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1contents
2chapter 1: spirituality
3the search for happiness
4religion, east and west
5mindfulness
6the truth of suf ering
7enlightenment
8chapter 2: the mystery of consciousness
9the mind divided
10structure and function
11are our minds already split?
12conscious and unconscious processing in the brain
13consciousness is what matters
14chapter 3: the riddle of the self
15what are we calling “i”?
16consciousness without self
17lost in thought
18the challenge of studying the self
19penetrating the illusion
20chapter 4: meditation
21gradual versus sudden realization
22dzogchen: taking the goal as the path
23having no head
24the paradox of acceptance
25chapter 5: gurus, death, drugs, and other puzzles
26mind on the brink of death
27the spiritual uses of pharmacology
28conclusion
29acknowledgments
30about sam harris
31notes
32index
33for annaka, emma, and violet
34chapter 1
35spirituality
36i once participated in a twenty-three-day wilderness program in the mountains of colorado. if
37the purpose of this course was to expose students to dangerous lightning and half the world’s
38mosquitoes, it was fulfilled on the first day. what was in essence a forced march through
39hundreds of miles of backcountry culminated in a ritual known as “the solo,” where we were
40finally permitted to rest—alone, on the outskirts of a gorgeous alpine lake—for three days of
41fasting and contemplation.
42i had just turned sixteen, and this was my first taste of true solitude since exiting my mother’s
43womb. it proved a sufficient provocation. after a long nap and a glance at the icy waters of the
44lake, the promising young man i imagined myself to be was quickly cut down by loneliness and
45boredom. i filled the pages of my journal not with the insights of a budding naturalist,
46philosopher, or mystic but with a list of the foods on which i intended to gorge myself the
47instant i returned to civilization. judging from the state of my consciousness at the time, millions
48of years of hominid evolution had produced nothing more transcendent than a craving for a
49cheeseburger and a chocolate milkshake.
50i found the experience of sitting undisturbed for three days amid pristine breezes and
51starlight, with nothing to do but contemplate the mystery of my existence, to be a source of
52perfect misery—for which i could see not so much as a glimmer of my own contribution. my
53letters home, in their plaintiveness and self-pity, rivaled any written at shiloh or gallipoli.
54so i was more than a little surprised when several members of our party, most of whom
55were a decade older than i, described their days and nights of solitude in positive, even
56transformational terms. i simply didn’t know what to make of their claims to happiness. how
57could someone’s happiness increase when all the material sources of pleasure and distraction
58had been removed? at that age, the nature of my own mind did not interest me—only my life
59did. and i was utterly oblivious to how different life would be if the quality of my mind were to
60change.
61our minds are all we have. they are all we have ever had. and they are all we can offer others.
62this might not be obvious, especially when there are aspects of your life that seem in need of
63improvement—when your goals are unrealized, or you are struggling to find a career, or you
64have relationships that need repairing. but it’s the truth. every experience you have ever had
65has been shaped by your mind. every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the
66minds involved. if you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your
67attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life—you
68won’t enjoy any of it.
69most of us could easily compile a list of goals we want to achieve or personal problems that
70need to be solved. but what is the real significance of every item on such a list? everything we
71want to accomplish—to paint the house, learn a new language, find a better job—is something
72that promises that, if done, it would allow us to finally relax and enjoy our lives in the present.
73generally speaking, this is a false hope. i’m not denying the importance of achieving one’s
74goals, maintaining one’s health, or keeping one’s children clothed and fed—but most of us
75spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of
76our search. each of us is looking for a path back to the present: we are trying to find good
77enough reasons to be satisfied now.
78acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are playing allows us to play it
79differently. how we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our
80experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives. mystics and contemplatives have made this
81claim for ages—but a growing body of scientific research now bears it out.
82a few years after my first painful encounter with solitude, in the winter of 1987, i took the
83drug 3,4-methylenedioxy-n-methylamphetamine (mdma), commonly known as ecstasy, and
84my sense of the human mind’s potential shifted profoundly. although mdma would become
85ubiquitous at dance clubs and “raves” in the 1990s, at that time i didn’t know anyone of my
86generation who had tried it. one evening, a few months before my twentieth birthday, a close
87friend and i decided to take the drug.
88the setting of our experiment bore little resemblance to the conditions of dionysian abandon
89under which mdma is now often consumed. we were alone in a house, seated across from
90each other on opposite ends of a couch, and engaged in quiet conversation as the chemical
91worked its way into our heads. unlike other drugs with which we were by then familiar
92(marijuana and alcohol), mdma produced no feeling of distortion in our senses. our minds
93seemed completely clear.
94in the midst of this ordinariness, however, i was suddenly struck by the knowledge that i
95loved my friend. this shouldn’t have surprised me—he was, after all, one of my best friends.
96however, at that age i was not in the habit of dwelling on how much i loved the men in my life.
97now i could feel that i loved him, and this feeling had ethical implications that suddenly
98seemed as profound as they now sound pedestrian on the page: i wanted him to be happy.
99that conviction came crashing down with such force that something seemed to give way
100inside me. in fact, the insight appeared to restructure my mind. my capacity for envy, for
101instance—the sense of being diminished by the happiness or success of another person—
102seemed like a symptom of mental illness that had vanished without a trace. i could no more
103have felt envy at that moment than i could have wanted to poke out my own eyes. what did i
104care if my friend was better looking or a better athlete than i was? if i could have bestowed
105those gifts on him, i would have. truly wanting him to be happy made his happiness my own.
106a certain euphoria was creeping into these reflections, perhaps, but the general feeling
107remained one of absolute sobriety—and of moral and emotional clarity unlike any i had ever
108known. it would not be too strong to say that i felt sane for the first time in my life. and yet the
109change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward. i was simply talking to my friend
110—about what, i don’t recall—and realized that i had ceased to be concerned about myself. i
111was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment,
112ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that
113separated me from him. i was no longer watching myself through another person’s eyes.
114and then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life
115could be. i was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends, and i suddenly realized that if
116a stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would have been fully
117included in this love. love was at bottom impersonal—and deeper than any personal history
118could justify. indeed, a transactional form of love—i love you because . . . —now made no
119sense at all.
120the interesting thing about this final shift in perspective was that it was not driven by any
121change in the way i felt. i was not overwhelmed by a new feeling of love. the insight had more
122the character of a geometric proof: it was as if, having glimpsed the properties of one set of
123parallel lines, i suddenly understood what must be common to them all.
124the moment i could find a voice with which to speak, i discovered that this epiphany about
125the universality of love could be readily communicated. my friend got the point at once: all i
126had to do was ask him how he would feel in the presence of a total stranger at that moment, and
127the same door opened in his mind. it was simply obvious that love, compassion, and joy in the
128joy of others extended without limit. the experience was not of love growing but of its being no
129longer obscured. love was—as advertised by mystics and crackpots through the ages—a state
130of being. how had we not seen this before? and how could we overlook it ever again?
131it would take me many years to put this experience into context. until that moment, i had
132viewed organized religion as merely a monument to the ignorance and superstition of our
133ancestors. but i now knew that jesus, the buddha, lao tzu, and the other saints and sages of
134history had not all been epileptics, schizophrenics, or frauds. i still considered the world’s
135religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but i
136now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.
137twenty percent of americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” although the
138claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a
139perfectly reasonable thing to do. it is to assert two important truths simultaneously: our world
140is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet
141there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally
142admit. one purpose of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and empirical
143support.
144before going any further, i should address the animosity that many readers feel toward the
145term spiritual. whenever i use the word, as in referring to meditation as a “spiritual practice,” i
146hear from fellow skeptics and atheists who think that i have committed a grievous error.
147the word spirit comes from the latin spiritus, which is a translation of the greek pneuma,
148meaning “breath.” around the thirteenth century, the term became entangled with beliefs about
149immaterial souls, supernatural beings, ghosts, and so forth. it acquired other meanings as well:
150we speak of the spirit of a thing as its most essential principle or of certain volatile substances
151and liquors as spirits. nevertheless, many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual” to
152be contaminated by medieval superstition.
153i do not share their semantic concerns.1 yes, to walk the aisles of any “spiritual” bookstore
154is to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but there is no other term—
155apart from the even more problematic mystical or the more restrictive contemplative—with
156which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, to
157fully bring their minds into the present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. and no
158other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.
159throughout this book, i discuss certain classically spiritual phenomena, concepts, and
160practices in the context of our modern understanding of the human mind—and i cannot do this
161while restricting myself to the terminology of ordinary experience. so i will use spiritual,
162mystical, contemplative, and transcendent without further apology. however, i will be precise
163in describing the experiences and methods that merit these terms.
164for many years, i have been a vocal critic of religion, and i won’t ride the same hobbyhorse
165here. i hope that i have been sufficiently energetic on this front that even my most skeptical
166readers will trust that my bullshit detector remains well calibrated as we advance over this new
167terrain. perhaps the following assurance can suffice for the moment: nothing in this book needs
168to be accepted on faith. although my focus is on human subjectivity—i am, after all, talking
169about the nature of experience itself—all my assertions can be tested in the laboratory of your
170own life. in fact, my goal is to encourage you to do just that.
171authors who attempt to build a bridge between science and spirituality tend to make one of two
172mistakes: scientists generally start with an impoverished view of spiritual experience,
173assuming that it must be a grandiose way of describing ordinary states of mind—parental love,
174artistic inspiration, awe at the beauty of the night sky. in this vein, one finds einstein’s
175amazement at the intelligibility of nature’s laws described as though it were a kind of mystical
176insight.
177new age thinkers usually enter the ditch on the other side of the road: they idealize altered
178states of consciousness and draw specious connections between subjective experience and the
179spookier theories at the frontiers of physics. here we are told that the buddha and other
180contemplatives anticipated modern cosmology or quantum mechanics and that by transcending
181the sense of self, a person can realize his identity with the one mind that gave birth to the
182cosmos.
183in the end, we are left to choose between pseudo-spirituality and pseudo-science.
184few scientists and philosophers have developed strong skills of introspection—in fact, most
185doubt that such abilities even exist. conversely, many of the greatest contemplatives know
186nothing about science. but there is a connection between scientific fact and spiritual wisdom,
187and it is more direct than most people suppose. although the insights we can have in meditation
188tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths
189about the human mind: our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as
190compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our
191experience of the world.
192there is now a large literature on the psychological benefits of meditation. different
193techniques produce long-lasting changes in attention, emotion, cognition, and pain perception,
194and these correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain. this field of
195research is quickly growing, as is our understanding of self-awareness and related mental
196phenomena. given recent advances in neuroimaging technology, we no longer face a practical
197impediment to investigating spiritual insights in the context of science.
198spirituality must be distinguished from religion—because people of every faith, and of none,
199have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences. while these states of mind are usually
200interpreted through the lens of one or another religious doctrine, we know that this is a mistake.
201nothing that a christian, a muslim, and a hindu can experience—self-transcending love,
202ecstasy, bliss, inner light—constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because
203their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. a deeper principle must be at work.
204that principle is the subject of this book: the feeling that we call “i” is an illusion. there is
205no discrete self or ego living like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. and the feeling that
206there is—the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is
207separate from yourself—can be altered or entirely extinguished. although such experiences of
208“self-transcendence” are generally thought about in religious terms, there is nothing, in
209principle, irrational about them. from both a scientific and a philosophical point of view, they
210represent a clearer understanding of the way things are. deepening that understanding, and
211repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the self, is what is meant by “spirituality” in the
212context of this book.
213confusion and suffering may be our birthright, but wisdom and happiness are available. the
214landscape of human experience includes deeply transformative insights about the nature of
215one’s own consciousness, and yet it is obvious that these psychological states must be
216understood in the context of neuroscience, psychology, and related fields.
217i am often asked what will replace organized religion. the answer, i believe, is nothing and
218everything. nothing need replace its ludicrous and divisive doctrines—such as the idea that
219jesus will return to earth and hurl unbelievers into a lake of fire, or that death in defense of
220islam is the highest good. these are terrifying and debasing fictions. but what about love,
221compassion, moral goodness, and self-transcendence? many people still imagine that religion is
222the true repository of these virtues. to change this, we must talk about the full range of human
223experience in a way that is as free of dogma as the best science already is.
224this book is by turns a seeker’s memoir, an introduction to the brain, a manual of contemplative
225instruction, and a philosophical unraveling of what most people consider to be the center of
226their inner lives: the feeling of self we call “i.” i have not set out to describe all the traditional
227approaches to spirituality and to weigh their strengths and weaknesses. rather, my goal is to
228pluck the diamond from the dunghill of esoteric religion. there is a diamond there, and i have
229devoted a fair amount of my life to contemplating it, but getting it in hand requires that we
230remain true to the deepest principles of scientific skepticism and make no obeisance to
231tradition. where i do discuss specific teachings, such as those of buddhism or advaita vedanta,
232it isn’t my purpose to provide anything like a comprehensive account. readers who are loyal to
233any one spiritual tradition or who specialize in the academic study of religion, may view my
234approach as the quintessence of arrogance. i consider it, rather, a symptom of impatience. there
235is barely time enough in a book—or in a life—to get to the point. just as a modern treatise on
236weaponry would omit the casting of spells and would very likely ignore the slingshot and the
237boomerang, i will focus on what i consider the most promising lines of spiritual inquiry.
238my hope is that my personal experience will help readers to see the nature of their own
239minds in a new light. a rational approach to spirituality seems to be what is missing from
240secularism and from the lives of most of the people i meet. the purpose of this book is to offer
241readers a clear view of the problem, along with some tools to help them solve it for themselves.
242the search for happiness
243one day, you will find yourself outside this world which is like a mother’s womb. you
244will leave this earth to enter, while you are yet in the body, a vast expanse, and know
245that the words, “god’s earth is vast,” name this region from which the saints have
246come.
247jalal-ud-din rumi
248i share the concern, expressed by many atheists, that the terms spiritual and mystical are often
249used to make claims not merely about the quality of certain experiences but about reality at
250large. far too often, these words are invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and
251intellectually grotesque. consequently, many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of
252spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception. this is a
253problem, because millions of people have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical
254seem the only terms available. many of the beliefs people form on the basis of these
255experiences are false. but the fact that most atheists will view a statement like rumi’s above as
256a symptom of the man’s derangement grants a kernel of truth to the rantings of even our least
257rational opponents. the human mind does, in fact, contain vast expanses that few of us ever
258discover.
259and there is something degraded and degrading about many of our habits of attention as we
260shop, gossip, argue, and ruminate our way to the grave. perhaps i should speak only for myself
261here: it seems to me that i spend much of my waking life in a neurotic trance. my experiences in
262meditation suggest, however, that an alternative exists. it is possible to stand free of the
263juggernaut of self, if only for moments at a time.
264most cultures have produced men and women who have found that certain deliberate uses of
265attention—meditation, yoga, prayer—can transform their perception of the world. their efforts
266generally begin with the realization that even in the best of circumstances, happiness is elusive.
267we seek pleasant sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, and moods. we satisfy our intellectual
268curiosity. we surround ourselves with friends and loved ones. we become connoisseurs of art,
269music, or food. but our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. if we enjoy some great
270professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for an hour,
271or perhaps a day, but then they subside. and the search goes on. the effort required to keep
272boredom and other unpleasantness at bay must continue, moment to moment.
273ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment. realizing this, many people
274begin to wonder whether a deeper source of well-being exists. is there a form of happiness
275beyond the mere repetition of pleasure and avoidance of pain? is there a happiness that does not
276depend upon having one’s favorite foods available, or friends and loved ones within arm’s
277reach, or good books to read, or something to look forward to on the weekend? is it possible to
278be happy before anything happens, before one’s desires are gratified, in spite of life’s
279difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?
280we are all, in some sense, living our answer to this question—and most of us are living as
281though the answer were “no.” no, nothing is more profound than repeating one’s pleasures and
282avoiding one’s pains; nothing is more profound than seeking satisfaction—sensory, emotional,
283and intellectual—moment after moment. just keep your foot on the gas until you run out of road.
284certain people, however, come to suspect that human existence might encompass more than
285this. many of them are led to suspect this by religion—by the claims of the buddha or jesus or
286some other celebrated figure. and such people often begin to practice various disciplines of
287attention as a means of examining their experience closely enough to see whether a deeper
288source of well-being exists. they may even sequester themselves in caves or monasteries for
289months or years at a time to facilitate this process. why would a person do this? no doubt there
290are many motives for retreating from the world, and some of them are psychologically
291unhealthy. in its wisest form, however, the exercise amounts to a very simple experiment. here
292is its logic: if there exists a source of psychological well-being that does not depend upon
293merely gratifying one’s desires, then it should be present even when all the usual sources of
294pleasure have been removed. such happiness should be available to a person who has declined
295to marry her high school sweetheart, renounced her career and material possessions, and gone
296off to a cave or some other spot that is inhospitable to ordinary aspirations.
297one clue to how daunting most people would find such a project is the fact that solitary
298confinement—which is essentially what we are talking about—is considered a punishment
299inside a maximum-security prison. even when forced to live among murderers and rapists, most
300people still prefer the company of others to spending any significant amount of time alone in a
301room. and yet contemplatives in many traditions claim to experience extraordinary depths of
302psychological well-being while living in isolation for vast stretches of time. how should we
303interpret this? either the contemplative literature is a catalogue of religious delusion,
304psychopathology, and deliberate fraud, or people have been having liberating insights under the
305name of “spirituality” and “mysticism” for millennia.
306unlike many atheists, i have spent much of my life seeking experiences of the kind that gave
307rise to the world’s religions. despite the painful results of my first few days alone in the
308mountains of colorado, i later studied with a wide range of monks, lamas, yogis, and other
309contemplatives, some of whom had lived for decades in seclusion doing nothing but meditating.
310in the process, i spent two years on silent retreat myself (in increments of one week to three
311months), practicing various techniques of meditation for twelve to eighteen hours a day.
