Knowledge and Reality
Crafting common sense
Aldous Huxley: “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
Encounter
You walk into a favorite forest. Obviously, it is not the only forest near your home. Yet this territory of the woods, like many others, is commonly referred to as Nature. On this planet, there are sundry more woods that comprise the vastness of Nature, and while we may not always go to these particular woods, there is little doubt what we mean by saying that we are heading into Nature in contrast to taking a walk in the city.
In our walk we sense the vast array of Nature’s inhabitants—trees, underbrush, flowers, weeds, dirt, insects, wind, birds, along with all the colors, contours, sounds, odors, etc. The surrounding atmosphere constantly occupies our senses as we walk. As we saunter, gaze, smell and listen to nature about us, a distinctly sensual pleasure swell in us.
Let us analyze this excursion. We have the capacity to sense the natural world. We make contact with its inhabitants and know it. That contact is simply called sense knowledge. My mind goes from a potential state of knowing to one of actual knowing. To refine this process more: my senses contact Nature and this interaction enables my intellect to assimilate Nature about me. From this brief experience, I gain some knowledge of Nature.
Knowable reality and the knowing agent
How this change from unknowing to knowing is possible requires two factors. One from Nature and one from the knower. First, Nature is progressing through her seasons as I walk through the woods and view this procession. It did not start with my entrance, nor will it cease when I depart. Nature is a power onto herself, independently of my presence. Her manifesting stages of growth and decay do not depend upon my presence or anyone else’s for that matter. Nature is not statically real as a statue in the town square but dynamically real full of surprises.
This power to exist and undergo tangible changes means that Nature’s inhabitants exhibit their reality. If Nature lacked this power, then she would be unknown. Moreover, this power to exist demonstrates that natural things are capable of being known, they are, in a word, —intelligible. The real equals intelligibility.
The second factor for my knowing is my innate apparatus: mind and senses. Just as Nature has the power to reveal or manifest, I have the power to perceive and apprehend. Although Nature exists and can be known, she remains unknown unless I apply my powers to her. I must desire to change from potentially knowing Nature to actually knowing her. When the receptive power of intellect, by way of the senses, meets the expository power of nature, we have the interaction called knowledge. Knowledge means that I apprehend and become the reality. Now Nature exists in two spheres, as it were, on her own and equally in my intellect.
A curious feature of knowing is that the more I apply my mind and senses to Nature the more she seems to reveal about herself. My knowledge of the real is my responsibility. By my attentive presence over time, learning occurs.
Increasing knowledge
As I delve into Nature and study it through the seasons, certain knowable aspects emerge. These aspects in the real were always there but could not be immediately discerned until I took the time to become more familiar with her ways. In studying Nature, my mind is in the act of discernment; the implicit becomes explicit. As time goes on, the exposure my mind and senses to Nature apprehends more of the subtle aspects and their associations. My personal growth in knowledge about Nature depends less on the Nature’s power to reveal herself than my power to discover and discern what is existing before me. It is the nature of Nature to reveal herself—but only to those who have a discerning attentiveness. Nature always speaks, as it were, and I have to listen or miss the message.
Paying attention
To my attentive eye, I gradually discern that Nature is not haphazard. Both in general and in exquisite detail, I apprehend through continuous exposure, say, to pine trees, certain orderly processes, recurring alterations, patterns of growth, size, cycles, interdependence, quality and quantity, aberrations, symbiotic connections, and more. These insights or ideas are not invented out of thin air; rather these empirical descriptions are the intelligible aspects of the complexity of real pine trees. These descriptive words are my verifiable attempt to explain the reality of pine trees. When I compare pines, say, with other woody plants of the forest, my knowledge broadens more to apprehend and distinguish their similarities and their differences. A science of forestry is burgeoning.
All this growth in knowledge occurs over time because I have an innate capacity or potential for knowing the real. It is the objective real that reveals its truth, not the knower that would impose or presume. But I must assiduously apply myself to the subject matter, become an attentive discerner, or my knowledge stays superficial. In this way, the various sciences emerge as I explore Nature’s variety.
My mind and senses derive their knowledge of the real from the real; they don’t make it up. No doubt, I can forget, make mistakes, misjudge, impose, overlook aspects, but the combination of continual exposure to the facts and my vigilant attention helps in correcting, clarifying, and confirming the truth of the matter. The joy of knowing comes from knowing reality not as I would like it to be but as it truly exists.
As the Ancients put it:
veritas sequitur esse rei (truth follows upon reality)
The utility of knowledge
Given my state of knowledge regarding pine trees, I can reach out and apply that knowledge to other spheres of human activities. I can distill the resin, for example, and use it; I can chop down the tree for Xmas decoration; I can slice the tree for building structures; I can use the needles for various concoctions, etc. In other words, my mind can discern the possible utility between the pine tree and practical enterprises.
The knowledge of the utility of pine trees comes less from the discernment of the pine tree as an object of knowledge but more as a possible intervention from my creative imagination. It’s not the tree that inspires utility so much as the practical bent of my desires. My imagination plays with the potential usefulness. Notable is the observation that the practical in some way depends upon the speculative. Unless I have sufficient familiarity with the nature of the trees and its inherent properties, there isn’t much to imagine. Knowledge precedes utility.
Reflecting on this wondrous experience of knowing, one can discern that amidst the variety and diversified abundance of nature and culture some enterprises would reveal a richer reality, as it were, than others. Even though one could spend a lifetime examining, say, the realm of snowflakes with their crystalline structures, the application of my mind and senses to other realities—family life, commerce, law, fine arts, etc.—would enrich me more in terms of both personal knowledge and human fulfillment.
Part II
A cosmic quest
Finally, one might venture upon the study of human nature and its implications for existence.
Raising the question of ‘why’ about human existence pertains to all cultures. We phrase this ‘why’ in different ways, such as: what’s the purpose of life? What is my origin? Where is my destiny? How best to get there? How can I be certain what is the right course for me? What’s the best lifestyle?
Then, or course, the correlative questions: what impedes my purpose? How can I eliminate these impediments? Why do people differ over human destiny? How can I prove these assertions? Why so much conflict between societies? Can what I don’t know hurt me? In response to these perennial questions classical yoga proffers at least two scriptures regarding this urgent matter: the Karikas and the Yoga Sutras.
Life’s predicament
In short, the heart of the vexing problem of life for yoga is the survey that human existence across the board exhibits a profound state of unknowing—ignorance or avidya—and, what’s tragically more in evidence, you are unaware that you are in that predicament. Double jeopardy! You don’t truly grasp your full nature, and you don’t know that it is your predicament, and thus you suffer in innumerable ways.
To put it another way: our lack of self-knowledge means we are less real than we can be, less creative than possible, less interested in life’s abundance. This also implies that our discernment of the world is less than what it can be. For all the enjoyment, sorrow, comfort, pain, thrills, distress, beauty, disappointments, and discount benefits that we can and do experience, we are light years from the unalloyed enrichment of our natural heritage. Hence, we stumble along.
The good news, however, is that our ignorance is not a total absence of reality and truth. Rather may I suggest we are more akin to near-sighted and partially color-blind individuals, with diminished hearing, slightly uncoordinated, with a little malnutrition thrown in, subject to moodiness, and easily prejudicial. Hey, things could be worse. And what makes this plight even more interesting for many persons is the conviction, for the most part, that this fine state of affairs is the way things should be and so we put up with it best we can. We tolerate our discontent.
This kind of thinking is fostered variously by the array of culture, which includes institutional religions.
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