Knowing and Not Knowing – What is Possible?

Is a chapter in the book The Buddha’s Radical

Psychology: Explorations by Rodger Ricketts, Psy.D. Copyright Rodger Ricketts, 2015. All rights
reserved. Protected by international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any manner whatsoever,or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, without express permission
of the Author‐publisher, except in case of brief quotations with due acknowledgement.
Published by Callistro Green.

Knowing and Not Knowing – What is Possible?

“Human thinking can only imagine reality, just as a portrait represents a person.
And as a portrait is not ‘the person’ it represents, likewise any theory is not ‘the
reality’ it describes. We then must humbly recognize that our minds’ coherence
and logic do not necessarily match the consistency of reality. And that also
entails that reality does ‘occur’ and that we cannot conclude it is an ‘illusion of
our minds’ simply because we cannot make sense of it.”
~ Henri Salles1

“The universe is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can
suppose.”
~ J.B.S. Haldane2

“Much exists and evolves in this world which is not accessible to our
comprehension, since our cerebral organization is primarily devised so that it
secures survival of the individual in natural surroundings. Over and above this,
modest silence is the appropriate attitude.”
~Walter Hess3

“Behind anything that can be experienced there is something that the mind
cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a
feeble reflection.”
~ Albert Einstein ~
“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of
questioning.” Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy,

In the previous chapter, we dealt with the intrinsic impossibility of

comprehending actuality through the means of our cognitive abilities. As
highlighted before, actuality is the backdrop and physical source from what we
ultimately base our subjective and conjectural interpretation of reality, which
is the fruit of a conceptualization processes. The Buddha, understanding all of
the flaws inherent in conceptualizing, would not have thought to put a label on
his teachings and, in fact, there are many texts in which he discourages
speculation about the ontology of the external world. His message was that we
should focus our awareness on our cognitive experience of life here and now.
So, although describing aspects of the ‘doctrine’ of the Buddha is a form of
conceptualizing with which we are cautious, nevertheless it helps us to better
grasp a Right View and develop confidence in what the Buddha wanted us to
understand, like a map that shows the terrain.

Construction of Reality

Since the Buddha emphasized the crucial role of our construction of

reality using our cognitive apparatus, was he teaching a model of metaphysical
idealism – a model in which no material things exist independently of the
mind? The answer is, clearly, no; the Buddha’s teachings can be better
described as a form of transcendental idealism. The crucial feature of
transcendental idealism is its assertion that, while our world of experience is
subjectively created and the ‘real’ lies beyond most of the ordinary range of our
perception and conceptualization of what can be experienced, we have our
experience only because there is the transcendentally real or the actual.
The Buddha taught that, through the khandhas, there is a vital and clear
link between the sense organs and what the sense datum is; this was not an
idealistic assertion. There is a substantial ‘environment’ with which we interact
and to which we respond. So, for the Buddha, there was no denial of the
existence of an external world as there is in Idealism. Rather, the Buddha
taught that our ignorance is the ordinary, pre‐enlightened, representational
cognitive understanding and experience of our world. We process what we
sense and then create subjective representations at the reflective phase of
experience; we mistake our interpretations of the world for the world itself –
we take our mental constructions to be the world. Ignorance is ‘seeing’ and
believing the world as consisting of discrete, static entities, both internal and
external.
Expressed in another way, Professor of Philosophy Thomas Metzinger, in
his book, The Ego Tunnel4, uses a metaphor to explain that conscious
experience is like a tunnel and, indeed, modern neuroscience has
demonstrated that the content of our conscious experience is not only an
internal representation but also an extremely selective way of representing
information – hence the tunnel metaphor. What we see, hear, feel, smell and
taste, is only a very small sampling of what actually ‘exists’ because our sensory
organs are necessarily limited and embedded as they evolved for reasons of the
organism’s survival. Our conscious model of reality is an inadequate projection
of the inconceivably richer actuality surrounding and sustaining us. Therefore,
the ongoing process of conscious experience is not an actual image of ‘reality’.