312i can attest that when one goes into silence and meditates for weeks or months at a time,
313doing nothing else—not speaking, reading, or writing, just making a moment-to-moment effort to
314observe the contents of consciousness—one has experiences that are generally unavailable to
315people who have not undertaken a similar practice. i believe that such states of mind have a lot
316to say about the nature of consciousness and the possibilities of human well-being. leaving
317aside the metaphysics, mythology, and sectarian dogma, what contemplatives throughout history
318have discovered is that there is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the
319conversation we are having with ourselves; there is an alternative to simply identifying with the
320next thought that pops into consciousness. and glimpsing this alternative dispels the
321conventional illusion of the self.
322most traditions of spirituality also suggest a connection between self-transcendence and
323living ethically. not all good feelings have an ethical valence, and pathological forms of
324ecstasy surely exist. i have no doubt, for instance, that many suicide bombers feel
325extraordinarily good just before they detonate themselves in a crowd. but there are also forms
326of mental pleasure that are intrinsically ethical. as i indicated earlier, for some states of
327consciousness, a phrase like “boundless love” does not seem overblown. it is decidedly
328inconvenient for the forces of reason and secularism that if someone wakes up tomorrow feeling
329boundless love for all sentient beings, the only people likely to acknowledge the legitimacy of
330his experience will be representatives of one or another iron age religion or new age cult.
331most of us are far wiser than we may appear to be. we know how to keep our relationships in
332order, to use our time well, to improve our health, to lose weight, to learn valuable skills, and
333to solve many other riddles of existence. but following even the straight and open path to
334happiness is hard. if your best friend were to ask how she could live a better life, you would
335probably find many useful things to say, and yet you might not live that way yourself. on one
336level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice. however,
337there are deeper insights to be had about the nature of our minds. unfortunately, they have been
338discussed entirely in the context of religion and, therefore, have been shrouded in fallacy and
339superstition for all of human history.
340the problem of finding happiness in this world arrives with our first breath—and our needs
341and desires seem to multiply by the hour. to spend any time in the presence of a young child is
342to witness a mind ceaselessly buffeted by joy and sorrow. as we grow older, our laughter and
343tears become less gratuitous, perhaps, but the same process of change continues: one roiling
344complex of thought and emotion is followed by the next, like waves in the ocean.
345seeking, finding, maintaining, and safeguarding our well-being is the great project to which
346we all are devoted, whether or not we choose to think in these terms. this is not to say that we
347want mere pleasure or the easiest possible life. many things require extraordinary effort to
348accomplish, and some of us learn to enjoy the struggle. any athlete knows that certain kinds of
349pain can be exquisitely pleasurable. the burn of lifting weights, for instance, would be
350excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. but because it is associated with health
351and fitness, most people find it enjoyable. here we see that cognition and emotion are not
352separate. the way we think about experience can completely determine how we feel about it.
353and we always face tensions and trade-offs. in some moments we crave excitement and in
354others rest. we might love the taste of wine and chocolate, but rarely for breakfast. whatever
355the context, our minds are perpetually moving—generally toward pleasure (or its imagined
356source) and away from pain. i am not the first person to have noticed this.
357our struggle to navigate the space of possible pains and pleasures produces most of human
358culture. medical science attempts to prolong our health and to reduce the suffering associated
359with illness, aging, and death. all forms of media cater to our thirst for information and
360entertainment. political and economic institutions seek to ensure our peaceful collaboration
361with one another—and the police or the military is summoned when they fail. beyond ensuring
362our survival, civilization is a vast machine invented by the human mind to regulate its states.
363we are ever in the process of creating and repairing a world that our minds want to be in. and
364wherever we look, we see the evidence of our successes and our failures. unfortunately, failure
365enjoys a natural advantage. wrong answers to any problem outnumber right ones by a wide
366margin, and it seems that it will always be easier to break things than to fix them.
367despite the beauty of our world and the scope of human accomplishment, it is hard not to
368worry that the forces of chaos will triumph—not merely in the end but in every moment. our
369pleasures, however refined or easily acquired, are by their very nature fleeting. they begin to
370subside the instant they arise, only to be replaced by fresh desires or feelings of discomfort.
371you can’t get enough of your favorite meal until, in the next moment, you find you are so stuffed
372as to nearly require the attention of a surgeon—and yet, by some quirk of physics, you still have
373room for dessert. the pleasure of dessert lasts a few seconds, and then the lingering taste in
374your mouth must be banished by a drink of water. the warmth of the sun feels wonderful on
375your skin, but soon it becomes too much of a good thing. a move to the shade brings immediate
376relief, but after a minute or two, the breeze is just a little too cold. do you have a sweater in the
377car? let’s take a look. yes, there it is. you’re warm now, but you notice that your sweater has
378seen better days. does it make you look carefree or disheveled? perhaps it is time to go
379shopping for something new. and so it goes.
380we seem to do little more than lurch between wanting and not wanting. thus, the question
381naturally arises: is there more to life than this? might it be possible to feel much better (in every
382sense of better) than one tends to feel? is it possible to find lasting fulfillment despite the
383inevitability of change?
384spiritual life begins with a suspicion that the answer to such questions could well be “yes.”
385and a true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease
386in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and that such ease is
387synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self. those who have never tasted
388such peace of mind might view these assertions as highly suspect. nevertheless, it is a fact that
389a condition of selfless well-being is there to be glimpsed in each moment. of course, i’m not
390claiming to have experienced all such states, but i meet many people who appear to have
391experienced none of them—and these people often profess to have no interest in spiritual life.
392this is not surprising. the phenomenon of self-transcendence is generally sought and
393interpreted in a religious context, and it is precisely the sort of experience that tends to increase
394a person’s faith. how many christians, having once felt their hearts grow as wide as the world,
395will decide to ditch christianity and proclaim their atheism? not many, i suspect. how many
396people who have never felt anything of the kind become atheists? i don’t know, but there is little
397doubt that these mental states act as a kind of filter: the faithful count them in support of ancient
398dogma, and their absence gives nonbelievers further reason to reject religion.
399this is a difficult problem for me to address in the context of a book, because many readers
400will have no idea what i’m talking about when i describe certain spiritual experiences and
401might assume that the assertions i’m making must be accepted on faith. religious readers
402present a different challenge: they may think they know exactly what i’m describing, but only
403insofar as it aligns with one or another religious doctrine. it seems to me that both these
404attitudes present impressive obstacles to understanding spirituality in the way that i intend. i can
405only hope that, whatever your background, you will approach the exercises presented in this
406book with an open mind.
407religion, east and west
408we are often encouraged to believe that all religions are the same: all teach the same ethical
409principles; all urge their followers to contemplate the same divine reality; all are equally wise,
410compassionate, and true within their sphere—or equally divisive and false, depending on one’s
411view.
412no serious adherents of any faith can believe these things, because most religions make
413claims about reality that are mutually incompatible. exceptions to this rule exist, but they
414provide little relief from what is essentially a zero-sum contest of all against all. the
415polytheism of hinduism allows it to digest parts of many other faiths: if christians insist that
416jesus christ is the son of god, for instance, hindus can make him yet another avatar of vishnu
417without losing any sleep. but this spirit of inclusiveness points in one direction only, and even
418it has its limits. hindus are committed to specific metaphysical ideas—the law of karma and
419rebirth, a multiplicity of gods—that almost every other major religion decries. it is impossible
420for any faith, no matter how elastic, to fully honor the truth claims of another.
421devout jews, christians, and muslims believe that theirs is the one true and complete
422revelation—because that is what their holy books say of themselves. only secularists and new
423age dabblers can mistake the modern tactic of “interfaith dialogue” for an underlying unity of
424all religions.
425i have long argued that confusion about the unity of religions is an artifact of language.
426religion is a term like sports: some sports are peaceful but spectacularly dangerous (“free
427solo” rock climbing); some are safer but synonymous with violence (mixed martial arts); and
428some entail little more risk of injury than standing in the shower (bowling). to speak of sports
429as a generic activity makes it impossible to discuss what athletes actually do or the physical
430attributes required to do it. what do all sports have in common apart from breathing? not much.
431the term religion is hardly more useful.
432the same could be said of spirituality. the esoteric doctrines found within every religious
433tradition are not all derived from the same insights. nor are they equally empirical, logical,
434parsimonious, or wise. they don’t always point to the same underlying reality—and when they
435do, they don’t do it equally well. nor are all these teachings equally suited for export beyond
436the cultures that first conceived them.
437making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply unfashionable in intellectual circles. in
438my experience, people do not want to hear that islam supports violence in a way that jainism
439doesn’t, or that buddhism offers a truly sophisticated, empirical approach to understanding the
440human mind, whereas christianity presents an almost perfect impediment to such understanding.
441in many circles, to make invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of bigotry.
442in one sense, all religions and spiritual practices must address the same reality—because
443people of all faiths have glimpsed many of the same truths. any view of consciousness and the
444cosmos that is available to the human mind can, in principle, be appreciated by anyone. it is not
445surprising, therefore, that individual jews, christians, muslims, and buddhists have given
446voice to some of the same insights and intuitions. this merely indicates that human cognition
447and emotion run deeper than religion. (but we knew that, didn’t we?) it does not suggest that all
448religions understand our spiritual possibilities equally well.
449one way of missing this point is to declare that all spiritual teachings are inflections of the
450same “perennial philosophy.” the writer aldous huxley brought this idea into prominence by
451publishing an anthology by that title. here is how he justified the idea:
452philosophia perennis—the phrase was coined by leibniz; but the thing—the metaphysic
453that recognizes a divine reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the
454psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine
455reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and
456transcendent ground of all being—the thing is immemorial and universal. rudiments of
457the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples
458in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one
459of the higher religions. a version of this highest common factor in all preceding and
460subsequent theologies was first committed to writing more than twenty-five centuries ago,
461and since that time the inexhaustible theme has been treated again and again, from the
462standpoint of every religious tradition and in all the principal languages of asia and
463europe.2
464although huxley was being reasonably cautious in his wording, this notion of a “highest
465common factor” uniting all religions begins to break apart the moment one presses for details.
466for instance, the abrahamic religions are incorrigibly dualistic and faith-based: in judaism,
467christianity, and islam, the human soul is conceived as genuinely separate from the divine
468reality of god. the appropriate attitude for a creature that finds itself in this circumstance is
469some combination of terror, shame, and awe. in the best case, notions of god’s love and grace
470provide some relief—but the central message of these faiths is that each of us is separate from,
471and in relationship to, a divine authority who will punish anyone who harbors the slightest
472doubt about his supremacy.
473the eastern tradition presents a very different picture of reality. and its highest teachings—
474found within the various schools of buddhism and the nominally hindu tradition of advaita
475vedanta—explicitly transcend dualism. by their lights, consciousness itself is identical to the
476very reality that one might otherwise mistake for god. while these teachings make metaphysical
477claims that any serious student of science should find incredible, they center on a range of
478experiences that the doctrines of judaism, christianity, and islam rule out-of-bounds.
479of course, it is true that specific jewish, christian, and muslim mystics have had
480experiences similar to those that motivate buddhism and advaita, but these contemplative
481insights are not exemplary of their faith. rather, they are anomalies that western mystics have
482always struggled to understand and to honor, often at considerable personal risk. given their
483proper weight, these experiences produce heterodoxies for which jews, christians, and
484muslims have been regularly exiled or killed.
485like huxley, anyone determined to find a happy synthesis among spiritual traditions will
486notice that the christian mystic meister eckhart (ca. 1260–ca. 1327) often sounded very much
487like a buddhist: “the knower and the known are one. simple people imagine that they should
488see god, as if he stood there and they here. this is not so. god and i, we are one in
489knowledge.” but he also sounded like a man bound to be excommunicated by his church—as he
490was. had eckhart lived a little longer, it seems certain that he would have been dragged into the
491street and burned alive for these expansive ideas. that is a telling difference between
492christianity and buddhism.
493in the same vein, it is misleading to hold up the sufi mystic al-hallaj (858–922) as a
494representative of islam. he was a muslim, yes, but he suffered the most grisly death imaginable
495at the hands of his coreligionists for presuming to be one with god. both eckhart and al-hallaj
496gave voice to an experience of self-transcendence that any human being can, in principle, enjoy.
497however, their views were not consistent with the central teachings of their faiths.
498the indian tradition is comparatively free of problems of this kind. although the teachings of
499buddhism and advaita are embedded in more or less conventional religions, they contain
500empirical insights about the nature of consciousness that do not depend upon faith. one can
501practice most techniques of buddhist meditation or the method of self-inquiry of advaita and
502experience the advertised changes in one’s consciousness without ever believing in the law of
503karma or in the miracles attributed to indian mystics. to get started as a christian, however,
504one must first accept a dozen implausible things about the life of jesus and the origins of the
505bible—and the same can be said, minus a few unimportant details, about judaism and islam. if
506one should happen to discover that the sense of being an individual soul is an illusion, one will
507be guilty of blasphemy everywhere west of the indus.
508there is no question that many religious disciplines can produce interesting experiences in
509suitable minds. it should be clear, however, that engaging a faith-based (and probably
510delusional) practice, whatever its effects, isn’t the same as investigating the nature of one’s
511mind absent any doctrinal assumptions. statements of this kind may seem starkly antagonistic
512toward abrahamic religions, but they are nonetheless true: one can speak about buddhism
513shorn of its miracles and irrational assumptions. the same cannot be said of christianity or
514islam.3
515western engagement with eastern spirituality dates back at least as far as alexander’s
516campaign in india, where the young conqueror and his pet philosophers encountered naked
517ascetics whom they called “gymnosophists.” it is often said that the thinking of these yogis
518greatly influenced the philosopher pyrrho, the father of greek skepticism. this seems a credible
519claim, because pyrrho’s teachings had much in common with buddhism. but his contemplative
520insights and methods never became part of any system of thought in the west.
521serious study of eastern thought by outsiders did not begin until the late eighteenth century.
522the first translation of a sanskrit text into a western language appears to have been sir charles
523wilkins’s rendering of the bhagavad gita, a cornerstone text of hinduism, in 1785. the
524buddhist canon would not attract the attention of western scholars for another hundred years.4
525the conversation between east and west started in earnest, albeit inauspiciously, with the
526birth of the theosophical society, that golem of spiritual hunger and self-deception brought into
527this world almost single-handedly by the incomparable madame helena petrovna blavatsky in
5281875. everything about blavatsky seemed to defy earthly logic: she was an enormously fat
529woman who was said to have wandered alone and undetected for seven years in the mountains
530of tibet. she was also thought to have survived shipwrecks, gunshot wounds, and sword fights.
531even less persuasively, she claimed to be in psychic contact with members of the “great white
532brotherhood” of ascended masters—a collection of immortals responsible for the evolution and
533maintenance of the entire cosmos. their leader hailed from the planet venus but lived in the
534mythical kingdom of shambhala, which blavatsky placed somewhere in the vicinity of the gobi
535desert. with the suspiciously bureaucratic name “the lord of the world,” he supervised the
536work of other adepts, including the buddha, maitreya, maha chohan, and one koot hoomi, who
537appears to have had nothing better to do on behalf of the cosmos than to impart its secrets to
538blavatsky.5
539it is always surprising when a person attracts legions of followers and builds a large
540organization on their largesse while peddling penny-arcade mythology of this kind. but perhaps
541this was less remarkable in a time when even the best-educated people were still struggling to
542come to terms with electricity, evolution, and the existence of other planets. we can easily
543forget how suddenly the world had shrunk and the cosmos expanded as the nineteenth century
544came to a close. the geographical barriers between distant cultures had been stripped away by
545trade and conquest (one could now order a gin and tonic almost everywhere on earth), and yet
546the reality of unseen forces and alien worlds was a daily focus of the most careful scientific
547research. inevitably, cross-cultural and scientific discoveries were mingled in the popular
548imagination with religious dogma and traditional occultism. in fact, this had been happening at
549the highest level of human thought for more than a century: it is always instructive to recall that
550the father of modern physics, isaac newton, squandered a considerable portion of his genius on
551the study of theology, biblical prophecy, and alchemy.
552the inability to distinguish the strange but true from the merely strange was common enough
553in blavatsky’s time—as it is in our own. blavatsky’s contemporary joseph smith, a libidinous
554con man and crackpot, was able to found a new religion on the claim that he had unearthed the
555final revelations of god in the hallowed precincts of manchester, new york, written in
556“reformed egyptian” on golden plates. he decoded this text with the aid of magical “seer
557stones,” which, whether by magic or not, allowed smith to produce an english version of god’s
558word that was an embarrassing pastiche of plagiarisms from the bible and silly lies about
559jesus’s life in america. and yet the resulting edifice of nonsense and taboo survives to this day.
560a more modern cult, scientology, leverages human credulity to an even greater degree:
561adherents believe that human beings are possessed by the souls of extraterrestrials who were
562condemned to planet earth 75 million years ago by the galactic overlord xenu. how was their
563exile accomplished? the old-fashioned way: these aliens were shuttled by the billions to our
564humble planet aboard a spacecraft that resembled a dc-8. they were then imprisoned in a
565volcano and blasted to bits with hydrogen bombs. their souls survived, however, and
566disentangling them from our own can be the work of a lifetime. it is also expensive.6
567despite the imponderables in her philosophy, blavatsky was among the first people to
568announce in western circles that there was such a thing as the “wisdom of the east.” this
569wisdom began to trickle westward once swami vivekananda introduced the teachings of
570vedanta at the world parliament of religions in chicago in 1893. again, buddhism lagged
571behind: a few western monks living on the island of sri lanka were beginning to translate the
572pali canon, which remains the most authoritative record of the teachings of the historical
573buddha, siddhartha gautama. however, the practice of buddhist meditation wouldn’t actually
574be taught in the west for another half century.
