Outside In (TW .5)

·5 Outside In

Perhaps John Dewey (1929, 227) said it as well as anyone: ‘a living organism and its life processes involve a world or nature temporally and spatially “external” to itself but “internal” to its functions.’

Dogen: ‘both within and without sentient beings is in itself the whole-being of the Buddha-nature’ (‘Bussho’ — Abe 1992, 146).

Loewenstein (1999, 3) begins his book on cellular communication by saying that ‘No one can escape a sense of wonder when looking at a living being from within.’ But no living being can look at itself from within; at best it can look at some of its own parts. The first person's view from within can only be oriented outward. Like any good microbiologist, Loewenstein is projecting his point of view into the object of his study, in much the same way that a skilled map-reader projects his location into the territory represented by a map. But the scientist's unmediated senses cannot take over as navigational guides. He sees the cells' interior through the lens of theory (not to mention the artificial lens of the microscope) – and he ‘literally’ sees it from without, while his imagination works from within it.

The brain is in the body, the body in the world, and the part cannot contain the whole. However, ‘higher logical analysis’ tells us that ‘a part is not necessarily less than its whole’, according to Peirce (CP 2.506).

Subjective experience is reality, but not from the subject's point of view. From that point of view, reality is ascribed to the objects of experience, or to other subjects, both of which are definitively located outside of the subject. Thus the world is in the subject, and the subject is in the world. The seeming paradox here is produced entirely by the inside/outside (container) metaphor.

When i recognize you as another subject of experience like myself, i assume that you have a world just as i do. This world, when you focus on it, is full of myriad creatures and wonderful life in full color and exquisite detail. But the most amazing circumstance of all is that the whole show, including your amazement, is all going on inside your head. Your experience is generated by (arises from, is, ..... ) the functioning of your brain.

Now, i don't know this in the same way that i ‘know’ my own world of experience. It's a theoretical model, part of a virtual reality scaffolded by language. But it's the only model that makes sense of the evidence – especially the case studies collected by neurologists, which demonstrate poignantly the dependence of normal mental functioning on an intact brain. When the brain is malfunctioning or damaged in some way, its owner's experience will be damaged in a correlated way. This is inexplicable unless it's the brain that does experience.

And since i have recognized you as a subject like me, i have to believe that my experience – my world (including ‘you’!) – is also a product of brain dynamics. I have no experience whatsoever of my brain, of course, because my brain is too busy doing the experiencing to also take a role in my world. (The one thing the spotlight can never illuminate is the spotlight.) In my subjective world, my knowledge of my brain's activity is a theoretical model just like my knowledge of your brain's activity. Our shared, consensual world, insofar as it is mediated by language, is the mutually reinforcing network of these models. We can maintain this virtual world because we can talk about these models among ourselves, and apply them pragmatically, with predictable results in the real world, the one in which we live and move.

Your actions in my head,
my head here in my hands
with something circling inside.
I have no name
for what circles
so perfectly.
…
This moment this love comes to rest in me,
many beings in one being.
In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
Inside the needle's eye a turning night of stars.
— Rúmí (Barks 1995, 278)

And yet the scientific study of the brain is only one route to realizing the inside-outness of the world/self. Who knows what other routes might have been discovered, and now lie buried in the rubbish-heap of discarded expressions, abandoned by consensus in its restless and ruthless self-renewal?

As great as the infinite space beyond is the space within the lotus of the heart. Both heaven and earth are contained in that inner space, both fire and air, sun and moon, lightning and stars. Whether we know it in this world or know it not, everything is contained in that inner space.
— Chandogya Upanishad (Easwaran, in Harvey 1996, 38)

The question of ‘whether we know it in this world’ need not suggest the possibility that we may know it in some other world, at some other time. ‘This world’ can refer to the phenomenal world of immediate perception, the world which appears as your ‘outside’, and the question can be whether we know its current containment in inner space, as well as the complementary containment of that space (which makes it ‘inner’).

