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.

Knowing from the Inside - part 2

In the last entry I had decided to create an imaginary world whose population of strange and wonderful beings operated in a reality opposite to that of our rational scientific view. This would include their way of knowing themselves and the world. And in that blog I said that I thought science’s assumptions about objective knowing, and its categorization of the ”subjective” as illusory, were fundamental to the scientific worldview. With its focus on the quantifiable, science has an unavoidable focus on the material world. It focuses on what we can measure and denies what we can’t. Outsides are real, and insides illusory.
So that aspect of science is what I will use to create the imaginary world. I'll call the inhabitants of our rational scientific world Outsiders, and the inhabitants of the new imaginary world Insiders. Everything is inside out. In the world of the Insiders, the outsides of things are considered to be illusory. The only reality is to be found within the subjective - on the inside. What you can measure quantitatively is seen by Insiders to be dangerously misleading (in terms of seeing or knowing reality) especially if unconnected to any inner knowing. True objectivity is to be found in what arises on the inside. I’m not saying that everything that goes on in their heads would be considered objective truth (which would be freaky), but I am saying that objective truth could be found only within – on the inside.
So, not so shockingly, the Insiders think that people are really to be known via their insides, and not by outer appearances (or what you could see with any kind of scan.) Perhaps more surprising is that, since they think that the outside appearance of everything is illusory, then everything has a hidden insides. A tree is not just a tree. Its reality lies mostly on the inside and is not confined to its external appearance (or the external appearance of all it’s parts if you dissect it). It has an inner life.
It seems to me that this would make a very different kind of world. It would be a world where nothing would be what it initially appears to be. In fact, it would be not a world of things, but a world of beings – a world of who’s and not what’s. And there would be a kind of equality (since it's all who's), which would require a kind of sensitivity to deal with and be a part of. After all, you’d never immediately know who it was you’re really dealing with.
From my perspective the next question, for next time, is how would you know anything in the Insiders world?

Knowing from the Inside - part 1

There is a basic core belief that lies behind our modern scientific worldview, which is that through analytic and rational thought we can objectively know something. The success of science and technology points to the apparently self-evident truth of this statement. We live our lives by it. We live in a world of “facts” produced by science. This would not be such a terribly bad thing were it not for a generally unspoken further assumption that has seeped into our modern worldview: the scientific approach is the only one that can lead to objective truth. Other ways of knowing are labeled as “subjective,” which has become just another word for delusion.

Thus we find ourselves in an odd place. All of us live within our subjective experience – it’s really all we know. When we see a color, say red, there’s no way to know whether someone else’s experience of it is the same as ours. Our experience is internal – it’s the only kind of experience there is. And yet, this subjective world we live in is not really real according to science. Truth lies in the material, hard, objective reality it reveals. Brain scans, which measure the external reality of our minds in terms of the brain’s electrical impulses and blood flow, are the truth about our thinking, feeling and perceiving selves. There really aren’t any invisible insides to people and things, just outsides visible to our instruments and senses.

To me this feels a lot like crawling out on a tree branch and then turning around and sawing it off. The only kind of experience we can have is subjective, and yet we say that’s not real or true. So what’s left to trust? It makes me wonder whether this scientific worldview is really true. Well, what if it isn’t? What if it’s completely mistaken? I guess the first question that would arise for me would be, “what are the alternatives?”

One way to explore that would be to take all of the characteristics of the rational scientific way of knowing the world – it’s assumptions and characteristics – and simply choose their opposites. We could create an imaginary world that works completely differently (apparently) than the one we live in. What would that world be like? I’d like to take that journey down the rabbit hole in my next blog entry…..

An Introduction

First and foremost, this is a place of play. It's a way to air one's own thoughts and experiences and to exchange insights with others. But before writing anything here, an introduction to who I am seems in order.

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My special interest is in the powerful contributions of mystical wisdom to discovering a new epistemology of wholeness. I have studied this issue for more than 10 years both theoretically and experientially.

I'm most familiar with Sufism, Islamic science, and some of the writings of Traditionalists. Of course a mystical worldview is not exclusive to Sufism, but is found (with varied interpretations) in many other spiritual traditions. Having said that, I propose that Sufism might have some unique and very useful insights toward discovering a new, more holistic epistemology.

Relative to this topic, my range of interests include:

• perennial philosophy
• integral philosophy
• traditionalism
• trans-rational ways of knowing
• inner epistemology
• symbolism, including the role of the Divine Sophia
• Sufism and its practical implications
• Islamic science (especially the principle of tawhid and its potential value to Western research practice)
• new, more encompassing research methods for Western science. In particular, I'm interested in methods that finally correlate with the findings of quantum physics...that take one beyond the ordinary epistemological confines of self, time and space
• further investigations into the new research paradigm and method proposed in my dissertation...what I currently call "Receptive Inquiry"
• contributing to discussions about reuniting science and spirituality

In this blog I will submit articles, anecdotal stories, and other miscellaneous ruminations.

