How do we know? — II

Matthijs Cornelissen
last revision: 30 September 2025

naïve and expert modes of arriving at knowledge

The way we use the four ways of acquiring knowledge we discussed in the first section of this chapter is in 'most of us most of the time' far from perfect, but all four of them can be perfected. This time, we'll look at them in the opposite direction from the sequence followed in the previous sections: we'll take them up from four to one. The reason to do so is that our collective effort during the last few centuries has gone almost entirely into objective knowledge of the physical and social domains which is knowledge by separative, indirect contact. As a result of this one-sided effort, we have become so much better in this way of acquiring knowledge than in the other three ways, that to many of us objective knowledge feels like something inherently good and trustworthy, a golden standard, while knowledge acquired by the other three ways gives the impression of being inherently vague and unreliable, if not plain suspect. So, we will move this time from the known to the unknown and start with knowledge of type 4.

1. Knowledge by separative indirect contact

   Knowledge by separative indirect contact is the explicit, sense-based, constructed knowledge of the physical world, and the expert mode of this type plays a major role in modern science. Modernity has made stunning progress perfecting this way of acquiring knowledge in the physical domain, and we need not detail out the methods it uses here.

   The problem with this way of acquiring knowledge is that it is only suitable for things and forces in the outer, physical world, and as we saw in the chapter on the history of psychology [pp. 16-23], what really matters to people cannot be studied in this manner. Our awareness of our own existence, the sense of our connectedness with nature and each other, love, the appreciation of beauty, joy, values and meaning are not "things", and they don't belong to the outer physical world that objective science can study. They exist in consciousness, and to know them, we need expert forms of the three more inward ways of acquiring knowledge.

2. Knowledge by separative direct contact

   In the beginning of the 20th century, mainstream psychology tried its hand at professionalising this way of acquiring knowledge, calling it "introspection". Unfortunately, it encountered such serious difficulties that it gave up on it and redefined itself as the science of behaviour which can be known (and measured) by knowledge of type four.

   In itself, it was not surprising that introspectionism met with difficulties: introspection is difficult. The tragedy was that the American psychologists who were confronted with these difficulties did not look outside their own culture. If they had done that, they would have realised that the Indian civilization had developed a highly sophisticated knowledge system and a technology of consciousness with which the difficulties of introspection can be overcome.

   To understand why the Indian system works while the way in which the early introspectionists tried to conduct objective observation of inner processes didn't, it helps to have a quick look at why the way science observes the physical outside world does work so well. To understand physical objects and events, science uses a combination of highly disciplined observation of often artificially created experimental situations, sophisticated instrumentation, mathematics and logical reasoning. By and large, this works well. Documentation, instrumentation, evaluation are all explicit, and straightforward, so that amongst specialists, consensus can generally be arrived at.

   Without proper instruments rain is probably as difficult to measure as the effectivity of therapy. But once you have installed a good instrument to measure rainfall, whether you like rain or what you think about climate change is unlikely to affect your measurements to any substantial degree. When, on the other hand, you want to know whether you have gained from a certain method of therapy, it is rather likely that your feelings towards the therapist, the effort you have put into it, and your ideas about therapy in general, will effect your assessment of the effectivity of the therapy.
      When your query is about what you're thinking at that very moment, the situation gets worse: when you ask someone "are you thinking of a yellow elephant?", the question works like a switch that determines the outcome.

   But in psychology things don't work in the same way: we cannot avoid human observers "to look inside", and a wide variety of psychological processes in the minds of these observers tend to effect the outcome of the observation in often complex ways. The early German and American introspectionists tried to train their observers, but their basic method of observation still used one part of the mind to study the functioning of another part of the same mind, and the result was comparable to what would happen if a judge would be asked to adjudicate a case in which he or his own family is involved. This is normally not considered acceptable since it would result in an obvious conflict of interest. In the case of introspection, in which one part of the mind is asked to observe what happens in another part of the same mind, there is a similar difficulty, especially because what happens inside someone tends to be value-laden and taken as indicative of the value of the person in whose mind it appears to happen. And this is only one of the problems. There are at least four. The second one is that the ordinary waking mind is not refined enough to study inner processes that are more subtle than those in the surface mind; the third is that the act of observation tends to affect what is happening; and the fourth problem is infinite regress.1

   The Indian solution avoids all four problems, because it is based on a deeper understanding of consciousness and its relationship to the mind and the body. In the ordinary waking state, consciousness and mind tend to be entangled both with each other and with the workings of the brain. Mainstream science takes it for granted that neither mind nor consciousness can exist without a functioning nervous system. It takes matter as the primary reality, looks at the brain as a biological information processing unit, and takes consciousness as no more than an epiphenomenon, property, or side-effect emerging from a small sub-group of brain-based mental processes. The Indian tradition looks at it the other way around. It takes consciousness as the primary reality and has found ways to separate consciousness from the mental processes that take place within it. One of the possibilities that then open up, is to watch the activities of one's mind as a completely detached centre of consciousness, a silent witness, or sākṣī. If done well, none of the complications of ordinary introspection occur. Arriving at a state of pure, absolutely silent witness consciousness is, of course, not trivial, but interestingly, it is actually doable. We'll see later in more detail how this can be accomplished and what it can then be used for.2

3. Knowledge by intimate direct contact

   Knowledge by intimate direct contact is used in professional skills and attitudes, and its systematic training has led to remarkable results in almost all fields of human endeavour. Managers use it to develop leadership qualities; athletes, dancers and craftsmen use it to train their physical skills; and actors use it to master the expression of emotions. But the "intimate direct contact" can go deeper, and, since in those deeper layers we are closely connected with each other and with everything else that exists, knowledge by intimate direct contact makes it also possible to know others, and even inanimate things and events, as if from the inside. In other words, it is the way of acquiring knowledge that gives access to many of the "anomalous" phenomena studied by parapsychology.