Transcendental Idealism

In transcendental idealism, that which we call the ‘external’ world – the

world we inhabit – is actually only a representation or interpretation we create
with our cognitive apparatus, not the actual reality itself. Just as, in a vaguely
similar way, a creative modern artist creates a totally different art form an
ordinary object, we create a picture of or representation of Reality which in no
way resembles it in its actuality. We can never truly know or sense Reality
because we are not only limited by, and cannot go beyond the input of our
khandhas, but our cognitive apparatus has evolved to only accommodate and
service that input. The fanciful and inaccessible nature of sense data is such
that as soon as one thinks in terms of them, one is estranged from reality. Our
entire framework of conceptual categories is only a set of representations or
pictures of reality, and the input through our sense organs is only possible
because of an integral relationship between aspects of ‘Reality’ and our sense
organs. See figure 1
 Figure 1 Simplified view of cat representation in mind

In other words, in Hamilton’s words, “[…] the reality of experience is

experiential. And the reality of Reality is unknowable in (normal) experiential
terms. The aim for the Buddhist is to understand the nature and limits of
experience by means of understanding the nature and extent of one’s subjective
cognitive apparatus. In Buddhist terms, this subjectively and objectively
correlated insight is knowing and seeing how things really are.”5
The Buddha, then, was not trying to answer ontological or metaphysical
questions, because they are not only misleading but ultimately unanswerable.
However, given our pre‐enlightened way of how we see things, we assume that
the world is as real as we cognitively construct it. We also think of the ‘self’ –
the abstracted experiencer of experience – as an individual, independent, and
continuing being in a world of other such discrete entities. However, as the
Buddha taught, since all things existing in samsara are cognitively dependently
originated, a subject‐object dualism and ultimately a miscomprehension,
‘Reality’ is not conceptually graspable or verbally articulable. When the
experiencer finally sees through the illusion of the projected dualisms and
understands the non‐substantialist nature of her cognitive world, she
experiences Nibbāna – bliss, serenity, and liberation.
Freedom from pre‐enlightened conceptuality arises when representations
are understood as creating or projecting both the sense of self and the
experience of a world where the self and the things of the world together form
the entanglement of desire. The ‘self’ is what desires, the things of the world
are what are desired, and grasping with intention occurs when the two meet in
the vorticial interplay with consciousness. This is the crux of suffering.

Support of Modern Science

Modern science supports the Buddha’s understandings about our

relationship with ‘Reality’. In his studies aiming to define and explain the
nature of a living system, the biologist H.R. Maturana comes to a conclusion
similar to the Buddha’s regarding the limits of our understanding of the nature
of experience: “The observer as an observer necessarily always remains in a
descriptive domain, that is, in a relative cognitive domain. No description of an
absolute reality is possible. Such a description would require an interaction with
the absolute to be described, but the representation which would arise from such
an interaction would necessarily be determined by the autopoietic (the natural
process which includes the potential for transformation, the creation of novelty,
from within the organization itself) organization of the observer, not by the
deforming agent; hence, the cognitive reality that it would generate would
unavoidably be relative to the knower.”6
Some consider these paradigms, including the Buddha’s, to represent a
form of Solipsism; the whole of reality and the external world and other people
are merely representations of the individual self, having no independent
existence of their own, and they might in fact not even exist. But this is clearly
a conclusion or teaching offered by neither the Buddha nor the modern
authors cited here. Instead, in all of their writings these thinkers speak of an
existing separate world; they do recognize that other humans and creatures
exist in our environment and that it is possible to empathize and interact with
them. In fact, the Buddha taught the Four Noble Truths specifically so that
other sentient beings could awaken from their ignorance and stop suffering.
What all these thinkers are claiming, and I think rightly so, is that the outer
environment is only partially accessible through the specialized doors of our
sense organs, and that the rest of ‘Reality’ is beyond the abilities of our input
mechanisms to absorb; all this leaves us with a very limited cognitive
construction of Reality.

