E X P E R I M E N T S IN C O N S C I O U S N E S S

7 Experiments in Consciousness
AT THE CORE of every religion lies an undeniable claim about the
human condition: it is possible to have one's experience of the world
radically transformed. Although we generally live within the limits
imposed by our ordinary uses of attention—we wake, we work,
we eat, we watch television, we converse with others, we sleep,
we dream—most of us know, however dimly, that extraordinary
experiences are possible.
The problem with religion is that it blends this truth so thoroughly
with the venom of unreason. Take Christianity as an example:
it is not enough that Jesus was a man who transformed himself
to such a degree that the Sermon on the Mount could be his heart's
confession. He also had to be the Son of God, born of a virgin, and
destined to return to earth trailing clouds of glory. The effect of such
dogma is to place the example of Jesus forever out of reach. His
teaching ceases to be a set of empirical claims about the linkage
between ethics and spiritual insight and instead becomes a gratuitous,
and rather gruesome, fairy tale. According to the dogma of
Christianity, becoming just like Jesus is impossible. One can only
enumerate one's sins, believe the unbelievable, and await the end of
the world.
But a more profound response to existence is possible for us, and
the testimony of Jesus, as well as that of countless other men and
women over the ages, attests to this. The challenge for us is to begin
talking about this possibility in rational terms.
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E X P E R I M E N T S IN C O N S C I O U S N E S S 205
The Search for Happiness
Though the lilies of the field are admirably clothed, you and I were
driven from the womb naked and squalling. What do we need to be
happy? Almost everything we do can be viewed as a reply to this
question. We need food, shelter, and clothing. We need the company
of others. Then we need to learn countless things to make the most
of this company. We need to find work that we enjoy, and we need
time for leisure. We need so many things, and there seems no alternative
but to seek and maintain them, one after the next, hour after
hour.
But are such things sufficient for happiness? Is a person guaranteed
to be happy merely by virtue of having health, wealth, and good
company? Apparently not. Are such things even necessary for happiness
? If so, what can we make of those Indian yogis who renounce
all material and familial attachments only to spend decades alone in
caves practicing meditation ? It seems that such people can be happy
as well. Indeed, some of them claim to be perfectly so.
It is difficult to find a word for that human enterprise which aims
at happiness directly—at happiness of a sort that can survive the
frustration of all conventional desires. The term "spirituality" seems
unavoidable here—and I have used it several times in this book
already—but it has many connotations that are, frankly, embarrassing.
"Mysticism" has more gravitas, perhaps, but it has unfortunate
associations of its own. Neither word captures the reasonableness
and profundity of the possibility that we must now consider: that
there is a form of well-being that supersedes all others, indeed, that
transcends the vagaries of experience itself. I will use both "spirituality"
and "mysticism" interchangeably here, because there are
no alternatives, but the reader should remember that I am using
them in a restricted sense. While a visit to any New Age bookstore
will reveal that modern man has embraced a daunting range of
"spiritual" preoccupations—ranging from the healing power of
crystals and colonic irrigation to the ardors of alien abduction—our
206 THE END OF FAITH
discussion will focus on a specific insight that seems to have special
relevance to our pursuit of happiness.
Most spiritual teachings agree that there is more to happiness
than becoming a productive member of society, a cheerful consumer
of every licit pleasure, and an enthusiastic bearer of children disposed
to do the same. Indeed, many suggest that it is our search for
happiness—our craving for knowledge and new experience, our
desire for recognition, our efforts to find the right romantic partner,
even our yearning for spiritual experience itself—that causes us to
overlook a form of well-being that is intrinsic to consciousness in
every present moment. Some version of this insight seems to lie at
the core of many of our religions, and yet it is by no means always
easy to discern among the articles of faith.
While many of us go for decades without experiencing a full day
of solitude, we live every moment in the solitude of our own minds.
However close we may be to others, our pleasures and pains are ours
alone. Spiritual practice is often recommended as the most rational
response to this situation. The underlying claim here is that we can
realize something about the nature of consciousness in this moment
that will improve our lives. The experience of countless contemplatives
suggests that consciousness—being merely the condition in
which thought, emotion, and even our sense of self arises—is never
actually changed by what it knows. That which is aware of joy does
not become joyful; that which is aware of sadness does not become
sad. From the point of view of consciousness, we are merely aware
of sights, sounds, sensations, moods, and thoughts. Many spiritual
teachings allege that if we can recognize our identity as consciousness
itself, as the mere witness of appearances, we will realize that
we stand perpetually free of the vicissitudes of experience.