The current in philosophy which most strongly emphasizes inside-outness is often called phenomenology. Henry Corbin, in a 1948 talk about the comparative study of religion, put it this way:

We are discovering that the I and the World, the modes of being of the personal subject and the regions of being which it explores, are not two things which get juxtaposed, but presences within each other, an interpresence, an indissoluble correlation, and a structure. It is within the general ensemble which can be termed the phenomenological orientation of the humanities. And there is also something analogous happening in the physical sciences.
— Corbin 1948 (1998, 23)

Since the world is inside out, you know yourself by knowing the world. Here we are referring not to a disembodied self, or an essential self who lives inside your body, but to your ‘ethical self’, to use a term coined by Gallagher and Marcel (in Gallagher and Shear 1999). What you see in (or as) the world implies a certain perspective embodied in a certain way, and thus informs you about yourself as an experiencing organism – so long as you don't disrupt this implying by focusing on yourself rather than the world. ‘This suggests that insofar as there is a contextualized self (a self contextualized in and by perception and action) it is something which can be expressed in action, emotion, or in certain attitudes, but not necessarily something which can be reported’ (Gallagher and Shear 1999, 290-91). That would explain Dogen's statement in Genjokoan:

When buddhas are truly buddhas they do not necessarily notice that they are buddhas. However, they are actualized buddhas, who go on actualizing buddhas.
— Dogen (Tanahashi 1985, 69)

In a world of interbeing, ‘actualized’ and ‘contextualized’ are equivalent expressions; and ‘noticing’ implies ‘being able to report’. The Buddhist practice of ‘mindfulness’ is equivalent to what Gallagher and Marcel call ‘embedded reflection’, which ‘can assist in keeping our intentions accessible, not as certain contents for epistemological investigation, but as pragmatic guides to our actions’; it is through action that the ‘ethical self’ is generated (Gallagher and Shear 1999, 295-6).

Louis A. Sass in ‘Schizophrenia, Self-Consciousness and the Modern Mind’ (Gallagher and Shear 1999) suggests that some forms of schizophrenia may be disorders of inside-outness, in a sense related to ‘hyper-self-consciousness’ or ‘hyper-reflexivity’. It takes two seemingly contradictory forms: in one, the ‘core self’, instead of functioning implicitly as the background for objects, becomes an object itself, so that the first-person view is disabled and the person feels like a puppet manipulated by remote and alien forces; or else the solipsistic sense of being ‘king over the all’ reigns unbalanced by a third-person perspective.

In the process of neurulation (Goodwin 1994, 164), the first stage in formation of the nervous system, the developing embryo turns itself outside in.

You could say that the body is the preconscious mind. Then the primary form of the human dialogue with nature is the body-mind dialogue.

The living, experiencing body relates to its environment by projecting its experience as an external world, i.e. by imagining it as separate from and outside of the subject. We can only mention this from a third-person point of view, because of course we do not experience this projection as a projection, but rather as the external world itself. Thus it is true to say that we have no knowledge of the external world, since all we have and all we are is the lived body. From a different but equally valid point of view, it is true to say that we construct an internal model of the external world, and that model constitutes our knowledge of it.

Merleau-Ponty, quoted by Freeman (1999a, 164): ‘To perceive is to render oneself present to something through the body.’

Even if subsequently, thought and the perception of space are freed from motility and spatial being, for us to be able to conceive space, it is in the first place necessary that we should have been thrust into it by our body, and that it should have provided us with the first model of those transpositions, equivalents and identifications which make space into an objective system and allow our experience to be one of objects, opening out on an ‘in itself.’
— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 164)

It seems that the mutual immersion of body and world is more intimate than we thought. This motivates choosing the word ‘medium’ over ‘environment’, since the latter suggests a more definitive separation between an organism and its external world. Thus Merleau-Ponty (1945, 169) says that ‘The body is our general medium for having a world.’ Maturana (below) also uses ‘medium’ this way. Another alternative is milieu. Rosen (1991, 41) uses ambience for the world as distinguished from self, while using environment for what is distinguished from a system (by an observer) as its background or surround.

