Page 48 - Hull's School Yearbook 2018-2019

experience, and immediate experience can only be talked about (very inadequately), never shared.’
Huxley may be suggesting that human life begins with complete understanding, because a baby has as yet very little or no knowledge to package and store new impressions. Children, however, soon have to acquire great quantities of conceptual knowledge and find their place in what Huxley calls ordinary life. Awareness is buried and access is no longer available, except by moments or flashes. At the same time essence is buried under a newly formed personality, which overlays essence and loses contact with it. This is the cave of Plato, its walls are made – amongst other things – by words.
Huxley is also pointing to a completely different and hidden meaning of understanding, to the hidden parts of our mind where creativity resides. This is why great insights and profound discoveries 'come' to us, they have to travel to us from a part of our mind outside ordinary consciousness. Though interminable years of study may be essential to us, they do not make us great inventors and years of practical training are not enough to write a good poem, compose a symphony or create a great work of art. This is also why great inventions and great artistic inspiration have something miraculous, they have penetrated into our ordinary world against all odds thanks to some few fortunate members of the human race who were ready to receive them. It will not surprise you that creative moments were regarded by the likes of Goethe, Huxley, Picasso and Mozart as glimpses of the Divine. Real understanding, in other words, transcends the ordinary when it becomes creative. Real understanding is in fact perhaps the highest state available to us, it can only be experienced. Real understanding, may well be the light outside Plato's cave.
Goethe's Faust is the perfect embodiment of the evolution from knowledge to understanding. We need to remember, though, that he starts at a rather high level. He has spent a lifetime as a university professor exploring all realms of human knowledge to the point where there seems to be nothing more to learn:
“Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,
Juristerei und Medizin,
Und leider auch Theologie
Durchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemühn. Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor!
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;
Goethe is not suggesting that knowledge is unnecessary, rather, that we have to reach its limits in order to make the next step in our development. In the case of Faust, the next step is not intellectual, but physical and emotional, with the support of a seemingly evil guide, Mephistopheles, who duly embarks with him on an exploration of love and, tragically, the darker reaches of the subconscious, sex, the lust for power and fame, the wish to be omnipotent. Mephistopheles gratifies all Faust's wishes and shocks Faust into recognizing who he really is. For instance, Mephistopheles helps Faust to seduce Margarathe, a beautiful innocent young lady who he immediately falls in love with and – unfortunately – she with him. They spend a night together without being married, she becomes pregnant and gives birth to an illegitimate child; her brother confronts Faust and is murdered by him. Margarethe kills her child, goes mad and ends up in prison. At this stage Faust has committed a whole series of mortal sins, destroyed the life of the woman he loved, murdered her brother and caused the murder of their child. Facing his own awfulness, Faust undergoes an inner change not intended by Mephistopheles, which eventually, in Faust II, leads to permanent understanding and divine grace, when he