Understanding is "(a set of) practical belief(s)", or "operationalised expectations" — with the emphasis on "practical" and "operationalised", meaning "grounded in experience", where "experience" includes thought, imagination, and emotion as well as sensory phenomena: all of consciousness.
No amount of instruction lets one understand swimming without getting into the water, or the taste of durian without putting it on the tongue. Even without having experienced swimming or durian directly, we are conscious of them, and we can understand the place they hold in our world, but only to the extent that they enter our experience at all. We can shape placeholders around the missing experiences, held in place by the experiences that surround them, but within those placeholders is a void.
What lies beyond consciousness offers no such surroundings; the limits of consciousness are unknowable. So we can understand what lies beyond consciousness only to the extent that it lies within consciousness — which is to say, we cannot.
This comment, to the extent that it proposes an understanding of the beyond-conscious, is in error.
This is not an understanding
Understanding is "(a set of) practical belief(s)", or "operationalised expectations" — with the emphasis on "practical" and "operationalised", meaning "grounded in experience", where "experience" includes thought, imagination, and emotion as well as sensory phenomena: all of consciousness.
No amount of instruction lets one understand swimming without getting into the water, or the taste of durian without putting it on the tongue. Even without having experienced swimming or durian directly, we are conscious of them, and we can understand the place they hold in our world, but only to the extent that they enter our experience at all. We can shape placeholders around the missing experiences, held in place by the experiences that surround them, but within those placeholders is a void.
What lies beyond consciousness offers no such surroundings; the limits of consciousness are unknowable. So we can understand what lies beyond consciousness only to the extent that it lies within consciousness — which is to say, we cannot.
This comment, to the extent that it proposes an understanding of the beyond-conscious, is in error.