To increase understanding

To increase understanding you have to increase capacity for understanding.

First, to get understanding you need sources, or the substance for understanding. Higher influences. Time-vetted truths. Experience as well. Language is a good general way to see these influences. Language suggests something deeper than surfacy knowledge. Language can be the inner higher visual meaning in an epic poem like the Iliad or the Odyssey. Language can be all that is involved in a hands-on trade, like brick laying, or gardening or commercial fishing or farming. There is metaphor in the actions of these things, and understanding gained in the experience of the process involved in doing them. Understanding can be found in great works of literature where truth has reached a summation and been articulated well. The Bible obviously is the beyond-summit engrafted temple of wisdom.

Music is a language as well.

An aside: you have to recognize the unity of truth. Unity of truth is an old phrase that has gone out of the language. It means truth is not relative, or subjective, and doesn't evolve (or change) over time. For instance the truths of human nature are as true today as at any time of the past since the fall of man. The truths of the ways of the world are the same. Customs and traditions and mores may be different from one era or culture to another, but truth is eternal.

So to then increase this understanding in yourself you need to increase your capacity for understanding. Think of your capacity as a glass that can only hold so much water. At a certain point any more water will just be wasted as it spills over the top. To hold more understanding you have to become a bigger glass.

This is described in an old formula: understanding equals knowledge plus being (understanding = knowledge + being).

Not just knowledge, but knowledge plus level of being.

This is why intellectuals and philosophers throughout history are often incredibly stupid (dangerously, murderously, demonically stupid). They are solely knowledge with little level of being.

How do you increase your level of being? By provoking your limits so as to then extend your limits. For instance, engaging influences (like books) that are just above your current level of understanding, and activities that are just outside your current circle of interests. Also, not just being developed intellectually, or emotionally (i.e. creatively), or physically, but to get developed in all three areas of your being. Put simply, be a book reader, a musician, and an athlete. This ideally is what happens in a school environment, but it ultimately has to be self-motivated and minus the solely worldly goal.

There are other categories of activity that increase level of being. The Bible presents them. Loving your enemy is one (a command that itself requires understanding to know what it actually means). All the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels (and of course the entire word of God) that is of the nature of something you do. Things that take effort to get better at. Going against the features of your fallen nature. Cultivating the features of your new nature as a regenerated follower of Christ.

This language of progressive sanctification can also be learned from secondary, or even secular works, separating the wheat from the chaff. Stoic philosophy gets close to Christian teachings in ancient sources such as Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. I use the language called the Fourth Way which I believe was best written (or spoken) out by P. D. Ouspensky in his book the Fourth Way. Ideas, practices, goals of inner, spiritual development. Always requiring Christian discernment (the Spirit of discernment) and a standard to judge all by (the word of God itself).

So when you make these efforts to increase level of being you then are able to increase understanding because you have greater capacity for understanding.