Peirce (EP1:42, W2:227 fn4) remarked that ‘just as we say that a body is in motion, and not that motion is in a body we ought to say that we are in thought and not that thoughts are in us.’ According to Lotman, we ought to say both:

The individual human intellect does not have a monopoly in the work of thinking. Semiotic systems, both separately and together as the integrated unity of the semiosphere, both synchronically and in all the depths of historical memory, carry out intellectual operations, preserve, rework and increase the store of information. Thought is within us, but we are within thought, just as language is something engendered by our minds and directly dependent on the mechanisms of the brain, and we are with[in] language. And unless we were immersed in language, our brain could not engender it (and vice versa: if our brain were not capable of generating language, we would not be immersed in it). The same with thought: it is both something engendered by the human brain and something surrounding us without which intellectual generation would be impossible. And finally the spatial image of the world is both within us and without us.
— Lotman (1990, 273)

From the whole system's point of view, any interaction within the system defines the actors by specifying their roles. But when we describe the interaction, we generally speak of the actors as if they existed prior to the interaction. Like your belief that ‘the world’ existed before you ‘came into’ it, this is the mode of expression proper to the outward-looking view.

According to Arthur Green, ‘the language of Kaballah may be read simultaneously as a myth of cosmic origins and a description of events within the mystic's mind.’ The outward-looking first-person view and the inward-looking third-person view of the first person mirror one another. ‘The inner structure of psychic life is the hidden structure of the universe; it is because of this that humans can come to know God by the path of inward contemplation and true self-knowledge’ (Green 2004, 47).

Merleau-Ponty (1945, 95) speaks of the

paradox … of all being in the world: when I move towards a world I bury my perceptual and practical intentions in objects which ultimately appear prior to and external to those intentions, and which nevertheless exist for me only in so far as they arouse in me thoughts and volitions.

This rolls up the meaning cycle, encapsulating the inside-outness of the world. Resurrection is always of buried intentions.

So Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast
Collecting up the scatterd portions of his immortal body
Into the Elemental forms of every thing that grows
— Blake, Four Zoas, PPB 370

In Blake ‘the fallen world is the eternal one turned inside out’ (Frye 1947, 291). ‘What we see in nature is our own body turned inside out’ (349).

Since the world is inside out, cosmogony tends to recapitulate ontogeny. This is a reversal of the old biological maxim that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,’ which turned out to be a useful heuristic tool although many applications of it would not pass a reality check. The same is surely true of this cosmological hypothesis.

Stages of development (Nelson, Donald etc.) can be seen as further articulations of earlier ideas such as the vague account in the Zohar of stages in the development of the soul (Tishby, in Fine 1995, 144-6).

If you consider evolutionary time as an expanding sphere, the center of which represents the first instant and the surface the present, you will find contemporary kinds, including fish and humans, at various points on or near the sphere itself, with different lines leading back into it.
— Depew and Weber (1995, 138)

The evolution of complex organisms like ourselves was partly a process of turning outside in. The sea in which life began now runs through our veins; we carry our environment around with us. The shells of more primitive creatures, which provided a framework for their life cycles, became our endoskeletons.

René Magritte:

We see [the world] as being outside ourselves, although it is only a mental representation of what we experience inside ourselves.… Time and space thus lose that unrefined meaning which is the only one everyday experience takes into account.
— (quoted in Jackendoff 1992, 157)

This quotation leads off Ray Jackendoff's article ‘The Problem of Reality’, which admirably and concisely delivers the evidence from psychology that the world is inside out. He does not quite put it that way, but he does say that ‘in some sense we have to turn the philosophical enterprise inside out’ (Jackendoff 1992, 170). Toward the end of the article, Jackendoff distinguishes between the ‘realist stance’, from which we normally perceive the ‘external world’, and the ‘constructivist stance’ which takes every feature of our experience (including the realist stance!) as ‘constructed’ according to the nature of our bodies and brains and their relationship with the world as seen by an observer. Since the realist stance is ‘common sense’, those unaccustomed to the observing-psychologist point of view naturally object to ‘constructivism’, as Jackendoff points out; but he also finds a more deep-seated resistance to it.

