The world is not as it appears to be.
How much can we really know when it comes to the difficult task of knowing ourselves?
In most spiritual practices, there is a notion that the world we see and experience is an illusion. It is called māyā in both Hindu and Buddhist world views, a blindness that prevents humans from having a complete experience of life. The word māyā in Sanskrit points to a mental condition of pretense or deceit that’s a hindrance on the path to realization. Its Hindu roots also carry some notion of magic that the gods use to create illusion unless they are appeased. In Buddhist and Hindu theology, samsara indicates the perpetual cycle of enslavement to birth and death and the pain of being caught up in the grip of illusion. Samsara simply means “world” in Sanskrit, but has been extrapolated out to include an endless cycle of birth and rebirth, spelling out continuous suffering.
The monotheistic religious traditions attribute our alienation from God and ourselves as the result of sin. In Christianity, particularly after Augustine, Eve's sin in the Garden of Eden, and Adam’s complicity, cursed all mankind to Original Sin until the sacrifice of Jesus. While any broad statement is, of course, misleading, it is enough here to point to the role of sin and alienation from God that traps us in misfortune’s clutches.
Religious and spiritual teachings have proposed various ways of digging ourselves out of this hole. Christianity and other monotheistic traditions advocate “conversion,” repentance, prayer, and good works; Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism veer towards the meditation/introspection end of the spectrum, coupled with an analysis of the condition itself.
Gurdjieff (I mention him because he is the subject of other posts on Buddha, S.J.), as well as various disciplines that have emerged more recently, attempt this analysis in the more neutral terms of being asleep. Gurdjieff said, "Man is immersed in dreams... He lives in sleep… He is a machine. He cannot stop the flow of his thoughts, he cannot control his imagination, his emotions, his attention... He does not see the real world. The real world is hidden from him by the wall of imagination."
These characterizations are simplistic and miss a lot of nuance, a fault for which I will be criticized, including by my inner critic, but my purpose is to point out the predicament, not necessarily to argue the merits of any particular solution.
A conundrum
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”― George Orwell
Why can’t we know the entire universe as it is? I will briefly outline three distinct ways that humans know (or imagine they know) the world: first, the gold standard, measurable data, and the instruments that humans have developed over time to explore, record and verify our knowledge; second, information that we “get” in conversation with other men and women about events in our lives, either in present time or from our history; and third, the information that comes to us from memoires, dreams and self-examination, as in therapy, and more broadly from what we might call the numinous sphere of our experience.
On December 25, 2021, the Webb Space Telescope was launched into space. Fourteen days, eight hours, eleven minutes, and three seconds later, after full deployment, when I logged into the NASA site, I was able to see the first images transmitted from the deep reaches of space. It required a 10 billion dollar, highly engineered instrument rotating at 1.5 million miles from Earth to expand the scope of our universe. My vision was extended by 13.5 billion light-years, allowing me to observe galaxies that formed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
I don’t know all the dimensions of what I refer to as “myself.” As an adult at 81, I still don't realize how all the emotional, physical, and spiritual trauma (or joy, but trauma has a tricky way of hiding because we tend to avoid pain) of years past affects me now. If I were completely aware, I would not have been stunned last week by that “ah ha” moment that shed light on some personal behaviors that have been troubling me for years. I’m calling this knowledge domain subjective as it relies on information about our reactions to past events that we store in our brains, or more broadly, our somatic systems.
I have sketched out the concepts of observation, recognition, and remembering or retrieval, with an emphasis on their limitations. Again, I accuse myself of gross over-simplification, but for the purposes of describing our conundrum: When I acknowledge the extent of my blindness, do I simply feel frustrated or unfulfilled in some existential sense, or do I undertake the practice of observing myself? Let me explore some of the ramifications of the philosophical argument behind my dilemma to see what, if anything, holds water, makes sense by congruity, and where there are holes in the bucket.
The first part of this argument I would like to examine is that, as humans, our perception of the universe is limited; however, we believe that the information at our disposal provides a complete representation of the world as it is. Even if we admit that the world is not as it appears, we imagine that with investigation, we can discern more accurate information and, like a sleuth, uncover the culprit and save ourselves. This is simply hubris.
Self-observation is at least partially what the language points to: we investigate ourselves. But there are limits to any claims about the reliability of our human experience. What part of the “self” comes into play is not altogether clear, but this much is true: it is “subjective.” How do we examine the data? Is it real? Can it be verified? Is it useful for understanding past personal events as well as predicting the results of present and future actions?
Common sense demands — correctly, I think — that I can only believe what’s in front of my nose is indeed what’s in front of my nose if and only if I limit what I assert about the way I see my world to what’s actually under my nose. I know the immediate world I directly perceive. Unless I can verify it, all the rest is an assumption. Suppose I allow my mind to stray into the world of made-up stories, half-remembered or repressed memories, heavenly illusions, or sexual fantasy. In that case, I can no longer legitimately assert that I am seeing the world as it is. I want to believe that I can be as stone-cold sober as a hanging judge, whether or not I really can wield judgments best left to God. I will convince myself that I won’t stray into the forbidden territory of false opinions or prejudice by taking the moral high ground, but in fact, I am deluded into believing that the world I see is objectively real. A small portion of what I see can be reliably verified by measurable data, but in fact, most is almost entirely subjective, buttressed with the few agreements that I’ve managed to wrestle into my corner from family and lovers, political allies, or friends from church. Yet we claim that common sense provides a reliable indicator of the validity of our varied experience.
