisdom as intuitive knowing or spiritual intuition, while understanding is defined as, “The ability of the mind to apprehend and realize the laws of thought and the relation of ideas one to another.”
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In other words, wisdom involves knowing and understanding involves knowing why.
Developing true, deep, spiritualized understanding is critical to fully allowing wisdom to blossom.
"Spiritualized understanding drives out war, poverty, and all the ills of human society. The prayer of St. Francis of Assisi challenges us to seek to understand, rather than to be understood."
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Carole Lunde : The Divine Design​
In a display of ecological and spiritual understanding, Chief Seattle famously notes,
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“Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. This we know. The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth.”
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We stand on the precipice of mastering a level of understanding that will enable us to step more fully and accurately into the title we’ve given ourselves, Homo sapiens, which means wise man.
Here is a brief personal message from Earth Care Core Team member, Rev. Helen Wright about her take on Understanding.