575it is easy enough to find fault with romantic ideas about eastern wisdom, and a tradition of such
576criticism sprang up almost the instant the first western seeker sat cross-legged and attempted to
577meditate. in the late 1950s, the author and journalist arthur koestler traveled to india and japan
578in search of wisdom and summarized his pilgrimage thus: “i started my journey in sackcloth and
579ashes, and came back rather proud of being a european.”7
580in the lotus and the robot, koestler gives some of his reasons for being less than awed by
581his journey to the east. consider, for example, the ancient discipline of hatha yoga. while now
582generally viewed as a system of physical exercises designed to increase a person’s strength and
583flexibility, in its traditional context hatha yoga is part of a larger effort to manipulate “subtle”
584features of the body unknown to anatomists. no doubt much of this subtlety corresponds to
585experiences that yogis actually have—but many of the beliefs formed on the basis of these
586experiences are patently absurd, and certain of the associated practices are both silly and
587injurious.
588koestler reports that the aspiring yogi is traditionally encouraged to lengthen his tongue—
589even going so far as to cut the frenulum (the membrane that anchors the tongue to the floor of the
590mouth) and stretch the soft palate. what is the purpose of these modifications? they enable our
591hero to insert his tongue into his nasopharynx, thereby blocking the flow of air through the
592nostrils. his anatomy thus improved, a yogi can then imbibe subtle liquors believed to emanate
593directly from his brain. these substances—imagined, by recourse to further subtleties, to be
594connected to the retention of semen—are said to confer not only spiritual wisdom but
595immortality. this technique of drinking mucus is known as khechari mudra, and it is thought to
596be one of the crowning achievements of yoga.
597i’m more than happy to score a point for koestler here. needless to say, no defense of such
598practices will be found in this book.
599criticism of eastern wisdom can seem especially pertinent when coming from easterners
600themselves. there is indeed something preposterous about well-educated westerners racing
601east in search of spiritual enlightenment while easterners make the opposite pilgrimage seeking
602education and economic opportunities. i have a friend whose own adventures may have marked
603a high point in this global comedy. he made his first trip to india immediately after graduating
604from college, having already acquired several yogic affectations: he had the requisite beads
605and long hair, but he was also in the habit of writing the name of the hindu god ram in
606devanagari script over and over in a journal. on the flight to the motherland, he had the good
607fortune to be seated next to an indian businessman. this weary traveler thought he had
608witnessed every species of human folly—until he caught sight of my friend’s scribbling. the
609spectacle of a western-born stanford graduate, of working age, holding degrees in both
610economics and history, devoting himself to the graphomaniacal worship of an imaginary deity in
611a language he could neither read nor understand was more than this man could abide in a
612confined space at 30,000 feet. after a testy exchange, the two travelers could only stare at each
613other in mutual incomprehension and pity—and they had ten hours yet to fly. there really are
614two sides to such a conversation, but i concede that only one of them can be made to look
615ridiculous.
616we can also grant that eastern wisdom has not produced societies or political institutions
617that are any better than their western counterparts; in fact, one could argue that india has
618survived as the world’s largest democracy only because of institutions that were built under
619british rule. nor has the east led the world in scientific discovery. nevertheless, there is
620something to the notion of uniquely eastern wisdom, and most of it has been concentrated in or
621derived from the tradition of buddhism.
622buddhism has been of special interest to western scientists for reasons already hinted at. it isn’t
623primarily a faith-based religion, and its central teachings are entirely empirical. despite the
624superstitions that many buddhists cherish, the doctrine has a practical and logical core that does
625not require any unwarranted assumptions. many westerners have recognized this and have been
626relieved to find a spiritual alternative to faith-based worship. it is no accident that most of the
627scientific research now done on meditation focuses primarily on buddhist techniques.
628another reason for buddhism’s prominence among scientists has been the intellectual
629engagement of one of its most visible representatives: tenzin gyatso, the fourteenth dalai
630lama. of course, the dalai lama is not without his critics. my late friend christopher hitchens
631meted out justice to “his holiness” on several occasions. he also castigated western students of
632buddhism for the “widely and lazily held belief that ‘oriental’ religion is different from other
633faiths: less dogmatic, more contemplative, more . . . transcendental,” and for the “blissful,
634thoughtless exceptionalism” with which buddhism is regarded by many.8
635hitch did have a point. in his capacity as the head of one of the four branches of tibetan
636buddhism and as the former leader of the tibetan government in exile, the dalai lama has
637made some questionable claims and formed some embarrassing alliances. although his
638engagement with science is far-reaching and surely sincere, the man is not above consulting an
639astrologer or “oracle” when making important decisions. i will have something to say in this
640book about many of the things that might have justified hitch’s opprobrium, but the general
641thrust of his commentary here was all wrong. several eastern traditions are exceptionally
642empirical and exceptionally wise, and therefore merit the exceptionalism claimed by their
643adherents.
644buddhism in particular possesses a literature on the nature of the mind that has no peer in
645western religion or western science. some of these teachings are cluttered with metaphysical
646assumptions that should provoke our doubts, but many aren’t. and when engaged as a set of
647hypotheses by which to investigate the mind and deepen one’s ethical life, buddhism can be an
648entirely rational enterprise.
649unlike the doctrines of judaism, christianity, and islam, the teachings of buddhism are not
650considered by their adherents to be the product of infallible revelation. they are, rather,
651empirical instructions: if you do x, you will experience y. although many buddhists have a
652superstitious and cultic attachment to the historical buddha, the teachings of buddhism present
653him as an ordinary human being who succeeded in understanding the nature of his own mind.
654buddha means “awakened one”—and siddhartha gautama was merely a man who woke up
655from the dream of being a separate self. compare this with the christian view of jesus, who is
656imagined to be the son of the creator of the universe. this is a very different proposition, and it
657renders christianity, no matter how fully divested of metaphysical baggage, all but irrelevant to
658a scientific discussion about the human condition.
659the teachings of buddhism, and of eastern spirituality generally, focus on the primacy of the
660mind. there are dangers in this way of viewing the world, to be sure. focusing on training the
661mind to the exclusion of all else can lead to political quietism and hive-like conformity. the
662fact that your mind is all you have and that it is possible to be at peace even in difficult
663circumstances can become an argument for ignoring obvious societal problems. but it is not a
664compelling one. the world is in desperate need of improvement—in global terms, freedom and
665prosperity remain the exception—and yet this doesn’t mean we need to be miserable while we
666work for the common good.
667in fact, the teachings of buddhism emphasize a connection between ethical and spiritual life.
668making progress in one domain lays a foundation for progress in the other. one can, for
669instance, spend long periods of time in contemplative solitude for the purpose of becoming a
670better person in the world—having better relationships, being more honest and compassionate
671and, therefore, more helpful to one’s fellow human beings. being wisely selfish and being
672selfless can amount to very much the same thing. there are centuries of anecdotal testimony on
673this point—and, as we will see, the scientific study of the mind has begun to bear it out. there
674is now little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines
675what kind of person one becomes. our minds—and lives—are largely shaped by how we use
676them.
677although the experience of self-transcendence is, in principle, available to everyone, this
678possibility is only weakly attested to in the religious and philosophical literature of the west.
679only buddhists and students of advaita vedanta (which appears to have been heavily
680influenced by buddhism) have been absolutely clear in asserting that spiritual life consists in
681overcoming the illusion of the self by paying close attention to our experience in the present
682moment.9
683as i wrote in my first book, the end of faith, the disparity between eastern and western
684spirituality resembles that found between eastern and western medicine—with the arrow of
685embarrassment pointing in the opposite direction. humanity did not understand the biology of
686cancer, develop antibiotics and vaccines, or sequence the human genome under an eastern sun.
687consequently, real medicine is almost entirely a product of western science. insofar as specific
688techniques of eastern medicine actually work, they must conform, whether by design or by
689happenstance, to the principles of biology as we have come to know them in the west. this is
690not to say that western medicine is complete. in a few decades, many of our current practices
691will seem barbaric. one need only ponder the list of side effects that accompany most
692medications to appreciate that these are terribly blunt instruments. nevertheless, most of our
693knowledge about the human body—and about the physical universe generally—emerged in the
694west. the rest is instinct, folklore, bewilderment, and untimely death.
695an honest comparison of spiritual traditions, eastern and western, proves equally invidious.
696as manuals for contemplative understanding, the bible and the koran are worse than useless.
697whatever wisdom can be found in their pages is never best found there, and it is subverted,
698time and again, by ancient savagery and superstition.
699again, one must deploy the necessary caveats: i am not saying that most buddhists or hindus
700have been sophisticated contemplatives. their traditions have spawned many of the same
701pathologies we see elsewhere among the faithful: dogmatism, anti-intellectualism, tribalism,
702otherworldliness. however, the empirical difference between the central teachings of
703buddhism and advaita and those of western monotheism is difficult to overstate. one can
704traverse the eastern paths simply by becoming interested in the nature of one’s own mind—
705especially in the immediate causes of psychological suffering—and by paying closer attention
706to one’s experience in every present moment. there is, in truth, nothing one need believe. the
707teachings of buddhism and advaita are best viewed as lab manuals and explorers’ logs
708detailing the results of empirical research on the nature of human consciousness.
709nearly every geographical or linguistic barrier to the free exchange of ideas has now fallen
710away. it seems to me, therefore, that educated people no longer have a right to any form of
711spiritual provincialism. the truths of eastern spirituality are now no more eastern than the
712truths of western science are western. we are merely talking about human consciousness and
713its possible states. my purpose in writing this book is to encourage you to investigate certain
714contemplative insights for yourself, without accepting the metaphysical ideas that they inspired
715in ignorant and isolated peoples of the past.
716a final word of caution: nothing i say here is intended as a denial of the fact that psychological
717well-being requires a healthy “sense of self”—with all the capacities that this vague phrase
718implies. children need to become autonomous, confident, and self-aware in order to form
719healthy relationships. and they must acquire a host of other cognitive, emotional, and
720interpersonal skills in the process of becoming sane and productive adults. which is to say that
721there is a time and a place for everything—unless, of course, there isn’t. no doubt there are
722psychological conditions, such as schizophrenia, for which practices of the sort i recommend in
723this book might be inappropriate. some people find the experience of an extended, silent retreat
724psychologically destabilizing.10 again, an analogy to physical training seems apropos: not
725everyone is suited to running a six-minute mile or bench-pressing his own body weight. but
726many quite ordinary people are capable of these feats, and there are better and worse ways to
727accomplish them. what is more, the same principles of fitness generally apply even to people
728whose abilities are limited by illness or injury.
729so i want to make it clear that the instructions in this book are intended for readers who are
730adults (more or less) and free from any psychological or medical conditions that could be
731exacerbated by meditation or other techniques of sustained introspection. if paying attention to
732your breath, to bodily sensations, to the flow of thoughts, or to the nature of consciousness itself
733seems likely to cause you clinically significant anguish, please check with a psychologist or a
734psychiatrist before engaging in the practices i describe.
735mindfulness
736it is always now. this might sound trite, but it is the truth. it’s not quite true as a matter of
737neurology, because our minds are built upon layers of inputs whose timing we know must be
738different.11 but it is true as a matter of conscious experience. the reality of your life is always
739now. and to realize this, we will see, is liberating. in fact, i think there is nothing more
740important to understand if you want to be happy in this world.
741but we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth—overlooking it, fleeing it, repudiating it.
742and the horror is that we succeed. we manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become
743happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling
744from pain—and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running.
745as a consequence, we spend our lives being far less content than we might otherwise be. we
746often fail to appreciate what we have until we have lost it. we crave experiences, objects,
747relationships, only to grow bored with them. and yet the craving persists. i speak from
748experience, of course.
749as a remedy for this predicament, many spiritual teachings ask us to entertain unfounded
750ideas about the nature of reality—or at the very least to develop a fondness for the iconography
751and rituals of one or another religion. but not all paths traverse the same rough ground. there
752are methods of meditation that do not require any artifice or unwarranted assumptions at all.
753for beginners, i usually recommend a technique called vipassana (pali for “insight”), which
754comes from the oldest tradition of buddhism, the theravada. one of the advantages of
755vipassana is that it can be taught in an entirely secular way. experts in this practice generally
756acquire their training in a buddhist context, and most retreat centers in the united states and
757europe teach its associated buddhist philosophy. nevertheless, this method of introspection can
758be brought into any secular or scientific context without embarrassment. (the same cannot be
759said for the practice of chanting to lord krishna while banging a drum.) that is why vipassana
760is now being widely studied and adopted by psychologists and neuroscientists.
761the quality of mind cultivated in vipassana is almost always referred to as “mindfulness,”
762and the literature on its psychological benefits is now substantial. there is nothing spooky about
763mindfulness. it is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the
764contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. cultivating this quality of mind has
765been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even
766produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory,
767emotional regulation, and self-awareness.12 we will look more closely at the neurophysiology
768of mindfulness in a later chapter.
769mindfulness is a translation of the pali word sati. the term has several meanings in the
770buddhist literature, but for our purposes the most important is “clear awareness.” the practice
771was first described in the satipatthana sutta,13 which is part of the pali canon. like many
772buddhist texts, the satipatthana sutta is highly repetitive and, for anything but an avid student
773of buddhism, exceptionally boring to read. however, when one compares texts of this kind with
774the bible or the koran, the difference is unmistakable: the satipatthana sutta is not a
775collection of ancient myths, superstitions, and taboos; it is a rigorously empirical guide to
776freeing the mind from suffering.
777the buddha described four foundations of mindfulness, which he taught as “the direct path
778for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the
779disappearance of pain and grief, for the attainment of the true way, for the realization of
780nibbana” (sanskrit, nirvana). the four foundations of mindfulness are the body (breathing,
781changes in posture, activities), feelings (the senses of pleasantness, unpleasantness, and
782neutrality), the mind (in particular, its moods and attitudes), and the objects of mind (which
783include the five senses but also other mental states, such as volition, tranquility, rapture,
784equanimity, and even mindfulness itself). it is a peculiar list, at once redundant and incomplete
785—a problem that is compounded by the necessity of translating pali terminology into english.
786the obvious message of the text, however, is that the totality of one’s experience can become
787the field of contemplation. the meditator is merely instructed to pay attention, “ardently” and
788“fully aware” and “free from covetousness and grief for the world.”
789there is nothing passive about mindfulness. one might even say that it expresses a specific
790kind of passion—a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. it is a
791mode of cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual.
792being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of
793experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. mindfulness is a vivid
794awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or body—thoughts, sensations, moods—
795without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant. one of the great strengths of
796this technique of meditation, from a secular point of view, is that it does not require us to adopt
797any cultural affectations or unjustified beliefs. it simply demands that we pay close attention to
798the flow of experience in each moment.
799the principal enemy of mindfulness—or of any meditative practice—is our deeply
800conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts. the problem is not thoughts themselves but
801the state of thinking without knowing that we are thinking. in fact, thoughts of all kinds can be
802perfectly good objects of mindfulness. in the early stages of one’s practice, however, the arising
803of thought will be more or less synonymous with distraction—that is, with a failure to meditate.
804most people who believe they are meditating are merely thinking with their eyes closed. by
805practicing mindfulness, however, one can awaken from the dream of discursive thought and
806begin to see each arising image, idea, or bit of language vanish without a trace. what remains is
807consciousness itself, with its attendant sights, sounds, sensations, and thoughts appearing and
808changing in every moment.
809in the beginning of one’s meditation practice, the difference between ordinary experience
810and what one comes to consider “mindfulness” is not very clear, and it takes some training to
811distinguish between being lost in thought and seeing thoughts for what they are. in this sense,
812learning to meditate is just like acquiring any other skill. it takes many thousands of repetitions
813to throw a good jab or to coax music from the strings of a guitar. with practice, mindfulness
814becomes a well-formed habit of attention, and the difference between it and ordinary thinking
815will become increasingly clear. eventually, it begins to seem as if you are repeatedly
816awakening from a dream to find yourself safely in bed. no matter how terrible the dream, the
817relief is instantaneous. and yet it is difficult to stay awake for more than a few seconds at a
818time.
819my friend joseph goldstein, one of the finest vipassana teachers i know, likens this shift in
820awareness to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that
821you are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall. your perception is
822unchanged, but the spell is broken. most of us spend every waking moment lost in the movie of
823our lives. until we see that an alternative to this enchantment exists, we are entirely at the
824mercy of appearances. again, the difference i am describing is not a matter of achieving a new
825conceptual understanding or of adopting new beliefs about the nature of reality. the change
826comes when we experience the present moment prior to the arising of thought.
827the buddha taught mindfulness as the appropriate response to the truth of dukkha, usually
828translated from the pali, somewhat misleadingly, as “suffering.” a better translation would be
829“unsatisfactoriness.” suffering may not be inherent in life, but unsatisfactoriness is. we crave
830lasting happiness in the midst of change: our bodies age, cherished objects break, pleasures
831fade, relationships fail. our attachment to the good things in life and our aversion to the bad
832amount to a denial of these realities, and this inevitably leads to feelings of dissatisfaction.
833mindfulness is a technique for achieving equanimity amid the flux, allowing us to simply be
834aware of the quality of experience in each moment, whether pleasant or unpleasant. this may
835seem like a recipe for apathy, but it needn’t be. it is actually possible to be mindful—and,
836therefore, to be at peace with the present moment—even while working to change the world for
837the better.
838mindfulness meditation is extraordinarily simple to describe, but it isn’t easy to perform.
839true mastery might require special talent and a lifetime of devotion to the task, and yet a
840genuine transformation in one’s perception of the world is within reach for most of us. practice
841is the only thing that will lead to success. the simple instructions given in the box that follows
842are analogous to instructions on how to walk a tightrope—which, i assume, must go something
843like this:
8441. find a horizontal cable that can support your weight.
8452. stand on one end.
8463. step forward by placing one foot directly in front of the other.
8474. repeat.
8485. don’t fall.
849clearly, steps 2 through 5 entail a little trial and error. happily, the benefits of training in
850meditation arrive long before mastery does. and falling, for our purposes, occurs almost
851ceaselessly, every time we become lost in thought. again, the problem is not thoughts
852themselves but the state of thinking without being fully aware that we are thinking.
853as every meditator soon discovers, distraction is the normal condition of our minds: most of
854us topple from the wire every second—whether gliding happily into reverie or plunging into
855fear, anger, self-hatred, and other negative states of mind. meditation is a technique for waking
856up. the goal is to come out of the trance of discursive thinking and to stop reflexively grasping
857at the pleasant and recoiling from the unpleasant, so that we can enjoy a mind undisturbed by
858worry, merely open like the sky, and effortlessly aware of the flow of experience in the present.