I suspect that, at bottom, people find constructivism threatening because it removes the last remaining bastion of human privilege in the natural world. The Copernican revolution denied us a position at the physical center of the universe; the Darwinian revolution placed us as just another step in the biological continuum. This leaves us in a precarious position, with only our minds to distinguish us from the rest of nature.… many of us have a deep-seated (if unspoken) need for a sense of transcendent superiority over the rest of nature. This need fuels a basic emotional resistance to constructivist psychology, which says on the contrary that even our much-prized minds are just natural devices. But what purpose does this sense of superiority serve? At this point in the history of humanity, maybe a little bit more humility about our place in the natural order wouldn't be such a bad thing.
— Jackendoff (1992, 175-6)

Inside and outside are, in Joyce's phrase, ‘polarised for reunion’ (FW 92): reunion is a final cause of polarisation. Perhaps this is why we tend to exaggerate the difference between the ‘poles’.

We naturally make all our distinctions too absolute. We are accustomed to speak of an external universe and an inner world of thought. But they are merely vicinities with no real boundary line between them. It comes to this: there are some ideas, – objects, be it remembered, – which will have their own way, and we cannot swerve them much, and the little effect we can produce upon them we only produce indirectly. They make up or indicate the outward world. There are other ideas which seem very docile, they are just as we think they ought to be. They form the inner world. Yet it will be found that the inner world has its surprises for us, sometimes. It isn't so exactly as we would have it as we fancy. It is rather our wishes which conform to it, Mahomet that repairs to the mountain. Neither is the moderate amount of control which we exercise upon the world of ideas nearly so direct as we fancy it to be. We go about instinctively, and without being aware how circuitously we proceed to change the current of thought. There is an intermediate world, our own neighborhood, household, and persons, which belongs to us, which we sometimes feel inclined to class with the outer world and sometimes with the inner world.
Experience being something forced upon us, belongs to the external type. Yet in so far as it is I or you who experiences the constraint, the experience is mine or yours, and thus belongs to the inner world.

— Peirce (CP 7.438-9)

Since your world is a sign, so are you.

… whenever we think, we have present to the consciousness some feeling, image, conception, or other representation, which serves as a sign. But it follows from our own existence (which is proved by the occurrence of ignorance and error) that everything which is present to us is a phenomenal manifestation of ourselves. This does not prevent its being a phenomenon of something without us, just as a rainbow is at once a manifestation both of the sun and of the rain. When we think, then, we ourselves, as we are at that moment, appear as a sign.
— Peirce (EP1:38)

The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world.
— Dogen (Tanahashi 1985, 77)

Inside and outside are inseparable. The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself.
— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 474)

(See also Kant 1781, e.g. A116.)

From a commentary by Chih-shen on the Heart Sutra, translated by Red Pine (2004, 48):

Avalokiteshvara sees existence but does not cling to existence and sees emptiness but is not attached to emptiness. Bodhisattvas can suck up the ocean in a strand of hair or put Mount Sumeru in a mustard seed. A mustard seed and a strand of hair represent the mind, while Mount Sumeru and the ocean represent the world. Whenever a bodhisattva thinks about Mount Sumeru or the ocean, they are in the bodhisattva's mind. Thus a mustard seed contains Mount Sumeru and a strand of hair the ocean. The reason this is so is because all dharmas come from the mind.

That is, from the primal person's mind, not from any existing individual's. Red Pine's glossary adds that Mount Sumeru ‘forms the axis of every world and is often used as a metaphor for the self’ (2004, 182).

For the Kabbalists the creation of the ‘external’ world ‘is nothing other than the exoteric aspect of a process which takes place in God himself’ (Scholem 1960, 101). Other aspects of inside-outness are reflected in the Kabbalistic ideas of the Shekhinah and of Adam Kadmon. ‘Here the God who can be apprehended by man is himself the First Man. The great name of God in His creative unfolding is Adam, as the Kabbalists declared on the strength of a gematria, or numerical equation’ (both JHVH and ADAM add up to 45; Scholem 1960, 104).

Isaac Luria turned neoplatonism inside out in his Kabbalistic version of ‘emanation’: the first (and continuing) event in the creative process was ‘withdrawal’ (tsimtsum) of the divine presence from the primal point.

