Any evidence we have that the understanding can be aligned with reality or truth comes about via indirect ways of knowing, through a strongly socially mediated form of reality testing. This is not constituted through purely superficial forms of knowing, mere theoretical understanding, since understanding itself, even in its most natural untheorised forms is hierarchical, and such hierarchy is naively taken as metaphysical - that is, any notion of truth involves levels of appearance giving way to deeper levels of appearance behind them extending far beneath ordinary ways of being in the world. The mind is capable of effortlessly shaping itself in accordance with such assumptions. So the mind of itself has capacities for hierarchical self-organisation and can explore its own intrinsic nature without any input from externally directed experience - in particular it can go at least as deep into hierarchical layers which correspond in terms of reality to fundamental metaphysics, to the very origins of experience. But in all this there is no reason to think that internal realities discovered in this way have any relation to external, indirectly discovered realities. In other words there are internal discoveries that feel just like discoveries of the original nature of what is but no guarantee that these provide any insight into the best discoveries of similarly structured discoveries about objective reality. Spiritual tact is to keep these realms in relation but clearly distinguished.