READ: Hidden or unseen?
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking-by-writing recently. I’ve been getting around to figuring out what I want to write about in my own chapter for the edited book I’m working on for Equinox. It’s called Religion and the Sense of Self, and I have had a lot of ideas spinning about my head about contemplation, meditation and identity. I’m very happy with the draft I’ve got at the moment, but it’s a bit heavy for a blog post with a non-academic audience. I did, however, want to share just a few ideas that I’m working with, and today I want to share one in particular.
The first issue to consider when thinking about contemplation is that it takes place in an unseen space. We can’t ever really know what’s happening in someone else’s body, but at least with asana we can see the shapes they make, or with pranayama we can hear the flow and pauses of the breath. Contemplation can be found in numerous forms of practice, but they are all defined by getting quiet, withdrawing, and turning inwards to find something unseen within. Because of this, my chapter starts with a point made by the philosopher of science, Martin Nitsche (2020). He says that there are various ways in which religion is considered to involve the invisible, the unknown and the unknowable.
In almost all cases, Nitsche points out, what is invisible is often assumed to be hidden. We assume that there is some essential reality that is veiled by the mundane world.
The concept of an essential but hidden and underlying order to existence is fundamental to many philosophical traditions, but particularly in South and East Asia. Anyone with even a basic understanding of yogic philosophy will be familiar with this concept and what it tells us about the nature of true selves, mundane selves, and the veil of everyday existence that cloaks the former in the latter.
“By far the greater share of Indian religious systems, to the exclusion of Buddhism, have understood the experience of transmigration to have at its center an enduring agent, or at any rate a “central something,” that is continuously present, retains its identity as it passes from one life to the next, and witnesses repeated sickness, aging, and death ad infinitum.” (Jones 2020, 3, emphasis added)
So one way to understand South Asian perspectives on religion, reality and the self is to think about two contradictory and fundamental ideas. Firstly, we have the Vedic belief that there is a core self that transcends lifetimes, and contemplation can help us be more authentic to that true self (Dwyer 2020, 13). Secondly, we have the Buddhist belief that what passes from lifetime to lifetime is just an essence or a pattern of being, and really not a self at all. There certainly isn’t a ‘true’ self that is revealed in meditation (Jones 2020, 2). There are notable exceptions to this divide, but in general, this is a useful summary of a debate that has lasted for thousands of years.
As Nitsche (2020, 550) also says, “If we attempt to think invisibilities from hiddenness, the path of thinking leads us to the contexts of appearing.”
What he means by this is that if we assume that something unseen is hidden, then all our thoughts inevitably start to revolve around the idea of uncovering and revealing. That might sound obvious, but not everything unseen is hidden. Some things don’t really come into being until we look at them.
This sounds like nonsense. After all, if I reach out with my eyes closed and touch my desk, it is definitely there, and very solid. But philosophers of science would point out that if we were tiny enough, we would pas right between the atoms of the desk without pausing, and if we try to find the desk using specific kinds of frequencies, such as x-rays, the desk becomes a mere shadow apart from any nails or screws that hold it together.
So how does this help us understand what’s happening in contemplation?
I don’t know if there is a fundamental truth to reality. I don’t know if, in the depths of meditation, we are listening to the still quiet voice of the self, or God, or the universe itself. As a researcher, and as a human being, I’m much more interested in other people’s opinions on that sort of thing, because of what we can learn by exploring those diverse perspectives.
First, I can visualise the yogic path of contemplation. Those practices are about travelling through a series of layers: we steadily peel back the veil of living, bit by bit, and somewhere right in the centre is a tiny seed of who we really are.
The self we discover in yogic contemplation is both unseen and hidden.
Next, there’s the Buddhist path of contemplation. Those practices see the present self as small and the real self as vast as the universe. We just can’t squeeze the larger self into our lives in any meaningful way, so better not to try, so we don’t get caught up in more illusions. Just focus on letting go and letting be.
The self of Buddhist practice is unseen but that’s because it is fundamentally unseeable.
Again, this is simplifying thousands of years of debate and discourse. But understanding these two polar perspectives is a start.
Finally, I remember all the conversations I have been having with philosophers of science. Their practice is their research. It says that everything – inside our bodies and out – is so much more huge than we can comprehend. In that reality, we are folded into the universe, and it is folded into us, enmeshed and entangled in a million ways.
Standing between the yogic and Buddhist selves, that self can be seen, but only in glimpses and flashes, and it can be known in partial ways, but never in full.
In fact, the more I spend time with philosophers of science, the more comfortable I become with their perspective that there is nothing fundamental, obvious or hidden about the universe. By any meaningful measure, physical universe is not an infinite container, it’s even bigger than that.
Anyway, now I’m looking out (pun intended!) for more examples of what is unseen, what is hidden, and what is unseeable. And as ever, not knowing what I’m looking at is at least as productive as being sure of what I’m seeing. That, I’m sure, Buddhist teachers are absolutely right about: learning to sit peacefully with not knowing – in ourselves and in others – is a useful practice for any contemplative practitioner, and a vital one to master if you want to teach.
Sources
Dwyer, Rachel. 2020. "Atman." In Key Concepts in Modern Indian Studies, edited by Gita Dharampal-Frick, Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach and Jahnavi Phalkey, 13-16. New York, USA: New York University Press.
Jones, C. V. 2020. "Introduction." In The Buddhist Self. United States: University of Hawaii Press.
Nitsche, Martin. 2020. "The Invisible and the Hidden within the Phenomenological Situation of Appearing." Open Theology 6 (1): 547-556.