As we have seen, the distinction between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of an organism can be made only by an external observer. Richard Lewontin points out that applying this distinction to the causes of variation among organisms was a major conceptual breakthrough. ‘Before the early nineteenth century internal and external forces were not seen as separated’ (Lewontin 2001, 73); prying them apart paved the way for Darwin and for biology as we know it today.

Darwin's theory of evolution was that variation among organisms arose from causes that were internal to the organisms and whose nature was independent of the demands of the external world. That is what is meant when we say that the mutations are ‘random.’ It is not that they are free from the ordinary processes of chemistry, but that their qualitative nature is at random with respect to how they will affect the organism in a particular environment. High temperature does not call forth mutations that specifically adapt the organism to live at high temperature. All sorts of mutations occur and it is only those that, by chance, enable the organism to survive better that will spread through the species. So the internal forces that give rise to variation are causally independent of the external forces that select them. The internal and external, what we now think of as the gene and the environment, meet in the organism. This alienation of internal from external forces, of inside from outside, with the organism as their nexus, is fundamental to the Darwinian view. Indeed it is the origin of modern analytic biology.
— Lewontin (2001, 72-3)

Necessary as it may be for purposes of science, the inside/outside split is artificial.

Listening not to me but to the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one.
—Heraclitus

(There extand by now one thousand and one stories, all told, of the same).
— Finnegans Wake, 5

All propositions relate to the same ever-reacting singular; namely, to the totality of all real objects. It is true that when the Arabian romancer tells us that there was a lady named Scheherazade, he does not mean to be understood as speaking of the world of outward realities, and there is a great deal of fiction in what he is talking about. For the fictive is that whose characters depend upon what characters somebody attributes to it; and the story is, of course, the mere creation of the poet's thought. Nevertheless, once he has imagined Scheherazade and made her young, beautiful, and endowed with a gift of spinning stories, it becomes a real fact that so he has imagined her, which fact he cannot destroy by pretending or thinking that he imagined her to be otherwise.
— Peirce, EP2:209 (sixth Harvard Lecture, 1903)

Fact and fiction differ not in their presence to the mind, nor do ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ realities. Peirce found a way to describe the nature of that presence, in terms of its formal elements, and prior to any distinction between appearance and reality. He called this study phaneroscopy, because of its focus on the phaneron, which in its undifferentiated unity includes whatever may become the object of our attention or function as a sign. Nothing we can mention is external to it; indeed the very externality of the external world is internal to the phaneron.

When explicit signs function as signs they work implicitly, or ‘transparently’; it's the object that appears. When signs are attended to as signs they become objects and thus opaque; which entails that something else intervenes as a sign between the object and the mind attending to it. For instance, when you make a word into an object by focusing on its role in the universe of discourse, some instance or token of the word (say on a particular page) is working transparently as a sign of the word; and if you focus on that instance as a sign, then again something else (say a retinal response pattern) ‘becomes’ the intervening medium. Semiosis being a continuous process, any such analysis is to some extent arbitrary. The transparent/opaque difference is not in fact absolute, but a matter of degree (Metzinger 2003b). This entails that the object of any sign must have been itself a sign in some earlier stage of semiosis, and the process has no absolute beginning. Likewise any interpretant must also function as a sign (generating another interpretant) as long as the process continues, and it has no absolute end. This is the semiotic aspect of Peirce's doctrine of continuity, or synechism as he called it. The mathematical aspect of it is most intimately related to topology (or ‘topical geometry’ as Peirce called it). Mathematically speaking, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are topological concepts.

Gospel of Thomas 89:

Jesus says: ‘Why do you wash the outside of the cup? Do you not understand that the one who created the inside is also the one who created the outside?’
— (5G)

According to DeConick (2007, 256), the social context of this saying was ‘the first-century debate over the purity of containers’. Everyone cleans the inside of a cup, but concern with cleaning the outside (for the sake of ritual purity) could be a sign of excessive attention to externals. In the parallel saying at Luke 11:39-40, Jesus expresses contempt for the coupling of such overzealous concern with neglect of the inner qualities which really count:

Now you Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of extortion and wickedness. You fools! Did not he who made the outside make the inside also?

