Knowing from the Inside - part 3

So last time I imagined a world in which there are hidden (to the senses) insides to everything. Every thing has an inner being or life. The Insiders, who are the inhabitants of this world, say that everything has a subjective existence and that this is what that thing really is. Knowing only the external aspects of something would tell you practically nothing of importance about it and, in fact, could be seriously misleading. So, if external appearances are not the way to really know something, like a tree, how do the Insiders get to know anything?

Well, in our scientific world we’re so used to knowing something by considering its outsides. In the case of the tree this means its appearance and the appearance and function of all the parts (cells etc.) of a tree if you were to take it apart. Science tries to know things by taking them apart and then looking at how they work – by function. We treat the tree as an object, which is nothing more than a collection of smaller objects (such as cells, molecules, and atoms.) But, in the Insiders world, this is not considered to be knowing the tree, because just as all of your cells don’t tell us about you as a subjective being, so the tree’s parts don’t tell us about the trees subjective being.

To know anything in the Insider’s world, you’d have to know it from the inside. You’d have to get to know its insides from your own insides – a kind of contact of insides would be needed – like a kind of empathy. In my imagination I see that this would be equivalent to treating a tree like a person. You would have to enter into a relationship with the tree. We all know that relationships are two way streets – the tree would have an impact on you, and you on it, and that impact would be felt on the inside – in feelings, thoughts, and intuitions.

For an Insider, when faced with a tree, they would have to assume that some of what is going on inside of them has to do with the tree. We could call this “subjective data” about the tree. Yes there would be sensory data revealing the outsides of the tree – they can see, hear and smell the tree - but there are also thoughts, ideas, feelings and intuitions arising. And just like getting to know a person is fraught with problems of projection – where you see something in them which is really a part of you – so it is with the tree. So the difficulty would lie in distinguishing real subjective data about the tree, from random thoughts and feelings going on in the Insider and relating more to say their difficult childhood than the tree. However, the Insiders have become very adept at this kind of distinction.

In fact, the more you think about this, the more you realize that it goes much further than this – it would have to. If we assume that inner contact is possible (or even unavoidable), it’s not clear that anything that arose inside the Insiders could be entirely unrelated to what’s around them. The Insiders are constantly in inner touch (in relationship) with their environment and who is around them (and everything is a who not a what). In fact, they see that all of their experience is arising in the context of a living inner relationship with others. Insides are constantly making contact and interacting with other insides. They experience that they’re not really separate from each another or any thing. In their inner world, nothing arises in a vacuum – in a separately exiting self. It is a world of connectivity and process.

The Insiders have a worldview in which the fundamental element is relationship - they see themselves as embedded in a web of inner connections and knowing. In the scientific worldview (of the Outsiders), the fundamental elements of the universe are static and separate objects, but to the Insiders this is just an appearance and not a reality. Since relationship is a dynamic quality - relationships are constantly changing and evolving - the Insiders universe is dynamic. It is a universe of process – constantly arising, constantly evolving, constantly becoming.

The inhabitants of this imaginary world still use science and its discoveries – it’s not like they deny that outsides exist and are useful, they just don’t treat science as a primary way of knowing. Without being tempered by the inner knowing, science is seen to be highly dangerous to the individual, others, and the environment in general.

Well, I suppose it’s time to wake up from this other-worldly dream. From the traditional scientific view, the Insiders world is ridiculous - a fantasy. In reality, I am an object in a world of objects, and I just had some spurious firings of neurons that somehow imagined or dreamed another kind of world. I suppose there is another other possibility: it could be that I’m really an Insider who is dreaming a world of objects most of the time, and I just had a few moments of clarity – I woke up for a few moments to imagine the world I really live in. Not sure if I can really tell which of these possibilities is correct. But I certainly know which “reality” I’d prefer, and perhaps it’s really my choice.