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Shafts of WisdomKnowledge Beyond IntuitionNature's Intelligence and the Mind-Body Problemby Christian de Quincey, Ph.D.Two philosophers, one a scientist from the West, the other a sage from the East, were sitting on the bank of a river discussing the nature of the world. The scientist reached down and scooped up a handful of sand: “This is the stuff of the world,” he said as he let the grains slip through his fingers and vanish into the water. “Particles of matter.” The sage smiled, then without a word stood up and walked into the flowing stream. “The world is like this,” he said, standing up to his waist in the water. The scientist looked up, and slightly amused, asked, “You mean the world is basically made of water?” “No, I don’t mean that,” replied the sage. “I mean the world is like this . . .” and he moved his arms slowly through the air as if following its unseen pattern of currents. The scientist, a little puzzled, inquired: “If you mean it is made of air, or perhaps of whatever air and water have in common, then in reality you agree with me, for both air and water are made of molecules and atoms, like the grains of the sand.” The sage shook his head. “The world is not made of anything. There is nothing—no-things, just activity.” “But what is it that produces the activity, just what is it that changes?” the scientist asked. “That’s my very point,” said the sage. “We are now asking similar questions. And we must answer it is the whole world that produces the activity. The whole world moves from within itself—don’t you agree?” Modern physics has now revealed that the fundamental subatomic entities it encounters in the quantum realm are not solid “things,” but events, dynamic patterns, and processes. The characteristic of all processes is that they change. Nature is not static. It does not stand still for scientists to discover its laws like a photographer capturing an image on film. If we wish to discover fundamental laws or principles of nature we should look into the nature of change. We should look into nature to discover its underlying patterns or dynamics, to discover what it is about change, process, action, that accounts for the regularities of the world of matter and for the unpredictable irregularities of consciousness. What, in other words, is the relationship between consciousness and change, between choice and time, between matter and dynamic form? We have from Eastern traditions a whole body of knowledge built around the idea that nothing is constant, everything changes. In Hinduism, for example, this vision is expressed as the cosmic dance of Shiva, in Buddhism as the ceaseless flux of dharmas, the moment-by-moment becomingness and vanishing of the world. In Taoism, the nature of these changes is explained in terms of the principle of interaction of yin and yang. It is a principle that the Western scientific mind finds difficult to grasp since it involves intuitive as well as rational sources of knowledge. In fact, as we shall see, it even involves forms of knowing that transcend intuition. To grasp the full implications of the yin-yang principle, one must go beyond rational arguments and logical analysis, and be open to the “shafts of wisdom” of intuition, insight, and a form of paradoxical knowing best described as “not-knowing” or “no-knowledge.” It is “paradox consciousness,” involving a form of knowing prior to and transcending any abstraction, or any separation of subject from object. It is a form of knowing where the “knower” merges with, or participates with, what is known. Because of this intuitive aspect, it is not easy to convey its essence in purely rational terms. But it has its rational aspect, too, that can be discussed in terms of logic and paradox. However, discussion of the principle in rational terms cannot convey its full meaning—this can be attained only by direct experience of the phenomenon, by non-mediated immersion in the experiential moment. The main value of rational discussion of such knowing, is to point out that rational knowledge cannot be the full story, and that with an awareness of the limitations of reason one can benefit from “other” sources of knowledge. A rational objection to the principle would be that, like psychoanalysis or Marxism, it is not falsifiable, and therefore not of much use to science. Such an objection can be met on more than one front. Firstly, unlike psychoanalysis and Marxism, the principle does not pretend or claim to be “scientific” in the sense that it is the product of logic and reason. Secondly, it can also go beyond, while including, reason as a means of apprehending the world. To criticize it rationally in an attempt to falsify it is to miss the point. Its rational aspect can be fruitfully criticized rationally, it would be irrational to criticize its non-rational aspect rationally. Reason hasn’t got much to say about understanding paradoxes. However, like nature itself, the yin-yang principle does not shy away from paradoxes in its interactions. Nothing is every wholly yin nor wholly yang, each always contains the germ of its opposite. Patterns that FitNone of this is intended to belittle the value and power of reason. In fact, in many of my written works and college lectures I emphasize the importance of a rigorous application of reason to our understanding of the mind-body problem. Reason, augmented by sensory empiricism, has given us a large, highly organized, and complex body of knowledge. It allows us to understand aspects of nature as diverse as why rivers flow into the ocean, how birds can fly, the size of the Earth and how it moves around the sun, how life may have evolved from inorganic matter, how