The implausibility of a soul whose powers are independent of the brain only increases once we recognize that even normal brains can be placed somewhere on a continuum of pathology. I know my soul speaks
English, because that is the language that comes out of me whenever I speak or write. I used to know a fair amount of French as well. It seems that I've forgotten most of it, though, since my attempts at communication while in France provoke little more than amusement and consternation in the natives. We know, however, that the difference between my remembering and not remembering something is a matter of physical differences in the neural circuits in my brain-specifically in the synaptic connections that are responsible for information encoding, information retrieval, or both. My loss of French, therefore, can be considered a form of neurological impairment. And any Frenchman who found his linguistic ability suddenly degraded to the level of my own would rush straight to the hospital. Would his soul retain his linguistic ability in any case? Has my soul retained its memory of how to conjugate the verb bruirel Where does this notion of soul-brain independence end? A native speaker of one of the Bantu languages would find that the functioning of my language cortex leaves even more to be desired. Given that I was never exposed to Bantu sounds as a child, it is almost certain that I would find it difficult in the extreme, if not impossible, to distinguish between them, much less reproduce them in a way that would satisfy a native speaker. But perhaps my soul has mastered the Bantu languages as well. There are only five hundred of them.
4 Whether the angle of approach is through the study of priming effects and visual masking, change blindness (D. J. Simons et al., "Evidence for Preserved Representations in Change Blindness," Consciousness and Cognition 11, no. 1 [2002]: 78-97), visual extinction and visuospatial neglect (G. Rees et al., "Neural Correlates of Consciousness in Humans," Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3 [April 2002]: 261-70), binocular rivalry and other bistable percepts (R. Blake and N. K. Logothetis, "Visual Competition," Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3, no. 1 [2002]: 13-21; N. K. Logothetis, "Vision: A Window on Consciousness," Scientific American Special Edition 12, no. 1 [2002] 18-25), or blind-sight (L. Weiskrantz, "Prime-sight and Blindsight," Consciousness and Cognition 11, no. 4 [2002]: 568-81), the signature of conscious perception is always the same: the subject (be he man or monkey) simply tells us, by word or deed, whether or not the character of his experience has changed.
5 Why isn't general anesthesia a way of ruling it out? Bathe the brain in the requisite chemicals, and people lose consciousness-end of story. The problem, however, is that we do not know that consciousness itself is truly interrupted during anesthesia. The problem with conflating consciousness with reportability is that we cannot distinguish the genuine cessation of consciousness from a mere failure of memory. What was it like to be asleep last night? You may feel that it was like nothing at all-you were "unconscious." But what about the dreams you don't remember? You were surely conscious while having them. Indeed, you may have been conscious throughout all the stages of sleep. We cannot rule out this possibility through subjective report alone.
6 Nevertheless, these are exactly the sorts of equivalences that scientists and philosophers working on "the self" are apt to draw. A conference was recently held at the New York Academy of Sciences entitled "The Self: From Soul to Brain," and while much of interest was said about the brain, not a single presenter defined the self in such a way as to distinguish it from truly global concepts like "the human mind" or "personhood." The feeling that we call "I" was left entirely untouched.
7 Certain philosophers, while they clearly have not transcended the subject/object divide as a matter of stable experience, conceptually repudiate it in their thinking. Sartre, for instance, saw that the subject could be nothing more than another object in the field of consciousness and, as such, was "contemporaneous with the World":
The World has not created me; the me has not created the World. These are two objects for absolute, impersonal consciousness, and it is by virtue of this consciousness that they are connected. This absolute consciousness, when it is purified of the 1, no longer has anything of the subject.. .. It is quite simply a first condition and absolute source of existence. And the relation of interdependence established by this absolute consciousness between me and the World is sufficient for the me to appear as "endangered" before the World, for the me (indirectly and through the intermediary states) to draw the whole of its content from the World. No more is needed in the way of a philosophical foundation for an ethics and a politics which are absolutely positive.