This is not to deny that suffering has a physical dimension. The
fact that a drug like Prozac can relieve many of the symptoms of
depression suggests that mental suffering can be no more ethereal
than a little green pill. But the arrow of influence clearly flies both
ways. We know that ideas themselves have the power to utterly
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define a person's experience of the world.1 Even the significance of
intense physical pain is open to subjective interpretation. Consider
the pain of labor: How many women come away from the experience
traumatized? The occasion itself is generally a happy one,
assuming all goes well with the birth. Imagine how different it
would be for a woman to be tortured by having the sensations of a
normal labor inflicted upon her by a mad scientist. The sensations
might be identical, and yet this would certainly be among the worst
experiences of her life. There is clearly more to suffering even physical
pain than painful sensation alone.
Our spiritual traditions suggest that we have considerable room
here to change our relationship to the contents of consciousness, and
thereby to transform our experience of the world. Indeed, a vast literature
on human spirituality attests to this.2 It is also clear that
nothing need be believed on insufficient evidence for us to look into
this possibility with an open mind.
Consciousness
Like Descartes, most of us begin these inquiries as thinkers, condemned
by the terms of our subjectivity to maneuver in a world that
appears to be other than what we are. Descartes accentuated this
dichotomy by declaring that two substances were to be found in
God's universe: matter and spirit. For most of us, a dualism of this
sort is more or less a matter of common sense (though the term
"spirit" seems rather majestic, given how our minds generally comport
themselves). As science has turned its reifying light upon the
mysteries of the human mind, however, Descartes' dualism (along
with our own "folk psychology") has come in for some rough treatment.
Bolstered by the undeniable successes of three centuries of
purely physical research, many philosophers and scientists now
reject Descartes' separation of mind and body, spirit and matter, as
the concession to Christian piety that it surely was, and imagine that
208 THE END OF FAITH
they have thereby erased the conceptual gulf between consciousness
and the physical world.
In the last chapter we saw that our beliefs about consciousness are
intimately linked to our ethics. They also happen to have a direct
bearing upon our view of death. Most scientists consider themselves
physicalists; this means, among other things, that they believe that
our mental and spiritual lives are wholly dependent upon the workings
of our brains. On this account, when the brain dies, the stream
of our being must come to an end. Once the lamps of neural activity
have been extinguished, there will be nothing left to survive.
Indeed, many scientists purvey this conviction as though it were
itself a special sacrament, conferring intellectual integrity upon any
man, woman, or child who is man enough to swallow it.
But the truth is that we simply do not know what happens after
death. While there is much to be said against a naive conception of a
soul that is independent of the brain,3 the place of consciousness in
the natural world is very much an open question. The idea that
brains produce consciousness is little more than an article of faith
among scientists at present, and there are many reasons to believe
that the methods of science will be insufficient to either prove or disprove
it.
Inevitably, scientists treat consciousness as a mere attribute of
certain large-brained animals. The problem, however, is that nothing
about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, declares it to be
a bearer of that peculiar, interior dimension that each of us experiences
as consciousness in his own case. Every paradigm that
attempts to shed light upon the frontier between consciousness and
unconsciousness, searching for the physical difference that makes
the phenomenal one, relies upon subjective reports to signal that an
experimental stimulus has been observed.4 The operational definition
of consciousness, therefore, is reportability. But consciousness
and reportability are not the same. Is a starfish conscious? No science
that conflates consciousness with reportability will deliver an
answer to this question. To look for consciousness in the world on
E X P E R I M E N T S IN C O N S C I O U S N E S S 209
the basis of its outward signs is the only thing that we can do. To
define consciousness in terms of its outward signs, however, is a fallacy.
Computers of the future, sufficiently advanced to pass the Turing
test,* will offer up a wealth of self-report—but will they be
conscious? If we don't already know, their eloquence on the matter
will not decide the issue. Consciousness may be a far more rudimentary
phenomenon than are living creatures and their brains.