In fact, scientific evidence has established the limitedness of the human body
in its ability to sense the larger environment. For example, the vibration
frequencies to which the human ear is sensitive are in the range of
approximately 20 to 20,000 Hz (hertz, or cycles per second), and this band is
just a narrow slit in the total spectrum of sound and vibration. Also, there are
many types of environmental factors (like radio waves, magnetic fields, inert
gases, etc.) that our bodies are completely insensitive to, and cannot detect at
all. So it is clear that there are significant limitations to our senses, and that
there are an incredible number of things we can neither perceive nor even
detect. The theoretical physicist Wolfram Schommers also postulates that only
some information of the possible external reality flows into the body of the
observer through his/her sense organs and that the brain ‘forms’ a picture of
that reality. This process is a transformation of representation of the objects in
the outside world. On one hand, we have the ‘Reality’; on the other hand, we
create a picture of reality, and the structures in the pictures are different from
the external Reality they are created to represent. Echoing the Buddha’s
reluctance to search for and answer metaphysical questions, Schommers
writes: “Furthermore, we can say quite generally that there is no picture-
independent point of view conceivable, i.e. there is no external point of view
which would enable a direct observation of basic reality. Thus, questions like
‘How is basic reality built up and what kind of processes take place in it?’ makes
no sense.”7
Schommers continues:
“Events occurring in the cosmos are presented inside a biological system
only as symbols in a picture. The picture (mental manifestations) in the mind
contains aspects of reality only in symbolic form, i.e. the elements in reality are
not identical with the pertinent elements in the picture. Therefore, ‘basic reality,’
i.e., reality which exists independently of the observer, is in principle not
accessible in any DIRECT WAY. Rather, it is observable or describable by means
of pictures on different levels, i.e., levels of reality […] Everything is located in the
head, not only the products of fantasy and scientific laws, but those things which
we understand as “hard” objects.”8
While some might disagree with the specific language Schommers uses
to represent this process of representation, the basic stance of the difference
between the outside environment and the internal creation of usable and
comprehensible cognitive models is not disputed by most neurologists.
Schommers argues, from a modern physicist’s perspective, for a viewpoint that
is very similar to the Buddha’s and to Transcendental Idealism.9
Bernard d’Espagnat, a theoretical physicist, also argues that we cannot
directly know the Transcendental Reality, because:
“When, in its spirit, quantum theory and Bell’s theorem are used as
touchstones, the two main traditional philosophical approaches, realism and
idealism, are found wanting. A more suitable conception seems to be an
intermediate one, in which the mere postulated existence of a holistic and hardly
knowable Mind – Independent Reality is found to have explaining power. […] This
model considers Reality as not lying in space and time, indeed being a prior to
both, and it involves the view that the great mathematical laws of physics may
only let us catch some glimpses on the structures of the Mind-Independent
Reality.”10
Veiled Reality

D’Espagnat calls this model ‘veiled reality’ to suggest that the Mind‐
Independent Reality, so similar to what we are calling Transcendental Idealism,
is for the most part unconceptualizable. ‘Veiled reality’ refers to a ‘world’
independent from humans and veiled by perception, brain structure, and the
language of our minds’ participation in knowledge. D’Espagnat also believes
that we are involved in this actuality because it is not separated from us by the
dualistic chasm of object vs. subject. Rather, we exist in it. We are an integral
part of the actual. We are ‘swimming’ in it. Reality is not a specific area of the
universe that exists separate from our senses. Our limitation is that we have
only the capacity to be involved in an exceedingly small aspect of it.
D’Espagnat holds, as the Buddha taught, that sense impressions and
sensations are real, as are our sense organs. In sight and color, both the
photons or waves as well as the retinal cones are real, and their interactions
create our vision. The same is true of our other sensations. This is the middle
way of understanding our place in reality. We don’t have to seek our
participation in it; we are a part of it. However, in our ignorance we take our
cognitive representations or pictures of reality to be reality itself. But under
certain meditative conditions, we can understand how our subject/object
dualistic substantialism creates this illusion – the illusion that is the ignorance
that creates our suffering.
As the Buddha explained in a descriptive explanation of the doctrine of
kamma and dependent origination, life has a certain predictability; certain
conditions have their origins in certain other conditions. Life is not total
randomness, but it is also not total determinism. We see a similar approach in
d’Espagnat’s account of veiled reality. We know that we are involved in reality
when we obtain approximately the same results regardless of our methods of
investigating a phenomenon or replicating behaviors. Stability is a reliable
criterion of reality. In other words, a reasonable or practical attitude is
required, one that recognizes that an event is created when a certain cause or
causes originate it. When my hungry cat comes into the kitchen, for example,
under most circumstances she will go to her food plate and eat. I don’t know if
she will walk or run, eat quickly or slowly, or if after entering the kitchen she’ll
choose not to eat because a loud noise will startle her, or whether she does not
feel well. But under most circumstances, quite reliably, she will eat the food on
her plate. In the affective/cognitive realm, when I am thirsty, if I think of a
drink that I enjoy a lot, I will have physical responses such as salivation, and
my desire or craving for that drink will increase. If my physical/affective/
cognitive experience repeats itself in a replicable way, I can assume that this
stability of phenomena demonstrates an indication of reality.