to produce electricity, from what goes on inside an atom to how a living cell manages to stay alive and reproduce itself, to the age and weight of the Earth, to how the sun manages to give off so much energy for billions of years, to how the universe may have begun and how it may end. That is really a wonderful store of knowledge. But, of course, in no case is the knowledge or understanding complete. And some, or even all, the explanations may turn out eventually to be wrong. But the point is, right or wrong, the “laws” and knowledge of science make some sense of the world we see around us; they make sense of our experiences. Scientific “laws” are means of correlating experiences and as such are essentially descriptions of observations. These descriptions are ordered into patterns. Scientific knowledge, its “laws” and its theories, is a pattern of descriptions of nature, and the more the pattern fits together the more we say we know what’s going on. But what we know is the pattern. The perennial “hard problem” or “world-knot” of Western science and philosophy is that nowhere in its patterns of explanation can we find a place for mind or consciousness. This is the notorious mind-body problem—a problem that never arose for the Chinese, for the very simple fact that they never made such a mind-body ontological separation. The Chinese Concepts of ‘Li’ and ‘Ch’i’From the time of Plato, Greek philosophy tended to split spirit and matter apart and conceive of them in some sort of opposition. But Aristotle, breaking with his great teacher, insisted that substance or matter (hyle) and form (morph) always go together. For Aristotle, form was an active principle—in-forming matter. The medieval neo-Confucian Chinese expressed a similar idea in their concepts of ch’i and li (Needham, 1977; Chan, 1986; Tillman, 1992). Ch’i refers to what we might call “matter-energy,” li is a universal organizing principle, an intrinsic patterning. Li and ch’i always go together: Matter-energy could not exist without some form or patterning, and the patterning naturally expresses itself though some substance. For the Chinese, a thing is always “becoming” itself, and at the same time changing into something else. Hence, their emphasis on “relations” and organizing principles according to which parts unite in wholes. The key word in Chinese thought, as the great sinologist Joseph Needham (1977) pointed out, is “order” or “above all pattern and organism” (p. 281). The Chinese word is li (which etymologically means veins in jade), and is perhaps best left untranslated, though it definitely has the meaning of “principle of organization” (Needham, 1977), or a tendency toward order, associated with the “within” of matter, of ch’i. The complementary concept to li, therefore, is ch’i, matter-energy, the “without,” which if left to itself would tend to run down into chaos. In the Chinese worldview, the “within” and “without,” li and ch’i, are mutually dependent. Matter-energy alone, without the organizing action of li, is unthinkable; it could achieve no form or order. And li alone, without the basis of ch’i, is likewise unthinkable. Organization has to be organization of something. The Chinese worldview was essentially organic. According to Needham, they saw the universe as not only capable of self-organization, but of realizing the highest expressions of human consciousness: Composed of matter-energy (chhi) and ordered by the universal principle of organisation (Li), it was a universe which, though neither created nor governed by any personal deity, was entirely real, and possessed the property of manifesting the highest human values (love, righteousness, sacrifice, etc.) when beings of an integrative level sufficiently high to allow of their appearance, had come into existence. This was a world-outlook consonant with science indeed . . . (1977, p. 412). In the West, however, soul or spirit was seen to be struggling with material bodies, either trying to impose and maintain order and form, or spirit was understood to be longing to escape from the imprisoning restrictions of material form. Hence Western knowledge has been afflicted with a “pathology,” what Needham called “the typical schizophrenia of Europe” (1977, p. 154)—its inability to bridge the fissure between mechanistic materialism and theological spiritualism. This antagonism between matter and spirit, between atomistic materialism and theological idealism, has left consciousness or the psyche as victim, without satisfactory meaning or explanation. The Chinese never experienced this metaphysical conflict since they viewed the world as a continuum passing from the void at one end to the grossest and most complex matter at the other—the universal energy (ch’i)-organization (li) matrix. In ancient Chinese cosmology, ch’i and li issue from the void (or the unmanifest and unknowable Tao). At its origin, ch’i is the rarest rarefied field of matter-energy, and li is the “within” of ch’i, organizing matter-energy into a growing, organic hierarchy of complexity thresholds. But the organization of ch’i is not a simple one-way process. It is also acted on by the waxing and waning oscillations of the primordial cosmic principles of yin and yang. Ch’i, therefore, is constantly in flux, undergoing endless condensations and dispersions, producing transitory vortices of complexity throughout the cosmos. These vortices may condense and disperse in a multitude of ways, but due to the organizing influence of li, there is a definite order in the formation of things. The Sung philosopher Chang Tsai underlined the eternal “becomingness” of the world, and pointed out that only by the careful examination of the cyclical nature of ch’i could we