And there appears to be no obvious way of ruling out such a thesis
experimentally.5
And so, while we know many things about ourselves in anatomical,
physiological, and evolutionary terms, we currently have no
idea why it is "like something" to be what we are. The fact that the
universe is illuminated where you stand, the fact that your thoughts
and moods and sensations have a qualitative character, is an absolute
mystery—rivaled only by the mystery, famously articulated by the
philosopher Schelling, that there should be anything at all in this
universe rather than nothing. The problem is that our experience of
brains, as objects in the world, leaves us perfectly insensible to the
reality of consciousness, while our experience as brains grants us
knowledge of nothing else. Given this situation, it is reasonable to
conclude that the domain of our subjectivity constitutes a proper
(and essential) sphere of investigation into the nature of the universe:
as some facts will be discovered only in consciousness, in firstperson
terms, or not discovered at all.
Investigating the nature of consciousness directly, through sustained
introspection, is simply another name for spiritual practice. It
should be clear that whatever transformations of your experience
are possible—after forty days and forty nights in the desert, after
* The mathematician Alan Turing once proposed a test for the adequacy of a computer
simulation of the human mind (and this has since been promoted in the literature
to a test for computer "consciousness"). The proposed test requires that a
human subject interrogate another person and a computer by turns, without knowing
which is which. If, at the end of the experiment, he cannot identify the computer
with any confidence, it is said to have "passed" the Turing test.
210 THE END OF FAITH
twenty years in a cave, or after some new serotonin agonist has been
delivered to your synapses—these will be a matter of changes occurring
in the contents of your consciousness. Whatever Jesus experienced,
he experienced as consciousness. If he loved his neighbor as
himself, this is a description of what it felt like to be Jesus while in
the presence of other human beings. The history of human spirituality
is the history of our attempts to explore and modify the deliverances
of consciousness through methods like fasting, chanting,
sensory deprivation, prayer, meditation, and the use of psychotropic
plants. There is no question that experiments of this sort can be conducted
in a rational manner. Indeed, they are some of our only
means of determining to what extent the human condition can be
deliberately transformed. Such an enterprise becomes irrational
only when people begin making claims about the world that cannot
be supported by empirical evidence.
What Are We Calling "I"?
Our spiritual possibilities will largely depend on what we are as
selves. In physical terms, each of us is a system, locked in an uninterrupted
exchange of matter and energy with the larger system of
the earth. The life of your very cells is built upon a network of barter
and exchange over which you can exercise only the crudest conscious
influence—in the form of deciding whether to hold your
breath or take another slice of pizza out of the fridge. As a physical
system, you are no more independent of nature at this moment than
your liver is of the rest of your body. As a collection of selfregulating
and continually dividing cells, you are also continuous
with your genetic precursors: your parents, their parents, and backward
through tens of millions of generations—at which point your
ancestors begin looking less like men and women with bad teeth and
more like pond scum. It is true enough to say that, in physical terms,
you are little more than an eddy in a great river of life.
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But, of course, your body is itself an environment teeming with
creatures, in relation to which you are sovereign in name alone. To
examine the body of a person, its organs and tissues, cells and
intestinal flora (sometimes fauna, alas), is to be confronted by a
world that bears no more evidence of an overriding conscious intelligence
than does the world at large. Is there any reason to suspect,
when observing the function of mitochondria within a cell, or the
twitching of muscle fibers in the hand, that there is a mind, above
and beyond such processes, thinking, "L'état c'est moi"? Indeed, any
privilege we might be tempted to accord the boundary of the skin in
our search for the physical self seems profoundly arbitrary.
The frontiers of the mental self are no easier to discern: memes,
taboos, norms of decorum, linguistic conventions, prejudices, ideals,
aesthetic biases, commercial jingles—the phenomena that populate
the landscape of our minds are immigrants from the world at large.
Is your desire to be physically fit—or your taste in clothing, your
sense of community, your expectation of reciprocal kindness, your
shyness, your affability, your sexual quirks, etc.—something that
originates with you? Is it something best thought of as residing in
you? These phenomena are the direct result of your embeddedness
in a world of social relationships and culture (as well as a product of
your genes). Many of them seem to be no more "you," ultimately,
than the rules of English grammar are.