859how to meditate
8601. sit comfortably, with your spine erect, either in a chair or cross-legged on a cushion.
8612. close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and feel the points of contact between your
862body and the chair or the floor. notice the sensations associated with sitting—
863feelings of pressure, warmth, tingling, vibration, etc.
8643. gradually become aware of the process of breathing. pay attention to wherever you
865feel the breath most distinctly—either at your nostrils or in the rising and falling of
866your abdomen.
8674. allow your attention to rest in the mere sensation of breathing. (you don’t have to
868control your breath. just let it come and go naturally.)
8695. every time your mind wanders in thought, gently return it to the breath.
8706. as you focus on the process of breathing, you will also perceive sounds, bodily
871sensations, or emotions. simply observe these phenomena as they appear in
872consciousness and then return to the breath.
8737. the moment you notice that you have been lost in thought, observe the present
874thought itself as an object of consciousness. then return your attention to the breath
875—or to any sounds or sensations arising in the next moment.
8768. continue in this way until you can merely witness all objects of consciousness—
877sights, sounds, sensations, emotions, even thoughts themselves—as they arise,
878change, and pass away.
879those who are new to this practice generally find it useful to hear instructions of this
880kind spoken aloud during the course of a meditation session. i have posted guided
881meditations of varying length on my website.
882the truth of suffering
883i am sitting in a coffee shop in midtown manhattan, drinking exactly what i want (coffee), eating
884exactly what i want (a cookie), and doing exactly what i want (writing this book). it is a
885beautiful fall day, and many of the people passing by on the sidewalk appear to radiate good
886fortune from their pores. several are so physically attractive that i’m beginning to wonder
887whether photoshop can now be applied to the human body. up and down this street, and for a
888mile in each direction, stores sell jewelry, art, and clothing that not even 1 percent of humanity
889could hope to purchase.
890so what did the buddha mean when he spoke of the “unsatisfactoriness” (dukkha) of life?
891was he referring merely to the poor and the hungry? or are these rich and beautiful people
892suffering even now? of course, suffering is all around us—even here, where everything appears
893to be going well for the moment.
894first, the obvious: within a few blocks of where i am sitting are hospitals, convalescent
895homes, psychiatrists’ offices, and other rooms built to assuage, or merely to contain, some of
896the most profound forms of human misery. a man runs over his own child while backing his car
897out of the driveway. a woman learns that she has terminal cancer on the eve of her wedding.
898we know that the worst can happen to anyone at any time—and most people spend a great deal
899of mental energy hoping that it won’t happen to them.
900but more subtle forms of suffering can be found, even among people who seem to have every
901reason to be satisfied in the present. although wealth and fame can secure many forms of
902pleasure, few of us have any illusions that they guarantee happiness. anyone who owns a
903television or reads the newspaper has seen movie stars, politicians, professional athletes, and
904other celebrities ricochet from marriage to marriage and from scandal to scandal. to learn that
905a young, attractive, talented, and successful person is nevertheless addicted to drugs or
906clinically depressed is to be given almost no cause for surprise.
907yet the unsatisfactoriness of the good life runs deeper than this. even while living safely
908between emergencies, most of us feel a wide range of painful emotions on a daily basis. when
909you wake up in the morning, are you filled with joy? how do you feel at work or when looking
910in the mirror? how satisfied are you with what you’ve accomplished in life? how much of your
911time with your family is spent surrendered to love and gratitude, and how much is spent just
912struggling to be happy in one another’s company? even for extraordinarily lucky people, life is
913difficult. and when we look at what makes it so, we see that we are all prisoners of our
914thoughts.
915and then there is death, which defeats everyone. most people seem to believe that we have
916only two ways to think about death: we can fear it and do our best to ignore it, or we can deny
917that it is real. the first strategy leads to a life of conventional worldliness and distraction—we
918merely strive for pleasure and success and do our best to keep the reality of death out of view.
919the second strategy is the province of religion, which assures us that death is but a doorway to
920another world and that the most important opportunities in life occur after the lifetime of the
921body. but there is another path, and it seems the only one compatible with intellectual honesty.
922that path is the subject of this book.
923enlightenment
924what is enlightenment, which is so often said to be the ultimate goal of meditation? there are
925many esoteric details that we can safely ignore—disagreements among contemplative traditions
926about what, exactly, is gained or lost at the end of the spiritual path. many of these claims are
927preposterous. within most schools of buddhism, for instance, a buddha—whether the historical
928buddha, siddhartha gautama, or any other person who attains the state of “full
929enlightenment”—is generally described as “omniscient.” just what this means is open to a fair
930bit of caviling. but however narrowly defined, the claim is absurd. if the historical buddha
931were “omniscient,” he would have been, at minimum, a better mathematician, physicist,
932biologist, and jeopardy contestant than any person who has ever lived. is it reasonable to
933expect that an ascetic in the fifth century bc, by virtue of his meditative insights, spontaneously
934became an unprecedented genius in every field of human inquiry, including those that did not
935exist at the time in which he lived? would siddhartha gautama have awed kurt gödel, alan
936turing, john von neumann, and claude shannon with his command of mathematical logic and
937information theory? of course not. to think otherwise is pure, religious piety.
938any extension of the notion of “omniscience” to procedural knowledge—that is, to knowing
939how to do something—would render the buddha capable of painting the sistine chapel in the
940morning and demolishing roger federer at centre court in the afternoon. is there any reason to
941believe that siddhartha gautama, or any other celebrated contemplative, possessed such
942abilities by virtue of his spiritual practice? none whatsoever. nevertheless, many buddhists
943believe that buddhas can do all these things and more. again, this is religious dogmatism, not a
944rational approach to spiritual life.14
945i make no claims in support of magic or miracles in this book. however, i can say that the
946true goal of meditation is more profound than most people realize—and it does, in fact,
947encompass many of the experiences that traditional mystics claim for themselves. it is quite
948possible to lose one’s sense of being a separate self and to experience a kind of boundless,
949open awareness—to feel, in other words, at one with the cosmos. this says a lot about the
950possibilities of human consciousness, but it says nothing about the universe at large. and it
951sheds no light at all on the relationship between mind and matter. the fact that it is possible to
952love one’s neighbor as oneself should be a great finding for the field of psychology, but it lends
953absolutely no credence to the claim that jesus was the son of god, or even that god exists. nor
954does it suggest that the “energy” of love somehow pervades the cosmos. these are historical
955and metaphysical claims that personal experience cannot justify.
956however, a phenomenon like self-transcending love does entitle us to make claims about the
957human mind. and this particular experience is so well attested and so readily achieved by those
958who devote themselves to specific practices (the buddhist technique of metta meditation, for
959instance) or who even take the right drug (mdma) that there is very little controversy that it
960exists. facts of this kind must now be understood in a rational context.
961the traditional goal of meditation is to arrive at a state of well-being that is imperturbable—or
962if perturbed, easily regained. the french monk matthieu ricard describes such happiness as “a
963deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind.”15 the purpose of
964meditation is to recognize that you already have such a mind. that discovery, in turn, helps you
965to cease doing the things that produce needless confusion and suffering for yourself and others.
966of course, most people never truly master the practice and don’t reach a condition of
967imperturbable happiness. the near goal, therefore, is to have an increasingly healthy mind—
968that is, to be moving one’s mind in the right direction.
969there is nothing novel about trying to become happy. and one can become happy, within
970certain limits, without any recourse to the practice of meditation. but conventional sources of
971happiness are unreliable, being dependent upon changing conditions. it is difficult to raise a
972happy family, to keep yourself and those you love healthy, to acquire wealth and find creative
973and fulfilling ways to enjoy it, to form deep friendships, to contribute to society in ways that are
974emotionally rewarding, to perfect a wide variety of artistic, athletic, and intellectual skills—
975and to keep the machinery of happiness running day after day. there is nothing wrong with
976being fulfilled in all these ways—except for the fact that, if you pay close attention, you will
977see that there is still something wrong with it. these forms of happiness aren’t good enough.
978our feelings of fulfillment do not last. and the stress of life continues.
979so what would a spiritual master be a master of? at a minimum, she will no longer suffer
980certain cognitive and emotional illusions—above all, she will no longer feel identical to her
981thoughts. once again, this is not to say that such a person will no longer think, but she would no
982longer succumb to the primary confusion that thoughts produce in most of us: she would no
983longer feel that there is an inner self who is a thinker of these thoughts. such a person will
984naturally maintain an openness and serenity of mind that is available to most of us only for brief
985moments, even after years of practice. i remain agnostic as to whether anyone has achieved such
986a state permanently, but i know from direct experience that it is possible to be far more
987enlightened than i tend to be.
988the question of whether enlightenment is a permanent state need not detain us. the crucial
989point is that you can glimpse something about the nature of consciousness that will liberate you
990from suffering in the present. even just recognizing the impermanence of your mental states—
991deeply, not merely as an idea—can transform your life. every mental state you have ever had
992has arisen and then passed away. this is a first-person fact—but it is, nonetheless, a fact that
993any human being can readily confirm. we don’t have to know any more about the brain or about
994the relationship between consciousness and the physical world to understand this truth about
995our own minds. the promise of spiritual life—indeed, the very thing that makes it “spiritual” in
996the sense i invoke throughout this book—is that there are truths about the mind that we are better
997off knowing. what we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more
998pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.
999the moment we admit the possibility of attaining contemplative insights—and of training
1000one’s mind for that purpose—we must acknowledge that people naturally fall at different points
1001on a continuum between ignorance and wisdom. part of this range will be considered “normal,”
1002but normal isn’t necessarily a happy place to be. just as a person’s physical body and abilities
1003can be refined—olympic athletes are not normal—one’s mental life can deepen and expand on
1004the basis of talent and training. this is nearly self-evident, but it remains a controversial point.
1005no one hesitates to admit the role of talent and training in the context of physical and
1006intellectual pursuits; i have never met another person who denied that some of us are stronger,
1007more athletic, or more learned than others. but many people find it difficult to acknowledge that
1008a continuum of moral and spiritual wisdom exists or that there might be better and worse ways
1009to traverse it.
1010stages of spiritual development, therefore, appear unavoidable. just as we must grow into
1011adulthood physically—and we can fail to mature or become sick or injured along the way—our
1012minds develop by degrees. one can’t learn sophisticated skills such as syllogistic reasoning,
1013algebra, or irony until one has acquired more basic skills. it seems to me that a healthy spiritual
1014life can begin only once our physical, mental, social, and ethical lives have sufficiently
1015matured. we must learn to use language before we can work with it creatively or understand its
1016limits, and the conventional self must form before we can investigate it and understand that it is
1017not what it appears to be. an ability to examine the contents of one’s own consciousness
1018clearly, dispassionately, and nondiscursively, with sufficient attention to realize that no inner
1019self exists, is a very sophisticated skill. and yet basic mindfulness can be practiced very early
1020in life. many people, including my wife, have successfully taught it to children as young as six.
1021at that age—and every age thereafter—it can be a powerful tool for self-regulation and selfawareness.
1022contemplatives have long understood that positive habits of mind are best viewed as skills
1023that most of us learn imperfectly as we grow to adulthood. it is possible to become more
1024focused, patient, and compassionate than one naturally tends to be, and there are many things to
1025learn about how to be happy in this world. these are truths that western psychological science
1026has only recently begun to explore.
1027some people are content in the midst of deprivation and danger, while others are miserable
1028despite having all the luck in the world. this is not to say that external circumstances do not
1029matter. but it is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines the quality of
1030your life. your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you
1031make to the lives of others. given this fact, it makes sense to train it.
1032scientists and skeptics generally assume that the traditional claims of yogis and mystics must
1033be exaggerated or simply delusional and that the only rational purpose of meditation is limited
1034to conventional “stress reduction.” conversely, serious students of these practices often insist
1035that even the most outlandish claims made by and about spiritual masters are true. i am
1036attempting to lead the reader along a middle path between these extremes—one that preserves
1037our scientific skepticism but acknowledges that it is possible to radically transform our minds.
1038in one sense, the buddhist concept of enlightenment really is just the epitome of “stress
1039reduction”—and depending on how much stress one reduces, the results of one’s practice can
1040seem more or less profound. according to the buddhist teachings, human beings have a
1041distorted view of reality that leads them to suffer unnecessarily. we grasp at transitory
1042pleasures. we brood about the past and worry about the future. we continually seek to prop up
1043and defend an egoic self that doesn’t exist. this is stressful—and spiritual life is a process of
1044gradually unraveling our confusion and bringing this stress to an end. according to the buddhist
1045view, by seeing things as they are, we cease to suffer in the usual ways, and our minds can open
1046to states of well-being that are intrinsic to the nature of consciousness.
1047of course, some people claim to love stress and appear eager to live by its logic. some even
1048derive pleasure from imposing stress on others. genghis khan is reported to have said, “the
1049greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy and drive him before you, to see his cities reduced
1050to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather to your bosom his wives
1051and daughters.” people attach many meanings to terms like happiness, and not all of them are
1052compatible with one another.
1053in the moral landscape, i argued that we tend to be unnecessarily confused by differences
1054of opinion on the topic of human well-being. no doubt certain people can derive mental
1055pleasure—and even experience genuine ecstasy—by behaving in ways that produce immense
1056suffering for others. but we know that these states are anomalous—or, at least, not sustainable
1057—because we depend upon one another for more or less everything. whatever the associated
1058pleasures, raping and pillaging can’t be a stable strategy for finding happiness in this world.
1059given our social requirements, we know that the deepest and most durable forms of well-being
1060must be compatible with an ethical concern for other people—even for complete strangers—
1061otherwise, violent conflict becomes inevitable. we also know that there are certain forms of
1062happiness that are not available to a person even if, like genghis khan, he finds himself on the
1063winning side of every siege. some pleasures are intrinsically ethical—feelings like love,
1064gratitude, devotion, and compassion. to inhabit these states of mind is, by definition, to be
1065brought into alignment with others.
1066in my view, the realistic goal to be attained through spiritual practice is not some permanent
1067state of enlightenment that admits of no further efforts but a capacity to be free in this moment, in
1068the midst of whatever is happening. if you can do that, you have already solved most of the
1069problems you will encounter in life.
1070chapter 2
1071the mystery of consciousness
1072investigating the nature of consciousness itself—and transforming its contents through
1073deliberate training—is the basis of spiritual life. in scientific terms, however, consciousness
1074remains notoriously difficult to understand, or even to define. in fact, many debates about its
1075character have been waged without the participants’ finding even a common topic as common
1076ground. while we need not recapitulate the history of our confusion on this point, it will be
1077useful to briefly examine why consciousness still poses a unique challenge to science. having
1078done so, we will see that spirituality is not just important for living a good life; it is actually
1079essential for understanding the human mind.
1080in one of the most influential essays on consciousness ever written, the philosopher thomas
1081nagel asks us to consider what it is like to be a bat.1 his interest isn’t in bats but in how we
1082define the concept of “consciousness.” nagel argues that an organism is conscious “if and only
1083if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something that it is like for the
1084organism.” whether you find that statement brilliant, trivial, or merely perplexing probably says
1085a lot about your appetite for philosophy. “brilliant” and “trivial” can both be defended, but
1086nagel’s claim needn’t leave you confused. he is simply asking you to imagine trading places
1087with a bat. if you would be left with any experience, however indescribable—some spectrum
1088of sights, sounds, sensations, feelings—that is what consciousness is in the case of a bat. if
1089being transformed into a bat were tantamount to annihilation, however, then bats are not
1090conscious.2 nagel’s point is that whatever else consciousness may or may not entail in physical
1091terms, the difference between it and unconsciousness is a matter of subjective experience.
1092either the lights are on, or they are not.3
1093but experience is one thing, and our growing scientific picture of reality is another. at this
1094moment, you might be vividly aware of reading this book, but you are completely unaware of
1095the electrochemical events occurring at each of the trillions of synapses in your brain. however
1096much you may know about physics, chemistry, and biology, you live elsewhere. as a matter of
1097your experience, you are not a body of atoms, molecules, and cells; you are consciousness and
1098its ever-changing contents, passing through various stages of wakefulness and sleep, from
1099cradle to grave.
1100and the question of how consciousness relates to the physical world remains famously
1101unresolved. there are reasons to believe that it emerges on the basis of information processing
1102in complex systems like a human brain, because when we look at the universe, we find it filled
1103with simpler structures, like stars, and processes, like nuclear fusion, that offer no outward
1104signs of consciousness. but our intuitions here may not amount to much. after all, how would
1105the sun appear if it were conscious? perhaps exactly as it does now. (would you expect it to
1106talk?) and yet somehow it seems far less likely that the stars are conscious and simply mute
1107than that they lack inner lives altogether.
1108whatever the ultimate relationship between consciousness and matter, almost everyone will
1109agree that at some point in the development of complex organisms like ourselves, consciousness
1110seems to emerge. this emergence does not depend on a change of materials, for you and i are
1111built of the same atoms as a fern or a ham sandwich. instead, the birth of consciousness must be
1112the result of organization: arranging atoms in certain ways appears to bring about an experience
1113of being that very collection of atoms. this is undoubtedly one of the deepest mysteries given to
1114us to contemplate.4
1115nevertheless, nagel was right to observe that the reality of consciousness is, first and
1116foremost, subjective—for it is simply the fact of subjectivity itself. and whether something
1117seems conscious from the outside is never quite the point. i happen to know a person who once
1118woke up during a surgery for which he had received a general anesthetic. owing to the paralytic
1119component of the anesthesia, however, he was unable to signal to his doctors that he was awake
1120and feeling rather more of the procedure than he liked. this was inconvenient, to say the least,
1121because they were in the process of replacing his liver. if you think the important part of
1122consciousness is its link to speech and behavior, spare a moment to consider the problem of
1123“anesthesia awareness.” it is a cure for much bad philosophy.5
1124it is surely a sign of intellectual progress that a discussion of consciousness need no longer
1125begin with a debate about its existence. to say that consciousness may only seem to exist, from
1126the inside, is to admit its existence in full—for if things seem any way at all, that is
1127consciousness. even if i happen to be a brain in a vat at this moment—and all my memories are
1128false, and all my perceptions are of a world that does not exist—the fact that i am having an
1129experience is indisputable (to me, at least). this is all that is required for me (or any other
1130sentient being) to fully establish the reality of consciousness. consciousness is the one thing in
1131this universe that cannot be an illusion.6
1132as our understanding of the physical world has evolved, our notion of what counts as
1133“physical” has broadened considerably. a world teeming with fields and forces, vacuum
1134fluctuations, and the other gossamer spawn of modern physics is not the physical world of
1135common sense. in fact, our common sense seems to be stuck somewhere in the sixteenth century.