achieve what we call scientific understanding. And Taoist Chuang Tzu emphasized the cyclical and organic development of ch’i to the complexity threshold of life, and its eventual decay into death and disorder. Yet there is always the one ch’i in the universe, concentrating here and spreading itself thin over there. The Taoist and neo-Confucian use of the concept ch’i, applying it to mean matter and energy, predated by more than a thousand years their equivalence by Einstein in Europe. Today, we are inclined to accept this equivalence without much question; it almost seems obvious to us. But it is not at all obvious; it took perhaps the greatest genius of twentieth century Europe to express it formally. Chu Hsi in the Middle Ages, and Chuang Tzu hundreds of years before that, had come near to the same idea in the concept of ch’i. Furthermore, the naturalistic outlook of ancient Chinese philosophers that fostered the concepts of complementary ch’i and li is very similar to the modern view of the universe as organic and process philosophers see it. The Taoist and neo-Confucian sages developed a philosophy of nature far more aligned with modern thinking, for instance in the works of A. N. Whitehead, and some quantum philosophers such as David Bohm, than the European philosophies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, orthodox science recognizes only ch’i or matter-energy as being real (and even then, missing many of the subtle energetic patterns of ch’i). But the ideas of organicist philosophers have been filtering through into biology, physics and cosmology, where li, or non-material organizing fields exist at all levels of the organic hierarchy. In biology, for instance, such organizing “morphic” fields have been proposed by Rupert Sheldrake (1981). In China, both li and ch’i are of equal ontological and cosmic significance; neither is more real than the other. They represent the “within” and the “without,” the protopsychic and the protophysical nature of the primordial universe evident in the process philosophies of Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and Teilhard de Chardin. In Chinese philosophy, consciousness does not present the same sort of awkward problems that have befuddled Western thinkers struggling with mind-body relations. Li and ch’i are in everything, or rather everything is made of ch’i according to the organizing fields or patterns of li. As li produces more complex patterns of ch’i, matter-energy ascends the organic hierarchy until the threshold of self-reflective consciousness is reached. Thus all human mentality is the result of an evolutionary process. In the twelfth century the neo-Confucian philosopher Chu Hsi had this to say about consciousness: "Someone asked whether consciousness is an inward stirring of something spiritual or due to activity of ch’i? The philosopher answered, ‘it is not entirely a question of ch’i,because the li of consciousness exists beforehand. Li alone is not conscious, but when li is combined with ch’i, then consciousness arises. Take, for example, the flame of this candle: It is because it receives so much good wax that we receive so much light" (Chu Hsi, trans. J. P. Bruce, 1922, Chpt. 42. Quoted in Needham, 1977, p. 488). When Chu Hsi says “the li of consciousness exists beforehand,” he is referring to the logically prior necessity of li; he does not mean that li precedes ch’i in time—chronologically. The ontological complementarity of li and ch’i is apparent when he goes on to say “li alone is not conscious, but when combined with ch’i, then consciousness arises.” Both are needed: Consciousness is always embodied. When we recognize the essentially organicist thinking behind terms such as li and ch’i, we can see how the ancient Chinese managed to bridge the split—or rather avoided creating it—between the theological view of some celestial law-giver ordering things from above, and the materialist view that order arises by chance. In the Chinese view, the order and harmony in the universe are neither divinely inspired nor the serendipity of chance arrangements, but result from the spontaneous cooperation of all organisms, which follow the interior necessities of their own natures. Echoing Presocratic Anaximander’s concept of the rotating apeiron, the neo-Confucian Chang Tsai wrote: “All rotating things have a spontaneous force, and thus their motion is not imposed upon them from outside” (Needham, 1977, p. 562). This spontaneous “force” or “law” is the combined effect of li and ch’i, the Tao of all beings, and is intrinsic to them (their entelechy), whatever their level of organization or complexity. It is a natural, organic patterning of nature, rather than an imposed law. Needham (1977): "It is the law to which parts of wholes have to conform by virtue of their very existence as parts of wholes. And this is true whether they are material parts of material wholes, or non-material parts of non-material wholes. . . . 