And yet, this feeling of being a self persists. If the term "I" refers
to anything at all, it does not refer simply to the body. After all, most
of us feel individuated as a self within the body. I speak of "my" body
more or less as I speak of "my" car, for the simple reason that every
act of perception or cognition conveys the tacit sense that the knower
is something other than the thing known. Just as my awareness of
my car demonstrates that I, as a subject, am something other than it,
as an object, I can be aware of my hand, or an emotion, and experience
the same cleavage between subject and object. For this reason,
the self cannot simply be equated with the totality of a person's mental
life or with his personality as a whole.6 Rather, it is the point of
2 1 2 THE E N D OF F A I TH
view around which the changing states of his mind and body appear
to be constellated. Whatever the relationship between consciousness
and the body actually is, in experiential terms the body is something
to which the conscious self, if such there be, stands in relation.
Exactly when, in evolutionary or developmental terms, this point of
view emerges is not known, but one thing is clear: at some point in
the first years of life most human beings are christened as "I," the
perennial subject, for whom all appearances, inside and out, become
objects of a kind, waiting to be known. And it is as "I" that every scientist
begins his inquiry into the nature of the world and every pious
man folds his hands in prayer.7
THE sense of self seems to be the product of the brain's representing
its own acts of representation; its seeing of the world begets an
image of a one who sees. It is important to realize that this feeling—
the sense that each of us has of appropriating, rather than merely
being, a sphere of experience—is not a necessary feature of consciousness.
It is, after all, conceivable that a creature could form a
representation of the world without forming a representation of
itself in the world. And, indeed, many spiritual practitioners claim to
experience the world in just this way, perfectly shorn of self.
A basic finding of neurophysiology lends credence to such claims.
It is not so much what they are but what they do that makes neurons
see, hear, smell, taste, touch, think, and feel. Like any other function
that emerges from the activity of the brain, the feeling of self is best
thought of as a process. It is not very surprising, therefore, that we
can lose this feeling, because processes, by their very nature, can be
interrupted. While the experience of selflessness does not indicate
anything about the relationship between consciousness and the
physical world (and is thus mute on the question of what happens
after death), it has broad implications for the sciences of mind, for our
approach to spirituality, and for our conception of human happiness.
As a mental phenomenon, loss of self is not as rare as our scholarly
neglect of it suggests. This experience is characterized by a
E X P E R I M E N T S I N C O N S C I O U S N E S S 213
sudden loss of subject/object perception: the continuum of experience
remains, but one no longer feels that there is a knower standing
apart from the known. Thoughts may arise, but the feeling that
one is the thinker of these thoughts has vanished. Something has
definitely changed at the level of one's moment-to-moment experience,
and this change—the disappearance of anything to which the
pronoun "\" can be faithfully attached—signals that there had been
a conscious experience of selfhood all the while, however difficult it
may be to characterize.
Look at this book as a physical object. You are aware of it as an
appearance in consciousness. You may feel that your consciousness
is one thing—it is whatever illuminates your world from some point
behind your eyes, perhaps—and the book is another. This is the kind
of dualistic (subject/object) perception that characterizes our normal
experience of life. It is possible, however, to look for your self in such
a way as to put this subject/object dichotomy in doubt—and even to
banish it altogether.
The contents of consciousness—sights, sounds, sensations,
thoughts, moods, etc.—whatever they are at the level of the brain,
are merely expressions of consciousness at the level of our experience.
Unrecognized as such, many of these appearances seem to
impinge upon consciousness from without, and the sense of self
emerges, and grows entrenched, as the feeling that that which
knows is circumscribed, modified, and often oppressed by that which
is known. Indeed, it is likely that our parents found us in our cribs
long before we found ourselves there, and that we were merely led
by their gaze, and their pointing fingers, to coalesce around an
implied center of cognition that does not, in fact, exist.8 Thereafter,
every maternal caress, every satisfaction of hunger or thirst, as well
as the diverse forms of approval and rebuke that came in reply to the
actions of our embodied minds, seemed to confirm a self-sense that
we, by example, finally learned to call "I"—and thus we became the
narrow locus around which all things and events, pleasant and
unpleasant, continue to swirl.
In subjective terms, the search for the self seems to entail a
2 1 4 THE E N D OF F A I TH
paradox: we are, after all, looking for the very thing that is doing the
looking. Thousands of years of human experience suggests, however,
that the paradox here is only apparent: it is not merely that the component
of our experience that we call "I" cannot be found; it is that
it actually disappears when looked for in a rigorous way.
