Looking at Our Own Reality

How does our own personal sense of reality arise? The answer seems obvious, but a little reflection proves that to be too simple. The obvious answer is that we feel our own bodily sensations—and also that we, ourselves, know this, this “Here I am.” There is a distinct duality present in this simple state of self-awareness. One polarity is a sense of continuity, of persistence. I was awfully worn out yesterday, but now I’m pretty chipper. The knowledge that I was and now I am—and simultaneously aware of both—is that sense of continuity. I remember being tired; my body is now energetic. The knowledge belongs to me; it is still there. And the mere fact of forgetting doesn’t change that. Thus for instance I haven’t the vaguest of how I felt at 9:20 a.m. on July 11, 2009. Indeed 2009, which is just the other day, is a pretty fuzzy memory unless I start consulting calendars to bring some of it back. Nevertheless I feel innately certain that I was present back in that vague past. So here we have it: continuity, persistence, now tired, now chipper, but while these states cycle, something remains unchanged. That something is the consciousness of my persistence.

The other pole of this duality, of course, is change itself. There is me—and the other, the over against. The most obvious “over against” is my body. The other, greater over against has changed over time, in itself and also in relation to me. Once it was Minnesota, then Virginia, then Kansas, then Missouri, then Germany, then Hungary. My body has also changed. Once it was small and young, now it is big and old. It is still the over against because it has changed—but “Here I am” has not.

So much for the obvious. But is that sufficient to make us feel real? One way to test that is to imagine ourselves in a situation where nothing else is present but Here I am and Stuff out there, the body close and intimate, all else a step removed—pleasing when it’s edible or drinkable, dangerous when it is hard and cold. A world like that would very quickly make us feel deep anguish. The closest to a documented case like that is the life of Helen Keller—close but not quite perfect. Keller was 19 months of age when an illness deprived her of sight and hearing. As I’ve noted in this blog earlier, she was beginning to learn to speak, was imitating phrases that she’d heard. She had also learned the word for water and remembered it (as “wah-wah”) throughout her painful period of mental darkness. Until she reached age seven and finally got help, she lived in a state of powerful frustration, longing to communicate somehow by using signs and gestures. It’s not a perfect case because she had, at an early age, already discovered—not the other but the others. Her fabulous story is of the greatest value in vividly showing how vitally important for a personal sense of reality is the presence of, and communication with, other Here I am’s.

Long ago and far away I came across a great truth. I think it was in Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s Pathways Through to Space. It is that the two great paths exist for human development, one based on heightened consciousness (Enlightenment) and the other through relationship (Love). Merrell-Wolff’s path was the first; indeed it seems to rank very high among the mystics. But I’d assert that Love is prior and higher—indeed that in its absolute absence, in a world of mental darkness such as Keller experienced in childhood—the very tools for higher awareness are denied us. Language, the tool we need for the first-mentioned path, comes about because we use it to relate to other living beings just like us. It begins with that wah-wah in earliest childhood. Our personal reality depends intrinsically on relationship—as does genuine transcendence. All else is secondary.

The Buddha ranks highest in the category of Enlightenment—achieved by a great act of denial, as it were. What were the roots of that effort? Seeing human misery when Siddhartha Gautama was young: compassion. And when the Buddha achieved his aim, what did he do? Did he pass on into Nirvana? If he had done so, some farmers would have found a desiccated body under that now famous bodhi tree. But no. The Buddha returned to the world to—to communicate, to relate. And one of the great religions sprouted from that seed. No. There are no genuine solitaries high or low. Enlightenment needs its justifying polarity too. Ultimately transcendence falls apart unless there is another person out there to give this person his or her reality.

The Experience of Helen Keller

Self-observation tells us that consciousness manifests in many forms. Sharp self-awareness is rather rare. In times of stress and trouble, during infatuations, during illness, disasters, or after winning a sizeable lottery—while daydreaming, watching TV, musing at the wheel, and even doing habitual work—the self is in various states of identification. For all practical purposes, it is one with, unified with, its own experience. The sense of self is vaguely present at all times, but the consciousness of the self is dormant. It requires concentration to take control. “I had to get a hold of myself,” people say—but indicating what? They mean that they had to break the identification and become aware. With consciousness fully present—rather than held captive by experience—directed action becomes possible. Arguably a principal difference between people is the degree to which they are able effectively to detach. The word is paradoxical because, in this context, to be detached is to be present, whereas to be identified means that the self is absent in a state of semi-sleep. Shocks awaken people.