'Law' was understood in a Whiteheadean organismic sense by the Neo-Confucian School. One could almost say that 'law' in the Newtonian sense was completely absent from the minds of Chu Hsi and the Neo-Confucians in their definition of Li; in any case it played a very minor part, for the main component was 'pattern,' including pattern living and dynamic to the highest extent, and therefore 'organism'" (pp. 567-568). The terms Tao and li can have similar meanings, and are fundamental to the Chinese organismic concept of “pattern.” Tao may be understood as the Great Pattern, a way or tendency within which the innumerable conglomerations of ch’i are ordered into subsidiary patterns according to li. The complementarity of li and ch’i, of the “within” and the “without,” is fundamental to the organic nature of change in patterns anywhere in the cosmos. Organic change always arises from within. Without any transcendental supreme deity consciously directing the changes in the universe, and without leaving it all to chance or external natural laws, the Chinese Taoists and neo-Confucianists could apprehend how there could yet be complexity and multiplicity without chaos and confusion. Everything moves, acts, and reacts, and changes according to the Tao, to its own te (virtue), or li, according to the intrinsic nature of its existence—its entelechy. Li, then, can be understood to refer to an active principle in nature, “within” all things, the process that gives form to matter. But how can we know the li, and how it shapes the ch’i? To answer this, we need to shift from ordinary ways of knowing via reason and the senses, which lie at the heart of Western science and philosophy. Instead, we will have to open up to those extrarational “shafts of wisdom” of intuition and to what the Chinese called “no-knowledge.” Different Ways of KnowingIn this next section, therefore, I will explore different ways of knowing, to see how these epistemologies may complement scientific knowing—particularly how they may contribute to developing a science of consciousness. The following discussion of epistemologies is inspired to a great extent by the work of R.G.H Siu, whose 1957 The Tao of Science, an essay on Western knowledge and Eastern wisdom, is a scholarly analysis of the comparative values and validity of rational knowledge and intuitive knowledge. Knowledge is a continuum because it is a reflection of the continuum of nature onto consciousness. But when restricted to logic and rational analysis, based on a causal view of the universe where “causes” and “effects” are regarded as separate phenomena, nature is represented in our consciousness as separated facts and discrete entities—and the continuum is chopped up into little bits. This is the process of abstraction by which science selects and focuses on particular details in the search for exactness and certainty. The conventional aim of science is to build up a detailed picture of nature from these little bits that are linked together or classified according to common properties and characteristics. This method has considerable experimental value, and had it not been developed scientific progress would have been significantly retarded. But it should be realized that the little pieces from which the scientific world picture is constructed are abstractions, and the piecemeal compartmentalized view of science does not represent the unbroken continuum of nature. The preciseness sought after by science does not exist in nature. Nature has no exact and discrete entities corresponding to scientific concepts such as electrons, atoms, molecules, genes, cells, organs, and individuals. Someone accustomed to a causal and rational mode of thought may object that exactness can be observed in nature. For example, we could point to a single tree and maintain there is just one tree—no more, no less. Or we could point to ourself and say “I am one, just one, individual.” But could we look at the ocean and point to one wave and define its boundaries? Where does the wave begin, and where does it end? You may object that this is not a fair comparison, that a wave is not so much a “thing” as a process. And you would be right. A wave is a process, but so is the tree and so is your body. There are no “things” distinct from processes. To maintain that a tree or a body, or anything, is not a process is to hold onto the idea that the universe is three-dimensional instead of four-dimensional, including a dimension of time. There are no eternal things. But even supposing we were able to somehow separate space from time, there would still be no exactness in nature. Just like the ocean wave, the tree, and human bodies, have no sharp boundaries. Where does the oxygen that you breathe become “you” and no longer a separate gas? At what point is the sweat on your brow something other than “you.” What about your breakfast, is that you yet? Organisms, whether human or tree, are constantly exchanging energy and substance with their environments, and there is no exact line of separation. If we could see to the minuteness of a billionth of a millimeter, where does the tree begin and the inanimate world end? Can we say exactly when or where a molecule of carbon dioxide (roughly ten millionth of a millimeter) being absorbed by a leaf becomes part of the living chloroplast in a leaf cell? The tree is constantly drawing salts from the soil into the fibril roots, and resin oozes from the cells of the bark. Just as an electron is an abstraction representing an uncertain process, so too are the concepts of a single, separate tree or an individual human being, abstractions. The exactness and precision of rational analysis are available only in theory. The gaps between the abstractions need to be filled in by the other shafts of wisdom that do not rely on causality, and so can provide us with an unbroken reflection of nature. Science is considered objective because its knowledge is open to inspection, and is independent of any individual viewpoint. But this objectivity of science is more apparent than real. It relies on the metaphysical assumption that subject and object can be separated and studied independently—the subject by the subjective methods of introspection (a form of knowledge believed to be confined to the subject), and the object by the objective scientific methods of rational analysis and logical deduction (providing universal knowledge). This assumed duality of subject and object is, however, invalid. First, the