Why Understanding Isn’t Enough

How are you doing on your journey to enlightenment? Um, someday is good, someday is not so good. How do you know when you're there? How do you know when you've found it? There's two things. There's understanding and realization.

Understanding is intellectually knowing something. Like, I'll give a simple analogy. Most people understand that we all die. At some point, we get old, hopefully, and we die. They understand that. Very few people realize death. When you realize something, it creates a permanent change in behavior. Understanding something doesn't create a change

in behavior. As you go within and you touch into higher states of consciousness and it's not a binary experience where you it's on off it's it's layered as I go in deeper and deeper and realize that I am energy, energy is inside of me no one would argue that no scientists would argue with that, now that energy cannot be created or destroyed. So it

means it's always existed. And I start to touch into that essence of the energy, I have the realization, I have always been here, I've never been created, I've always existed because I'm pure energy, that realization now starts to create

a change in my behavior pattern, my perspective changes, I realized not only have I always existed, you have always existed, so has everyone else always existed. Now I start to be more have more understanding, more empathy, more compassion, more love for humanity. I don't

judge. I understand that we are all pure energy. So realization causes a shift in behavior and perspective. Understanding doesn't. It's just an intellectual knowing of something doesn't really cause behavioral change. So that's how you know you're making progress. And the more progress you make and the more realizations you have, the more your behavior changes.

How I act and react to life experiences creates a more positive outcome rather than a more uplifting outcome that shows I have deeper and deeper maturity and deeper and deeper realizations. When you talk about reincarnation and you talk about the soul and you talk about always

existing, all of that implies that there's this cohesive unit that makes up Don DePone or it makes up Dave. Otherwise, for lack of a better term, referred to as the soul, right?

And that's what continues on. In this concept of the collective, there's also this belief, which I would argue probably is more where my head is at, is that I kind of,

I think I do believe in this collective knowledge, like this collective of everything in the universe. But I also think that when I die, I just become, I dissipate into the collective.

Now, that's not as romantic, it's not as inspiring of a thought as thinking that I get to keep what I've created and I become and how I've grown. Does that fit at all into the Hindu belief? It does not fit into the Hindu belief.

It's, I've heard many people say that, you know, that don't subscribe to either the heaven hell concept of one life, you know, usually the Abrahamic religion has a one life concept where you die. There's typically a judgment, heaven hell kind of concept.

and then the Eastern belief, you know, you reincarnate again. So the disappearing and nothing exists doesn't fit into the Hindu concept. That disappearing, that disappearing, dissipating. Dissipating into everything else, right?

Yeah, I've heard that. It's definitely not part of the Hindu belief.