“The balance between knowledge and being is even more important than a separate development of either one or the other. And a separate development of knowledge or of being is not desirable in any way. Although it is precisely this one-sided development that often seems particularly attractive to people.

“If knowledge outweighs being a man knows but has no power to do. It is useless knowledge. On the other hand if being outweighs knowledge, a man has the power to do, but …does not know what to do. The being he has acquired becomes aimless and efforts made to attain it prove to be useless.

“In the history of humanity there are known many examples when entire civilizations have perished because knowledge outweighed being or being outweighed knowledge.”

“What are the results of the development of the line of knowledge without being, or the development of the line of being without knowledge?” someone asked during a talk upon this subject.

“The development of the line of knowledge without the line of being gives a weak yogi,” said G. “That is to say, a man who knows a great deal but can do nothing. A man who does not understand (he emphasized these words) what he knows. A man for whom there is no difference between one kind of knowledge and another.

And the development of the line of being without knowledge gives a stupid saint. That is, a man who can do a great deal but who does not know what to do or with what object. And if he does anything, he acts in obedience to his subjective feelings which may lead him … actually to do the opposite of what he wants. In either case both the weak yogi and the stupid saint are brought to a standstill. Neither the one nor the other can develop further.

“In order to understand this and, in general, the nature of knowledge and the nature of being, as well as their interrelation, it is necessary to understand the relation of knowledge and being to ‘understanding.’

“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…

“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, in totally different ways… 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.”

Taken from P.D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous. For more on this topic, see our earlier issue: https://fourthwaytoday.org/category/the-forge-work-on-will-and-being/.