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Impatience is not wanting to understand that you don’t understand.
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#251

 

James Richardson

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We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said. It would be an inadmissible abstraction to contend that we must first have achieved a contemporaneousness with the author or the original reader by means of a reconstruction of his historical horizon before we could begin to grasp the meaning of what is said. A kind of anticipation of meaning guides the effort to understand from the very beginning.

 

Hans-Georg Gadamer

 

Dear premies, I guess this is the last night of this festival, of this Guru Puja and really, what have we understood? Really, in one way, what can we understand? What is there to understand? And it's just like sometimes you just feel, Understand? When I use the word understand ... But there is nothing to understand! And if there is something to understand, there is only one thing to understand, and that is to surrender!

 

Maharaji (Prem Rawat)

 

Perhaps you would say: Who would want to deny that every good gift and every perfect gift is from above? But not wanting to deny it is still a very long way from wanting to understand it, and wanting to understand it is still a very long way from wanting to believe it. Does the fruit of the knowledge here again seem so delectable that instead of making a spiritual judgment you demand and identifying sign from the good and the perfect, a proof that it actually did come from above? How should such a sign be constituted? Should it be constituted? Should it be more perfect than the perfect, better than the good, since it is assumed to demonstrate, and it pretends to demonstrate, that the perfect is the perfect. Should it be a sign, a wonder? Is not a wonder the archenemy of doubt, with which it is never combined? p. 135

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

We do not deny that wanting in all earnestness to understand what a person does not yet understand earnestly enough-if he wants to seek his own way to this consciousness and not leave it to God, who knows best how to alarm all self-confidence out of a person and keep him, when he is about to sink into his own nothingness, from maintaining by himself the diver’s connection with the earthly-we do not deny that wanting in all earnestness to understand this makes life difficult. Let us just admit it without thereby becoming so discouraged or cowardly that we want to sleep our way to what others have had to work for; let us not take it in vain when the believer enthusiastically declares that all his suffering is only brief and short, that the yoke of self-denial is beneficial, that the cross of sufferings ennobles a person more than anything else, and let us hope to God that someday we shall come so far that we, too, are able to speak enthusiastically. Let us not demand this too early, lest the believer’s zealous words discourage us because this does not occur immediately.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

Nor is there any embarrassment in the fact that we're ridiculous, isn't it true? For it's actually so, we are ridiculous, light-minded, with bad habits, we're bored, we don't know how to look, how to understand, we're all like that, all, you, and I, and they! Now, you're not offended when I tell you to your face that you're ridiculous? And if so, aren't you material? You know, in my opinion it's sometimes even good to be ridiculous, if not better: we can the sooner forgive each other, the sooner humble ourselves; we can't understand everything at once, we cant start right out with perfection! To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well. This I tell you, you, who have already been able to understand. .. and not understand ... so much. I'm not afraid for you now;

 

Fyodor Dostoevsky