The Age of Explanation

Benjamin Brénainn
Jul 2
8 min read

Huang Shang. Suzhou Planisphere. 1247. Stone engraving, based on astronomical observations of 1193.

Part I

There is a strange paradox at the heart of modern life which has become a distortion. The modern era is the most informed civilisation in human history. Never before have ordinary people possessed such immediate access to knowledge. We can access centuries of philosophy, theology, science, and literature in moments.

Information surrounds us from the moment we wake until the moment we sleep. Yet for all our knowledge, many people feel increasingly disconnected from meaning, fulfillment, purpose, wonder, transcendence, and depth. We know more and experience less. We are informed about everything and confidently certain of very little. We have become experts in description while often remaining strangers to experience based understanding.

The modern mind has been trained to believe that understanding something is equivalent to possessing it. If we can explain a thing, define it, analyse it, categorise it, and place it within a system, we assume we have somehow mastered it. But some realities refuse to be reduced to explanation. No amount of studying beauty is the same as beholding it or feeling it.

No amount of reading about love is the same as experiencing it or knowing it. No amount of discussing courage is the same as standing in the moment that requires it and acting courageous. There remains a profound difference between information and experience. The ancient world largely understood this distinction. Whether in philosophy, worship, contemplation, or art, people assumed that the deepest realities of existence could not merely be observed from a distance by thought.

They had to be entered. Participated in. Experienced beyond the mind. Modern culture increasingly struggles with this idea and in many ways rejects it. We live through symbols, abstractions, and representations. We often encounter life secondhand from others. We consume information about experiences rather than inhabit them.

We discuss realities rather than enter them and this is the distortion. As a result, many people feel an unshakable sense of distance from reality. Distance from meaning, fulfilment and purpose. Distance from beauty, reality and themselves. The irony is that this distance often grows in proportion to our knowledge as it increases. We continue gathering information in hopes that the next insight, the next idea, the next understanding, and hope the next explanation will finally satisfy the deeper longing beneath the surface.

Yet the longing remains in an ocean of being unsatisfied. Why is this? It is because human beings were never designed to live on information alone. There is something within us that hungers for direct participation in reality itself- to experience life and all its truths. The human being longs for communion with something greater than ourselves. This may be one of the defining spiritual crises of our age- beyond skepticism or immorality but distance from experiencing reality.

A civilisation can survive disagreement, uncertainty and even upheaval but when meaning is lost- this often is difficult to recover. Once this disappears, everything becomes ordinary. Mystery becomes an inconvenience. Spirituality becomes speculation. The sacred becomes merely an interesting thought. And perhaps nowhere is this more visible than in contemporary spirituality where this was once the pinnacle of human experience but has now been reduced to a mere ideology.

Many people possess an abundance of religious language. They know the terminology and even follow its instructions. They understand the systems. They can discuss doctrines, movements, traditions, and theories. Yet beneath all the discussion remains a quiet dissatisfaction that many struggle to name and this is because something is missing. The dissatisfaction is not necessarily intellectual since religion is often aimed at intellectual fulfillment.

The issue is existential and in the very life of the human heart. The soul senses that reality is deeper than its explanations and that structures of religion are often cages to this reality. The spiritual life contains depths not captured by analysis and moves beyond it. There is a difference between speaking about something and encountering it firsthand and this defines one's understanding of a thing. This is why throughout history the great mystics, saints, contemplatives, and philosophers often sounded surprisingly similar despite their differences. Consistently they pointed beyond mere concepts toward the experience of reality. Beyond observation and toward participation. Beyond abstraction toward reality and the true knowing of it.

They understood that the greatest things in life are not merely understood in the mind but entered personally. Perhaps the future belongs not to those who can produce the most information, but to those who can recover meaning and purpose. Those who can still stand before beauty without reducing it. Those who can still encounter mystery without immediately explaining it away. Those who recognize that some realities are not problems to solve but depths to experience. In the end, human beings do not merely seek answers. They seek reality. They seek meaning. They seek purpose. And until humanity recovers that distinction, we may continue accumulating knowledge while remaining strangers to the very things for which the human heart was made to know.

That is not merely a religious problem. It is one of the central human questions of our age. Maybe you've felt it. Not necessarily as a crisis discussed publicly. Not necessarily as a conflict recognized by the masses. Just as a quiet awareness that something is missing and is empty. You may continue moving through life. You may accomplish goals. You may learn new things. You may accumulate experiences. You may become more informed, more connected, more capable.

