One’s level, one’s depth of understanding is monitored by their mode/modes of thought. Reading can lead to education, expanded reading as well as repetitive study leads to its furtherance, but the way to really understand anything is to contemplate it, that is  look thoughtfully for a long time at, think profoundly and at length; meditate on it. Just to be integrative I think the best form of contemplation is what I would call deep contemplative analysis which combines both the reductive scientific mode and a prayerful mode as well. That way one not only deepens one understanding and even experience of something, it also insures that one contemplates as many of the aspects of that something as one currently knows. Thus it is both a deepening and a broadening at the same time.