There are limits to what is knowable. Absolute, hard limits that no-one can break through. Not anybody, not now, not later. Knowing those limits puts everything else into perspective. We can still think about what is beyond those limits, but that thinking cannot qualify as knowledge. Rather, it is some form of speculation. Useful, perhaps. Fun, maybe. Necessary, even! But always, speculation. with that out of the way, let’s look at these limits.
1 experience
There is no getting beyond, or out of, experience. Absolutely everything that can be observed, felt or thought is observed, felt or thought as an experience in consciousness. And we can’t get out of consciousness, we can’t go beyond it. Pick up a rock. Everything about that action is an experience. You seeing the rock, you feeling its texture. Its weight. Your thoughts about it. All are experiences in consciousness. There is absolutely nothing you could be aware of that is not just another experience in consciousness.
Peering through a telescope you may see the image of a galaxy, or you could read a book about galaxies, or hear Carl Sagan talk about them. All you will ever know about them is as an experience.
Yet we maintain something must underlie those experiences. Something (like matter) must precede them. We’ll get back to that later. Next limit.
2 now
We see pattern in our experiences: regularity, consistency and predictability and we model around those. It seems to work incredibly well. There’s a problem though. Those stories are all based on the past and even the future. Because we gave a memory of how things went in the past, we create a mode l in our minds of how things work and we believe we can predict what will happen in the future. But we have no access whatsoever to the past other than as an experience in the now.
We may believe our memory in the moment reflects something about what happened in the past but there is no way to check. And when we actually pay close attention it may become distressingly clear that our memories are rather flimsy, transient and dreamlike in character. Wisps.
But regardless, there’s no getting out of the now. Ever.
3 this
There is experience in the moment. But there is absolutely no access to anyone else’s experience, ever. This experience, right now and right here is certainly experienced, but anybody else’s experience can never be ascertained. You can believe, think and hope your experience in the moment is not the only experience in the only consciousness. But you can never know or verify. There is no getting out of this consciousness.
4 is
We can’t choose what we hear or feel or otherwise sense. But we think we can choose what we think and decide. But even a tiny amount of introspection shows this is not the case. When we pay attention to our thoughts, we can see them arise in consciousness from ‘the deep’ so to speak. They just bubble up out of nowhere. And when we start thinking about thinking, those thoughts likewise just appear, without any access to a thinker or a conscious process of assembling our thoughts.
Whatever we experience (even thought) just is. No agent or agency anywhere. Experience is and that’s a hard limit.
5 stories
Everything is a concept and concepts are stories. And no story is true because they are all made-up. Words are conventions, agreements: ‘Let’s label this experience with these symbols and these sounds’.
There is no getting around the fact that all words are defined by more words and that all knowledge is just words strung together. Imagine Wikipedia and an online dictionary hyperlinked into itself completely. And now realize that the whole thing is made-up from start to finish and just stories. An incredible web of bla, bla, bla.
So…
You can’t get out of experience, the now or your consciousness. You don’t have free will and all your knowledge is made-up stories.
Experiences will arise whether you clench your hand around the tiller or not. And maybe those experiences are the point. They are after all the only certain part. Try putting your attention there for a bit, on this, your experience, in the now, as you experience it, as you feel it, without the concepts.
‘Be here now’ is pretty good advice from old Richard Alpert (Ram Dass).
Try it some time.