There are two ways we “know” things, and to understand the difference is vital for Awakening.
There’s a word zoologists use which is helpful to illustrate this distinction. The word is “umwelt”, from the German for environment, though zoologists use it to refer to a perceptual world. Thus a tick, which cannot see visually, still knows a world of temperature sensation, touch, and smell, which is all it needs to jump onto a passing mammal whose blood it can consume. It’s hard for us to imagine that sensory world, or that of a blind mole rat, a deep sea giant squid, or even a bee which sees different colours from humans. We can expect though, that each animal has a world-picture from the combination of its senses just as humans do. Our experiential-world, our umwelt, is the direct knowing of the senses, for example seeing blue – but without naming it as blue nor as sky or anything else. Perhaps we can imagine how a baby’s world appears.
In contrast to this knowing of how experience is, we develop concepts for knowing “what” it is. This is quite different, and can be cultural, learned, assumed, and even in its own terms, wrong. Buddhists are used to discovering the “emptiness” of these conceptual constructions. This is the world of our thinking, we could say we have a thought-world. A key point about this way of knowing is that it is relational. Anything named is distinguished from something else, in fact naming is division: think of the trope that Eskimos have more words for snow, for instance, or the fact that entomologists have more names for beetles, and so on.
light doesn’t need a light shining on it
Obviously both ways of knowing are vital for us, there is no need to discard thinking and we cannot discard direct sensory perception. The problem comes when we fail to distinguish them. Our umwelt is not relational, it is a single world of awareness: there is no division between inside our body and outside, no need to posit a separate being experiencing this umwelt, it’s simply there. J. Krishnamurti made the point that light doesn’t need a light shining on it, to be seen. Light shines of itself. We don’t need a separate awareness to know awareness.
Even solipsism is relational, it is the assumption that there is an I that is having the experience, thus rendering other beings as merely my experience. So the “one-sided” nature of our umwelt is not solipsism, that would be a thought-construction.
When we apply relational description to our umwelt, to our world of sense-knowing, we believe there really is an I knowing our experience, including our thoughts. Believing something which we do not experience causes endless trouble! Applying the relational way of seeing is relevant when we need to distinguish ourselves from someone else, as in “I like coconut, you don’t”. But this is an “I” which is permanent, separate, unchanging… and not actually existent. It’s an idea of “I” – useful at times, but not anything real. Father Christmas is an idea which doesn’t seem to change with the development of central heating, or proliferation of its representatives in various grottos. Known for the notional image it is, acceptance is widespread and relatively harmless.
an umwelt mandala, operating in a relational mandala
We could also use the term “mandala” to describe the two ways of knowing. We are an umwelt mandala, operating in a relational mandala. Knowing this, we have no problem. Not realising this, we believe relational divisions apply to our umwelt mandala.
This becomes yet more confusing when we examine how we speak about “I”: we find many inconsistencies, and once we realise the unity and primary truth of our umwelt, we can find no real experience which corresponds to that “I”. And it goes further than that. Once we see the way we have conflated one mandala, our thought-view, with the undeniable truth of the other, our experiential umwelt mandala, we see that we cannot find it because it does not exist, never has and never could.
Pieces of Five 