Space and Time

“The relationship between space and time in the human mind has long been the
subject of philosophical inquiry and psychological experimentation. There is
now no doubt that space and time are intimately linked in our minds, yet the
nature of this relationship remains scientifically and neurologically unclear.”11
“There is no first beginning, no first beginning is knowable.”
~ SamyuttaNikaya 15.1‐2

The Buddha’s teachings suggest that our experiencing of time and space
has important implications. As Sue Hamilton notes, “[…] if the structure of the
world of experience is correlated with the cognitive process, then it is not just
that we name objects, concrete and abstract, and superimpose secondary
characteristics according to the senses. It is also that all the structural features
of the world of experience are cognitively correlated. In particular, space and
time are not external to the structure but are part of it.”5 Therefore, everything
that is knowable in temporal and spatial terms is dependent on our subjective
cognitive process. Hamilton continues, “If the entirety of the structure of the
world as we know it is subjectively dependent, including space and time, it
follows that the very concept of there being origins, beginnings, ends, extents,
limits, boundaries, and so on, is subject-dependent. The entirety of temporality
and of special extension are concepts which do not operate independently of
subjective cognitive processes.”5
When Hamilton turns to the ‘the classic unanswered or undetermined
questions’ of the Buddha, such as ‘Is the world eternal or finite?’, she points to
an important difference of the Transcendental Reality model regarding time
and space as we understand the implications of the Buddha’s teachings.
Inherent in these questions about eternity is the assumption that time and
space “are transcendentally real – that is, that they operate externally to
subjective cognitive process. As with the questions on the self, they seek to find a
permanence or immortality. However, if space and time are part of the structural
characteristics of the experiential world, and that is cognitively dependent, then
one can see that the presupposition of the transcendental reality of time and
space is false, and that the fundamental premises on which the questions rest are
therefore also false and unanswerable.”5 In other words, the Transcendental
Idealism model assumes that reality is embedded in space and time, whereas
the Buddha teaches that space and time don’t exist outside of us but are a part
of our cognitive constructions of reality.

D’Espagnat, from the perspective of a physicist, takes a similar position:

“I am therefore inclined to think that “the Real” – alias human independent
reality – is not embedded in space-time. And indeed, I go as far as speculating
that, quite the contrary, the nature of space-time is [...] not ‘nominal but
phenomenal,’ that space-time is a ‘reality – for-us.’”12D’Espagnat emphasizes
here the fact that our experience of space‐time is subjective to our cognitive
constructions of phenomena.
Another perspective worth noting on the issue of space‐time and reality
as a cognitive construction is written by Manoj Thulasidas, an experimental
physicist, who builds on ‘an insight from cognitive neuroscience about the
nature of ‘reality’:
“Reality is a convenient representation that our brain creates out of our
sensory inputs. This representation, though convenient, is an incredibly distant
experiential mapping of the actual physical causes that make up the input to our
senses. […] Reality is nothing but a cognitive model created in our brain starting
from our sense inputs, visual inputs being the most significant. Space itself is
part of this cognitive model. […] Once we identify the manifestations of the
limitations of our perceptions and cognitive representations, we can understand
the consequent constraints on our space and time.”13

Schommers takes a related perspective on space and time:

“We normally assume that our sensations produced by the brain are
identical with reality itself, but this should not be the case as we have argued that
space-time cannot be outside the brain because space-time has to be considered
as an auxiliary element for the representation of physically real processes. In
other words, the outside world, the material bodies, cannot be embedded in
space-time. That in particular means that not only the things in front of us (cars,
houses, trees, etc.) are in our head but also space-time, where all these things are
positioned. We have only impressions that all these ‘hard objects,’ together with
space-time, are located outside us. Space and time are obviously elements of the
brain; they come into existence due to specific brain functions.”9

Schommers also relates the position of the important philosopher

Immanuel Kant: “Space and Time are exclusively features of our brain and the
world outside is projected on it.”14 “Kant argues that Space Time (and the Causal
Motion of Matter in Space) are our constructions of our own mind.”9 So this
model asserts that even space and time are intimately linked in our cognitive
experience, resulting in a construction of a reality constructed by our cognitive
representations.
Actuality