THE foregoing is just a gloss on the phenomenology here, but it
should be sufficient to get us started. The basic (and, I think, uncontestable)
fact is that almost every human being experiences the duality
of subject and object in some measure, and most of us feel it
powerfully nearly every moment of our lives. It is scarcely an exaggeration
to say that the feeling that we call "I" is one of the most
pervasive and salient features of human life: and its effects upon the
world, as six billion "selves" pursue diverse and often incompatible
ends, rival those that can be ascribed to almost any other phenomenon
in nature. Clearly, there is nothing optimal—or even necessarily
viable—about our present form of subjectivity. Almost
every problem we have can be ascribed to the fact that human beings
are utterly beguiled by their feelings of separateness. It would seem
that a spirituality that undermined such dualism, through the mere
contemplation of consciousness, could not help but improve our situation.
Whether or not great numbers of human beings will ever be
in a position to explore this terrain depends on how our discourse on
religion proceeds. There is clearly no greater obstacle to a truly
empirical approach to spiritual experience than our current beliefs
about God.
The Wisdom of the East
Inevitably, the foregoing will strike certain readers as a confusing
eruption of speculative philosophy. This is unfortunate, for none of
it has been speculative or even particularly philosophical—at least
EXPERIMENTS IN CONSCIOUSNESS 215
not in the sense that this term has acquired in the West. Thousands
of years have passed since any Western philosopher imagined that a
person should be made happy, peaceful, or even wise, in the ordinary
sense, by his search for truth.9 Personal transformation, or indeed
liberation from the illusion of the self, seems to have been thought
too much to ask: or rather, not thought of at all. Consequently, many
of us in the West are conceptually unequipped to understand empirical
claims of the sort adduced above.
In fact, the spiritual differences between the East and the West are
every bit as shocking as the material differences between the North
and the South. Jared Diamond's fascinating thesis, to sum it up in a
line, is that advanced civilization did not arise in sub-Saharan Africa,
because one can't saddle a rhinoceros and ride it into battle.10 If there
is an equally arresting image that accounts for why nondualistic,
empirical mysticism seems to have arisen only in Asia, I have yet to
find it. But I suspect that the culprit has been the Christian, Jewish,
and Muslim emphasis on faith itself. Faith is rather like a rhinoceros,
in fact: it won't do much in the way of real work for you, and yet at
close quarters it will make spectacular claims upon your attention.
This is not to say that spiritual realization has been a common
attainment east of the Bosporus. Clearly, it has not. It must also be
conceded that Asia has always had its fair share of false prophets and
charlatan saints, while the West has not been entirely bereft of wisdom.
11 Nevertheless, when the great philosopher mystics of the East
are weighed against the patriarchs of the Western philosophical and
theological traditions, the difference is unmistakable: Buddha,
Shankara, Padmasambhava, Nagarjuna, Longchenpa, and countless
others down to the present have no equivalents in the West. In spiritual
terms, we appear to have been standing on the shoulders of
dwarfs. It is little wonder, therefore, that many Western scholars
have found the view within rather unremarkable.12
While this is not a treatise on Eastern spirituality, it does not
seem out of place to briefly examine the differences between the
Eastern and the Western canons, for they are genuinely startling. To
216 THE END OF FAITH
illustrate this point, I have selected a passage at random from a shelf
of Buddhist literature. The following text was found with closed
eyes, on the first attempt, from among scores of books. I invite the
reader to find anything even remotely like this in the Bible or the
Koran.
[I]n the present moment, when (your mind) remains in its own
condition without constructing anything,
Awareness at that moment in itself is quite ordinary.
And when you look into yourself in this way nakedly (without
any discursive thoughts),
Since there is only this pure observing, there will be found a lucid
clarity without anyone being there who is the observer;
Only a naked manifest awareness is present.
(This awareness) is empty and immaculately pure, not being created
by anything whatsoever.
It is authentic and unadulterated, without any duality of clarity
and emptiness.
It is not permanent and yet it is not created by anything.
However, it is not a mere nothingness or something annihilated
because it is lucid and present.
It does not exist as a single entity because it is present and clear
in terms of being many.