If you also feel a passion for any of the topics I've outlined here, you are cordially invited into the discussion!

Debra Mater, PhD

Knowing the Universe: Robin J. Weeks, Ph.D.

This is a talk that Robin gave at a small gathering he organized in Sedona.  The film is by Connie Baxter-Marlow, co-owner of Sedona's beautiful and welcoming retreat center, The INNstitute.

The Taste of Strawberries

  (image source)

I recently re-read this lecture by Stephen Talbott entitled "Owen Barfield and the Technological Society."  In it, Talbott reminds his audience of how eloquently and urgently Barfield spoke of the necessity of learning to live in a world in which the insides of phenomena shine through the outsides.  Such a world must be taken as it is, moment to moment, through wide eyes, an open heart and an open mind.  We must come to know it slowly, allowing it to disclose itself as our intimacy with it grows.  We should know better than to ask impertinent questions and expect an honest answer, should know better than to come running at it with greedy eyes and a scalpel.  A mechanistic worldview is one that tries to find the insides of the world by taking the outsides apart, or by translating the parts into other parts.  Atomism just makes the outsides smaller while string theory just makes them weirder but the insides remain closed to our senses and our imaginations, so much so that they begin to seem like a projection of our own fancy.

To know both the inside and the outside of a thing, on the other hand, is to know it in its wholeness.  It is to know the inside as an expression of the outside and to know that neither can be fully apprehended without the other.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term "esemplastic" to describe this apprehension of the whole but it is also possible to think of it as an aesthetic knowing.  The analytical mind functions by taking things apart.  The aesthetic mind cannot function without an intuition of how things exist together, not as conglomerates, but in indivisible unity.  To alter one word of a poem, one note of a symphony is to utterly alter the meaning of each and every component of the piece and of the piece as a whole.  To alter meaning is to alter nature because what something means is what it is.  The beauty we experience in art is the necessity and harmony of relationship.  It is a view of the integral nature of a world in which everything, including each of us, has a place.

Most of us, however, do not like to be put in our place.  If our place proved too small and the world too big, we might find ourselves lost (that is if we forget or fail to realize how the whole world turns with the motion of each, single speck of dust). It is easier just to avoid the whole problem by spending a lifetime, or most of it, skimming the surfaces without ever diving into the terrifying whole.  We have an animal instinct of misguided self-preservation to keep our experience of art on the outside of ourselves by either reacting to it only viscerally or by returning as quickly as possible to our everyday surface consciousness.  Perhaps this is why many of the experiences in which we choose to indulge ourselves are designed to be no more than the action of the world's outsides on our outsides.  Experiences of this kind jolt but they do not awaken. 

Consider the fact that most of us have at least two sense memories associated with the flavor of strawberries.  There is the flavor of the fruit, itself—full and subtly varied, an expression of earth, vine, weather and season—and there is the taste of strawberry candy, of Lifesavers, soda pop and cupcake frosting too pink to believe.  This kind of "strawberry" is based on a recipe designed to suggest the flavor of fruit (in a form that, like the golem of Jewish legend, has no real life of its own) but the flavor is remade in a way that is calculated to have the maximum effect on our senses.  In this meeting of the self and the candy, both the qualities in nature that are being imitated and our responses to those qualities have been reduced to a formula.  The result is an empty shell that dissolves as quickly as the sugar dissolves in the mouth.  Another example of this kind of calculation would be the proportions of a Barbie doll or comic book heroine that are so exaggerated that they could not exist in nature (because the poor woman would be unable to stand) but that are designed to maximize certain animal responses.

Movies and TV shows are also often concocted according to a "jolts per minute" formula that calculates how often the audience should laugh, cry, shudder or scream.  We like this because our outsides are taken for a nice, safe ride around the outsides of the world while our insides remain asleep like a baby in the backseat.  This doesn't seem to us to be a problem because we think that being able to figure out how the formula works—when we explicate a poem, for instance, or analyze an artist's technique—means that we understand, that we really know the work.  The tragedy is that we apply this method, not only to works that are lifeless shells, but to works that are teeming with life and that are calling out to us to take part in the Life of the world. 

Barfield on the "Scientific Spirit"

According to Owen Barfield, in Romanticism Comes of Age, the scientific spirit "means absolute, unqualified open-mindedness.  It means the deletion of the word belief from one's vocabulary, and the readiness to unite one's sympathies temporarily with any conceivable hypothesis for which the barest prima facie case can be made out, in order to give that hypothesis a completely unbiased consideration."  He goes on to say that "if it is true that the pundits of the scientific world are now represented as 'authorities' in much the same way as the Church Fathers once were, it is also true that allegiance is only given to them because they are at any rate in some vague way believed to be really open-minded...We are determined to believe something, so we believe this."