Yet beneath all of it remains a strange dissatisfaction. Not because your life is empty but because something is distorted. There is a difference between possessing things and possessing meaning. Knowledge cannot grant meaning nor true happiness. Many people spend years assuming their hunger is for success, relationships, achievement, knowledge, or even certainty in material goods. Then they obtain some of those things and discover the hunger remains and isn't enough.This either leads the heart to despair and in this moment of despair decides to abandon this path or press on forward even more committed.

The human heart is peculiar in this way that it intrinsically has free will of choice toward meaning or away from it. It continually reaches beyond whatever it possesses since it is designed for more than information. It longs for something greater than itself. Something more enduring than pleasure. Something deeper than knowledge. Something more substantial than distractions of momentary feelings. And perhaps the most important question is not whether that longing exists since it does in every individual.

The question is whether humanity is recognizing it correctly as diagnosing that something remains dead. What if the restlessness is a symptom of a greater sickness? What if it is a clue into man’s true pathway forward? What if it is pointing toward something real to be known? Every civilisation has its strengths and weaknesses.The strength of our age is explanation or acquisition of knowledge. We explain everything. We explain the universe. We explain the body. We explain morality. We explain religion. We explain human behavior. We explain beauty. We explain our beliefs. And in many ways this has been a remarkable achievement.But every strength, when exaggerated, eventually becomes a weakness thus neglecting its opposite which creates balance.

A civilisation obsessed with explanation eventually begins believing that whatever can be explained has been exhausted and needs no further attention. Soon mystery becomes ignorance. Soon wonder is merely an emotion. Soon spirituality is merely psychology. Yet human beings stubbornly resist this reduction, knowing it is wrong. No matter how sophisticated our explanations become, people continue searching for meaning as proof that it is inherently human.

They continue searching for beauty, wonder and the possibility of God. There are moments when reality seems to become transparent to unveil this hidden meaning that there is more to life than what exists on the surface. A mountain at dawn. A sky filled with stars. A piece of music that suddenly overwhelms you. A silence that feels strangely alive.

For a brief moment, ordinary perception gives way to something deeper which cannot be explained. And what makes such moments remarkable is not that they provide answers but fulfilment. It is that they awaken awareness of meaning and purpose in the soul. They remind us that reality possesses depths beyond what we normally perceive by thought. The world often appears ordinary because we have become accustomed to it and have submitted to a culture that diminishes the extraordinary- until we no longer see it. Yet beneath the malaise of familiarity remains hidden wells of life.

Beneath the visible remains the invisible world. Beneath the surface remains depth and though many are blind- some have eyes to see. Perhaps wisdom begins when a person realises that reality is far larger than his explanations of it and that wisdom is greater than knowledge.

And perhaps wonder begins when he stops trying to conquer that which cannot be explained fully and simply stands before it with open embrace. There was a time when I assumed that understanding would eventually satisfy me. That if I could gather enough answers, enough knowledge, enough insight, the deeper questions would finally disappear. And to some degree, understanding helped. It removed confusion. It clarified many things. But eventually I discovered something unexpected: the deepest questions are not always answered by accumulating more information.

They concern realities that must be experienced personally rather than merely explained. I began to suspect that understanding was not the destination. It was only the beginning of the journey in which a human develops wisdom. One of the great differences between the ancient world and the modern world lies in how they understood knowledge. For modern people, knowledge is primarily descriptive and informational. For many ancient peoples, knowledge was both spiritual and transformational. A person did not truly know something merely because he could describe it and this was seen as foolishness or folly.

Humans knew it because it had become part of them by lived experience. Wisdom was not measured by accumulation but in lived transformation. The goal was not simply to understand reality but to be aligned to it and be changed as a result. This assumption appears throughout the ancient philosophers, the saints, the mystics, the poets, and the sages. Again and again they return to the same intuition: There are realities that cannot be grasped from a mental thought alone.

They must be entered and known personally, lived and experienced. The modern world has gained much through analysis but abandoned wisdom. Some forms of knowing only become available when a person moves beyond observation and begins to participate in reality itself so that they may become something new. The human is then formed as a type of person who lives aligned to reality not as one who merely thinks about it.

This essay is an original work protected under the copyright laws of the United States and applicable international copyright treaties. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, translated, adapted, stored in a retrieval system, or used to create derivative works in any form or by any means, whether electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, artificial intelligence training, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder, except for brief quotations used in reviews, scholarly works, or other uses permitted by applicable copyright law. This essay and its writing style is the original writing style of Benjamin Brénainn. No part, concept or idea of this essay was created, generated or automated by the use of artificial intelligence and such software has only been used for grammatical editing purposes.