From Chapter 1: Eye to Eye

We hear a lot today about "paradigms," and especially about "new and higher" paradigms—"supertheories" that would include, beyond the physical sciences, the higher knowledge claims of philosophy-psychology and of transcendental-mystical religion—a type of truly unified world view. The vision itself is fascinating: finally, an overall paradigm or theory that would unite science, philosophy-psychology, and religion-mysticism; finally, a truly "unified field theory"; finally, a comprehensive overview. Some very skilled, very sober, very gifted scholars, from all sorts of different fields, are today talking exactly that. Extraordinary.

The precise implications and meanings of all this will become, I believe, more obvious as we proceed; for the moment, let us simply call any such paradigm, however tentative or fledgling (and assuming it is even possible), an "integral paradigm," meaning an overall knowledge quest that would include not only the "hard ware" of physical sciences but also the "soft ware" of philosophy and psychology and the "transcendental ware" of mystical-spiritual religion. If this type of new, higher, and comprehensive paradigm is indeed starting to emerge—and I think it is—then it is probably true that the single greatest issue it must face—an issue it has not yet adequately treated—is its relation to empirical science. For, the argument goes, if any sort of "new and higher" paradigm is not an empirical science, then it has no valid epistemology—no valid means of acquiring knowledge—and thus anything it says or proclaims, no matter how otherwise comforting, must therefore be invalid, nonsensical, and meaningless. There is no use trying to figure out the range or scope or methods of knowledge of the "new and higher" paradigm, which wishes to include philosophy and mysticism, until you can demonstrate that you have actual knowledge of any sort to begin with. Make no mistake about it:

We do not deny a priori that the mystic is able to discover truths by his own special methods. We wait to hear what are the propositions which embody his discoveries, in order to see whether they are verified or confuted by our empirical observations. But the mystic, so far from producing propositions which are empirically verified, is unable to produce any intelligible propositions at all.

The statement is from A. J. Ayer, the noted philosopher, and he concludes that the fact that the mystic "cannot reveal what he 'knows' or even himself devise an empirical test to validate his 'knowledge' shows that his state of mystical intuition is not a genuinely cognitive state."

Would a new integral paradigm be an empirical science? If not, could it claim genuine cognition and knowledge? Or, for that matter—and this is really the whole point of our discussion—can any sort of higher philosophical or spiritual truths be adequately "validated"? There has been an immense amount written on these subjects, but I personally find that most of it just slides off the main issues, like greasy hands chasing soap. In this chapter and the next, then, I would like to examine briefly the nature of empirical science, the meaning of philosophical knowledge, and the essence of transcendental or spiritual knowledge, as well as the relationships between them—and that might help us more easily envision the nature of a new and truly comprehensive paradigm, if such, indeed, exists.

Three Eyes of the Soul

St. Bonaventure, the great Doctor Seraphicus of the Church and a favorite philosopher of Western mystics, taught that men and women have at least three modes of attaining knowledge—"three eyes," as he put it (following Hugh of St. Victor, another famous mystic): the eye of flesh, by which we perceive the external world of space, time, and objects; the eye of reason, by which we attain a knowledge of philosophy, logic, and the mind itself; and the eye of contemplation, by which we rise to a knowledge of transcendent realities.

Further, said St. Bonaventure, all knowledge is a type of illumination. There is exterior and inferior illumination (lumen exterius and lumen inferius), which lights the eye of flesh and gives us knowledge of sense objects. There is lumen interius, which lights the eye of reason and gives us knowledge of philosophical truths. And there is lumen superius, the light of transcendent Being which illumines the eye of contemplation and reveals salutary truth, "truth which is unto liberation."

In the external world, said St. Bonaventure, we find a vestigium or "vestige of God"—and the eye of flesh perceives this vestige (which appears as separate objects in space and time). In ourselves, in our psyches—especially in the "threefold activity of the soul" (memory, reason, and will)—we find an imago of God, revealed by the mental eye. And ultimately, through the eye of contemplation, lighted by the lumen superius, we find the whole transcendent realm itself, beyond sense and reason—the Divine Ultimate itself.