1136it has also been generally forgotten that many of the patriarchs of physics in the first half of the
1137twentieth century regularly impugned the “physicality” of the universe and placed mind—or
1138thoughts, or consciousness itself—at the very wellspring of reality. nonreductive views like
1139those of arthur eddington, james jeans, wolfgang pauli, werner heisenberg, and erwin
1140schrödinger seem to have had no lasting impact.7 in some ways we can be thankful for this, for
1141a fair amount of mumbo jumbo was in the air. pauli, for instance, was a devotee of carl jung,
1142who apparently analyzed no fewer than 1,300 of the great man’s dreams.8 although pauli was
1143one of the titans of physics, his thoughts about the irreducibility of mind probably had as much
1144to do with jung’s febrile imagination as they did with quantum mechanics.
1145the allure of the numinous eventually subsided. once physicists got down to the serious
1146business of building bombs, we were apparently returned to a universe of objects—and to a
1147style of discourse, across all branches of science and philosophy, that made the mind seem ripe
1148for reduction to the “physical” world.
1149these developments have greatly inconvenienced new age thinkers—or would have, had
1150they deigned to notice them. authors struggling to link spirituality to science generally pin their
1151hopes on misunderstandings of the “copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics,” which
1152they take as proof that consciousness plays a central role in determining the character of the
1153physical world. if nothing is real until it is observed, consciousness cannot arise from
1154electrochemical events in the brains of animals like ourselves; rather, it must be part of the very
1155fabric of reality. but this simply isn’t the position of mainstream physics. it is true that,
1156according to copenhagen, quantum mechanical systems do not behave classically until they are
1157observed, and before that they may seem to exist in many different states simultaneously. but
1158what counts as “observation” under the original copenhagen view was never clearly defined.
1159the notion has been refined since, and it has nothing to do with consciousness. it’s not that the
1160mysteries of quantum mechanics have been resolved—the physical picture is strange however
1161one looks at it. and the problem of how an underlying quantum mechanical reality becomes the
1162seemingly classical world of tables and chairs hasn’t been completely understood. however,
1163there is no reason to think that consciousness is integral to the process. it seems certain,
1164therefore, that anyone who would base his spirituality on misinterpretations of 1930s physics is
1165bound to be disappointed. as we will see, the link between spirituality and science must be
1166found in another place.9
1167we know, of course, that human minds are the product of human brains. there is simply no
1168question that your ability to decode and understand this sentence depends upon
1169neurophysiological events taking place inside your head at this moment. but most of this mental
1170work occurs entirely in the dark, and it is a mystery why any part of the process should be
1171attended by consciousness. nothing about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, suggests
1172that it is a locus of experience. were we not already brimming with consciousness ourselves,
1173we would find no evidence for it in the universe—nor would we have any notion of the many
1174experiential states that it gives rise to. the only proof that it is like something to be you at this
1175moment is the fact (obvious only to you) that it is like something to be you.10
1176however we propose to explain the emergence of consciousness—be it in biological,
1177functional, computational, or any other terms—we have committed ourselves to this much: first
1178there is a physical world, unconscious and seething with unperceived events; then, by virtue of
1179some physical property or process, consciousness itself springs, or staggers, into being. this
1180idea seems to me not merely strange but perfectly mysterious. that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
1181when we linger over the details, however, this notion of emergence seems merely a
1182placeholder for a miracle.
1183consciousness—the sheer fact that this universe is illuminated by sentience—is precisely
1184what unconsciousness is not. and i believe that no description of unconscious complexity will
1185fully account for it. to simply assert that consciousness arose at some point in the evolution of
1186life, and that it results from a specific arrangement of neurons firing in concert within an
1187individual brain, doesn’t give us any inkling of how it could emerge from unconscious
1188processes, even in principle. however, this is not to say that some other thesis about
1189consciousness must be true. consciousness may very well be the lawful product of unconscious
1190information processing. but i don’t know what that sentence actually means—and i don’t think
1191anyone else does either.11 this situation has been characterized as an “explanatory gap”12 and
1192as the “hard problem of consciousness,”13 and it is surely both. some philosophers have
1193suggested that the relationship between mind and body will be understood only with reference
1194to concepts that are neither physical nor mental but that are in some way “neutral.”14 others
1195claim that consciousness can be known to be the product of physical causes but cannot be
1196conceptually reduced to such causes.15 still others have argued that the notion of a nonreductive
1197physical account is incoherent.16
1198i am sympathetic with those who, like the philosopher colin mcginn and the psychologist
1199steven pinker, have suggested that perhaps the emergence of consciousness is simply
1200incomprehensible in human terms.17 every chain of explanation must end somewhere—
1201generally with a brute fact that neglects to explain itself. perhaps consciousness presents an
1202impasse of this sort.18
1203in any case, the task of explaining consciousness in physical terms bears little resemblance
1204to other successful explanations in the history of science. the analogies that scientists and
1205philosophers marshal here are invariably misleading. the fact, for instance, that we can now
1206describe the properties of matter, such as fluidity, in terms of microscopic events that are not
1207themselves “fluid” does not suggest a way to understand consciousness as an emergent property
1208of the unconscious world. it is easy to see that no single water molecule can be “fluid,” and it is
1209easy to see that billions of such molecules, freely sliding past one another, would appear as
1210“fluidity” on the scale of a human hand. what is not easy to see is how analogies of this kind
1211have persuaded so many people that consciousness can be readily explained in terms of
1212information processing.19
1213for an explanation of a phenomenon to be satisfying, it must first be, at a minimum,
1214intelligible. in this regard, the emergence of fluidity poses no problems: the free sliding of
1215molecules seems exactly the sort of thing that should be true of a substance to ensure its fluidity.
1216why can i pass my hand through liquid water and not through rock? because the molecules of
1217water are not bound so tightly as to resist my motion. notice that this explanation of fluidity is
1218perfectly reductive: fluidity really is “nothing but” the free motion of molecules. for this
1219explanation to be sufficient, we must admit that molecules exist, of course, but once we do, the
1220problem is solved. no one has described a set of unconscious events whose sufficiency as a
1221cause of consciousness would make sense in this way. any attempt to understand consciousness
1222in terms of brain activity merely correlates a person’s ability to report an experience
1223(demonstrating that he was aware of it) with specific states of his brain. while such
1224correlations can amount to fascinating neuroscience, they bring us no closer to explaining the
1225emergence of consciousness itself.
1226there will almost certainly come a time when we will build a robot whose facial
1227expressiveness, tone of voice, and flexibility of thought will cause us to wonder whether or not
1228it is conscious. this robot might even claim to be conscious and be eager to participate in the
1229kinds of experiments we now perform on human beings, allowing us to correlate its responses
1230to stimuli with changes in its “brain.” it seems clear, however, that unless we can do more than
1231this, we will never know whether there is “something that it is like” to be such a machine.20
1232some readers may think that i’ve stacked the deck against the sciences of the mind by
1233comparing consciousness to a phenomenon as easily understood as fluidity. surely science has
1234dispelled far greater mysteries. what, for instance, is the difference between a living system
1235and a dead one? insofar as questions about consciousness itself can be kept off the table, it
1236seems that the difference is now reasonably clear to us. and yet, as late as 1932, the scottish
1237physiologist j. s. haldane (father of j. b. s. haldane) wrote:
1238what intelligible account can the mechanistic theory of life give of the . . . recovery from
1239disease and injuries? simply none at all, except that these phenomena are so complex and
1240strange that as yet we cannot understand them. it is exactly the same with the closely
1241related phenomena of reproduction. we cannot by any stretch of the imagination conceive
1242a delicate and complex mechanism which is capable, like a living organism, of
1243reproducing itself indefinitely often.21
1244scarcely twenty years passed before our imaginations were duly stretched. much work in
1245biology remains to be done, but anyone who entertains vitalismi at this point is simply ignorant
1246about the nature of living systems. the jury is no longer out on questions of this kind, and more
1247than half a century has passed since the earth’s creatures required an élan vital to propagate
1248themselves or to recover from injury. is my skepticism that we will arrive at a physical
1249explanation of consciousness analogous to haldane’s doubt about the feasibility of explaining
1250life in terms of processes that are not themselves alive?
1251it wouldn’t seem so. to say that a system is alive is very much like saying that it is fluid,
1252because life is a matter of what systems do with respect to their environment. like fluidity, life
1253is defined according to external criteria. consciousness is not (and, i think, cannot be). we
1254would never have occasion to say of something that does not eat, excrete, grow, or reproduce
1255that it might be “alive.” it might, however, be conscious.22
1256might a mature neuroscience nevertheless offer a proper explanation of consciousness in
1257terms of its underlying brain processes? again, there is nothing about a brain, studied at any
1258scale, that even suggests that it might harbor consciousness—apart from the fact that we
1259experience consciousness directly and have correlated many of its contents, or lack thereof,
1260with processes in our brains. nothing about human behavior or language or culture
1261demonstrates that it is mediated by consciousness, apart from the fact that we simply know that
1262it is—a truth that someone can appreciate in himself directly and in others by analogy.23
1263here is where the distinction between studying consciousness itself and studying its contents
1264becomes paramount. it is easy to see how the contents of consciousness might be understood in
1265neurophysiological terms. consider, for instance, our experience of seeing an object: its color,
1266contours, apparent motion, and location in space arise in consciousness as a seamless unity,
1267even though this information is processed by many separate systems in the brain. thus, when a
1268golfer prepares to hit a shot, he does not first see the ball’s roundness, then its whiteness, and
1269only then its position on the tee. rather, he enjoys a unified perception of the ball. many
1270neuroscientists believe that this phenomenon of “binding” can be explained by disparate groups
1271of neurons firing in synchrony.24 whether or not this theory is true, it is at least intelligible—
1272because synchronous activity seems just the sort of thing that could explain the unity of a
1273percept.
1274this work suggests, as many other findings in neuroscience do, that the contents of
1275consciousness can often be made sense of in terms of their underlying neurophysiology.25
1276however, when we ask why such phenomena should be experienced in the first place, we are
1277returned to the mystery of consciousness in full.26
1278unfortunately, efforts to locate consciousness in the brain generally fail to distinguish
1279between consciousness and its contents. as a result, many researchers have taken one form of
1280consciousness (or one class of its contents) as a sufficient view of the whole. for instance,
1281christof koch and others have done some very clever work on vision, looking for which
1282regions of the brain encode conscious visual perception.27 the phenomenon of binocular
1283rivalry has provided an especially useful foothold here: it just so happens that when each eye is
1284presented with a different visual stimulus, a person’s conscious experience is not a blending of
1285the two images but, rather, a series of apparently random transitions between them. if, for
1286instance, you are shown a picture of a house in one eye and a human face in the other, you will
1287not see the two images competing with each other or otherwise superimposed. you will see the
1288house for a few seconds, and then the face, and then the house again, switching at random
1289intervals. this phenomenon has allowed experimenters to look for those regions of the brain (in
1290both humans and monkeys) that respond to a change in conscious perception. the
1291psychophysical situation seems tailor-made to distinguish the frontier between the conscious
1292and unconscious components of vision, because the input remains constant—each eye receives
1293the continuous impression of a single image—while somewhere in the brain a wholesale change
1294in the contents of consciousness occurs every few seconds. this is very interesting—and yet
1295subjects experiencing binocular rivalry are conscious throughout the experiment; only the
1296contents of visual awareness have been modulated by the task. if you shut your eyes at this
1297moment, the contents of your consciousness change quite drastically, but your consciousness
1298(arguably) does not.
1299this is not to say that our understanding of the mind won’t change in surprising ways through
1300our study of the brain. there may be no limit to how a maturing neuroscience might reshape our
1301beliefs about the nature of conscious experience. are we unconscious during sleep or merely
1302unable to remember what sleep is like? can human minds be duplicated? neuroscience may one
1303day answer such questions—and the answers might well surprise us.
1304but the reality of consciousness appears irreducible. only consciousness can know itself—
1305and directly, through first-person experience. it follows, therefore, that rigorous introspection
1306—“spirituality” in the widest sense of the term—is an indispensable part of understanding the
1307nature of the mind.
1308the mind divided
1309if spirituality is to become part of science, however, it must integrate with the rest of what we
1310know about the world. it has long been obvious that traditional approaches to spirituality cannot
1311do this—being based, to one or another degree, on religious myths and superstitions. consider
1312the idea that human beings, alone among nature’s animals, have been installed with immortal
1313souls. this dogma came under pressure the moment darwin published on the origin of species
1314in 1859, but it is now truly dead. by sequencing a wide variety of genomes, we have finally
1315rendered our continuity with the rest of life undeniable. we are such stuff as yeasts are made of.
1316of course, only 25 percent of americans believe in evolution (while 68 percent believe in the
1317literal existence of satan).28 but we can now say that any conception of our place in the
1318universe that denies we evolved from more primitive life forms is pure delusion.
1319neuroscience has also produced results that are equally hostile to the traditional idea of
1320souls—and, therefore, to any approach to spirituality that presupposes their existence. one such
1321finding, conclusively demonstrated in humans and animals since the 1950s, is widely known as
1322the “split brain”—a phenomenon so at odds with common sense that, even within the culture of
1323science, it has defied integration into our thoughts.
1324the human brain is divided at the level of the cerebrum (everything above the brain stem) into
1325right and left hemispheres. the reason for this is still unclear, but it does not seem altogether
1326strange that the left-right symmetry of our bodies would be reflected in our central nervous
1327system. this structure turns out to have surprising consequences.
1328the right and left hemispheres of all vertebrate brains are connected by several nerve tracts
1329called commissures, the function of which, we now know, is to pass information back and forth
1330between them. the main commissure in the brains of placental mammals like ourselves is the
1331corpus callosum, the fibers of which link similar regions of the cortex across the hemispheres.
1332the evolutionary history of this structure is still a matter of dispute, but in human beings it
1333represents a larger system of connectivity than the sum of all the fibers linking the cortex to the
1334rest of the nervous system.29 as we are about to see, the unity of every human mind depends on
1335the normal functioning of these connections. without them, our brains—and minds—are
1336divided.
1337certain people have had their forebrain commissures surgically severed. this is generally
1338undertaken as a treatment for severe epilepsy, though other surgeries occasionally require that
1339some of these fibers be cut. as a treatment for epilepsy, patients usually receive a callosotomy,
1340a procedure whereby most or all of the corpus callosum is severed to prevent local storms of
1341unregulated activity from spreading throughout the brain and producing a seizure.30
1342the split brain was brought to the world’s attention half a century ago by roger w. sperry
1343and colleagues.31 sperry was awarded a nobel prize in 1981 for this work, which inspired a
1344literature that now spans neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, psychiatry, and philosophy.
1345before sperry began his research, it appeared that dividing the brains of these patients simply
1346mitigated their seizures (which was, after all, the point) without producing any changes in their
1347behavior. this seemed to lend credence to the ancient notion that the corpus callosum does
1348nothing more than hold the two hemispheres of the brain together.
1349once patients recover from this surgery, they generally appear quite normal, even on
1350neurological exam.32 under the experimental conditions that sperry and his colleagues devised,
1351however—first in cats and monkeys,33 and then in humans
135234—two principal findings emerged.
1353first, the left and right hemispheres of the brain display a high degree of functional
1354specialization. this discovery was not entirely new, because it had been known for at least a
1355century that damage to the left hemisphere could impair the use of language. but the split-brain
1356procedure allowed scientists to test each hemisphere independently on a variety of tasks,
1357revealing a range of segregated abilities. the second finding was that when the forebrain
1358commissures are cut, the hemispheres display an altogether astonishing functional
1359independence, including separate memories, learning processes, behavioral intentions, and—it
1360seems all but certain—centers of conscious experience.
1361the independence of the hemispheres in a split-brain patient comes about because most
1362nerve tracts running to and from the cortex are segregated, left and right. everything that falls in
1363the left visual field of each eye, for instance, is projected to the right hemisphere of the brain,
1364and everything in the right visual field is projected to the left hemisphere. the same pattern
1365holds for both sensation and fine motor control in our extremities. thus, each hemisphere relies
1366on intact commissures to receive information from its own side of the world. while it can
1367rarely speak, because speech is usually confined to the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere
1368can respond to questions by pointing to written words and objects with the left hand.
1369the classic demonstration of hemispheric independence in a split-brain patient runs as
1370follows: show the right hemisphere a word—egg, say—by briefly flashing it in the left half of
1371the visual field, and the subject (speaking from his language-dominant left hemisphere) will
1372claim to have seen nothing at all. ask him to reach behind a partition and select with his left
1373hand (which is predominantly controlled by the right hemisphere) the thing that he “did not see,”
1374and he will succeed in picking out an egg from among a multitude of objects. ask him to name
1375the item he now holds in his left hand without allowing the left hemisphere to get a look at it,
1376and he will be unable to reply. if shown the egg and asked why he selected it from among the
1377available materials, he will probably confabulate an answer (again, with his language-dominant
1378left hemisphere), saying something like “oh, i picked it because i had eggs for breakfast
1379yesterday.” this is a peculiar state of affairs.