(On the other hand) it is not created as a multiplicity of things
because it is inseparable and of a single flavor.
This inherent self-awareness does not derive from anything outside
itself.
This is the real introduction to the actual condition of things.
—Padmasambhava13
One could live an eon as a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew and never
encounter any teachings like this about the nature of consciousness.
The comparison with Islam is especially invidious, because Padmasambhava
was virtually Muhammad's contemporary.14 While the
E X P E R I M E N T S I N C O N S C I O U S N E S S 217
meaning of the above passage might not be perfectly apparent to all
readers—it is just a section of a longer teaching on the nature of
mind and contains a fair amount of Buddhist jargon ("clarity,"
"emptiness," "single flavor," etc.)—it is a rigorously empirical document,
not a statement of metaphysics. Even the contemporary literature
on consciousness, which spans philosophy, cognitive science,
psychology, and neuroscience, cannot match the kind of precise, phenomenological
studies that can be found throughout the Buddhist
canon. Although we have no reason to be dogmatically attached to
any one tradition of spiritual instruction, we should not imagine
that they are all equally wise or equally sophisticated. They are not.
Mysticism, to be viable, requires explicit instructions, which need
suffer no more ambiguity or artifice in their exposition than we find
in a manual for operating a lawn mower.15 Some traditions realized
this millennia ago. Others did not.
Meditation
Most techniques of introspection that aim at uncovering the intrinsic
properties of consciousness are referred to as methods of meditation.
To be told that a person is "meditating," however, is to be given
almost no information at all about the content of his experience.
"Meditation," in the sense that I use it here, refers to any means
whereby our sense of "self"—of subject/object dualism in perception
and cognition—can be made to vanish, while consciousness
remains vividly aware of the continuum of experience.16
Inevitably, the primary obstacle to meditation is thinking. This
leads many people to assume that the goal of meditation is to produce
a thought-free state. It is true that some experiences entail the
temporary cessation of thought, but meditation is less a matter of
suppressing thoughts than of breaking our identification with them,
so that we can recognize the condition in which thoughts themselves
arise. Western scientists and philosophers generally imagine that
2l8 THE END OF FAITH
thinking is the epitome of conscious life and would no sooner have
a mind without thoughts than hands without fingers. The fundamental
insight of most Eastern schools of spirituality, however, is
that while thinking is a practical necessity, the failure to recognize
thoughts as thoughts, moment after moment, is what gives each of
us the feeling that we call "I," and this is the string upon which all
our states of suffering and dissatisfaction are strung.17 This is an
empirical claim, not a matter of philosophical speculation. Break the
spell of thought, and the duality of subject and object will vanish—
as will the fundamental difference between conventional states of
happiness and suffering. This is a fact about the mind that few Western
scholars have ever made it their business to understand.
It is on this front that the practice of meditation reveals itself to
be both intellectually serious and indispensable. There is something
to realize about the nature of consciousness, and its realization does
not entail thinking new thoughts. Like any skill that requires refinements
in perception or cognition, the task of recognizing consciousness
prior to the subject/object dichotomy can be facilitated by an
expert.18 But it is, at least in principle, an experience that is available
to anyone.
You are now seated, reading this book. Your past is a memory. Your
future is a matter of mere expectation. Both memories and expectations
can arise in consciousness only as thoughts in the present
moment.
Of course, reading is itself a species of thinking. You can probably
hear the sound of your own voice reading these words in your mind.
These sentences do not feel like your thoughts, however. Your
thoughts are the ones that arrive unannounced and steal you away
from the text. They may have some relevance to what you are now
reading—you may think, "Didn't he just contradict himself
there?"—or they may have no relevance at all. You may suddenly
find yourself thinking about tonight's dinner, or about an argument
E X P E R I M E N T S IN C O N S C I O U S N E S S 219
you had days ago, even while your eyes still blindly scan lines of
text. We all know what it is like to read whole paragraphs, and even
pages of a book without assimilating a word. Few of us realize that
we spend most of our lives in such a state: perceiving the present—
present sights, sounds, tastes, and sensations—only dimly, through
a veil of thought. We spend our lives telling ourselves the story of
past and future, while the reality of the present goes largely unexplored.