Here the washing of the outside probably stands as one example of a general tendency, while the ‘inside’ doesn't refer to the cup at all – both are figurative, but in different ways. This probably applies to the more elliptical Thomas version as well. What's less clear is whether the reversal of order between the final sentences of the Thomas and Luke (Q) versions makes a real difference in emphasis.

For a different approach to the practice (not ritual) of ‘washing’ – also of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ – consider the ‘Semmen’ chapter of Dogen's Shobogenzo:

when we preserve the methods that the Buddhas and Ancestors have trained in and actualized, then a Buddha’s methods for using water with which to wash the body and using the Water with which to cleanse the mind will have been handed down to us. Accordingly, in training to realize Buddhahood, we go beyond ‘clean’, we discard ‘unclean’, and we abandon ‘not clean’ and ‘not unclean’.
Hence, even though we may not yet have soiled ourselves, we wash and cleanse ourselves, and even when we have reached Great Immaculacy, we still wash and cleanse ourselves. This process has been preserved solely in the Way of the Buddhas and Ancestors. It is beyond what those who are non-Buddhists understand. Were the situation as those befuddled persons say, even if we were to reduce the five vital organs and the six forms of entrails to particles of dust so minute that they were like empty space, and then completely use up the waters of the great ocean in washing them, unless we washed the inside of these particles, how could they possibly be immaculate? And unless we washed the inside of empty space, how could we possibly achieve complete immaculacy within and without?
, Nearman 668

Gendlin (1995) explains how the ‘subjective side’ of any act of meaning performs a whole set of crossing functions. One of them is the work done in language by indexical signs:

Words in themselves are general; but we speak and read not only in their generality, always also in the particular situation. This is a fourth function performed by the subjective side, not by commonality patterns. After all, the words are general. Even words like “you,” “now,” “here” only mean this situation by your direct reference to your felt sense now.

It is the crossing of inside and out, or rather of the views from within and without, that makes meaning. The crossing is the recreation of each, an organic process, not a mechanical assembly of already-made components. What each component is, and how it works, is dynamically modified by the whole situation in which it works. Mechanistic thinking about cognition leads to what Gendlin (1995) calls ‘the grand error of most Western theories – the assumption that all cognition must consist of pre-existing patterns or units.’ Out of a syllogism or logic machine you can't get any more than you put into it.

Gendlin's Process Model can be seen as the spiritual vision of St. Paul translated into contemporary terms. Paul says that Christ is in us even as we are in Christ, if we live as members of His body. In Gendlin's terms, ‘we can say that present process goes on in the body, and also that the body is in process’ (Gendlin (1998, IV-B).

The structure of experience is that of a Klein bottle. Consciousness is the bottleneck, where outside turns in. It is a bottleneck, relative to the whole of mental processing, because working memory is so limited, the spotlight of attention so narrowly focused and conscious decision-making so slow. Its contents include all of our modelings of reality, and models are useful only when they are much simpler than the processes they model.

According to Maturana (1978a, 46), the operational closure of the nervous system entails that the distinction between illusion and reality is dependent on social consensus:

… a closed neuronal network cannot discriminate between internally and externally triggered changes in relative neuronal activity. This distinction pertains exclusively to the domain of descriptions in which the observer defines an inside and an outside for the nervous system and the organism. In fact, for any given animal, the structure of its nervous system and its structure as a whole organism, not the structure of the medium, determine what structural configuration of the medium may constitute its sensory perturbations and what path of internal changes of states it undergoes as a result of a particular interaction. Furthermore, since these structures are the result of the structural coupling of the organism to its medium, closure in the organization of the nervous system and the organism make perception an expression of the structural coupling of an organism to its medium that is distinguishable from illusion or hallucination only in the social domain.

If only an observer can classify events as ‘outside’ or ‘inside’ the brain (or the body) observed, then the observer himself can recognize the observed organism as external to his own thoughts only by inhabiting the social domain. Only that sequence of his own brain states which constitutes an observer's discourse can generate the kind of language in which internal and external have meaning. For the brain as an operationally closed system, there are only events which incite, invite or accompany other events. When we talk about our experience of external reality – or about ‘inner’ experience (as if there were another kind)! – we are always playing the social role of observers. No wonder, then, that self-consciousness removes us from the pure presence of experiencing, or of the phaneron. That presence is primal, not private, because there can be no privacy where there are no others, no observers.