All of this fits precisely with Hugh of St. Victor (first of the great Victorine mystics), who distinguished between cogitatio, meditatio, and contemplatio. Cogitatio, or simple empirical cognition, is a seeking for the facts of the material world using the eye of flesh. Meditatio is a seeking for the truths within the psyche itself (the imago of God) using the mind's eye. Contemplatio is the knowledge whereby the psyche or soul is united instantly with Godhead in transcendent insight (revealed by the eye of contemplation).

Now that particular wording—eye of flesh, mind, and contemplation—is Christian; but similar ideas can be found in every major school of traditional psychology, philosophy, and religion. The "three eyes" of a human being correspond, in fact, to the three major realms of being described by the perennial philosophy, which are the gross (flesh and material), the subtle (mental and animic), and the causal (transcendent and contemplative). These realms have been described extensively elsewhere, and I wish here only to point to their unanimity among traditional psychologists and philosophers.

To extend St. Bonaventure's insights, we moderns might say that the eye of flesh—the cogitatio, the lumen interius/exterius —participates in a select world of shared sensory experience, which it partially creates and partially discloses. This is the "gross realm," the realm of space, time, and matter (the subconscient). It is the realm shared by all those possessing a similar eye of flesh. Thus humans can even share this realm, to some degree, with other higher animals (especially mammals), because the eyes of flesh are quite similar. If a human holds a piece of meat in front of a dog, the dog will respond—a rock or plant will not. (The meat does not exist for the organism lacking the necessary mode of knowledge and perception, the necessary eye of flesh.) In the gross realm, an object is never A and not-A; it is either A or not-A. A rock is never a tree, a tree is never a mountain, one rock is not another rock, and so on. This is basic sensorimotor intelligence—object constancy—the eye of flesh. It is the empirical eye, the eye of sensory experience. (It should be said, at the start, that I am using the term "empirical" as it is employed in philosophy: capable of detection by the five human senses or their extensions. When empiricists like Locke concluded that all knowledge is experiential, they meant that all knowledge in the mind is first in the five senses. When Buddhists say that "meditation is experiential," they do not mean the same thing as Locke; they are rather using the term "experience" to mean "directly conscious, not mediated by forms or symbols." We will return to this topic in the next chapter; in the meantime, I will use "empirical" as the empiricists use it: "sensory experience.")

The eye of reason, or more generally, the eye of mind—the meditatio, the lumen interius —participates in a world of ideas, images, logic, and concepts. This is the subtle realm (or more precisely, the lower portion of the subtle, but the only one I will discuss here). Because so much of modern thought is based solely on the empirical eye, the eye of flesh, it is important to remember that the mental eye cannot be reduced to the fleshy eye. The mental field includes but transcends the sensory field. While not excluding it, the mind's eye rises far above the eye of flesh: in imagination, it can picture sensory objects not immediately present, and thus transcend the flesh's imprisonment in the simply present world; in logic, it can internally operate upon sensorimotor objects, and so transcend actual motor sequences; in will, it can delay the flesh's instinctual and impulsive discharges and thus transcend the merely animal and subhuman aspects of the organism.

Although the eye of mind relies upon the eye of flesh for much of its information, not all mental knowledge comes strictly from fleshy knowledge, nor does it deal solely with the objects of the flesh. Our knowledge is not entirely empirical and fleshy. "According to the sensationalists [that is, empiricists]," says Schuon, "all knowledge originates in sensorial experience [the eye of flesh]. They go so far as to maintain that human knowledge can have no access to any suprasensory knowledge and are unaware of the fact that the suprasensible can be the object of a genuineperception and hence of a concrete experience [notice that Schuon correctly refuses to equate empirical and experiential, since there are supraempirical or suprasensory experiences]. Thus, it is upon an intellectual infirmity that these thinkers build their systems, without their appearing to be in the least impressed by the fact that countless men as intelligent as themselves have thought otherwise than they do."

The point is precisely as Schumacher said: "In short, we 'see' not simply with our eyes but with a great part of our mental equipment as well [the eye of mind]. . . . With the light of the intellect [the lumen interius ] we can see things which are invisible to our bodily senses. The truth of ideas cannot be seen by the senses." For example, mathematics is a nonempirical knowledge or a supraempirical knowledge. It is discovered, illuminated, and implemented by the eye of reason, not by the eye of flesh.

