The Limits of Our Knowing
The Limits of Our Knowing
One of the challenges with the idea that we are incomplete beings is that we have almost no way of recognizing our incompleteness and the limits of our knowing from within our ordinary state. We naturally take our present consciousness as the measure of consciousness itself. We may think we know what it means to be conscious, to know reality, to love and to be present. When we think about awakening, we often simply translate it into improved versions of experiences we already know—being calmer, wiser, more loving, or attentive. We do not realize that an entirely different scale of experience may be possible.
Ouspensky writes in The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution:
"Man as we know him is not a completed being; nature develops him only up to a certain point and then leaves him, to develop further, by his own efforts and devices, or to live and die such as he was born."
The key word is possible. Nature gives us what we need to survive, reproduce, think, feel, work, form societies, and participate in the life of the planet. But nature apparently has no need to make most of us fully conscious beings. Further development is possible but not automatic. Self-remembering does not happen by itself.
Other traditions express something similar. Christianity speaks of being born again, suggesting that physical birth is only the beginning. Christ repeatedly says, Watch. Buddhism describes human birth as precious because awakening is possible, not guaranteed. The Buddha's final instruction was, in essence, to strive diligently. Sufism speaks of polishing the mirror of the heart so that it can reflect a reality that is already present.
Among our unrealized possibilities are the higher emotional and higher intellectual centers. These are not simply improved versions of ordinary emotions and thoughts. They belong to another level of perception and understanding. Ouspensky taught that the higher centers already exist and are functioning, but ordinarily we have little connection with them. Something higher may be present, but we are unable to receive it because of the wrong work of our lower centers.
This creates a peculiar problem: how can we genuinely desire something we have never experienced? We can study spiritual ideas for years while understanding them through the very mind whose limitations we are trying to transcend. This is why even a brief experience of a higher state is so important. These experiences happen in the course of our everyday lives. I remember one instance while I was gardening on a steep, rocky hill and lost my footing. I fell backwards onto the road below. I was not badly hurt, but during the moments of the fall, my sense of time and space expanded, and I was shocked into another state of consciousness that persisted for some time.
The moment we experience something instead of merely hearing about it, things change. When we return to our ordinary state, we may recognize something we could not see before: how incomplete and limited our usual state actually is.
Such experiences also change the meaning of spiritual effort. Before them, we may work because some teaching tells us we should, as if in a dark room trying to find something. Afterwards, we work because we have tasted something and know, however imperfectly, what is missing. The memory of a higher state can create a wish that intellectual understanding alone cannot produce.
This also points to the importance of a teacher. A real teacher does more than provide information or exercises. Someone who knows this territory can help us recognize what we cannot yet recognize by ourselves and may help create conditions in which we experience something new. The higher centers of the Teacher can communicate directly with our own higher centers. Left entirely to ourselves, we tend to interpret the unknown in terms of the known and put a boundary on what we can know.
A taste of something higher motivates our own efforts. Once we have experienced the difference, however briefly, we have a new scale against which our ordinary state can be measured. A new possibility is given. Its full realization is not.
The Flammarion Wood Engraving (colorized version), Unknown artist. First appeared in the book L'atmosphère : météorologie populaire, published in 1888
Comments