1380when the lateralization of inputs to the brain is exploited in this way, it becomes difficult to
1381say that the person whose brain has been split is a single subject, for everything about his
1382behavior suggests that a silent intelligence lurks in his right hemisphere, about which the
1383articulate left hemisphere knows nothing. the duality of mind is further demonstrated by the fact
1384that these patients can simultaneously perform separate manual tasks. for instance, a person
1385whose brain is functioning normally will find it impossible to draw incompatible figures
1386simultaneously with the right and left hands; divided brains accomplish this task easily, like two
1387artists working in parallel. in the acute phase after surgery, patients’ left and right hands
1388sometimes engage in a tug-of-war over an object or sabotage each other’s work. the left
1389hemisphere can speak about its condition and may even understand the anatomical details of the
1390procedure that has brought it about, yet it remains remarkably naïve about the experience of its
1391neighbor on the right. even many years after surgery, the left hemispheres of these subjects
1392express surprise or irritation when their right hemispheres respond to an experimenter’s
1393instructions.35 to ask the left hemisphere what it is like to not know what the right hemisphere
1394is thinking is rather like asking a normal subject what it is like to not know what another person
1395is thinking: he simply does not know what the other person is thinking (or even, perhaps, that
1396he or she exists).
1397what is most startling about the split-brain phenomenon is that we have every reason to
1398believe that the isolated right hemisphere is independently conscious. it is true that some
1399scientists and philosophers have resisted this conclusion,36 but none have done so credibly. if
1400complex language were necessary for consciousness, then all nonhuman animals and human
1401infants would be devoid of consciousness in principle. if those whose left hemispheres have
1402been surgically removed are still believed to be conscious—and they are—how could the mere
1403presence of a functioning left hemisphere rob the right one of its subjectivity in the case of a
1404split-brain patient?37
1405the consciousness of the right hemisphere is especially difficult to deny whenever a subject
1406possesses linguistic ability on both sides of the brain, because in such cases the divided
1407hemispheres often express different intentions. in a famous example, a young patient was asked
1408what he wanted to be when he grew up: his left brain replied, “a draftsman,” while his right
1409brain used letter cards to spell out “racing driver.”38 in fact, the divided hemispheres
1410sometimes seem to address each other directly, in the form of a verbalized, interhemispheric
1411argument.39
1412in such cases, each hemisphere might well have its own beliefs. consider what this says
1413about the dogma—widely held under christianity and islam—that a person’s salvation depends
1414upon her believing the right doctrine about god. if a split-brain patient’s left hemisphere
1415accepts the divinity of jesus, but the right doesn’t, are we to imagine that she now harbors two
1416immortal souls, one destined for the company of angels and the other for an eternity in hellfire?
1417the question of whether there is “something that it is like” to be the right hemisphere of a
1418split-brain patient must be answered in the only way that it is ever answered in science: we can
1419merely observe that its behavior and underlying neurology are sufficiently similar to that which
1420we know to be correlated with consciousness in our own case. there is no difficulty in doing
1421this for a normal split-brain patient who retains the use of her left hand. in fact, the
1422consciousness of the disconnected right hemisphere is easier to establish than that of most
1423toddlers. the question of whether the right hemisphere is conscious is really a pseudo-mystery
1424used to bar the door to a great one: the uncanny fact that the human mind can be divided with a
1425knife.
1426structure and function
1427the right and left hemispheres of our brain show differences in their gross anatomy, many of
1428which are also found in the brains of other animals. in humans, the left hemisphere generally
1429makes a unique contribution to language and to the performance of complex movements.
1430consequently, damage on this side tends to be accompanied by aphasia (impairment of spoken
1431or written language) and apraxia (impairment of coordinated movement).
1432people usually show a right-ear (left-hemisphere) advantage for words, digits, nonsense
1433syllables, morse code, difficult rhythms, and the ordering of temporal information, whereas
1434they show a left-ear (right-hemisphere) advantage for melodies, musical chords, environmental
1435sounds, and tones of voice. similar differences have been found for other senses as well. we
1436know, for instance, that the right hand (sensation from which projects almost entirely to the left
1437hemisphere) is better able to discriminate the order of stimuli, while the left hand is more
1438sensitive to their spatial characteristics.
1439however, the right hemisphere is dominant for many higher cognitive abilities, both in
1440normal brains and in those that have been surgically divided. it tends to have an advantage
1441when reading faces, intuiting geometrical principles and spatial relationships, perceiving
1442wholes from a collection of parts, and judging musical chords.40 the right hemisphere is also
1443better at displaying emotion (with the left side of the face) and at detecting emotions in others.41
1444interestingly, this obliges us to view one another’s least expressive side of the face (the right)
1445with our most emotionally astute hemisphere (the right), and vice versa. psychopaths generally
1446do not show this right-hemisphere advantage for the perception of emotion; perhaps this is one
1447reason why they are bad at detecting emotional distress in others.42
1448most evidence suggests that the two hemispheres differ in temperament, and it now seems
1449uncontroversial to say that they can make different (and even opposing) contributions to a
1450person’s emotional life.43 in a divided brain, the hemispheres are unlikely to perceive self and
1451world in the same way, nor are they likely to feel the same about them.
1452much of what makes us human is generally accomplished by the right side of the brain.
1453consequently, we have every reason to believe that the disconnected right hemisphere is
1454independently conscious and that the divided brain harbors two distinct points of view. this
1455fact poses an insurmountable problem for the notion that each of us has a single, indivisible self
1456—much less an immortal soul. the idea of a soul arises from the feeling that our subjectivity
1457has a unity, simplicity, and integrity that must somehow transcend the biochemical wheelworks
1458of the body. but the split-brain phenomenon proves that our subjectivity can quite literally be
1459sliced in two. (this is why sir john eccles, a neuroscientist and a committed christian,
1460declared, against all evidence, that the right hemisphere of the divided brain must be
1461unconscious.) this fact has interesting ethical repercussions. for instance, the biologist lee
1462silver wonders what we should do if a person with a split brain wanted to have her right
1463hemisphere removed because she could no longer endure the conflict with her “other self.”
1464would this be a therapeutic intervention or a murder? however, the most important
1465implications are for our view of consciousness: it is divisible—and, therefore, more
1466fundamental than any apparent self.
1467imagine undergoing a complete callosotomy. like most such surgeries, you could be kept
1468awake, because there are no pain receptors in the brain. there is also no reason to think that
1469you would lose consciousness during the procedure, because a person can have an entire
1470hemisphere removed (hemispherectomy) without loss of consciousness.44 nor would you suffer
1471a lapse in memory. after surgery, you would tend to speak in a way characteristic of
1472alexithymia (the inability to describe your emotional life), and you might also demonstrate an
1473inappropriate degree of politeness.45 whether or not you had occasion to notice these changes
1474in yourself, it seems all but certain that you would retain your sense of being a “self” throughout
1475the experience.
1476given that each hemisphere in your divided brain would have its own point of view,
1477whereas now you appear to have only one, it is natural to wonder which side of the longitudinal
1478fissure “you” would find yourself on once the corpus callosum was cut. would you land on the
1479right or on the left? it is hard to resist the uncanny demands of arithmetic here. assuming that
1480you were not simply extinguished and replaced by two new subjects—which seems ruled out by
1481the fact that you would probably remain conscious throughout the procedure and retain your
1482memories—it is tempting to conclude that your subjectivity must collapse to a single
1483hemisphere. once the surgery was over, it would be obvious that you can’t be on both sides of
1484the great divide.
1485perhaps it is reasonable to believe that you would find yourself in the left hemisphere,
1486retaining the reins of speech, since speech and discursive thinking do much to define your
1487experience in the present. but consider some of the other cognitive abilities you now
1488consciously enjoy, which we know are governed primarily by your right hemisphere. who, for
1489instance, would greet your loved ones with your left hand and effortlessly recognize their faces,
1490their facial expressions, and their tones of voice?
1491i think this riddle admits of a rather straightforward solution. consciousness—whatever its
1492relation to neural events—is divisible. and just as it isn’t shared between the brains of separate
1493individuals, it need not be shared between the hemispheres of a single brain once the structures
1494that facilitate such sharing have been cut. if some way of linking two brains with an artificial
1495commissure were ever devised, we should expect that what had been two distinct persons
1496would be unified in the only sense that consciousness is ever unified, as a single point of view,
1497and unified in the only sense that minds are ever unified, by virtue of common contents and
1498functional abilities.
1499the experience of dreaming is instructive here. each night, we lie down to sleep, only to be
1500stolen from our beds and plunged into a realm where our personal histories and the laws of
1501nature no longer apply. generally, we do not retain enough of a purchase on reality to even
1502notice that anything out of the ordinary has happened. the most astonishing quality of dreams is
1503surely our lack of astonishment when they arise. the sleeping brain seems to have no
1504expectation of continuity from one moment to the next. (this is probably owing to the
1505diminished activity in the frontal lobes that occurs during rem sleep.) thus, sweeping changes
1506in our experience do not, in principle, detract from the unity of consciousness. left to its own
1507devices, consciousness seems happy to just experience one thing after the next.
1508if my brain harbors only one conscious point of view—if all that is remembered, intended,
1509and perceived is known by a single “subject”—then i enjoy unity of mind. the evidence is
1510overwhelming, however, that such unity, if it ever exists in a human being, depends upon some
1511humble tracts of white matter crossing the midline of the brain.
1512are our minds already split?
1513roger sperry and his colleagues demonstrated in the 1950s that the corpus callosum cannot
1514facilitate a complete transfer of learning between the cerebral hemispheres.46 after cutting the
1515optic chiasma in cats (and thereby confining the inputs from each eye to a single hemisphere),
1516they discovered that only simple learning acquired through one eye could transfer to the other
1517side of the brain. given the immense amount of information processing that takes place in each
1518hemisphere, it seems certain that even a normal human brain will be functionally split to one or
1519another degree. two hundred million nerve fibers seem insufficient to integrate the
1520simultaneous activity of 20 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex, each of which makes
1521hundreds or thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of connections to its neighbors.47 given
1522this partitioning of information, how can our brains not harbor multiple centers of
1523consciousness even now?
1524the philosopher roland puccetti once observed that the existence of separate spheres of
1525consciousness in the normal brain would explain one of the most perplexing features of splitbrain
1526research: why is it that the right hemisphere is generally willing to bear silent witness to
1527the errors and confabulations of the left? could it be that the right hemisphere is used to it?
1528an answer consistent with the hypothesis of mental duality in the normal human brain
1529suggests itself. the non-speaking hemisphere has known the true state of affairs from a
1530very tender age. it has known this because beginning at age two or three it heard speech
1531emanating from the common body that, as language development on the left proceeded,
1532became too complex grammatically and syntactically for it to believe it was generating;
1533the same, of course, for what it observed the preferred hand writing down in school
1534through the years. postsurgically, little has changed for the mute hemisphere (other than
1535loss of sensory information about the ipsilateral half of bodily space). . . . being inured to
1536this status of cerebral helot, it goes along. thankless cooperation can become a way of
1537life.48
1538take a moment to absorb how bizarre this possibility is. the point of view from which you are
1539consciously reading these words may not be the only conscious point of view to be found in
1540your brain. it is one thing to say that you are unaware of a vast amount of activity in your brain.
1541it is quite another to say that some of this activity is aware of itself and is watching your every
1542move.
1543there must be a reason why the structural integrity of the corpus callosum creates a
1544functional unity of mind (insofar as it does), and perhaps it is only the division of the corpus
1545callosum that makes for separated regions of consciousness in the human brain. but whatever
1546the final lesson of the split brain is, it thoroughly violates our commonsense intuitions about the
1547nature of our subjectivity.
1548a person’s experience of the world, while apparently unified in a normal brain, can be
1549physically divided. the problem this poses for the study of consciousness may be
1550insurmountable. if i were to interrogate my brain with the help of a colleague—one who was
1551willing to expose my cortex and begin probing with a microelectrode—neither of us would
1552know what to make of a region that failed to influence the contents of “my” consciousness. the
1553split-brain phenomenon suggests that all that i would be able to say is whether i (as perhaps
1554only one among many centers of consciousness to be found in my brain) felt anything when my
1555friend applied the current. feeling nothing, i wouldn’t know whether the neurons in question
1556constituted a region of consciousness in their own right—for the simple reason that i might be
1557just like a split-brain patient given to wonder, with his articulate left hemisphere, whether or
1558not his right hemisphere is conscious. it surely is, and yet no amount of experimental probing on
1559his part will drive the relevant facts into view. as long as we must correlate changes in the
1560brain—or any other physical system—with first-person reports, any physical systems that are
1561functionally mute may nevertheless prove to be conscious, and our attempt to understand the
1562causes of consciousness will fail to take them into account.
1563all brains—and persons—may be split to one or another degree. each of us may live, even
1564now, in a fluid state of split and overlapping subjectivity. whether or not this seems plausible
1565to you may not be the point. another part of your brain may see the matter differently.
1566conscious and unconscious processing in the brain
1567the frontier between conscious and unconscious mental processes has fascinated psychologists
1568and neuroscientists for more than a century. the realization that the unconscious mind must have
1569some cognitive and emotional structure was the foundation of freud’s work and also the stage
1570upon which he erected an impressively unscientific mythology. the connection between
1571conscious thoughts and unconscious processes was also present in the work of william james,
1572whose views on this topic, and on the mind in general, still deserve our attention:
1573suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. the state of our consciousness is peculiar.
1574there is a gap therein; but no mere gap. it is a gap that is intensely active. a sort of
1575wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle
1576with the sense of our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term.
1577if wrong names are proposed to us, this singularly definite gap acts immediately so as to
1578negate them. they do not fit into its mould. and the gap of one word does not feel like the
1579gap of another, all empty of content as both might seem necessarily to be when described
1580as gaps. . . . the rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it; or the
1581evanescent sense of something which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us
1582fitfully, without growing more distinct.49
1583in other words, the unconscious mind exists, and our conscious experience gives some
1584indication of its structure. recent advances in experimental psychology and neuroimaging have
1585allowed us to study the boundary between conscious and unconscious mental processes with
1586increasing precision. we now know that at least two systems in the brain—often referred to as
1587“dual processes”—govern human cognition, emotion, and behavior. one is evolutionarily
1588older, unconscious, and automatic; the other evolved more recently and is both conscious and
1589deliberative. when you find another person annoying, sexually attractive, or inadvertently
1590funny, you are experiencing the percolations of system 1. the heroic efforts you make to
1591conceal these feelings out of politeness are the work of system 2.
1592scientists have learned how to target system 1 through the phenomenon of “priming,”
1593revealing that complex mental processes lurk beneath the level of conscious awareness.50 the
1594experimental technique of “backward masking” has been at the center of this research: human
1595beings can consciously perceive very brief visual stimuli (down to about 1/30 of a second), but
1596we can no longer see these images if they are immediately followed by a dissimilar pattern (a
1597“mask”). this fact allows for words and pictures to be delivered to the mind subliminally,51
1598and these stimuli have subsequent effects on a person’s cognition and behavior. for instance,
1599you will be faster to recognize that ocean is a word if it follows a related prime, like wave,
1600than if it follows an unrelated one, like hammer. and emotionally charged terms are more
1601easily recognized than neutral ones (sex can be presented more briefly than car), which further
1602demonstrates that the meanings of words must be gleaned prior to consciousness. subliminally
1603promised rewards drive activity in the brain’s reward centers,52 and masked fearful faces and
1604emotional words increase activity in the amygdala.53 clearly, we are not aware of all the
1605information that influences our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
1606many other findings attest to the importance of our unconscious mental lives. amnesiacs,
1607who can no longer form conscious memories, can still improve their performance on a wide
1608variety of tasks through practice.54 for instance, a person can learn to play golf with increasing
1609proficiency, all the while believing that whenever she picks up a club it is for the first time. the
1610acquisition of such motor skills occurs outside of consciousness in normal people as well. your
1611conscious memories of practicing a musical instrument, driving a car, or tying your shoelaces
1612are neurologically distinct from your learning how to do these things and from your knowing
1613how to do them now. people with amnesia can even learn new facts and have their ability to
1614recognize names
161555 and generate concepts
161656 improve in response to prior exposure, without
1617having any memory of acquiring such knowledge. in fact, we are all in this position with respect
1618to most of our semantic knowledge of the world. do you remember learning the meaning of the
1619word door? probably not. how do you recognize it and bring its meaning to mind? you have no
1620idea. these processes occur outside consciousness.57
1621consciousness is what matters
1622despite the obvious importance of the unconscious mind, consciousness is what matters to us—
1623not just for the purpose of spiritual practice but in every aspect of our lives. consciousness is
1624the substance of any experience we can have or hope for, now or in the future. if god spoke to
1625moses out of a burning bush, the bush would have been a visual percept (whether veridical or
1626not) of which moses was consciously aware. it should be clear that if a person begins to suffer
1627from intractable pain or depression, if he experiences a continuous ringing in his ears or the
1628consequences of having acquired a bad reputation among his colleagues, these developments
1629are matters of consciousness and its contents, whatever the nature of the unconscious processes
1630that give rise to them.
1631consciousness is also what gives our lives a moral dimension. without consciousness, we
1632would have no cause to wonder how we should behave toward other human beings, nor could
1633we care how we were treated in return. granted, many moral emotions and intuitions operate
1634unconsciously, but it is because they influence the contents of consciousness that they matter to
1635us. i have argued elsewhere, and at length in the moral landscape, that we have ethical
1636responsibilities toward other creatures precisely to the degree that our actions can affect their
1637conscious experience for better or worse.58 we don’t have ethical obligations toward rocks (on
1638the assumption that they are not conscious), but we do have such obligations toward any
1639creature that can suffer or be deprived of happiness. of course, it can be wrong to destroy rocks
1640if they happen to be valuable to other conscious creatures. the taliban’s destruction of the
16411,500-year-old standing buddhas of bamiyan was wrong not from the perspective of the statues
1642themselves but from that of all the people who cared about them (and the future people who
1643might have cared).
