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Painting for the title banner is by Zhang Daqian, Panorama of Mount Lu, 1981–83, wall mural in portable scroll format, ink, color on silk, 70 x 392 inches (178.5 x 994.6 cm), National Palace Museum, Taipei.


MISTY RAIN
Indistinct Shadows of the True Man With No Title

This is the third installment of MISTY RAIN, a book that is but a concept, not yet reality. The first installment was posted on January 1, 2026. The journey should be of some interest, at least for me. You are welcome to come along.


THE MYTH OF KNOWLEDGE

The old poet carries on bravely, the Chan master’s words are gentle and profound. 

Too drunk to follow what he’s saying, conscious only of red and green blur.
Su Tung P’o

The brain of homo sapiens, it is said, weighs about the same as a bag of flour; yet runs (and runs and runs) on little more than a bowl of porridge. Still a blur, this brain of ours. “The human brain can process one billion bits of information every second. But our conscious minds can handle only 40 to 50 bits of information a second,” so says Science. And our thoughts trundle along at a mere 10 bits per second.

Knowledge is more than just bits of information. Apprehension and understanding take the bits of perception and create conceptionalizations which in turn may or may not become concepts. The process is not exactly clear, not even to the neuroscientist. The mind of man is a whirlagig made up of all manner of sensations, feelings, emotions, desires, instincts, ideas of worth, of aesthetics, of time and space and number, ideas of differences and resemblances, ideas of dependence between events, and between ends and means, subject and object, judgments of affirming, denying, doubting, supposing any of the above ideas, and judgments upon the previous judgments that affirm, deny, or doubt.

The myth of knowledge is that there is no certainty about what we know, and that there is no way to know what we do not know. To probe mind with mind becomes a case of a man riding an ox in search of an ox.

From a Chinese collection of stories compiled in the 4th century and titled Soushenji (搜神記, "Investigations into deities") comes this tale:

A man traveling along the road at nightfall came upon a grass-roofed hut, newly built, by the roadside. From a window, an old woman gazed at him as he passed. He asked her for a night’s lodging, which she granted. During the night, he heard a young boy outside, calling and saying, “A-hsiang, the Governor says to haul out your thunder cart!” Looking from his window, he saw the woman with her cart walking down the road. Later that night there came rolling thunder and heavy rain. The next morning the man found himself alone in the hut. He rose, called out, but received no answer. Starting down the road, somewhat perplexed, the man looked back at the place where he had spent the night, but saw only the mounded dirt of a newly dug grave.

Perceptions can be quite perverse. What we think we perceive ultimately depends on one’s point of view, one’s perspective; and one’s perspective is a product of genetics and experience. An oft quoted paragraph from THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON by James Boswell (1740-1791) is this:

“After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.'”

Dr. Johnson (1709-1784), noted English writer with many contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, sermonist, biographer, editor, and lexicographer, hit the stone a telling blow, it is true; but, like Jung, missed the mark.

George Berkeley (1685-1783) was an Anglo-Irish philosopher, writer, and clergyman who is regarded as the founder of "immaterialism", a philosophical theory he developed which later came to be known as subjective idealism. He was a talented metaphysician famous for defending idealism, the view that reality consists exclusively of minds and their ideas.

Both of these notable men came at the world with different perspectives. Both were correct in their views; both were mistaken. Western philosophers divide their world into reality and metaphysics. Most Eastern philosophers make no clear distinction between the two. Engineers tend towards factual, concrete conceptualizations. Poets (those individuals who live in their heads) tend to gravitate to abstraction and metaphysics generally and Chinese philosophy in particular. A rather efficacious metaphor often used to describe the state of mind for those reared by the dogma of Western civilization is that of a coin. The two sides of the coin are abstractions created by our minds. The solid center portion of the coin is the real stuff of which the natural world is made (which was said to be a plenum by James et al and which includes us of course). Place good and evil (black and white, left and right) on the faces of the coin. The relative natural world is neither and both and fills the space between.

Knowledge, of course, leans heavily on perspective. One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. Newtonian physics offers one view of the material world. Quantum physics (Einstein’s piece of the pie) gives another look to the business. And the holographic universe (Hawking and his black holes) provides a third. All three are different, yet all three necessarily overlap.

