How much can we really know, especially when it comes to the difficult task of knowing ourselves?
A proposition: The world is not as it appears to be.
In most spiritual practice 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 at best and miss a lot of nuance, a fault for which I will be criticized, but my purpose is to simply point to 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
I know that I cannot know the entire universe as it is. If I need proof I just need to log onto the cameras of the Webb Space Telescope. I am in awe of the universe’s vast expanse, and in 14 days, 8 hrs, 11 mins, and 3 secs, I will be able to see the first images Webb transmits from the deep reaches of space, but I need a 10 billion dollar delicate instrument rotating at 1.5 million miles from earth. I don't even know my immediate world as it is. I am limited, for example, by the range of my hearing. I am sitting in the same room with a friend when he or she begins talking about a car coming up on the road, but I haven’t even heard the rumble of tires on the stony path. I cannot even fully know myself. If I were completely aware, I would not have been stunned by an “ah ha” moment that shed light on some personal behaviors that were troubling for years on end.
When I see and admit that this is so, including the extent of my blindness, I’m presented with a conundrum. Whether I simply observe that I feel frustrated or unfulfilled in some existential sense, or 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 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, but we believe that the information at our disposal portrays 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 some investigation, we can discern more accurate information and, like a sleuth, uncover the culprit and save ourselves. This is of course simply hubris.
Self-observation is at least partially what the language points to: we investigate ourselves. But there are limits to our claims about the reliability of our human experience. What part of the “self” comes into play is not altogether clear, but this is true: it is “subjective.” How do we examine the data? Is it real, can it be verified? Is it useful for understanding the events of past personal history as well as predicting the results of present and future actions?
Common sense demands--correctly I think--that I can only believe that what’s in front of my nose is in fact 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 only know the immediate world I can directly perceive. Unless I can verify it, all the rest is assumption. If I allow my mind to stray into the world of made-up stories, half-remembered or repressed memories, heavenly illusions or sexual fantasy, 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 when in fact it 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.
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, as in drawing boundaries for the experience I can assert as true and 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, importantly, empirical scientific evidence which, along with an understanding of the instruments of observation (including both physical sciences and psychology), allows us to test and verify our assumptions. This is also common sense.
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 describes what’s in front of his nose with similar identifiable characteristics, mass, color, along with the collection of data from my other sensations, at least 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 in order to describe a gap in our understanding. What we know empirically we neglect both in the way we conduct our lives and what we allow ourselves to believe. However, 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 lacunae in our experience where we just don’t have any reliable information. In my view it is unknown because it is unknowable. We as humans do not have the 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 physiology of our brains, our mind plays a trick; we tend to forget and set this aside. We still experience dissatisfaction with not getting 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, or book, practice, or belief system with an answer.
It doesn't even have to be a good answer. But keep in mind that at least some of the grasping answers to an existential question require suspension of belief; perhaps the answer imposes an alternative set of beliefs, and demands submission to its authority. In some sense it operates quite a bit like a narcotic or psychological addiction--the high it produces needs to be repeated in order for it to be effective.
Over many centuries, our answers have taken the form of the tribal ritual the Nepali woman I know used when she 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. In my view the solution should have been to hire a competent plumber, but the magic formula for gaining wealth was left to a witch doctor.
The other end of the spectrum of tapping into the unknown is Bob Hoffman sitting in a Berkeley coffee bar, glancing off into space and delivering a prediction 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 or she 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.
Let’s take a trip to Ojai California
This unleashed a series of events that would transform Krishnamurti’s life--Annie Besant and Leadbeater claimed that they had discovered the heralded World Teacher; they took the young man under their wing, even legally adopting him, and carefully indoctrinated him in the doctrines of Theosophy. Eventually Krishna would rebel against The Order of the Star in the East, the organization that had created and encouraged the myths surrounding his role in the Enlightenment of Man and Womankind. Rejecting the role of spiritual teacher, he set out for the rest of his life to lecture about the ruse of surrendering to the guru.
Since I first learned about him in the 70’s and 80’s, Krishnamurti always left an odd, unbalanced taste in my mouth. It was not his argument or his eloquence. On the surface I could find no fault in that. It was the way people used him. Most of these followers, if pressed, could thread their way to the end of an argument, but It was just too easy to say, in a slightly superior tone, “Read Krishnamurti. You don’t know what you’re talking about,” and walk away. They weren’t blatantly stupid and arrogant. For the most part, they just wanted to have sex with whomever they wanted or eat whatever their tastes dictated, except for the strict vegetarian who ruined his marriage to a lovely Italian woman who couldn’t give up sausages. She told me she tried, but her husband wouldn’t tolerate a mixed-cuisine marriage. (By the time of their divorce she also had a Green Card.)
It was impossible to convince this anti-authoritarian faction that the statement, “The guru says that you can’t trust the guru” is an argument from authority that should be rigorously applied equally across all the guru’s statements. When you rely on the guru to tell you that you can’t trust the guru, your decision not to trust the guru still relies on basic trust. The skepticism may have real teeth (and I think it does), but I will insist on other avenues of verification which of course merits me the label of materialist.
Why is this Krishnamurti so persuasive and appealing? First of all, what is his argument? I just did a thought experiment, not entirely rigorous but still revealing. I picked up Krishna's First and Last Freedom, and began to read. After three paragraphs, enough to catch the thread of his argument in its context, I randomly turned ahead some pages, and continued to read from the top of the first paragraph that caught my eye. I was shocked. It made perfect sense. I wasn't jarred by any abrupt shift in the argument; the tone, even the sentences maintained a conversational flow.
I might conclude that Krishna used an argument that can be succinctly stated in the three paragraphs which he repeated and riffed over and over, but that would not do justice to his rigorous self-examination or his eloquence. I went back to First and Last Freedom, and read through the chapters carefully and was moved by the intelligent, even forceful way he invites each of us into his analysis which included a thorough examination of our belief systems*, our prejudices, our sensory experience, and our past memories.
He was exhaustively thorough and doggedly insistent. He could be compassionate as well as angry or dismissive without apology. But in my view the analysis is always kept at arm’s length, or perhaps I have not read him as carefully and thoroughly as I should. He does emphasize over and over that our immediate experience has to be seen and evaluated within the context of our relationships, with ourselves, with our past, with our environment, as well as with our family and friends. He was obviously a man who investigated the prison of his own delusion, Leadbeater and Besant grooming him for the unique role as avatar for the Coming Age, but he never gets very personal or vulnerable about his own experience.
It is ironic that the man who preached that the guru is untrustworthy, himself became a guru. As much as Krishna might protest, the path to a normal life must have been difficult when he uncovered the sham that his karma had singled him out. I think he actually tried to be normal, but circumstances created a pampered life. To bolster my case that he was nothing more than a real human, he had a long term lover, the wife of a close associate. Of course he lied about it, claiming to be celibate--which leads me back to my initial problem with his analysis. “Trust me to tell you not to trust me” is the brick wall you hear in the conversation of an abusive lover.
I still haven’t really answered my own question about knowing ourselves. I’ve just pointed to 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 fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.”
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*"Belief is the central problem in the analysis of mind. Believing seems the most "mental" thing we do, the thing most remote from what is done by mere matter. The whole intellectual life consists of beliefs, and of the passage from one belief to another by what is called "reasoning." Beliefs give knowledge and error; they are the vehicles of truth and falsehood. Psychology, theory of knowledge and metaphysics revolve about belief, and on the view we take of belief our philosophical outlook largely depends.”
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (1921), Lecture. XII: Belief, p. 295
