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 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 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 "I" 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 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 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 non-dualistic, empirical mystici
sm 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
2l6 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 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 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 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, spiritua
l 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