"Knowledge is one thing, understanding is another thing.
"People often confuse these concepts and do not clearly grasp what is the difference
between them.
"Knowledge by itself does not give understanding. Nor is understanding increased
by an increase of knowledge alone. Understanding depends upon the relation of
knowledge to being. Understanding is the resultant of knowledge and being. And
knowledge and being must not diverge too far, otherwise understanding will prove to
be far removed from either. At the same time the relation of knowledge to being does
not change with a mere growth of knowledge. It changes only when being grows
simultaneously with knowledge. In other words, understanding grows only with the
growth of being.
"In ordinary thinking, people do not distinguish understanding from knowledge.
They think that greater understanding depends on greater knowledge. Therefore they
accumulate knowledge, or that which they call knowledge, but they do not know how
to accumulate understanding and do not bother about it.
"And yet a person accustomed to self-observation knows for certain that at different
periods of his life he has understood one and the same idea, one and the same thought,
in totally different ways. It often seems strange to him that he could have understood
so wrongly that which, in his opinion, he now understands rightly. And he realizes, at
the same time, that his knowledge has not changed, and that he knew as much about the given
subject before as he knows now. What, then, has changed? His being has changed.
And once being has changed understanding must change also.
"The difference between knowledge and understanding becomes clear when we
realize that knowledge may be the function of one center. Understanding, however, is
the function of three centers. Thus the thinking apparatus may know something. But
understanding appears only when a man feels and senses what is connected with it.
"We have spoken earlier about mechanicalness. A man cannot say that he
understands the idea of mechanicalness if he only knows about it with his mind. He
must feel it with his whole mass, with his whole being;
then he will understand it.
(Ouspensky, "In Search of ...", p67-8), italics by the author.