Variant: If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.
“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”
“In general, I feel if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself.”
Writers at Work interview (1963)
“If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.”
“… you realize that you don't understand yourself any better than you understand anyone else.”
Source: This is Where I Leave You
“Don't criticize what you can't understand.”
“It is easy to understand God as long as you don't try to explain him.”
Interview with Suzie Daggett at Insight: Healthy Living (July 2006).
Context: Mystics, contrary to religionists, are always saying that reality is not two things — God and the world — but one thing, consciousness. It is a monistic view of reality based on consciousness that mystics claim to directly intuit. The problem with science has always been that most scientists believe that science must be done within a different monistic framework, one based on the primacy of matter. And then, quantum physics showed us that we must change that myopic prejudice of scientists, otherwise we cannot comprehend quantum physics. So now we have science within consciousness, a new paradigm of science based on the primacy of consciousness that is gradually replacing the old materialist science. Why? Not only because you can't understand quantum physics without this new metaphysics but also because the new paradigm resolves many other paradoxes of the old paradigm and explains much anomalous data.
“If you don't like yourself, you can't like other people. -- Lazarus Long.”
