Category: Outside In

When i recognize you as another experiencing subject like myself, i assume that you have a world just as i do. This world, when you focus on it, is full of myriad creatures and wonderful life in full color and exquisite detail. But the most amazing circumstance of all is that the whole show, including your amazement, is all going on inside your head. Your experience is generated by (arises from, is the feeling of, ….. ) the functioning of your brain.

Now, i don’t know this in the same way that i ‘know’ my own world of experience. It’s a theoretical model, part of a virtual reality scaffolded by language. But it’s the only model that makes sense of the evidence – especially the case studies collected by neurologists, which demonstrate poignantly the dependence of normal mental functioning on an intact brain. When the brain is malfunctioning or damaged in some way, its owner’s experience will be altered in a correlated way. How can we doubt that experiencing is a performance of the brain?

And since i have recognized you as a subject like me, i have to believe that my experience – my world (including ‘you’!) – is also a product of brain dynamics. I have no experience of my brain, of course, because my brain is too busy doing the experiencing to also take a role in my world. (The one thing the spotlight can never illuminate is the spotlight.) In my world, my knowledge of my brain’s activity is a theoretical model just like my knowledge of your brain’s activity. Our shared, consensual world, insofar as it is mediated by language, is the mutually reinforcing network of these models. We can maintain this virtual world because we can talk about these models among ourselves, and apply them pragmatically, with predictable results in the real world, the one in which we live and move.

Your actions in my head,
my head here in my hands
with something circling inside.
I have no name
for what circles
so perfectly.
…
This moment this love comes to rest in me,
many beings in one being.
In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
Inside the needle’s eye a turning night of stars.

— Rúmí (Barks 1995, 278)

As Evan Thompson (2007) explains, external (‘transcendent’) events are ‘given as such by virtue of the intentional activities of consciousness.’ In this sense they really are external, yet they are ‘intentionally immanent’:

their status as external events for the system (as opposed to their status for an observer of the system) is a function of the system’s own activity. Their meaning or significance corresponds to an attractor of the system’s dynamics (a recurrent pattern of activity toward which the system tends), which itself is an emergent product of that very dynamics. The external world is constituted as such for the system by virtue of the system’s self-organizing activity.

— Thompson (2007, 27)

This is another way of saying that an external event (of which a system is conscious) is the dynamic object which determines a sign to determine an interpretant which is an event internal to the system’s dynamics. This is how the Thirdness of a sign ‘brings about a Secondness between two things,’ as Peirce put it; it makes one manifest as external to the other.

The NHS translation of Thomas 67:

Jesus said, “One who knows everything but lacks in oneself lacks everything.”

DeConick’s translation:

Jesus said, ‘Whoever knows everything, but needs (to know) himself, is in need of everything.

In the Book of Thomas which is also included in Nag Hammadi codex II, Jesus says to his ‘twin’ Thomas that

those who have not known themselves have known nothing, but those who have known themselves already have acquired knowledge about the depth of the universe.

— Meyer (2005, 210)

Strangely enough, this fits with the logical sense of depth (intension), which is intrinsic or internal to a term or symbol while its breadth (extension) is extrinsic or external. Given that we ourselves are symbols, as Peirce says, ‘everything which is present to us is a phenomenal manifestation of ourselves’ (EP1:38). Its presence to us necessarily involves its otherness, its Secondness to us, its externality, while the form this manifestation takes for us arises from the depth of internality: its Firstness is the form of what matters to the bodymind. The Thirdness of the phenomenon is the sign’s act of meaning, the semiosis.

Both within and without sentient beings is in itself the whole-being of the Buddha-nature.

— Dogen, ‘Bussho’ (Abe 1992, 146)

A living organism and its life processes involve a world or nature temporally and spatially “external” to itself but “internal” to its functions.

— John Dewey (1929, 227)

Facts are living turned inside out.

— David Byrne and Brian Eno, ‘Crosseyed and Painless’

for philosophy … experience can only mean the total cognitive result of living …

— Peirce, CP 7.538

Sufi advice from Rumi:

When you learn a craft, practice it.
That learning comes through the hands.

If you want dervishhood, spiritual poverty,
and emptiness, you must be friends with a sheikh.

Talking about it, reading books, and doing practices
don’t help. Soul receives from soul that knowing.

The mystery of spiritual emptiness
may be living in a pilgrim’s heart, and yet
the knowing of it may not yet be his.

Wait for the illuminating openness,
as though your chest were filling with light,
as when God said,
Did We not expand you? (Qur’an 94: 1)
Don’t look for it outside yourself.
You are the source of milk. Don’t milk others!

There is a milk fountain inside you.
Don’t walk around with an empty bucket.

You have a channel into the ocean,
and yet you ask for water from a little pool.

Beg for that love expansion. Meditate only
on THAT. The Qur’an says,
And He is with you (57: 4).

Barks, Coleman; Jalal al-Din Rumi. The Essential Rumi – reissue: New Expanded Edition (p. 255). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Zen wisdom holds that ‘face-to-face transmission’ of the dharma can only happen between one Buddha and another. Yet there is something strange about calling it ‘transmission.’ One buddha-mind is not a bucket into which another pours the dharma; rather your teacher, by means of a turning word or some other sign, triggers your realization of buddha-nature.

Some things can only be transmitted face-to-face, such as the ‘treasury of the true dharma eye’ (Dogen) – perhaps because the two buddhas playing the roles of teacher and student must read each other’s ‘body language,’ including verbal language, in ‘real time.’ But full-time occupation with transmission of the way did not stop Dogen from reading and writing, or from guiding his students in their own reading practice, as he did quite directly and forcefully in many of his recorded talks. He learned early on from his teacher Rujing that ‘It is a mistake to regard the scriptural teachings as outside of the ancestral path’ (Tanahashi 2000, 13). So even though Zen represents ‘an independent transmission apart from doctrine or scripture’ (Abe 1985, 105), scriptural teachings are not outside of the Way as Dogen sees it.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

— Einstein (1956, 24)