Analytical thought is fatal to intuitions of integral thinking
Aldous Huxley
The true opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but deception.
Knowledge is a person’s understanding of reality, of the self, and of the relationship between the two. Experience is perhaps the purest form of understanding, and understanding, in turn, gives rise to knowledge. Ignorance is simply the absence of knowledge, it leaves open the possibility of discovery and truth. Deception, however, replaces reality with falsehood. Being deceived and existing within a false reality is worse than being ignorant.
Language and thought are indispensable tools for developing knowledge through learning and communication. Yet they function differently when applied to concrete objects than when applied to abstract ideas. Concrete entities—a tree, a flower, a stone—can be seen, touched, and directly experienced. Because they engage the senses immensely, they produce a relatively complete perception, making our understanding of them clearer and less ambiguous. Here words merely label the mental experiences of these objects. The concreteness of the experience will limit the extent to which language could distort the nature of these entities.
Abstract ideas, such as justice and liberty, are different. They may be deeply experienced by the human mind, yet they cannot be physically touched, directly measured, or fully described in mathematical terms. They can be communicated through language, examined through logic, and approached through thought, but only within certain limits.
Whenever an experience or idea is translated into language, some part of it is inevitably diminished. To place something within the boundaries of words, we must simplify it, emphasize certain aspects, and leave others unexpressed. This reduction is inherent to language itself. The loss becomes especially profound when language attempts to capture ideas that exist only as deeply lived experiences within the human soul. Language can point toward them, but it can never contain them in their entirety..
ஓ… ஓ… உயிரே… இது போதை நேரம், எதுவும் பேசாதே
Dhanush
When language and thought reduce an idea beyond a certain threshold, a profound reversal can occur. Rather than illuminating the idea, language may begin to obscure it. Instead of informing and expanding knowledge, it can distort, mislead, and ultimately deceive. The result is a paradoxical impoverishment of knowledge, a form of deception: a person may emerge less informed through language and thought.
Five ideas are especially vulnerable to this limitation: God, love, happiness, meaning, and consciousness. They represent the highest forms of human experience, buried in the depths of our soul, pervading it entirely, yet none possesses a tangible form in the physical world. Words and symbols are often used to describe —as we are doing now—but they cannot fully convey their essence. At their best, words can only direct a person towards them; they cannot produce understanding. In matters such as these, what remains unspoken is often more significant than what is expressed.
Thou Before Whom All Words Recoil
Adi Shankara
These five realities do not exist in isolation, they coexist, each capable of creating the others. A mother, overwhelmed by love as she beholds the sublime beauty of her child, encounters within that moment God, happiness, and meaning. A charitable person, giving unconditionally to the world, discovers happiness and, through that act, comes to know God, love, and meaning. A person grounded in faith likewise finds within it meaning, love, and happiness. Each of these realities seems to contain the others, as though they are different expressions of a single, deeper human experience. Yet words and symbols cannot fully wrap such realities, and their inability to capture what transcends them may even mislead the mind into mistaking what cannot be adequately expressed for what does not exist.
There is one other idea that is even more baffling than these five. It is a paradox, for it is both experienced and never experienced during life. It is also a potential, for it is neither present nor ever absent during a living moment. Death is not merely the cessation of a heartbeat or the loss of brain function. It is an idea that may be best understood as the absence of the five realities we have described: God, love, happiness, meaning, and consciousness. A person is most alive when any or all of these are present. Yet death occupies a unique place among human experiences. No person in the history of world has ever experienced death, although every one of us has witnessed death. It is at once the most familiar and the most inaccessible of all realities – concrete in its appearance, abstract in its essence, and perhaps the sovereign of all conceptual forms.
References:
- Being mortal. Atul Gawande
- When breath becomes air. Paul Kalanithi
- Two sources of religion and morality. Henri Bergson
- Perennial philosophy. Aldous Huxley
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