J. P. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, trans. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick (New York: Hill and Wang, 1937), 105-6.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes a similar point, even while confining himself to subject/object language: "The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects." Cited in F. Varela at al., The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 4.
8 This is not to say that infants are mystics. Nevertheless, a process of increasing individuation clearly occurs from birth onward. See K. Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala, 1995), for a criticism of the false equation between what he calls the pre-rational and the trans-rational. As Wilber points out, there is no reason to romanticize childhood in spiritual terms. Indeed, if our children appear to inhabit the kingdom of heaven, why stop with them? We might as well direct our envy at our primate cousins, for they-when they are not too overcome by the pleasures of cannibalism, gang rape, and infanticide to seem so-are the most gleeful children of all.
9 Thus, a man like Heidegger, who was an abject admirer of Hitler, can nevertheless be commended to our attention, with scarcely a hint of shame, as one of the giants of European thought. Schopenhauer, who was undoubtedly a clever fellow, hurled a seamstress down a flight of stairs, injuring her permanently (he was, we are told, annoyed by the sound of her voice). Other eminent thinkers could also be singled out-Wittgenstein was a manifestly tortured soul and an enthusiastic practitioner of corporal punishment when in the company of unruly little girls-but, and this is the astonishing fact, not a single Western thinker can be named who rivals the great philosopher-mystics of the East. There are those who feel no embarrassment at reaching as far back as Plotinus for an example of a mystic reared in an Eastern corner of the West. But Plotinus, by his own admission, enjoyed only an occasional glimpse of the plenum that he so eloquently described. In the context of one of the Eastern schools of contemplative practice, he would have been acknowledged for nothing more than having set out toward the goal in earnest.
The situation appears to have been somewhat different in the ancient world. Greek philosophers spoke frequently of the state of eudaimonia -the objective state of happiness that was thought to attend the good life-but their efforts to reach it were not very sophisticated. The closest thing to an Eastern mysticism to be found among the ancient Greeks was skepticism, in the tradition of Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 365-270 BC)-but Pyrrho's teachings amounted to disavowal of philosophy altogether. Happiness has since been relegated to the ontological backwater of moral philosophy, and the ideal of the philosopher as sage is not even a distant memory.
The teachings of Pyrrho, which have survived in the writings of the second-century physician Sextus Empiricus, enunciate what is clearly a spiritual discipline, not at all unlike the dialectic of Madhyamika in Mahayana Buddhism. The Skeptic (with a capital S) is not merely a philosopher who failed in his office-having sought to gather true beliefs about the world and found his basket empty at the end of the day-he is the person who has found the peace (Greek ataraxia) to which such a failure can lead.
Skepticism, in Pyrrho's sense, is not the dogmatic assertion that nothing at all can be known. It is the acknowledgment that whatever we know at present is simply the way things seem, and
the Skeptic refuses to take another step into the twilight of metaphysical views. He knows that he does not know anything other than appearances-and the fact that this seems to be a truth about the nature of experience is, likewise, nothing more than the way things appear to him at present. As Sextus says, "the Skeptic continues to search," studiously withholding judgment (Greek epoche). He does not even judge that this is a position that should be maintained-rather, every belief on offer seems to invite its own contradiction, and the Skeptic has merely taken note of the unsatisfactoriness of the situation thus far. The man is befuddled, and he is happy to stay that way.