1644i have never come across a coherent notion of bad or good, right or wrong, desirable or
1645undesirable that did not depend upon some change in the experience of conscious creatures. it is
1646not always easy to nail down what we mean by “good” and “bad”—and their definitions may
1647remain perpetually open to revision—but such judgments seem to require, in every instance,
1648that some difference register at the level of experience. why would it be wrong to murder a
1649billion human beings? because so much pain and suffering would result. why would it be
1650wrong to painlessly kill every man, woman, and child in their sleep? because of all the
1651possibilities for future happiness that would be foreclosed. if you think such actions are wrong
1652primarily because they would anger god or would lead to your punishment after death, you are
1653still worried about perturbations of consciousness—albeit ones that stand a good chance of
1654being wholly imaginary.
1655i take it to be axiomatic, therefore, that our notions of meaning, morality, and value
1656presuppose the actuality of consciousness (or its loss) somewhere. if anyone has a conception
1657of meaning, morality, and value that has nothing to do with the experience of conscious beings,
1658in this world or in a world to come, i have yet to hear of it. and it would seem that such a
1659conception of value could hold no interest for anyone, by definition, because it would be
1660guaranteed to be outside the experience of every conscious being, now and in the future.
1661the fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand—that your thoughts and moods and
1662sensations have a qualitative character in this moment—is a mystery, exceeded only by the
1663mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in the first place. although science
1664may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to dispel the
1665fundamental mystery of our being itself. that doesn’t leave much scope for conventional
1666religious beliefs, but it does offer a deep foundation for a contemplative life. many truths about
1667ourselves will be discovered in consciousness directly or not discovered at all.
1668i. vitalism is the now discredited doctrine that living systems require some nonphysical principle to explain their organization and
1669behavior.
1670chapter 3
1671the riddle of the self
1672i once spent an afternoon on the northwestern shore of the sea of galilee, atop the mount where
1673jesus is believed to have preached his most famous sermon. it was an infernally hot day, and
1674the sanctuary where i sat was crowded with christian pilgrims from many continents. some
1675gathered silently in the shade, while others staggered about in the sun, taking photographs.
1676as i gazed at the surrounding hills, a feeling of peace came over me. it soon grew to a
1677blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. in an instant, the sense of being a separate self—an
1678“i” or a “me”—vanished. everything was as it had been—the cloudless sky, the brown hills
1679sloping to an inland sea, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water—but i no longer felt
1680separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. only the world
1681remained.
1682the experience lasted just a few seconds, but it returned many times as i looked out over the
1683land where jesus is believed to have walked, gathered his apostles, and worked many of his
1684miracles. if i were a christian, i would undoubtedly have interpreted this experience in
1685christian terms. i might believe that i had glimpsed the oneness of god or been touched by the
1686holy spirit. if i were a hindu, i might think in terms of brahman, the eternal self, of which the
1687world and all individual minds are thought to be a mere modification. if i were a buddhist, i
1688might talk about the “dharmakaya of emptiness,” in which all apparent things manifest as in a
1689dream.
1690but i am simply someone who is making his best effort to be a rational human being.
1691consequently, i am very slow to draw metaphysical conclusions from experiences of this sort.
1692and yet, i glimpse what i will call the intrinsic selflessness of consciousness every day,
1693whether at a traditional holy site, or at my desk, or while having my teeth cleaned. this is not an
1694accident. i’ve spent many years practicing meditation, the purpose of which is to cut through the
1695illusion of the self.
1696my goal in this chapter and the next is to convince you that the conventional sense of self is an
1697illusion—and that spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment. there are
1698logical and scientific reasons to accept this claim, but recognizing it to be true is not a matter of
1699understanding these reasons. like many illusions, the sense of self disappears when closely
1700examined, and this is done through the practice of meditation. once again, i am suggesting an
1701experiment that you must conduct for yourself, in the laboratory of your own mind, by paying
1702attention to your experience in a new way.
1703the buddha’s famous parable meant to denigrate mere intellectualism seems apropos here:1
1704a man is struck in the chest with a poison arrow. a surgeon rushes to his side to begin the work
1705of saving his life, but the man resists these ministrations. he first wants to know the name of the
1706fletcher who fashioned the arrow’s shaft, the genus of the wood from which it was cut, the
1707disposition of the man who shot it, the name of the horse upon which he rode, and a thousand
1708other things that have no bearing upon his present suffering or his ultimate survival. the man
1709needs to get his priorities straight. his commitment to thinking about the world results from a
1710basic misunderstanding of his predicament. and though we may be only dimly aware of it, we,
1711too, have a problem that will not be solved by acquiring more conceptual knowledge.
1712little has changed since the buddha’s time. many people claim to have no interest at all in
1713spiritual life. indeed, most scientists and philosophers disdain the subject, for it suggests a
1714neglect of intellectual standards: bliss, it has been noted, is not conducive to detached
1715observation.2 and yet, we are all seeking fulfillment while living at the mercy of changing
1716experience. whatever we acquire in life gets dispersed. our bodies age. our relationships fall
1717away. even the most intense pleasures last only a few moments. and every morning, we are
1718chased out of bed by our thoughts.
1719in this chapter, i will invoke a variety of concepts that have yet to do much useful work in
1720our study of the natural world, or even of the brain, but do very heavy lifting throughout the
1721course of our lives: concepts such as self and ego and i. admittedly, these terms appear less
1722than scientific, but we have no new words with which to name, and subsequently study, one of
1723the most striking features of our existence: most of us feel that our experience of the world
1724refers back to a self—not to our bodies precisely but to a center of consciousness that exists
1725somehow interior to the body, behind the eyes, inside the head. the feeling that we call “i”
1726seems to define our point of view in every moment, and it also provides an anchor for popular
1727beliefs about souls and freedom of will. and yet this feeling, however imperturbable it may
1728appear at present, can be altered, interrupted, or entirely abolished. such transformations run
1729the gamut from run-of-the-mill psychosis to spiritual epiphany.
1730what makes me the same person i was five minutes ago, or yesterday, or on my eighteenth
1731birthday? is it that i remember being those former selves and my memories are (somewhat)
1732accurate? in fact, i’ve forgotten most of what has happened to me over the course of my life, and
1733my body has been gradually changing all the while. is it enough to say that i am physically
1734continuous with my former selves because most of the cells in my body are the same as or
1735descended from those that made up the bodies of these younger men?
1736as we have seen, the split-brain phenomenon puts pressure on the very idea of personal
1737identity. but things can get even worse. in a now famous thought experiment, the philosopher
1738derek parfit asks us to imagine a teleportation device that can beam a person from earth to
1739mars. rather than travel for many months on a spaceship, you need only enter a small chamber
1740close to home and push a green button, and all the information in your brain and body will be
1741sent to a similar station on mars, where you will be reassembled down to the last atom.
1742imagine that several of your friends have already traveled to mars this way and seem none
1743the worse for it. they describe the experience as being one of instantaneous relocation: you
1744push the green button and find yourself standing on mars—where your most recent memory is of
1745pushing the green button on earth and wondering if anything would happen.
1746so you decide to travel to mars yourself. however, in the process of arranging your trip, you
1747learn a troubling fact about the mechanics of teleportation: it turns out that the technicians wait
1748for a person’s replica to be built on mars before obliterating his original body on earth. this
1749has the benefit of leaving nothing to chance; if something goes wrong in the replication process,
1750no harm has been done. however, it raises the following concern: while your double is
1751beginning his day on mars with all your memories, goals, and prejudices intact, you will be
1752standing in the teleportation chamber on earth, just staring at the green button. imagine a voice
1753coming over the intercom to congratulate you for arriving safely at your destination; in a few
1754moments, you are told, your earth body will be smashed to atoms. how would this be any
1755different from simply being killed?
1756to most readers, this thought experiment will suggest that psychological continuity—the
1757mere maintenance of one’s memories, beliefs, habits, and other mental traits—is an insufficient
1758basis for personal identity. it’s not enough for someone on mars to be just like you; he must
1759actually be you. the man on mars will share all your memories and will behave exactly as you
1760would have. but he is not you—as your continued existence in the teleportation chamber on
1761earth attests. to the earth-you awaiting obliteration, teleportation as a means of travel will
1762appear a horrifying sham: you never left earth and are about to die. your friends, you now
1763realize, have been repeatedly copied and killed. and yet, the problem with teleportation is
1764somehow not obvious if a person is disassembled before his replica is built. in that case, it is
1765tempting to say that teleportation works and that “he” is really stepping onto the surface of
1766mars.
1767one might conclude that personal identity requires physical continuity: i am identical to my
1768brain and body, and if they get destroyed, that’s the end of me. but parfit shows that physical
1769continuity matters only because it normally supports psychological continuity. merely hanging
1770on to one’s brain and body cannot be an end in itself. just consider the unfortunate case of
1771someone with advanced dementia: he is physically but not psychologically continuous with the
1772person he used to be. if he could be given new neurons that would emulate the old ones in his
1773healthy brain—restoring his memories, creativity, sense of humor—this would be far better than
1774keeping his current neurons that are succumbing to neurodegenerative disease. if we grant that
1775the gradual replacement of individual neurons would be compatible with continued
1776consciousness, it seems clear that the maintenance of psychological continuity is what we care
1777about. and it is generally what we mean by a person’s “survival” from one moment to the next.
1778parfit pushes the concept of personal identity about as far as it can go and resolves the
1779apparent paradox of teleportation by arguing that “identity is not what matters”; rather, we
1780should be concerned only about psychological continuity. however, he also states that
1781psychological continuity cannot take a “branching form” (or at least not for long), as it does
1782when a person is copied on mars while the original person survives on earth. parfit believes
1783that we should view the teleportation case in which a person is destroyed before being
1784replicated as more or less indistinguishable from the normal pattern of personal survival
1785throughout our lives. after all, in what way are you subjectively the same as the person who
1786first picked up this book? in the only way you can be: by displaying some degree of
1787psychological continuity with that past self. viewed in this way, it is difficult to see how
1788teleportation is any different from the mere passage of time. as parfit says, “i want the person
1789on mars to be me in a specially intimate way in which no future person will ever be me. . . .
1790what i fear will be missing is always missing. . . . ordinary survival is about as bad as being
1791destroyed and replicated.”3 here, parfit does not mean “bad” in the sense that we should find
1792these truths depressing. he is merely arguing that ordinary survival from moment to moment is
1793no more demonstrative of personal identity than destruction/replication would be. parfit’s view
1794of the self, which he appears to have arrived at independently through an immensely creative
1795use of thought experiments, is essentially the same as the one found in the teachings of
1796buddhism: there is no stable self that is carried along from one moment to the next.
1797i agree with most of what parfit has to say about personal identity. however, because his
1798view is purely the product of logical argument, it can seem uncannily detached from the reality
1799of our lives. although experience in meditation may not immediately resolve the teleportation
1800paradox or make it clear why one should care about one’s own future experience any more than
1801that of a stranger, it can make these philosophical problems easier to think about.
1802when talking about psychological continuity, we are talking about consciousness and its
1803contents—the persistence of autobiographical memories in particular. everything that is
1804personal, everything that differentiates my consciousness from that of another human being,
1805relates to the contents of consciousness. memories, perceptions, attitudes, desires—these are
1806appearances in consciousness. if “my” consciousness were suddenly filled with the contents of
1807“your” life—if i awoke this morning with your memories, hopes, fears, sensory impressions,
1808and relationships—i would no longer be me. i would be the same as your clone in the
1809teleportation case.
1810my consciousness is “mine” only because the particularities of my life are illuminated as
1811and where they arise. for instance, i currently have an annoying pain in my neck, the result of a
1812martial arts injury. why is this “my” pain? why am i the only one who is directly aware of it?
1813these questions are a symptom of confusion. there is no “i” who is aware of the pain. the pain
1814is simply arising in consciousness in the only place it can arise: at the conjunction of this brain
1815and this neck. where else could this particular pain be felt? if i were cloned through
1816teleportation, an identical pain might be felt in an identical neck on mars. but this pain would
1817still be right here in this neck.
1818whatever its relation to the physical world, consciousness is the context in which the objects
1819of experience appear—the sight of this book, the sound of traffic, the sensation of your back
1820against a chair. there is nowhere else for them to appear—for their very appearance is
1821consciousness in action. and anything that is unique to your experience of the world must
1822appear amid the contents of consciousness. we have every reason to believe that these contents
1823depend upon the physical structure of your brain. duplicate your brain, and you will duplicate
1824“your” contents in another field of consciousness. divide your brain, and you will segregate
1825those contents in bizarre ways.
1826we know, from experiments both real and imagined, that psychological continuity is
1827divisible—and can, therefore, be inherited by more than one mind. if my brain were surgically
1828divided by callosotomy tomorrow, this would create at least two independent conscious minds,
1829both of which would be psychologically continuous with the person who is now writing this
1830paragraph. if my linguistic abilities happened to be distributed across both hemispheres, each of
1831these minds might remember having written this sentence. the question of whether i would land
1832in the left hemisphere or the right doesn’t make sense—being based, as it is, on the illusion that
1833there is a self bobbing on the stream of consciousness like a boat on the water.
1834but the stream of consciousness can divide and follow both tributaries simultaneously.
1835should these tributaries converge again, the final current would inherit the “memories” of each.
1836if, after years of living apart, my hemispheres were reunited, their memories of separate
1837existence could, in principle, appear as the combined memory of a single consciousness. there
1838would be no cause to ask where my “self” had been while my brain was divided, because no
1839“i” exists apart from the stream. the moment we see this, the divisibility of the human mind
1840begins to seem less paradoxical. subjectively speaking, the only thing that actually exists is
1841consciousness and its contents. and the only thing relevant to the question of personal identity is
1842psychological continuity from one moment to the next.
1843what are we calling “i”?
1844one thing each of us knows for certain is that reality vastly exceeds our awareness of it. i am,
1845for instance, sitting at my desk, drinking coffee. gravity is holding me in place, and the manner
1846in which this is accomplished eludes us to this day. the integrity of my chair is the result of the
1847electrical bonds between atoms—entities i have never seen but which i know must exist, in
1848some sense, with or without my knowledge. the coffee is dissipating heat at a rate that could be
1849calculated with precision, and the second law of thermodynamics decrees that it is, on balance,
1850losing heat every moment rather than gathering it from the cup or the surrounding air. none of
1851this is evident to me from direct experience, however. forces of digestion and metabolism are
1852at work within me that are utterly beyond my perception or control. most of my internal organs
1853may as well not exist for all i know of them directly, and yet i can be reasonably certain that i
1854have them, arranged much as any medical textbook would suggest. the taste of the coffee, my
1855satisfaction at its flavor, the feeling of the warm cup in my hand—while these are immediate
1856facts with which i am acquainted, they reach back into a dark wilderness of facts that i will
1857never come to know. i have neurons firing and forming new connections in my brain every
1858instant, and these events determine the character of my experience. but i know nothing directly
1859about the electrochemical activity of my brain—and yet this soggy miracle of computation
1860appears to be working for the moment and generating a vision of a world.
1861the more i persist in this line of thought, the clearer it becomes that i perceive scarcely a
1862scintilla of all that exists to be known. i can, for instance, reach for my cup of coffee or set it
1863down, seemingly as i please. these are intentional actions, and i perform them. but if i look for
1864what underlies these movements—motor neurons, muscle fibers, neurotransmitters—i can’t feel
1865or see a thing. and how do i initiate this behavior? i haven’t a clue. in what sense, then, do i
1866initiate it? that is difficult to say. the feeling that i intended to do what i just did seems to be
1867only that: a feeling of some internal signature, perhaps the result of my brain’s having formed a
1868predictive model of its ensuing actions. it may not be best classified as a feeling, but surely it is
1869something. otherwise, how could i note the difference between voluntary and involuntary
1870behavior? without this impression of agency, i would feel that my actions were automatic or
1871otherwise beyond my control.
1872one question immediately presents itself: where am i that i have such a poor view of things?
1873and what sort of thing am i that both my outside and my inside are so obscure? and outside and
1874inside of what? my skin? am i identical to my skin? if not—and the answer is clearly no—why
1875should the frontier between my outside and my inside be drawn at the skin? if not at the skin,
1876then where does the outside of me stop and the inside of me begin? at my skull? am i my skull?
1877am i inside my skull? let’s say yes for the moment, because we are quickly running out of
1878places to look for me. where inside my skull might i be? and if i’m up there in my head, how is
1879the rest of me me (let alone the inside of me)?
1880the pronoun i is the name that most of us put to the sense that we are the thinkers of our thoughts
1881and the experiencers of our experience. it is the sense that we have of possessing (rather than of
1882merely being) a continuum of experience. we will see, however, that this feeling is not a
1883necessary property of the mind. and the fact that people report losing their sense of self to one
1884or another degree suggests that the experience of being a self can be selectively interfered with.
1885obviously, there is something in our experience that we are calling “i,” apart from the sheer
1886fact that we are conscious; otherwise, we would never describe our subjectivity in the way we
1887do, and a person would have no basis for feeling that she had lost her sense of self, whatever
1888the circumstances. nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to pinpoint just what it is we take
1889ourselves to be. many philosophers have noticed this problem, but few in the west have
1890understood that the failure to locate the self can produce more than mere confusion.4 i suspect
1891that this difference between eastern and western philosophy has something to do with the
1892influence of abrahamic religion and its doctrine of the soul. christianity, in particular, presents
1893impressive obstacles to thinking intelligently about the nature of the human mind, asserting, as it
1894does, the real existence of individual souls who are subject to the eternal judgment of god.
1895what does it mean to say that the self cannot be found or that it is illusory? it is not to say
1896that people are illusory. i see no reason to doubt that each of us exists or that the ongoing history
1897of our personhood can be conventionally described as the history of our “selves.” but the self
1898in this more global, biographical sense undergoes sweeping changes over the course of a
1899lifetime. while you are in many ways physically and psychologically continuous with the
1900person you were at age seven, you are not the same. your life has surely been punctuated by
1901transitions that significantly changed you: marriage, divorce, college, military service,
1902parenthood, bereavement, serious illness, fame, exposure to other cultures, imprisonment,
1903professional success, loss of a job, religious conversion. each of us knows what it is like to
1904develop new capacities, understandings, opinions, and tastes over the course of time. it is
1905convenient to ascribe these changes to the self. that is not the self i am talking about.
