Immersion and understanding

 

December 22, 2020

A friend of mine recently said that one can’t understand anything unless one is “outside” it. 

This in response to my comment that one doesn’t understand an experience unless one is immersed in it.

The idea that we can be outside of anything raises questions. For example, when we think of physics, can we be outside of it? Physics creates us; we are always within it, even as we think of it. If metaphysics causes us to arise, and we think of metaphysics, we are still within metaphysics. And so on. The point is that it is nearly impossible to end up “outside” of anything. Transcending every boundary simply means that a new boundary has formed, expanding the parameters.

We can examine the question with a fairly simple thought experiment. I am a human. I want to understand dogs. Dogs are not human; so I am outside them. Yet by being outside them I haven’t really gained any experience or understanding of dogs at all. No matter how much I analyze their behavior, they remain dogs and I remain human; their experience will be forever closed to me. The only way in which I understand dogs is the way in which humans understand them. I can't be a dog. 

Furthermore, I’m never going to understand dogs as, for example, a rat who perceives them as a predator will. And so on. 

So the understanding of dogs, in my case, is completely subjective and doesn’t actually consist of a whole understanding at all. It is simply a different perspective.

The closest I can come to understanding the dog, in fact, would be to completely immerse myself in the idea of dog, to try to become a dog in my own experience and behavior. I don’t just have to observe the dog; in some strange and indescribable way, I have to be the dog. Native peoples have traditions of totem animals embodying this idea: the understanding is gained through immersion, by adoption of the totem's character and even body itself. 

Modern science sees it the other way around. It purports "objectivity;" yet we have all seen well enough by now that modern science throws eight pounds of baby out with every eight ounces of bathwater it touts as the answer to all and sundry. Science likes life cold and hard; but actual human beings are warm and fuzzy. To become a "scientist," to try and see things from outside, poses contradictions from the beginning. 

Even the meaning of the word understand has some contradictory properties built into it in relation to this question. To be under, in the first place, means to be lower in status than; and to stand means to be in a specific, particular position.

 So to under-stand doesn’t mean to grasp or to comprehend so much as to see one’s inferiority and acknowledge it. We're not adding complications here; just looking at some pretty basic stuff; and almost immediately we arrived a place other than where we thought we were, eh?

To understand can, by inference and etymology, be interpreted as being "immersed in, while seeing. That is to say, the idea of grasping our position, as tiny parts of a much greater whole, sensing it, experiencing it. In this sense the whole point of understanding and the meaning it embodies is in the context of immersion, not transcendence.

We could further argue that all ideas of transcendence are illusory. Every belief in transcendence is marked by the expansion of the envelope. It reminds one of the old Zen adage: once you have attained the limitless void, go further. 

Transcended the transcendence, they advise.

Immersion, to be dipped in something, is a different proposition. To be immersed in this life is the irrevocable property of our being. We only cease immersion in this particular life at the time of death; so death is the last great immersion for every creature. Until it comes, we may imagine transcendence; but these imaginations are the stuff of dreams, not the practical encounters that consciousness actually engages in.

I suppose that the tension between transcendence and immersion, between ignorance and understanding, arises from the question of whether or not we can transcend anything. 

Do we want to be different; or do we want to Be? 

Gurdjieff’s adage was never, 

“I am, and I wish to be different;” 

it was always, 

“I am, I wish to be.”

I could have it wrong, but this sounds a lot more like immersion than transcendence to me.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.