The Case

To illustrate the thesis I present the fascinating case of Helen Keller (1880-1968). Keller lost her sight and hearing in an illness at the age of 19 months. She was beginning to learn to speak, was imitating phrases that she heard. She had also learned the word for water and remembered it (as “wah-wah”) throughout her painful period of mental darkness. Thus her acquisition of language had at least begun, if only barely. Then she fell into a world of total silence and darkness. It is clear from her autobiography that she was conscious in a way—but conscious in the way I’ve labeled as identification. She felt a need to communicate and tried to do so with some success by using signs and gestures—pushing, pulling, imitating the motions of cutting bread to get bread, and so on. She felt powerful frustrations. And she enjoyed sensory experiences using her remaining powers of movement, smell, and touch. But full consciousness dawned in her only as she was approaching her seventh birthday. This happened while she felt the flow of water on one hand as her teacher, Anne Sullivan, spelled out the word for water with finger-motions on Helen’s other hand. Suddenly Helen understood. This was a revolutionary and dramatic experience for her! As soon as she had understood that a certain pattern of finger-touches stood for water—and that the experience of water thus had a name—her heroic and splendid career began. She had been enabled to experience abstraction. As she put it later, “The mystery of language was revealed to me.”

Discussion

Let us ponder this mystery, the mystery of naming. It consist of the association of two radically different phenomena with one another. In Keller’s case the two were the flow of water and a series of touches. Her mind made the conjunction: this is that. Her power of consciousness grasped this difference and sameness. But the association was presented to her by another person, and repeatedly, until Keller “got it.”

Keller’s experience, of course, was of a fundamental type, akin to something like the taste of chocolate. To convey what any taste actually is using words alone comes down to empty gesturing unless the other party shares the experience. But if the other does, just naming it suffices. In Keller’s case, one cannot say much more than simply to assert that such an association, between this and that, is obviously possible; we’ve all experienced it. But why then was this particular experience so revolutionary in Helen Keller’s case? During her long period of silence and darkness, she had already begun to use a kind of language—a language of motions. Why did her pushing (to signal “go away”) and pulling (to signal “come”)—and the discovery that these signs got appropriate responses—not give her the grand experience of understanding that a signed word gave her later?

My guess is that the discovery, the mystery of language, is the discovery of abstraction—but also that abstraction really points at something more than merely “abbreviation.” The motions she used earlier were such abbreviations, but they didn’t give her that moment of Aha! It seems that the abstract points to or reveals some aspect of another reality which, by means of the abstraction itself, suddenly becomes perceivable. Thus the emotion Keller felt came from the sudden opening to the dimension of Intelligence. In her own report, she spoke of having a feeling of suddenly remembering something long forgotten. Pushing and pulling were too closely associated with the physical facts of go-away, come-hither to serve the purpose of abstraction. The word “water” spelled with fingers, however, did have this alien quality of otherness and therefore its magical effect. The finger-spelling was radically different from the flow of water Keller actually felt on her other hand. An effort of inner linking took place. A new world opened.

The word “symbol” derives from the Greek word meaning “sign.” Language provides an alternative world of signs for every conceivable aspect of reality. By its very nature, language is arbitrary, illustrated by the fact that humanity uses many different languages. This quality, this arbitrary assignment of this for that, where the this has no resemblance whatever to the that, demands a corresponding motion or act by the perceiving intelligence, a perceptive act. When this act takes place effectively, the self awakens to a power dormant until then. The mystery of language, therefore, appears to be its power to evoke a recognition of meaning.

Curiously the perception of meaning, like the taste of chocolate, is a primordial experience we can’t describe. In a manner of speaking we acquire meanings long before we do. For most of us the recognition of abstraction is not an explosive experience, as it was for Helen Keller. Meaning is intrinsically associated with naming. For the child, early on, a table covered with objects is just a sensory landscape without meaning until the child discovers that that red object over there is called a “cup.” Once the object and the symbol are connected, the cup has meaning even as all the other stuff remains a landscape. “Buckle, Mami,” one of my daughters used to say in her crib, still tiny. She meant her bottle. Her hunger, her desire to have some milk, had been resolved into a clear meaning with a name. She had acquired a power more discriminating and efficient than simply crying.

