Inside/Outside

 The Truth is known but people struggle to put a name to it. Recently found value in the ideas of inside/outside again.

In spirituality people often say things like "go inside" and "find yourself." The answer and the truth is "within" you. What does this mean? Where is the inside that you can go to?

Chances are the "inside" people identify initially is wrong, which rather makes such statements useless.

This issue is handled amazingly in the Shurangama Sutra Volume 1. While the Sutra does not come directly from Buddha it is still excellent. In Chapter 5 when asked the location of the Mind, Ananda answers what many still believe today at least 1500 years later: 

Ananda said to the Buddha, “World Honored One, all the ten kinds of living beings in the world alike maintain that the conscious mind dwells within the body; ..." [p172]

Then Buddha shows Ananda problems with this view:

“Your mind is capable of understanding everything thoroughly. Now if your present mind, which thoroughly understands everything, were in your body, then you should be aware first of what is inside your body. Can there be living beings who first see inside their bodies before they observe things outside? [p177]

So Ananda is forced to say the Mind is outside the body in order to account for seeing the world but not the inner organs of the body. But he only makes it worse and is ultimately left realising that the Mind is without location. It is the same issue that the characters in a painting might have if asked where the canvas is. In if mind has location where is the "inside" that spirituality speaks of.

It is linked to Relativity and Measurement.

To measure something we take a "standard" and we compare with the unknown in a defined way. For length we put the ruler end to end, for weight we add to scales etc. We then get a count of how many times the standard fits into the unknown. Note that we are talking about standards fitting into an unknown. This is the sense of inside used in spirituality. A 10kg weight can be thought about has having 10x 1Kg weights "inside" it.

Now consider a much more poignant measure: how many years does someone's life have in it? So recently Prince Philip died. Everyone did the measurement and said he had 99 years inside his life. Soon afterwards actress Helen McCrory died and she only had 52 years inside. When we compare these measurement we say that the inside of Helen's life was smaller than the inside of Prince Philip's life.

But this only works from the outside. Lets go inside a year itself? How big is a year? Interesting isn't it: no answer. The inside has no size. we must go outside the year and find something else like the number of days. we answer 365 days. Now a year has an inside. But then how big is a day? we must answer with another outside. By itself a day has no size, or for that matter any measurement or quantity.

While there is no inherent quantity inside our lives there is Quality. Robert Pirsig has a lot to say about this. The key point is that quality without measurement has no boundaries. This is very very hard to see clearly. Wittgenstein notes in 'Philosophical Investigations' how odd it is to consider the word "Red" while looking at a red thing and try to understand how these two things have any connection at all. The perceived colour is a quality that if we don't measure and name, is just what it is, infinite and present. It exists as it is quite apart from the rest of the world. In meditation we can just sit with it as it is. However when we name it, it gets a package and that package distinguishes it from its surrounding and other colours. Perhaps it is a red apple on a brown table. When we let our brains go all the way and process it with a name the red then exists in relation to other colours especially the brown of the table. This named red is solid, graspable and gives us a mental satisfaction. But we lose the quality when we bottle it like this. It is a very delicate mental process that is easily missed until we spend time in meditation looking closely at it. The distinction is also called Nama and Rupa in the Indian literature. Rupa is just the form or phenomenon as it is and Nama is the mental process of giving it a measured box with a name on it. They are quite separate just as Wittgenstein noted looking at a red thing (rupa) and thinking that it is red (nama). 

So we see that for things to have a "measure" we must compare them with something "outside". The "inside" actually has no measure by itself. This leads to a fundamental spiritual discovery: things depends upon other things to be what they are! Inside things are just themselves.

This means that we can change what the inside looks like just by comparing with something else. Helen McCrory only looks young compared with Prince Philip. James Dean had only 24 years inside him making Helen now look quite big. The other thing is what we make of big and small. Its assumed that a big life is good. But if we measure illness then we want small. Going into the outside world in order to get a measure on things is a messy thing. But inside things just are and that makes all things the same. Helen McCrory lived a life and from the inside it looked exactly the same as Prince Philip's. When we go inside there is Equanimity and there is no Suffering. This quality of the inside of being without measure is called Emptiness in Buddhism (originally Sunyata).

So how do we get inside? Its about not measuring things. The tool of measurement is the discerning mind and the key method to getting this distinction is to meditate. That means to get the discerning mind to focus on something. Commonly its the breath. We can discern and measure just in breath and out breath to start with. We go inside when that discernment falls away and there is just breathing.