   Since such phenomena are extremely hard to explain within the boundaries of a purely physicalist understanding of reality, they have till now been met with much scepsis and they have not remotely received the attention they deserve. This is not only tragical but also disingenuous, since the hard sciences have fully accepted that there are forces and phenomena that are not accessible by our human senses. It is as if psychologists have been so mesmerised by the success of the hard sciences that they are scared to tread outside the safe limits of what they think the physical sciences do, while the physical sciences themselves have crossed the boundaries of what our outer, physical sense-organs can tell long back.

   Once physicists realised that there might be things that cannot be perceived with the ordinary human senses, they constructed instruments that translate those extra aspects of reality into human-perceptible form. And they would have made no progress whatsoever if they had not done so. Science would not have made any progress if it had refused to create instruments that are sensitive to things the ordinary human senses cannot perceive, things like electromagnetism, x-rays, infrared and ultraviolet light, ultrasound, the list is forever expanding.

   In psychology, it is the same: here too, limiting ourselves to what we can discern in the ordinary waking state blocks all possibilities for progress: we must create new instruments of knowledge that can accurately perceive those aspects of the inner realities that cannot be seen in the ordinary waking state. The only difference is that the instruments psychology needs to create and perfect must be part of the inner domain: they must be sensitive to what is happening inside consciousness. And this is what the Indian systems of yoga have done. Just as science made physical instruments to study the physical domain, the Indian knowledge systems made psychological instruments to study the psychological domain. They developed a technology of consciousness and created antaḥkaraṇa, sophisticated inner instruments of knowledge, with which they could study the inner realities precisely and reliably. We'll have a closer look at how this is done in the next section.

4. Knowledge by identity

   If we perfect these inner instruments of knowledge well enough and manage to silence the normal working of the mind completely, the resulting inner clarity makes it possible to develop the last way of acquiring knowledge, knowledge by identity, to levels way beyond what is presently "normal".

   The nature of knowledge by identity is perhaps best understood in the context of the involution and evolution of consciousness we discussed in an earlier chapter [p. 75]. As we saw there, it must be a conscious force that gives each part of the universe its specific properties, and knowledge by identity is the knowledge aspect of that conscious force. In other words, knowledge by identity is the intrinsically perfect and comprehensive knowledge that each thing has of itself; it tells each thing how to be and how to act in harmony with all the forces that have an impact on it from the outside. Since the consciousness in each entity is only to some extent separated out but also, as if in the background, continuous with the consciousness in all other elements and the cosmos as a whole, it is possible, at least in principle, to use knowledge by identity to know reality as a whole, as well as every detail, directly, from inside out, without the need of the senses, the brain or whatever. In other words, one can look at knowledge by identity as the basic "intelligence" that is there in every individual part of the manifestation as well as in the whole, and it is the essential oneness between the two that explains the incredible harmony of the whole, where even the simplest physical thing obeys perfectly all laws of nature that pertain to it in perfect harmony with everything that happens around it. Secular mystics like J.D Krishnamurti and Bohm called it the intelligence hidden in the universe. In a more traditional, religious language, one could say that knowledge by identity is the way the Divine knows — and manifests — itself in the world.

   As mentioned in the previous section, in ordinary life, knowledge by identity tends to be hidden almost entirely under the other three types of knowledge, which is the reason that the Indian tradition recommends silencing the outer parts of the mind as the best way to find our innermost Self, and with that the inalienable happiness and wisdom that are its intrinsic properties. Sri Aurobindo considers knowledge by identity, once fully developed and purified, the only way of acquiring knowledge that can be made completely reliable. It is the knowledge of the Self, ātmavidyā, which binds our individual consciousness to the cosmic consciousness that sustains the manifestation as a whole.

Summing up the naive and expert modes of acquiring knowledge.

The naive and expert modes of acquiring knowledge can then be summarised as in Table 8b.

	Way of acquiring knowledge	Naïve mode	Expert mode
4	Knowledge by separative indirect contact	ordinary, sense-based knowledge of physical world	the hard sciences
3	Knowledge by separative direct contact	introspection	pure witness (sakshi); purusha-based self-observation
2	Knowledge by intimate direct contact	superficial experiential knowledge	professional skills
			"anomalous" knowledge; real intuition
1	Knowledge by identity	superficial awareness of one's own existence	spontaneous, inherently true Knowledge

Table 8b. Naive and expert modes of the four ways of acquiring knowledge

In the next two sections, we will have a look at how our "inner instruments of knowledge" can be made more sensitive, precise and reliable, and in the final section of this chapter, we'll see how the naive and expert modes of the four ways of acquiring knowledge can be used to study the different realms that together make up our complex human existence.

Endnotes