Language awakens intelligence by separating the self and its surroundings (including its internal experiences like pain or pleasure) into a triad of relationships: there is the self, there is the object, and there is its abstract representation—its meaning. And meaning, to be sure, is a deeper concept than mere abstraction. Using that representation, the child can understand the object and, in turn, manipulate it in the mind itself and in communication with others. But using this insight, the self itself becomes an object of thought. An inchoate sensation becomes me; me becomes Jane, initially. Later, more ceremoniously, the last name is added: me becomes Jane Xavier.

Now the chief lesson I draw from this case is that language is a tool, a means. The capacity for understanding must be present and is innate. It isn’t language that produces intelligence but intelligence that manifests by using a tool. And once the tool is present, the powers of the intelligence are able to expand.

Understanding and Intellectual Grasp

At bottom understanding and intellectual grasp are really one and the same thing. Or are they? I ask the question for a reason. The understanding of something often dawns in my mind before I’ve actually articulated it, thus taken it apart into pieces and realized, in detail, how everything fits together. But even before I do that, I’ve already understood the object. Conversely, understanding may also arise suddenly from the puzzled handling of details, looking at them this way, that way. All at once I understand.

This is a peculiar experience. What is this feeling? What actually happens? Mysterious. A man will say: “Well, I just knew.” If then you ask him how he knew, you may sometimes trigger a retrospective inspection of the process; the account of it will depend on the ability of the person to see into his own innards. The speaker will begin to trace a process backward. We usually call it a process of thought, but the point I’m after is that thought is often not involved at all.

The man in this case will begin his account by examining slices of the process one by one, isolating them from one another. Put another way, the speaker reviews his stream of experiences over time and notes his reactions one by one, almost second by second. When this process originally took place, the speaker did not engage in conceptualization—did not use tokens, words. The process worked beneath the level of speech or its equivalent, thought. The speaker nonetheless absorbed the events and his reactions to them. Translating that process into speech (spoken or silent) is really what results in intellectual grasp. But we know the thing, we understand it, before we ever proceed to its mental formulation into concepts. Like many other people, I often don’t know what I know until I write it down, but, paradoxically, I knew that before I wrote it. But after writing I possess it more fully and completely. But what is it that I possess? It is a structure of symbols in meaningful relationships. And I’m persuaded by my experience that the meaning and the relationships preexisted my grasp of them. Hence the world is intelligible. Some disagree. They assert that no meaning exists out there, none whatsoever. We impose it by using speech. How we act on our understanding may, of course, depend on which fork of this divide we take.

Experiential footnote: I grasped this process years ago once when our washing machine broke down. I disassembled it enough to expose its pulleys, blocks, and belts. I stared at it for at least half an hour totally absorbed, fingering this lever, pushing that belt. I wasn’t analyzing. I examined the assembly by looking at it, now this part, now that; I was letting my mind absorb the picture by focusing on it in great detail. Suddenly, with a flash, I understood the damn thing. I just knew. Then I trusted myself to proceed to the next steps of disassembly—because I now had a feel for how the thing actually worked. The conceptual process began only as I proceeded. In two hours I had the thing running again.

Now putting things this way may seem to support the modern line of thought that intellect and consciousness are the consequence of language, that language could and did simply evolve by accidental changes in our throat so that simple grunts could become much more elaborated sounds. Etc. I take exactly the opposite tack. I think that our innate endowment, what I call soul or self, has hierarchically overlaid powers each seeking expression and realization as soon as it has the modes to actualize itself. Thus understanding is the foundation; the symbolizing intellect is the next higher layer; above the intellect yet other powers await unfolding. In the species homo sapiens nature managed to implement the means by which intellect could function, but it did so because a fierce energy within the self sought expression and exploited the accidents of nature. It is the intellect that creates language, not language the intellect. Same facts, different interpretation.

One corollary of this view is that understanding—in a pre-verbal sense—is present in animals, indeed in all living things, as well; so is, I would assert, the potential for our kind of consciousness. This view is consistent with my experience with Winston, our much loved labrador in Minnesota, who certainly possessed much understanding. I would also point those interested to the fascinating story of Helen Keller, a person whose physical defects prevented her exercise of an innate facility until rescued by Anne Sullivan. This is a fascinating and highly illuminating case. I’ve written it up—its here on this computer somewhere. This post suggests that I ought to find that analysis and present it in the future. It makes my case.