Even introductory philosophy texts are quite certain on that point: "Whether these [mathematical] expressions are to be understood as referring to anything physical is not his concern but that of the physicist. For the mathematician, statements are viewed as statements of logical relationships; he is not interested in their empirical or factual meaning [if they have any]." Thus, no one has ever seen, with the eye of flesh, the square root of a negative one. That is a transempirical entity, and can only be seen by the mind's eye. Most of mathematics, as Whitehead says, is transempirical and even a priori (in the Pythagorean sense).

Likewise with logic. The truth of a logical deduction is based on internal consistency—it is not based upon its relation to sensory objects. Thus, a valid logical syllogism might say, "All unicorns are mortal. Tarnac is a unicorn. Therefore Tarnac is mortal." Logically that is valid; empirically it is meaningless (not sound), for the simple reason that no one has ever seen a unicorn in the first place. Logic is transempirical. Thus many philosophers, such as Whitehead, have held that the abstract (or mental) sphere is necessary and a priori for the manifestation of the natural/sensory realm, and this is approximately what the Eastern traditions mean when they say that the gross arises from the subtle (which arises from the causal).

In mathematics, in logic—and more: in imagination, in conceptual understanding, in psychologic insight, in creativity—we see things with the mind's eye which are not fully present to the eye of flesh. Thus we say that the mental field includes but greatly transcends the fleshy field.

The eye of contemplation is to the eye of reason as the eye of reason is to the eye of flesh. Just as reason transcends flesh, so contemplation transcends reason. Just as reason cannot be reduced to, nor derived solely from, fleshy knowledge, so contemplation cannot be reduced to nor derived from reason. Where the eye of reason is transempirical, the eye of contemplation is transrational, translogical, and transmental. "Gnosis [the eye of contemplation, the lumen superius] transcends the mental realm and a fortiori the realm of the sentiments [the sensory realm]. This transcendence results from the 'supernaturally natural' function of [gnosis], namely the contemplation of the Immutable, of the Self which is Reality, Consciousness, and Bliss. The quest of philosophers, therefore, has nothing in common with that of contemplatives, since its basic principle of exhaustive verbal adequacy is opposed to any liberating finality, to any transcending of the sphere of words."

We will be returning to these three different fields of knowledge throughout this chapter. In the meantime, let us simply assume that all men and women possess an eye of flesh, an eye of reason, and an eye of contemplation; that each eye has its own objects of knowledge (sensory, mental, and transcendental); that a higher eye cannot be reduced to nor explained solely in terms of a lower eye; that each eye is valid and useful in its own field, but commits a fallacy when it attempts, by itself, to fully grasp higher or lower realms.

Within that context, I will try to demonstrate that while an integral or truly comprehensive paradigm will draw freely on the eye of flesh and the eye of mind, it must also draw significantly on the eye of contemplation. This means that a new and integral paradigm—if such is ever to exist—would be in the extremely favorable position of being able to use and integrate all three eyes—gross, subtle, and causal. I will also argue that, by and large, empiric-analytic science belongs to the eye of flesh, phenomenological philosophy and psychology to the eye of mind, and religion/meditation to the eye of contemplation. Thus a new and integral paradigm would ideally and ultimately be a synthesis and integration of empiricism, rationalism, and transcendentalism (whether this overall endeavor can or should be called a "higher science" will be dealt with in the next chapter; in this chapter, "science" will refer to classical empiricanalytic science).

But there is one major difficulty and one major hazard which is first to be overcome, and that is the tendency toward category error, which is the attempt of one eye to usurp the roles of the other two. I will point out some of the major category errors committed by religion, by philosophy, and by science, and then—as one example—I will discuss the historical category errors that led to the rise of modern scientism. I do not mean to pick on science in this regard—religion and philosophy have been just as guilty, as we will see. However, historically speaking, the most recent and most pervasive category error has concerned the role of empirical science, and it is important to try to understand that error as carefully as we can, not only because, of all the category errors, it has probably had the most impact, but also because in many subtle ways it is still with us.

Following those assumptions, we can begin with an examination of the rise and meaning of empirical science.