observer (subject) interferes in an unascertainable manner with the object of investigation. Not only is the boundary between subject and object an illusion, but both subject and object are constantly influencing each other, and there is no way the subject can subtract or extract him- or herself from the environment of the object to arrive at “purely objective” knowledge. The “actualities” are there for everyone, but because of their inherent uncertainties, no two people can observe the same event. To counteract this, many observations are made and concepts and theories are formed based on probabilities. But this is not the clear objective knowledge that is the stated aim of orthodox science. Each observation is experienced by each individual observer, not by society at large. The concepts and theories are no more objective than those of other bodies of knowledge such as metaphysics, mysticism, or art, as already pointed out. And the publication of scientific theories in journals and books does not make science a public affair any more than the publication of metaphysical treaties or descriptions of mystical experience. Yet scientific knowledge is considered a public affair on the basis that being the product of rational analysis of objective evidence, it is communicable between people. This “communicability” is supposed to distinguish scientific from mystical, artistic or religious knowledge. But just how much scientific knowledge is communicable and to whom? It is fine in theory to say that scientific knowledge published in journals and books is there for everyone to inspect and acquire, but once again the theory does not correspond with reality. Scientific knowledge is not open to universal public scrutiny. The public that science speaks of is a select group of initiates—not just anyone can pick up a book on, for example, “the biochemistry of cytodifferentiation” and understand what it is about. Someone who understands and learns from such a specialist publication is unlikely to gain much information from another journal in another specialist discipline, say, particle physics. The development of science in focusing more and more on finer details abstracted from nature has resulted in scientific knowledge that becomes increasingly hidden away in a maze of specialist disciplines. The rate of progression of specialization seems exponential. In the eighteenth century, it was still quite possible for a well-read citizen to encompass the entire spectrum of the sciences and a lot more besides. One could be an authority on mathematics, astronomy, as well as philosophy, art and theology. By now, specialization has increased so much that no one person could possibly read through even a fraction of the published literature. No one researcher could possible have an inkling of what researchers in all the other fields are doing. To get at all this knowledge, and to correlate it into a coherent description of nature is nowadays impossible. And even if there were some supergenius who could get it all together, how much would that person really know? How much knowledge has been communicated in contrast to rumor or hear-say evidence, no matter how “authoritative”? It would be one thing to transfer the store of information in thousands of scientific publications to the consciousness of the supermind, but it would be altogether something else to learn to operate the technology for investigating the fine, abstracted details. Take, for example, something as basic as the electron. The supergenius may have read all the relevant literature, but until he or she has actually assembled the required apparatus, prepared the experiments and observed the indirect evidence for him- or herself, knowledge of even the existence of the electron remains just sophisticated and authoritative rumor. How can scientific knowledge, which consists of an increasing number of specialized compartments—each focusing on esoteric details abstracted from nature—be considered a public affair, universally communicable? Since the vast majority of people are excluded from scientific knowledge because of their unfamiliarity with the subject matter, it is no more objective than the knowledge of the mystic or the shaman. Each requires a process of hierarchic initiation before the knowledge is available. The methods of initiation may be different—logical analysis and rationality in science, intuition and insight in mysticism—but the availability or scientific knowledge and mystical knowledge is the same. Young students of science must learn the ropes for themselves, guided by reason and logic, just as aspiring mystics must develop meditation, guided by extra-rational experience. Each can be helped on the way by teachers who have already got the relevant knowledge, and can indicate the path to progress. In each case, until the students go through the initiation process themselves the knowledge remains just rumor. Something else often overlooked as a result of the dominance of rational thought in science is that the “public” science speaks of is confined to the consciousness of human beings. At first glance, this point may seem so obvious that it is irrelevant. From the scientific or rational viewpoint, of course, all other animals and the plants are excluded from the public to which scientific knowledge is communicated. For how would you communicate the theory of relativity to a dog, or transmit the concept of genetic mutation to a drosophila fly or pea-vine? These creatures can’t think; they have no rational faculties. The sharing of knowledge is limited to human consciousness because other creatures are incapable of understanding. If |
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