Some would argue more strongly that common sense doesn't just advise, as in “take aspirin if you’re feeling a bit woozy.” Normative logic prescribes limits for my world, drawing boundaries for the experiences I can assert are true and can reasonably trust. The process of expanding my world requires another level of investigation. I am obliged to account for the way I want to see the world. This demands that I undertake a careful, critical examination of subjective factors, from yearning and dissatisfaction to remembering with Proust the smell of my mother’s cookies, the elation of catching my first fly ball, or the humiliation of being punched in the nose by the class bully.
This simple observation may point us in the right direction. We begin to see and understand the mechanisms of the apparatus of our perceptions, the thoughts, feelings, sensations, visual perceptions, and the registration of this experience in our memories. Our worldview is very limited unless we are willing to admit other factors, including, for example, our conversations with other people, our reading of history, and, most importantly, empirical scientific evidence, which, along with an understanding of the instruments of observation (including both physical science and psychology), allows us to test and verify our assumptions. This is also common sense.
However, I don’t want to let my argument devolve into complete solipsism. Surmising that what’s in front of my nose is also what’s in front of my friend’s nose is possible only if I have an agreement with my friend that he or she describes what’s in front of his or her nose with similar identifiable characteristics, mass, color, along with the collection of data from my other sensations, within a range of probable predictors. This will include an agreement to use a common descriptive language. Digging through this complex web of linguistic and psychological machinations tests the limits of human intelligence, but it does seem to be a worthwhile project. It can lead to freedom, but it can also verge on the preposterous.
I have drawn this picture as extensively as I could to describe a gap in our understanding. We neglect what we know empirically both in the way we conduct our lives and in what we allow ourselves to believe. We would like to believe that our understanding can get us out of trouble, and when it doesn’t, we look elsewhere to fill in the gap.
The Lacunae. The Unknown is simply unknown. The rest is just shit we make up. Enter the Guru!
There’s a natural lacuna in our experience where we don’t have reliable information. In my view, it is unknown because it is unknowable. We as humans do not have access to the data required, or our physical bodies and minds simply do not have the capacity to experience or know what remains hidden. There is no ontological reason; there are no secrets.
It’s a normal human instinct to seek certainty. We all want peace of mind, but because we are afraid, or lazy, or greedy, or insecure, or arrogant, this creates an opening for the guru’s stealthy entrance. This ignorance becomes the playground for superstition, magic, wizards (sorry, Harry Potter), myth, and deception. Any appeal to a supernatural or unseen world that uses our inability to know creates a loophole and opens a vast playground for all kinds of mischief, from the taboo against walking under a ladder to believing your daily horoscope, supplied, of course, for a fee.
Even after we’ve observed and accepted that we as human beings have a limited range of perception due to physiological constraints, the limited capacity of our sense organs, as well as the neuro-physiology of our brains, our mind plays a trick; we tend to forget and set this aside, but we still experience dissatisfaction: we don’t get all the things we think we want or imagine we need. Plus, there are psychological consequences that come from the firing and misfiring of synapses that distribute endorphins to our pleasure centers. It makes no difference whether or not these actions and reactions are random or follow some predictable pattern; we experience an imbalance coupled with limited data to account for it. Voilá, from chemistry set to ontological predicament!
As a matter of fact, our suffering always seems to get the upper hand. When our unhappiness or dissatisfaction reaches a tipping point, we reach out for an answer, even if it means grasping for straws. Enter the person, book, practice, or belief system with an answer. It doesn't even have to be a good answer. Searching for answers to existential questions can require suspension of belief; perhaps the answer imposes an alternative set of beliefs and demands submission to its authority. In some sense, it operates like a narcotic or psychological addiction — the high it produces needs to be repeated for it to be effective.
Over many centuries, our answers have taken the form of tribal ritual. In the small village where I live, when I’m in northern India, I rented the first floor of a lovely new building; my flat had been designed and built by a trained architect; the rent was relatively high. A good friend rented a smaller room on the ground floor, but there was a problem with the ventilation and the sewage. It really felt unsanitary. It had been built on the cheap by a local carpenter. Complaints got no results. Tempers flared. My friend left; there were bad feelings all around. The Nepali woman who owned the property called on a village priest to solve a problem. I saw with my own eyes the bloody sacrifice of a young goat to create favorable circumstances for increased guest house revenue ― and sanitary plumbing. My solution would have been to hire a competent plumber, but my owner opted to pay a witch doctor for the magic of animal sacrifice.
At another end of the spectrum, Bob Hoffman, the psychic tailor and inventor of a process psychic therapy recommended by Claudio Naranjo, sits in a Berkeley coffee bar, gazes off into space; he delivers a prediction or confirmation about a life choice or personal problem, allegedly from his spiritual guide, Dr. Fisher. I can hear the certainty in the psychic’s tone of voice when he divines the root of your predicament and says, “Doors will open.” The door actually remains shut until we see for ourselves what is posing as an answer. Snake oil doesn’t even loosen the hinges.
I still haven’t really answered my own question about knowing ourselves. I’ve just pointed out some of the false claims. Knowing that there are limits to what we can know doesn’t invalidate what direct experience teaches us or weaken those experiences. It simply rejects their infallibility. I can be satisfied with my own experience. In the words of Jack Kerouac, “One day I will find the right words, ... then it sounds; you just can't fail when you get into the rhythm of the dance.”
Note: I would like to acknowledge Geshe-la Kelsang Wangmo’s course on Dignaga, which was taught at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, McLeod Ganj, HP, India, during the Spring semester of 2014.
