Knowing and Seeing

Before studying the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism, we have to deal with the question of how we can make any comparison at all between an exact science, expressed in the highly sophisticated language of modern mathematics, and spiritual disciplines which are mainly based on meditation and insist on the fact that their insights cannot be communicated verbally.

What we want to compare are the statements made by scientists and Eastern mystics about their knowledge of the world. To establish the proper framework for this comparison, we must firstly ask ourselves what kind of ‘knowledge’ we are talking about; does the Buddhist monk from Angkor Wat or Kyoto mean the same thing by ‘knowledge’ as the physicist from Oxford or Berkeley? Secondly, what kind of statements are we going to compare?

What are we going to select from the experimental data, equations and theories on the one side, and from the religious scriptures, ancient myths, or philo- sophical treatises on the other?

This chapter is intended to clarify these two points: the nature of the knowledge involved and the language in which this knowledge is expressed.

Throughout history, it has been recognized that the human mind is capable of two kinds of knowledge, or two modes of consciousness, which have often been termed the rational and the intuitive, and have traditionally been associated with science and religion, respectively.

In the West, the intuitive, religious type of knowledge is often devalued in favour of rational, scientific knowledge, whereas the traditional Eastern attitude is in general just the opposite. The following statements about knowledge by two great minds of the West and the East typify the two positions.

Socrates in Greece made the famous statement ‘I know that I know nothing’, and Lao Tzu in China said, ‘Not knowing that one knows is best.’ In the East, the values attributed to the two kinds of knowledge are often already apparent from the names given to them. The Upanishads, for example, speak about a higher and a lower knowledge and associate the lower knowledge with various sciences, the higher with religious awareness. Buddhists talk about ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ knowledge, or about ‘conditional truth’ and ‘trans- cendental truth’. Chinese philosophy, on the other hand, has always emphasized the complementary nature of the intuitive and the rational and has represented them by the archetypal pair yin and yang which form the basis of Chinese thought. Accordingly, two complementary philosophical traditions- Taoism and Confucianism-have developed in ancient China to deal with the two kinds of knowledge.

Rational knowledge is derived from the experience we have with objects and events in our everyday environment. It belongs to the realm of the intellect whose function it is to discriminate, divide, compare, measure and categorize. In this way, a world of intellectual distinctions is created; of opposites which can only exist in relation to each other, which is why Buddhists call this type of knowledge ‘relative’.

Abstraction is a crucial feature of this knowledge, because in order to compare and to classify the immense variety of shapes, structures and phenomena around us we cannot take all their features into account, but have to select a few significant ones.

Thus we construct an intellectual map of reality in which things are reduced to their general outlines. Rational knowledge is thus a system of abstract concepts and symbols, characterized by the linear, sequential structure which is typical of our thinking and speaking. In most languages this linear structure is made explicit by the use of alphabets which serve to communicate experience and thought in long lines of letters.

The natural world, on the other hand, is one of infinite varieties and complexities, a multidimensional world which contains no straight lines or completely regular shapes, where things do not happen in sequences, but all together; a world where-as modern physics tells us-even empty space is curved. It is clear that our abstract system of conceptual thinking can never describe or understand this reality com- pletely. In thinking about the world we are faced with the same kind of problem as the cartographer who tries to cover the curved face of the Earth with a sequence of plane maps. We can only expect an approximate representation of reality from such a procedure, and all rational knowledge is therefore necessarily limited.

The realm of rational knowledge is, of course, the realm of science which measures and quantifies, classifies and analyses. The limitations of any knowledge obtained by these methods have become increasingly apparent in modern science, and in particular in modern physics which has taught us, in the words of Werner Heisenberg, ‘that every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.” For most of us it is very difficult to be constantly aware of the limitations and of the relativity of conceptual knowledge. Because our representation of reality is so much easier to grasp than reality itself, we tend to confuse the two and to take our concepts and symbols for reality. It is one of the main aims of Eastern mysticism to rid us of this confusion. Zen Buddhists say that a finger is needed to point at the moon, but that we should not trouble ourselves with the finger once the moon is recognized; the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu wrote:

Fishing baskets are employed to catch fish; but when the fish are got, the men forget the baskets; snares are em- ployed to catch hares; but when the hares are got, men forget the snares. Words are employed to convey ideas; but when the ideas are grasped, men forget the words.* In the West, the semanticist Alfred Korzybski made exactly the same point with his powerful slogan, ‘The map is not the territory.’

What the Eastern mystics are concerned with is a direct experience of reality which transcends not only intellectual

thinking but also sensory perception. In the words of the Upanishads, What is soundless, touchless, formless, imperishable, Likewise tasteless, constant, odourless, Without beginning, without end, higher than the great, stable- By discerning That, one is liberated from the mouth of death.3 Knowledge which comes from such an experience is called ‘absolute knowledge’ by Buddhists because it does not rely on the discriminations, abstractions and classifications of the intellect which, as we have seen, are always relative and approximate. It is, so we are told by Buddhists, the direct experience of undifferentiated, undivided, indeterminate ‘such- ness’. Complete apprehension of this suchness is not only the core of Eastern mysticism, but is the central characteristic of all mystical experience. The Eastern mystics repeatedly insist on the fact that the ultimate reality can never be an object of reasoning or of demonstrable knowledge. It can never be adequately des- cribed by words, because it lies beyond the realms of the senses and of the intellect from which our words and concepts are derived. The Upanishads say about it: There the eye goes not, Speech goes not, nor the mind. We know not, we understand not How one would teach it.4 Lao Tzu, who calls this reality the Tao, states the same fact in the opening line of the Tao Te Ching: ‘The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao.’ The fact-obvious from any reading of the newspapers-that mankind has not become much wiser over the past two thousand years, in spite of a prodigious increase in rational knowledge, is ample evidence of the impossibility of communicating absolute knowledge by words. As Chuang Tzu said, ‘If it could be talked about, every- body would have told their brother.‘5 Absolute knowledge is thus an entirely non-intellectual