Knowledge has grown exponentially since the industrial revolution, and continues to befuddle humans with new bits and odd twists of the old bits. The universe, for example, as theoretical physics would have it, is not a ‘uni’ but rather a ‘multi.’ The universe we perceive is currently occupied by 8.3 billion humans. Out there (or in there or wherever) are an infinite number of universes with, perhaps, an infinite number of living organisms. The multiverse is defined as a ‘hypothetical collection of diverse universes, each of which would comprise everything that is experimentally accessible by a connected community of observers.’ So it is claimed at www.britannica.com/science/multiverse. I mention this just to add fuel to the fire: just how many bits of information might there be in a multiverse?

Knowledge of just our universe, that which contains the Milky Way galaxy and our solar system, has so far eluded a complete scientific explication. We know a good deal about the observable universe, but that accounts for only 5% of what is out there (in there?). The other 95% consists of dark matter and dark energy of which we know literally nothing. And a multiverse?

Spare me.

The multiverse is an example of the expanding world of knowledge, billions and billions of bits that line up on the unknown side of the ledger. The more we know, it seems, the more we need to know. The same conundrum exists in every branch of science, and in every corner of the humanities. Those who seek answers so assiduously are like men (or women) locked in a room with no windows and but one locked door. The key is in the lock, but will not turn. There they stand in a frenzy, shouting and pounding on the door.

Consider: If brute force will not force the door, perhaps some subtle strategy, some sleight of hand, might do the trick (see Sun Tzu, element number seven). If one gently jiggles the key, might the lock not turn? This is of course the Chinese concept of wu wei (無為), doing less to get more. If a practical example is needed, consider trying to texture sheet rock: a frustrating business for the DIY home owner. The more spackling he spreads, the worse it gets.

Wittgenstein, when asked what his aim in philosophy was, gave this answer: To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle. The fly is us; the bottle is the plenum. There is no getting out (probably); but we would like to know what we are about. The physicist presumes to show how that fly got in the bottle in the first place as well as the whence and wherefore of the bottle. If one swaps the fly for a goose, one gets this Chan Buddhist story:

The governor of Hsuan province came to Chan master Nan-chuan (748 - 835 CE) and posed the following problem: A man raises a goose in a bottle, watching it grow until one day he realizes that the goose had grown too large to get out of the bottle. Since the fellow did not want to break the bottle or kill the goose, he was quite perplexed, hung out on the horns of a dilemma. What should he do, asked the governor. Nan-chuan gazed at the man for a moment, then quietly addressed him. My esteemed governor, he said, and then shouted, THE GOOSE IS OUT!

Hypothetical questions can always be answered with hypothetical answers; and isn’t it all hypothetical? Well, yes and no.

Dr. J stubbed a gouty toe on his rock. The nuns of my catechism classes, as I remember, when asked if God were all powerful, could He make a rock that even He couldn’t lift, always answered with their malevolent yard stick smacking the arm of the offender.

So how do we find a modicum of certainty in what we know (or think we know)? And what do we do about all that dark matter we know nothing about? The word ‘tree’ is a common concept. But ‘tree’ is not a tree. If our knowledge stops at ‘tree’ we essentially know nothing. Arguably all we ‘know’ comes to nothing (did I hear Bishop Berkeley chortling?). And it is in that sense that metaphysics suggests that all form is void, all is nothingness (Dr. J is apoplectic). Not a plenum; but rather a vacuum or something like. Lao Tzu (Laozi, 6th C. BCE. Well worth a visit, but not on this excursion.) would suggest the Tao (道, way) which is the label for that which is nothing but also not-nothing and from which comes the ten thousand things.

The fly and the goose are still with us but the ‘fly’ or the ‘goose’ are not.

There. The fly is out.



NOTES:
‘The old poet carries on bravely,’ SELECTED POEMS OF SU TUNG P’O, Burton Watson translation. Copper Canyon Press. 1994.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/caltech-scientists-have-quantified-the-speed-of-human-thought-394395

See https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/. This year (2025) there have been over 131, 400, 000 births; and 62,000,000 deaths.

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951) an Austro-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.

My thanks to William James for the conversation on categories of mind.