1 Kings 10:7 · World English Bible
However I didn’t believe the words until I came and my eyes had seen it. Behold, not even half was told me! Your wisdom and prosperity exceed the fame which I heard.
Ṭalab: Seeking Attar calls the quest the first stretch of the road. Something you have only heard about lodges in you and will not sit still, and more secondhand detail only sharpens the itch.
From the Sufism reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
SUFISM
Ṭalab: Seeking Attar calls the quest the first stretch of the road. Something you have only heard about lodges in you and will not sit still, and more secondhand detail only sharpens the itch. The pull quiets only when a person has gone the distance and stood in front of the thing without anyone in between.
News is not like seeing with your own eyes: hearing leaves you outside The Prophet's saying puts plainly what most people half know already. Someone else's account is still their words, and a person holds back a portion of belief without meaning to. The gap that even careful description leaves stays open until you are standing there, and then the held-back part lets go.
Dhawq: Tasting Al-Ghazali uses tasting for what a person learns only by having it happen to them. Someone can carry a correct description around for years and still stand outside it, the way a sober person can define drunkenness. The meeting itself adds no new facts, and yet every account heard beforehand suddenly feels thin.
Ḥayra: Bewilderment Ibn Arabi treats astonishment as a high place on the road, not a stumble or a failure of understanding. You arrive with expectations cut to the size of a report, and what stands there overflows them until you have nothing to say. The blankness comes from a person stretching to hold something larger than the shape they had ready.
Being unable to take it in is itself taking it in: the shortfall is what you learn Abu Bakr said this, and al-Ghazali kept repeating it for centuries after. When something far outruns its description, the honest response is to admit you cannot get to the bottom of it. A person ends up knowing the size of it by how far all the words fell short.
Sufism lens
What have I been confidently describing without ever having stood in front of it?
Teachers say the pointing finger is not the moon, and a student who studies the finger has missed the whole errand. The words are useful only until you look up for yourself.
The Tao that can be put into words is not the Tao. Any description is already a smaller thing than what it describes, so language ends and looking begins.
The one who says they fully understand it does not, and the one who says they cannot grasp it has come closer. The shortfall itself is accurate information about the size of the thing.
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Sufism