Actuality is not fully accessible to us because of the sense organs/input

relationship inherent in the khandhas, which can absorb from the larger
transcendent reality only a small amount of input that they can then
cognitively process. Actuality is not accessible in a direct way, and the
subjectively independent point of view is cognitively constructed. In actual
reality, space and time as we experience them do not exist. While cognitive
constructs can be formed on the basis of different types of space‐time
structures, there will be no similarity between the structures and
characteristics of the ‘veiled reality’ and our corresponding cognitive
constructs. Put another way, a transcendental reality does exist; the human
mind and ideas that are dependent on human bodies and brains do exist; there
is a necessary connection between the matter of our brain and body and other
matter in the universe which enables us to see it, move it around; our
representation of Reality (including space and time) does not come directly
from our senses, but is constructed by the mind and is limited to sensing only a
tiny fraction of what exists in Actuality. So we have the assertion that space‐
time is a part of our cognitive modeling of the external world, a modeling that
is severely limited by the fact that the input of information that creates our
cognitive constructions is extremely selective and narrow. The conclusion, as
the Buddha explained, is that we cannot know the absolute reality; chasing
after this knowledge is a part of the pre‐enlightened ignorance that creates
frustration and suffering.
 Modern science continues to expand our knowledge of the selective
knowable reality because it continues to create more sophisticated sense‐
dependent measuring instruments (such as the electron microscope, PET
scanner, telescopes, X‐ray astronomy detectors, and the like) that allow us to
investigate previously unknown aspects of the world. This, however, does not
change the fact that what is being expanded is merely such knowledge as is
available through the khandhas and cognitive apparatus. However, in fact,
basic Reality, the reality which exists independently of us, remains inaccessible
in any direct way. As Karl Mannheim stated: “[…] The world as ‘world’ exists
only with reference to the knowing mind, and the mental activity of the subject
determines the form in which it appears. […] This is the first stage in the
dissolution of an ontological dogmatism which regarded the ‘world’ as existing
independently of us, in a fixed and definitive form.”15 For the Buddha, questions
concerning the existence of the world in time and space and so on are
unanswerable because they are formulated on false premises and therefore can
never really be answered. Speculating about these questions is not the way to
peace, to release, to Nibbāna. Buddhism is very pragmatic and empirical: the
attainment of Nibbāna. The practice of mental culture or development along
the Eight‐factor Path is aimed at that direct understanding of how our
cognitive apparatus works and, therefore, at showing us that our lived
experience is truly neither an inherent ‘I’ nor ‘world’.

Bibliography, Chapter 7
1. Salles, H. (http://gravimotion.info/coherence_ consistency.htm) Retrieved 7
June 2013.
2. Haldane, J. B. S. (1927). Possible Worlds and Other Papers . Piscataway, New
Jersey: Transaction Publishers.
3. Hess, W. R., & Fischer, H. (1973). Brain and Consciousness: A Discussion
About the Function of the Brain. Perspectives in biology and medicine, 17(1),
109‐118.
4. Metzinger, T. (2009). The ego tunnel: The science of the mind and the myth of
the self. Basic Books.
5. Hamilton, S. (2000). Early Buddhism: A new approach: The I of the
beholder(Vol. 16). Psychology Press.
6. Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: The
realization of the living (No. 42). Springer Science & Business Media.
7. Schommers, W. (1994). Space and time, matter and mind: The Relationship
between Reality and Space-time. London: World Scientific.
8. Schommers, W. (1998). The visible and the invisible: matter and mind in
physics (Vol. 3). London: World Scientific.
9. Schommers, W. (2010). Quantum processes. World Scientific Books.
10. d'Espagnat, B. (1998). Quantum theory: A pointer to an independent
reality.arXiv preprint quant-ph/9802046.
11. Casasanto, D., Fotakopoulou, O., & Boroditsky, L. (2010). Space and Time in
the Child’s Mind: Evidence for a Cross‐Dimensional Asymmetry. Cognitive
Science, 34(3), 387‐405.
12. d'Espagnat, B. (2006). On physics and philosophy (Vol. 41). Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
13. Thulasidas, M.. (2008). Constraints of Perception and Cognition in
Relativistic Physics. Galilean Electrodynamics 6, 103‐117.
14. Haselhurst, G., “Kant”, (http://www.spaceandmotion.com). Retrieved 7 June
2013.
15. <Mannheim, K. (2013). Ideology and utopia. London: Routledge.
Ibid. Hamilton. p. 174. Hamilton’s assertion constitutes an important
difference from what some claim is the reason that the Buddha
refused to answer these questions. For example: ‘But the Buddha’s
fundamental point – which was always for him the soteriological
point – was that to know the answers to these questions is not
necessary for liberation and that to treat them as though they were
will only hinder our advance toward liberation.’ (John Hick, ‘The
Buddha’s “Undetermined Questions” and the Religions’ (available at
www.johnhick.org.uk, accessed 7 June 2013). Instead, the Buddha was
often asked about the substantialism of self, time, and space because
the seekers who asked these questions were still approaching these
topics from a pre‐enlightened perspective. Therefore, the questions
were nonsensical to the Buddha since he understood that the
questions were founded on ignorance. His not answering was not
based on a strategic manner of teaching; his point was merely that
there is no answer to these questions