This position has rarely been accorded the respect that it deserves in the West, for it has been widely doubted whether it can be honestly maintained by any means short of administering repeated blows to one's head. It is also generally conflated (as in B. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945]) with the more dogmatic mistrust of knowledge evinced by Arcesilaus, Carneades, and the other regents of Plato's Academy during its two-hundred-year flirtation with the refusal of all dogmas-having decided, in opposition to obvious contradictions in its tradition, to take its inspiration from Socrates in only his skeptical moods. Academic skepticism appears to have been a more strident critique of the knowledge of others-and therefore a declaration of the "truth" that no one knows anything at all-though it is true that in conversation, Pyrrho's suspension of belief would have amounted to much the same thing. Consequently, most philosophers have not recognized Pyrrho's innovation to be the empirical turn toward profundity that it genuinely was. It is said that Pyrrho acquired his discipline from a naked ascetic (Greek gymnosophist) he met while on Alexander's campaign to the borders of India. He is also reported to have been quite a saintly figure, presumably as a consequence of the peace he acquired in the absence of opinions. It should be noted, however, that the ataraxia which Sextus describes in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism was not "enlightenment" in the Eastern sense-rather, it seems to have amounted to little more than a condition of not suffering as much as ordinary men. Nevertheless, ataraxia was a realizable spiritual goal supported by sound reasoning and, as such, represents an empirical advance over the aims of mere philosophy.
10 There is more to Diamond's thesis than this, but it essentially boils down to the unequal geographical distribution of animals and foodstuffs that can be readily domesticated.
11 At least on paper. Nevertheless, what is so remarkably barren about the Western philosophical tradition is that while the occasional lucky man in his most muscular moments of inquiry may have won a brief, experiential insight into the non-dual nature of consciousness-someone like Schelling, for instance, or Rousseau while he was lolling in a boat on Lake Geneva-philosophers in the East have spent millennia articulating and integrating such insights into distinct methods of contemplative practice: rendering them both reproducible and verifiable by consensus.
12 My debt to a variety of contemplative traditions that have their origin in India will be obvious to many readers. The esoteric teachings of Buddhism (e.g., the Dzogchen teachings of the Vajrayana) and Hinduism (e.g., the teachings of Advaita Vedanta), as well as many years spent practicing various techniques of meditation, have done much to determine my view of our spiritual possibilities. While these traditions do not offer a unified perspective on the nature of the mind or the principles of spiritual life, they undoubtedly represent the most committed effort human beings have made to understand these things through introspection. Buddhism, in particular, has grown remarkably sophisticated. No other tradition has developed so many methods by which the human mind can be fashioned into a tool capable of transforming itself. Attentive readers will have noticed that I have been very hard on religions of faith-Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even Hinduism-and have not said much that is derogatory of Buddhism. This is not an accident. While Buddhism has also been a source of ignorance and occasional violence, it is not a religion of faith, or a religion at all, in the Western sense. There are millions of Buddhists who do not seem to know this, and they can be found in temples throughout Southeast Asia, and even the West, praying to Buddha as though he were a numinous incarnation of Santa Claus. This distortion of the tradition notwithstanding, it remains true that the esoteric teachings of Buddhism offer the most complete methodology we have for discovering the intrinsic freedom of consciousness, unencumbered by any dogma. It is no exaggeration to say that meetings between the Dalai Lama and Christian ecclesiastics to mutually honor their religious traditions are like meetings between physicists from Cambridge and the Bushmen of the Kalahari to mutually honor their respective understandings of the physical universe. This is not to say that Tibetan Buddhists are not saddled with certain dogmas (so are physicists) or that the Bushmen could not have formed some conception of the atom. Any person familiar with both literatures will know that the Bible does not contain a discernible fraction of the precise spiritual instructions that can be found in the Buddhist canon. Though there is much in Buddhism that I do not pretend to understand-as well as much that seems deeply implausible-it would be intellectually dishonest not to acknowledge its preeminence as a system of spiritual instruction.
As for the many distinguished contemplatives who have graced the sordid history of Christianity-Meister Eckhart, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Seraphim of Sarov, the venerable Desert Fathers, et al.-these were certainly extraordinary men and women: but their mystical insights, for the most part, remained shackled to the dualism of church doctrine, and accordingly failed to fly. Where they do take to the air, with a boost from Neoplatonism and other heterodox views, it is in defiance of the very tradition they might have epitomized (had it been wise enough to transcend its own literary conceits), and therefore they serve as hallowed exceptions that prove the rule-mystical Christianity was dead the day Saul set out for Damascus.