Now, if one could drop that social role, discard the mask of personality, close down that part of brain functioning, then no distinction would exist between inner and outer, or between subject and object. And this state of no-distinction sounds very much like the states of experience reported by meditators and mystics. Of course, in order to report these states, people have to step back into the social role which sustains the consensual domain; so it is very difficult (if not impossible) to investigate the connection between the report and the actual experience. These reports, like all linguistic behavior and experience, are necessarily shaped by the culture and worldview of the person reporting. This may account for any differences in the form of the reports; but that is not an empirically testable hypothesis, since empirical testing is limited to the consensual domain.

But how do we enter the consensual domain in the first place? It must begin with joint attention to something already experienced as other, as external to self and therefore observable by others – i.e. with (what we later call) Secondness as an element of the phaneron.

If the subject/object distinction is an artifact of language, i.e. of structural coupling, and if coupling is enabled by operational closure, then the identity (or mutual containment) of world and experience underlies not only ‘mystical’ experience but all experience. In that case meditation is a technique for raising this substratum of experience to the level of consciousness, or making it accessible to consciousness. This seems to be the walk that Zen practitioners talk:

Zen is a teaching about how we can sit with stillness in the midst of our self, our heart, our breath and the world, and then to let them open into our wider self and into the world of other people. In this mind, the world passes transparently through us and we start to feel how there is neither outside nor inside. Everyday this practice touches more and more of our life, and we come to know what the koans and sutras are talking about.
— Richard Baker (Tanahashi and Schneider 1994, 20)

What may look like the ‘attainment’ of a singular ‘state’ (say, enlightenment) is actually the recognition of a presence that never leaves us (say, the Buddha-nature). Since the whole of the phaneron, including thoughts about phenomena and teachings about practice, is present to this ‘mind’, it must be what all the scriptures are talking about.

The incorporation of living cells inside of other cells, so that both lived a new life instead of dying, was apparently the key to the formation of eukaryotic life on earth. Variations on the theme of mutual incorporation are found in many strands of early Christian scripture. In John 15:4, Jesus says ‘Abide in me, and I in you’; and this invitation to mutual containment is extended beyond the immediate circle:

I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their own word [δια του λογου αὐτων], that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they may also be in us, so that the world [κοσμος] may believe that thou hast sent me.
— John 17:20

The Gospel of Thomas promises that anyone who really understands the sayings of the living Jesus becomes the living Jesus, and that Jesus becomes him. This could be seen as equivalent to mutual containment; and it is significant that this theme is shared by John and Thomas, two sources which are in many ways opposed (see Chapter 6).

‘For the One who has become many, remains the One undivided, but each part is all of Christ.’ — Saint Symeon the younger, as quoted by Campbell (1949, 39).

Sweetser (1990, 49) says that ‘a pervasive and coherently structured system of metaphors underlies our tendency to use vocabulary from the external (sociophysical) domain in speaking of the internal (emotional and psychological) domain.’ But if it seems that conventions of language turn meaning inside out, this may only reflect the fact that we know ourselves from the outside in. For instance, suppose you ‘flip’ your experience of a Necker cube, so that the back of it becomes front and the front back. How do you recognize this change in the quality of your experience? Wittgenstein poses this question in PI, IIxi (202):

‘And is it really a different impression?’ —In order to answer this I should like to ask myself whether there is really something different there in me. But how can I find out? —I describe what I am seeing differently.

Your description of the phenomenon then is the sign of an internal change. Is this the only sign you can have of such a change? Well, there might be non-verbal behavioral clues, but they too are ‘external’. Upon reflection, it seems that we can know our own minds, even our own feelings, only from the outside in.