Now we live in ignorance of the freedom and simplicity of
consciousness, prior to the arising of thought.
Your consciousness, while still inscrutable in scientific terms, is
an utter simplicity as a matter of experience. It merely stands before
you, as you, and as everything else that appears to your notice. You
see this book. You hear a variety of sounds. You feel the sensations
of your body in space. And then thoughts of past and future arise,
endure for a time, and pass away.
If you will persistently look for the subject of your experience,
however, its absence may become apparent, if only for a moment.
Everything will remain—this book, your hands—and yet the illusory
divide that once separated knower from known, self from
world, inside from outside, will have vanished. This experience has
been at the core of human spirituality for millennia. There is nothing
we need believe to actualize it. We need only look closely enough
at what we are calling "I."
Once the selflessness of consciousness has been glimpsed, spiritual
life can be viewed as a matter of freeing one's attention more
and more so that this recognition can become stabilized. This is
where the connection between spirituality and ethics becomes
inescapable. A vast literature on meditation suggests that negative
social emotions such as hatred, envy, and spite both proceed from
and ramify our dualistic perception of the world. Emotions such as
love and compassion, on the other hand, seem to make our minds
very pliable in meditative terms, and it is increasingly easy to concentrate
under their influences. It does not seem surprising that it
would be easier to free one's attention from the contents of thought,
and simply abide as consciousness, if one's basic attitude toward
other human beings were positive and if one had established relationships
on this basis. Lawsuits, feuds, intricate deceptions, and
being shackled and brought to The Hague for crimes against humanity
are not among the requisites for stability in meditation. It also
seems a matter of common sense that the more the feeling of selfhood
is relaxed, the less those states that are predicated upon it will
arise—states like fear and anger. Scientists are making their first
attempts to test claims of this sort, but every experienced meditator
has tested them already.19 While much of the scientific research done
on meditation has approached it as little more than a tool for stress
reduction, there is no question that the phenomenon of selflessness
has begun to make its way into the charmed circle of third-person,
experimental science.20
As in any other field, spiritual intuitions are amenable to intersubjective
consensus, and refutation. Just as mathematicians can
enjoy mutually intelligible dialogue on abstract ideas (though they
will not always agree about what is intuitively "obvious"), just as
athletes can communicate effectively about the pleasures of sport,
mystics can consensually elucidate the data of their sphere. Thus,
genuine mysticism can be "objective"—in the only normative sense
of this word that is worth retaining—in that it need not be contaminated
by dogma.21 As a phenomenon to be studied, spiritual experience
is no more refractory than dreams, emotions, perceptual
illusions, or, indeed, thoughts themselves.22
A STRANGE future awaits us: mind-reading machines, genuine virtual
reality, neural implants, and increasingly refined drugs may all
have implications for our view of ourselves and of our spiritual possibilities.
We have entered an era when our very humanness, in
genetic terms, is no longer a necessary condition of our existence.
The fusion of human and machine intelligence is also a serious possibility.
What will such changes in the conventional boundaries
between self and world mean for us ? Do they have any relevance for
a spirituality that is rooted in the recognition of the nonduality of
consciousness?
It seems to me that the nature of consciousness will trump all
these developments. Whatever experience awaits us—either with
the help of technology or after death—experience itself is a matter
of consciousness and its content. Discover that consciousness inherently
transcends its contents, discover that it already enjoys the
well-being that the self would otherwise seek, and you have transcended
the logic of experience. No doubt experience will always
have the potential to change us, but it appears these changes will still
be a matter of what we can be conscious of in the next moment, not
of what consciousness is in itself.23
MYSTICISM is a rational enterprise. Religion is not. The mystic has
recognized something about the nature of consciousness prior to
thought, and this recognition is susceptible to rational discussion.
The mystic has reasons for what he believes, and these reasons are
empirical. The roiling mystery of the world can be analyzed with
concepts (this is science), or it can be experienced free of concepts
(this is mysticism).24 Religion is nothing more than bad concepts
held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial—at once full
of hope and full of fear—of the vastitude of human ignorance.
A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual
experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential
for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually
defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is
clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe
anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it. Clearly, it must be
possible to bring reason, spirituality, and ethics together in our
thinking about the world. This would be the beginning of a rational
approach to our deepest personal concerns. It would also be the end
of faith.