Contemplatives within the other Semitic traditions have had their mystical impulses similarly constrained. Sufism (itself influenced by Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Christian monasticism) has generally been considered a form of heresy in the Muslim world-as the terrible deaths of Al-Hallaj (854-922) and other distinguished Sufis attest. Where its doctrine has remained mindful of the Koran, Sufism is wedded to an indissoluble dualism; similarly, Jewish Kabbalists (whose teachings bear the influence of Christian Gnosticism, Sufism, and Neoplatonism) do not seem to have considered a truly non-dual mysticism a possibility. See G. Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Dorsette Press, 1974).
There is no denying the mystical talents of many Jewish, Christian, and Muslim contemplatives. Every religious tradition, no matter how wayward its beliefs, is likely to have produced a handful of men and women who profoundly realized the inherent freedom of consciousness.
As consciousness already is free of subject and object duality, the emergence of an Eckhart or a Rumi is no surprise at all. The existence of such spiritual luminaries, however, suggests nothing about the adequacy of the Bible and the Koran as contemplative manuals. I trust that some lucky man has been enlightened while being run over by a train or flung from the bow of a pirate ship. Does this mean that such mishaps constitute adequate spiritual instruction ? While I do not deny that every tradition, East and West, is likely to have produced a few mystics whose insights breached the gilded prison of their faith, the failures of faith-based religion are so conspicuous, its historical degradation so great, its intolerance so of this world, that I think it is time we stopped making excuses for it.
The New Age has offered little progress in this regard, because it has made spiritual life seem generally synonymous with the forfeiture of brain cells. Most of the beliefs and practices that have been designated as "spiritual," in this New Age or in any other, have arisen and thrive in a perfect vacuum of critical intelligence. Indeed, many New Age ideas are so ridiculous as to produce terror in otherwise dispassionate men. In response to the absurdities that are arrayed, each year, at events like the Whole Life Expo, scientists and
other rational people have found new reason to criticize and discard all spiritual claims and their evidence. And so it is that every man who concerns himself with the disposition of the planets before the disposition of his ideas simply heaps more fuel upon the dark fires of cynicism.
But there have been other sources of cynicism. Inevitably, spiritual practice must be taught by those who are expert in it, and those who profess to be experts-to be genuine gurus-are not always as selfless as they claim. As a consequence of their antics, many educated people now believe that a guru is simply a man who, while professing his love for all beings, secretly longs to rule an ashram populated exclusively by beautiful young women. This stereotype is not without its exemplars-and while the occasional yogi of renown may lick a leper's wounds with apparent enthusiasm, many display far more ordinary longings.
I know a group of veteran spiritual seekers who, after searching for a teacher among the caves and dells of the Himalayas for many months, finally discovered a Hindu yogi who seemed qualified to lead them into the ethers. He was as thin as Jesus, as limber as an orangutan, and wore his hair matted, down to his knees. They promptly brought this prodigy to America to instruct them in the ways of spiritual devotion. After a suitable period of acculturation, our acetic-who was, incidentally, also admired for his physical beauty and for the manner in which he played the drum-decided that sex with the prettiest of his patrons' wives would suit his pedagogical purposes admirably. These relations were commenced at once, and endured for some time by a man whose devotion to wife and guru, it must be said, was now being sorely tested. His wife, if I am not mistaken, was an enthusiastic participant in this "tantric" exercise, for her guru was both "fully enlightened" and as dashing a swain as Lord Krishna. Gradually, this saintly man further refined his spiritual requirements, as well as his appetites. The day soon dawned when he would eat nothing for breakfast but a pint of Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream topped with cashews. We might well imagine that the meditations of a cuckold, wandering the frozen-food aisles of a supermarket in search of an enlightened man's enlightened repast, were anything but devotional. This guru was soon sent back to India with his drum.