Wir kennen den Kontur des Fühlens nicht; nur, was ihn formt von außen. (‘We never know the actual, vital contour of our own emotions – just what forms them from outside.’)
— Rilke, Fourth Duino Elegy (Mitchell 1982)

Likewise Peirce (EP1:30): ‘We have no power of Introspection, but all knowledge of the internal world is derived by hypothetical reasoning from our knowledge of external facts.’ (See also EP1:43). Leonard Talmy, on the other hand, says that ‘the only instrumentality that can access the phenomenological content and structure of consciousness is that of introspection’ (2000, II, 4). For instance, ‘judgments made by individuals as to the grammaticality or the logical-inferential properties of sentences’ – judgments crucial to the formal linguistic study of syntax – ‘are purely the product of introspection’ (Talmy 2000, II, 4).

But this would probably not count as ‘introspection’ for Peirce, as the object of the judging individual's attention must be a sentence that has already been uttered, which places it in the social domain, not the private psychological one (even if the utterer is ‘talking to herself’). A language can only belong to a community; its reality does not depend on any individual user, even though it would cease to be if nobody used it. Your language is therefore part of your external world, and from a Peircean perspective, the grammaticality of any instance of it is also belongs to that world, not to the private world of the individual psyche – which for Peirce is irrelevant to logic (semiotic) anyway.

Logic, for me, is the study of the essential conditions to which signs must conform in order to function as such. How the constitution of the human mind may compel men to think is not the question; and the appeal to language appears to me to be no better than an unsatisfactory method of ascertaining psychological facts that are of no relevancy to logic.
EP2:309

Metzinger (2003) identifies four different kinds of ‘introspection,’ one of which corresponds loosely with implicit ‘reasoning.’ Gendlin makes a similar move in the first part of A Process Model by distinguishing four kinds of ‘environment.’ If we examined these various theoretical views, each in its context, we might come to see them as varying articulations of a conceptual consensus.

Is it possible to contemplate our own intentional states? And if so, does it serve any pragmatic purpose?

Personally i am skeptical that introspection or any other technique can reveal ‘pure’ intentional states to us, unmediated by memory. Experience consists of intentional states, and it is biologically implausible that we are capable of meta-states which can experience our experience, as it were – that is, view it without viewing with it. However, we can certainly contemplate our own images, projections or models of intentional states, and thus indirectly ‘know ourselves’.

Even introspection should tell us that there is at least one act to which we can never direct attention while engaged in the act, and that is the directing of attention.

‘The Eye sees more than the Heart knows’ (Blake, PPB, 44). One does not ‘look within’ for signs or symbols of intention; one allows the heart to use the language designed by nature and culture for directing attention outward.

However, let's suppose that self-contemplation could take the form of a conversation, with contemplator and contemplated taking turns. This turn-taking might reach a such a speed that the length of a turn is less than the time-span that can be resolved in consciousness (around half a second), giving rise to an experience of what Corbin (1971) calls ‘bi-unity’. Corbin cites Hermetic texts presenting such a scenario:

one and the same role is played in turn, even simultaneously, by Hermes and his Perfect Nature. … the Sufi contemplates himself in contemplating the theophanic witness; the Contemplator becomes the Contemplated and vice versa, a mystical situation expressed by the wonderful Eckhartian formula: ‘The seeing through which I know him is the same seeing through which he knows me.’
— Corbin (1971, 19)

The fact remains, though, that whatever wisdom you discover in conversation with your own Perfect Nature can be brought into the consensual light of day only through dialog with other people.

Another way of imagining self-contemplation is to think of God the Creator as using his creature's eye for his own vision. Thus Corbin (1971, 22) quotes Ibn Arabi: ‘I created perception in Thee only that therein I might become the object of my perception.’

This, by the way, is one of the few ‘mystical experiences’ to which i can testify. I vividly recall one night in 1990 when i had the overwhelming sensation of being used as a sense organ by some kind of cosmic being. I didn't feel either kindliness or hostility radiating from this being; it regarded the world through me with detached curiosity. From this i would infer that my experience was not of the type referred to by Corbin or Ibn Arabi, for the Other who was using me was in no sense my counterpart; nor was it mainly interested in contemplating itself.

On Umwelt, Innenwelt and Lebenswelt, see Deely (2001, 6-10).

Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, you and your Umwelt are mirror images; only you can't stand beside each other as twins can.

For other meditations on the ‘inner and the outer’, see the Gospel of Philip (Meyer 2005, 67-8), and David Bohm (2003, 277).