What is understanding, as a matter of experience? Is it tied up with emotion somehow?
Corollary. In mindfulness, what object of awareness would I notice upon coming upon a realisation (e.g anatta)
@Failed_Buddhist
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Appreciate the nudge, but I don't know that I can do justice to any of those questions.
I can try for the first one a bit, but it's contingent. likes to use "awakenings" as a sort of everyday term that can port all the way into Buddhist-style realizations and beyond.
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If you use Ian's awakening model, an awakening is a multi-level understanding with lasting impact.
This usually requires different sorts of "understandings" to line up. I.e. you may feel something in the head, in the heart, in the body, believe it, think it... simultaneously.
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It doesn't need to hit all the notes at once, but generally the stronger and deeper the awakening, the more parts of "you" are affected.
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In myself, I know there are things I understand intellectually, but struggle to accept emotionally, things I feel that I can't reason with. Etc.
One thing that happens a lot in meditation for some people is these sorts of "aha" moments where you have a sudden mini-understanding.
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Sometimes these feel really transformative, but aren't.
"Ha, I'll never do that again!"
"Oh, now I understand!"
Week later, back to normal.
One way to model this discrepancy is to say that you haven't understood that thing as well as you thought, because it isn't integrated.
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the realization is real. You have too much/too strong conditioning pointing in other directions, so as it fades that stuff takes back over. If you were relatively equanimous/had less bad conditioning, it might well stick.
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That analysis may well be correct. I feel like I'm "gaining" new insights quite often, at the moment, despite not doing meditation per se.
But I'm doing shitloads of work on equanimity and my conditioning through other sources.