1906the self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment—
1907the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts inside one’s head, the sense of being an owner or
1908inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to appropriate as a kind of vehicle.
1909even if you don’t believe such a homunculus exists—perhaps because you believe, on the basis
1910of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein—
1911you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. and yet, however
1912one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found. it cannot be seen amid the particulars of
1913experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself is viewed as a totality. however, its
1914absence can be found—and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears.
1915consciousness without self
1916this is an empirical claim: look closely enough at your own mind in the present moment, and
1917you will discover that the self is an illusion. the problem with a claim of this kind, however, is
1918that one can’t borrow another person’s contemplative tools to test it. to see how the feeling of
1919“i” is a product of thought—indeed, to even appreciate how distracted by thought you tend to be
1920in the first place—you have to build your own contemplative tools. unfortunately, this leads
1921many people to dismiss the project out of hand: they look inside, notice nothing of interest, and
1922conclude that introspection is a dead end. but just imagine where astronomy would be if,
1923centuries after galileo, a person were still obliged to build his own telescope before he could
1924even judge whether astronomy was a legitimate field of inquiry. it wouldn’t make the sky any
1925less worthy of investigation, but astronomy’s development as a science would become
1926immensely more difficult.
1927a few pharmacological shortcuts exist—and i discuss some of them in a later chapter—but
1928generally speaking, we must build our own telescopes to judge the empirical claims of
1929contemplatives. judging their metaphysical claims is another matter; many of them can be
1930dismissed as bad science or bad philosophy after merely thinking about them. but to determine
1931whether certain experiences are possible—and if possible, desirable—and to see how these
1932states of mind relate to the conventional sense of self, we have to be able to use our attention in
1933the requisite ways. primarily, that means learning to recognize thoughts as thoughts—as
1934transient appearances in consciousness—and to no longer be distracted by them, if only for
1935short periods of time. this may sound simple enough, but actually accomplishing it can take a
1936lot of work. unfortunately, it is not work that the western intellectual tradition knows much
1937about.
1938lost in thought
1939when we see a person walking down the street talking to himself, we generally assume that he
1940is mentally ill (provided he is not wearing a headset of some kind). but we all talk to ourselves
1941constantly—most of us merely have the good sense to keep our mouths shut. we rehearse past
1942conversations—thinking about what we said, what we didn’t say, what we should have said.
1943we anticipate the future, producing a ceaseless string of words and images that fill us with hope
1944or fear. we tell ourselves the story of the present, as though some blind person were inside our
1945heads who required continuous narration to know what is happening: “wow, nice desk. i
1946wonder what kind of wood that is. oh, but it has no drawers. they didn’t put drawers in this
1947thing? how can you have a desk without at least one drawer?” who are we talking to? no one
1948else is there. and we seem to imagine that if we just keep this inner monologue to ourselves, it
1949is perfectly compatible with mental health. perhaps it isn’t.
1950as i was working to finish this book, we experienced a series of plumbing leaks in our
1951house. the first appeared in the ceiling of a storage room. we considered ourselves genuinely
1952lucky to have found it, because this was a room that we might have gone months without
1953entering. a plumber arrived within a few hours, cut the drywall, and fixed the leak. a plasterer
1954came the next day, repaired the ceiling, and painted it. this sort of thing happens eventually in
1955every home, i told myself, and my prevailing feeling was of gratitude. civilization is a
1956wonderful thing.
1957then a similar leak appeared in an adjacent room a few days later. contact information for
1958both the plumber and the plasterer was at my fingertips. now i felt only annoyance and
1959foreboding.
1960a month later, the horror movie began in earnest: a pipe burst, flooding six hundred square
1961feet of ceiling. this time the repair took weeks and created an immense amount of dust; two
1962cleaning crews were required to deal with the aftermath—vacuuming hundreds of books, drying
1963and shampooing the carpet, and so forth. throughout all this we were forced to live without
1964heat, for otherwise the dust from the repair would have been sucked into the vents, and we
1965would have been breathing it in every room of the house. eventually, however, the problem was
1966fixed. we would have no more leaks.
1967and then, last night, scarcely one month after the previous repair, we heard the familiar
1968sound of water falling onto carpet. the moment i heard the first drops, i was transformed into a
1969hapless, uncomprehending, enraged man racing down a staircase. i’m sure i would have
1970comported myself with greater dignity had i come upon the scene of a murder. a glance at the
1971ballooning ceiling told me everything i needed to know about the weeks ahead: our home
1972would be a construction site once again.
1973of course, a house is a physical object beholden to the laws of nature—and it won’t fix
1974itself. from the moment my wife and i grabbed buckets and salad bowls to catch the falling
1975water, we were responding to the ineluctable tug of physical reality. but my suffering was
1976entirely the product of my thoughts. whatever the needs of the moment, i had a choice: i could
1977do what was required calmly, patiently, and attentively, or do it in a state of panic. every
1978moment of the day—indeed, every moment throughout one’s life—offers an opportunity to be
1979relaxed and responsive or to suffer unnecessarily.
1980we can address mental suffering of this kind on at least two levels. we can use thoughts
1981themselves as an antidote, or we can stand free of thought altogether. the first technique
1982requires no experience with meditation, and it can work wonders if one develops the
1983appropriate habits of mind. many people do it quite naturally; it’s called “looking on the bright
1984side.”
1985for instance, as i was beginning to rage like king lear in the storm, my wife suggested that
1986we should be thankful that it was fresh water pouring through our ceiling and not sewage. i
1987found the thought immediately arresting: i could feel in my bones how much better it was to be
1988mopping up water at that moment than to be ankle deep in the alternative. what a relief! i often
1989use thoughts of this kind as levers to pry my mind loose from whatever rut it has found on the
1990landscape of unnecessary suffering. if i had been watching sewage spill through our ceiling,
1991how much would i have paid merely to transform it into fresh water? a lot.
1992i am not advocating that we be irrationally detached from the reality of our lives. if a
1993problem needs fixing, we should fix it. but how miserable must we be while doing good and
1994necessary things? and if, like many people, you tend to be vaguely unhappy much of the time, it
1995can be very helpful to manufacture a feeling of gratitude by simply contemplating all the terrible
1996things that have not happened to you, or to think of how many people would consider their
1997prayers answered if they could only live as you are now. the mere fact that you have the leisure
1998to read this book puts you in very rarefied company. many people on earth at this moment can’t
1999even imagine the freedom that you currently take for granted.
2000in fact, the effects of consciously practicing gratitude have been studied: when compared to
2001merely thinking about significant life events, contemplating daily hassles, or comparing oneself
2002favorably to others, thinking about what one is grateful for increases one’s feelings of wellbeing,
2003motivation, and positive outlook toward the future.5
2004one does not need to know anything about meditation to notice how thinking governs one’s
2005mental state. this morning, for instance, i awoke in a state of carefree happiness. and then i
2006remembered the leak. . . . most readers will be familiar with this experience: something bad
2007has happened in your life—a person has died, a relationship has ended, you have lost your job
2008—but there is a brief interval after awakening before memory imposes its stranglehold. it often
2009takes a moment or two for one’s reasons for being unhappy to come online. having spent years
2010observing my mind in meditation, i find such sudden transitions from happiness to suffering both
2011fascinating and rather funny—and merely witnessing them goes a long way toward restoring my
2012equanimity. my mind begins to seem like a video game: i can either play it intelligently,
2013learning more in each round, or i can be killed in the same spot by the same monster, again and
2014again.
2015once, while staying in an especially depressing hotel in kathmandu, i was awakened in the
2016middle of the night by the feeling of a claw scratching my foot. i sat up in terror, convinced that
2017there was a rat in my bed. i had recently learned that the lepers i had seen throughout my travels
2018in asia lost their fingers and toes not to the disease itself but because they no longer felt pain.
2019this resulted in burns and other injuries. even worse, rats often ate their extremities while they
2020slept.
2021however, the darkness of my room was perfectly still. it had been only a dream. and as
2022suddenly as it had come, the feeling of terror subsided. my mind and body were now flooded
2023with relief. “what a strange dream,” i thought. “i actually felt claws on my skin—but nothing
2024was there. the mind is so amazing”—and then came the unmistakable sound of something
2025scurrying toward me beneath the sheets.
2026i bounded from the bed with the agility of a chinese acrobat. after a few interminable
2027moments spent groping in the darkness of an unfamiliar room, i turned on the lights, and all was
2028silent once again. as i stared at the tangle of blankets on the bed, i genuinely hoped that i had
2029lost my sanity and not, in fact, my privacy. i flung back the covers—and there, in the middle of
2030the mattress, sat a large brown rat. the creature eyed me with a sickening frankness and
2031intensity; it appeared to be standing its ground, no doubt ruing the loss of such an ample source
2032of protein. i feigned an attack of my own, lunging and shrieking—half ape, half cartoon
2033housewife—and the beast raced across the sheets, sprung to the floor, and disappeared behind
2034the dresser.6
2035in the span of a few seconds, my mind had traversed the extremes of human emotion,
2036swinging from terror to exquisite relief and back to terror—entirely on the wings of thought:
2037there’s a rat in my bed!
2038oh, it was only a dream . . .
2039rat!
2040again, i’m not saying that one’s thoughts about reality are all that matter. i would be the first
2041to admit that it is generally a good idea to keep rats out of one’s bed. but it can be liberating to
2042see how thoughts pull the levers of emotion—and how negative emotions in turn set the stage
2043for patterns of thinking that keep them active and coloring one’s mind. seeing this process
2044clearly can mean the difference between being angry, depressed, or fearful for a few moments
2045and being so for days, weeks, and months on end.
2046breaking the spell of negative emotions
2047most of us let our negative emotions persist longer than is necessary. becoming
2048suddenly angry, we tend to stay angry—and this requires that we actively produce the
2049feeling of anger. we do this by thinking about our reasons for being angry—recalling an
2050insult, rehearsing what we should have said to our malefactor, and so forth—and yet
2051we tend not to notice the mechanics of this process. without continually resurrecting the
2052feeling of anger, it is impossible to stay angry for more than a few moments.
2053while i can’t promise that meditation will keep you from ever again becoming
2054angry, you can learn not to stay angry for very long. and when talking about the
2055consequences of anger, the difference between moments and hours—or days—is
2056impossible to exaggerate.
2057even without knowing how to meditate, most people have experienced having their
2058negative states of mind suddenly interrupted. imagine, for instance, that someone has
2059made you very angry—and just as this mental state seems to have fully taken possession
2060of your mind, you receive an important phone call that requires you to put on your best
2061social face. most people know what it’s like to suddenly drop their negative state of
2062mind and begin functioning in another mode. of course, most then helplessly grow
2063entangled with their negative emotions again at the next opportunity.
2064become sensitive to these interruptions in the continuity of your mental states. you
2065are depressed, say, but are suddenly moved to laughter by something you read. you are
2066bored and impatient while sitting in traffic, but then are cheered by a phone call from a
2067close friend. these are natural experiments in shifting mood. notice that suddenly
2068paying attention to something else—something that no longer supports your current
2069emotion—allows for a new state of mind. observe how quickly the clouds can part.
2070these are genuine glimpses of freedom.
2071the truth, however, is that you need not wait for some pleasant distraction to shift
2072your mood. you can simply pay close attention to negative feelings themselves, without
2073judgment or resistance. what is anger? where do you feel it in your body? how is it
2074arising in each moment? and what is it that is aware of the feeling itself? investigating
2075in this way, with mindfulness, you can discover that negative states of mind vanish all
2076by themselves.
2077thinking is indispensable to us. it is essential for belief formation, planning, explicit
2078learning, moral reasoning, and many other capacities that make us human. thinking is the basis
2079of every social relationship and cultural institution we have. it is also the foundation of science.
2080but our habitual identification with thought—that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as
2081thoughts, as appearances in consciousness—is a primary source of human suffering. it also
2082gives rise to the illusion that a separate self is living inside one’s head.
2083see if you can stop thinking for the next sixty seconds. you can notice your breath, or listen
2084to the birds, but do not let your attention be carried away by thought, any thought, even for an
2085instant. put down this book, and give it a try.
2086some of you will be so distracted by thought as to imagine that you succeeded. in fact,
2087beginning meditators often think that they are able to concentrate on a single object, such as the
2088breath, for minutes at a time, only to report after days or weeks of intensive practice that their
2089attention is now carried away by thought every few seconds. this is actually progress. it takes a
2090certain degree of concentration to even notice how distracted you are. even if your life
2091depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought.
2092this is a remarkable fact about the human mind. we are capable of astonishing feats of
2093understanding and creativity. we can endure almost any torment. but it is not within our power
2094to simply stop talking to ourselves, whatever the stakes. it’s not even in our power to recognize
2095each thought as it arises in consciousness without getting distracted every few seconds by one
2096of them. without significant training in meditation, remaining aware—of anything—for a full
2097minute is just not in the cards.
2098we spend our lives lost in thought. the question is, what should we make of this fact? in the
2099west, the answer has been “not much.” in the east, especially in contemplative traditions like
2100those of buddhism, being distracted by thought is understood to be the very wellspring of human
2101suffering.
2102from the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or
2103unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. it’s a mode of not knowing what is
2104actually happening in the present moment. it is essentially a form of psychosis. thoughts
2105themselves are not a problem, but being identified with thought is. taking oneself to be the
2106thinker of one’s thoughts—that is, not recognizing the present thought to be a transitory
2107appearance in consciousness—is a delusion that produces nearly every species of human
2108conflict and unhappiness. it doesn’t matter if your mind is wandering over current problems in
2109set theory or cancer research; if you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are
2110confused about who and what you are.
2111the practice of meditation is a method of breaking the spell of thought. however, in the
2112beginning, you are unlikely to understand just how transformative this shift in attention can be.
2113you will spend most of your time trying to meditate or imagining that you are meditating
2114(whether by focusing on your breathing or anything else) and failing for minutes or hours at a
2115stretch. the first sign of progress will be noticing how distracted you are. but if you persist in
2116your practice, you will eventually get a taste of real concentration and begin to see thoughts
2117themselves as mere appearances arising in a wider field of consciousness.
2118the eighth-century buddhist adept vimalamitra described three stages of mastery in
2119meditation and how thinking appears in each. the first is like meeting a person you already
2120know; you simply recognize each thought as it arises in consciousness, without confusion. the
2121second is like a snake tied in a knot; each thought, whatever its content, simply unravels on its
2122own. in the third, thoughts become like thieves entering an empty house; even the possibility of
2123being distracted has disappeared.7
2124long before reaching this kind of stability in meditation, however, one can discover that the
2125sense of self—the sense that there is a thinker behind one’s thoughts, an experiencer amid the
2126flow of experience—is an illusion. the feeling that we call “i” is itself the product of thought.
2127having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking.
2128consider the following train of thought (a version of which may have already passed through
2129your mind):
2130what is harris going on about? i know i’m thinking. i’m thinking right now. what’s the
2131big deal? i’m thinking, and i know it. how is this a problem? how am i confused? i can
2132think about anything i want—watch, i’ll picture the eiffel tower in my mind’s eye right
2133now. there it is. i did it. in what sense am i not the thinker of these thoughts?
2134thus is the knot of self tied. it isn’t enough to know, in the abstract, that thoughts continually
2135arise or that one is thinking at this moment, for such knowledge is itself mediated by thoughts
2136that are arising unrecognized. it is the identification with these thoughts—that is, the failure to
2137recognize them as they spontaneously appear in consciousness—that produces the feeling of “i.”
2138one must be able to pay attention closely enough to glimpse what consciousness is like between
2139thoughts—that is, prior to the arising of the next one. consciousness does not feel like a self.
2140once one realizes this, the status of thoughts themselves, as transient expressions of
2141consciousness, can be understood.
2142what are we conscious of? we are conscious of the world; we are conscious of our bodies in
2143the world; and we also imagine that we are conscious of our selves within our bodies. after all,
2144most of us don’t feel merely identical to our bodies. we seem to be riding around inside our
2145bodies. we feel like inner subjects that can use the body as a kind of object. this last
2146impression is an illusion that can be dispelled.
2147the selflessness of consciousness is in plain view in every present moment—and yet, it
2148remains difficult to see. this is not a paradox. many things in our experience are right on the
2149surface, but they require some training or technique to observe. consider the optic blind spot:
2150the optic nerve passes through the retina of each eye, creating a small region in each visual
2151field where we are effectively blind. many of us learned as children to perceive the subjective
2152consequences of this less-than-ideal anatomy by drawing a small circle on a piece of paper,
2153closing one eye, and then moving the paper into a position where the circle became invisible.
2154no doubt most people in human history have been totally unaware of the optic blind spot. even
2155those of us who know about it go for decades without noticing it. and yet, it is always there,
2156right on the surface of experience.
2157the absence of the self is also there to be noticed. as with the optic blind spot, the evidence
2158is not far away or deep within; rather, it is almost too close to be observed. for most people,
2159experiencing the intrinsic selflessness of consciousness requires considerable training. it is,
2160however, possible to notice that consciousness—that in you which is aware of your experience
2161in this moment—does not feel like a self. it does not feel like “i.” what you are calling “i” is
2162itself a feeling that arises among the contents of consciousness. consciousness is prior to it, a
2163mere witness of it, and, therefore, free of it in principle.
2164the challenge of studying the self
2165many scientists use the term self to refer to the totality of our inner lives. i have attended whole
2166conferences on the self and read books ostensibly devoted to this topic without seeing the
2167feeling we call “i” even mentioned. the self that i am discussing throughout this book—the
2168illusory, albeit reliable, source of so much suffering and confusion—is the feeling that there is
2169an inner subject, behind our eyes, thinking our thoughts and experiencing our experience.
2170we must distinguish between the self and the myriad mental states—self-recognition,
2171volition, memory, bodily awareness—with which it can be associated. to appreciate the
2172difference, consider the (semi-fictional) condition of a person suffering from global retrograde
2173amnesia (sometimes called “soap opera” amnesia, wherein a person has entirely forgotten his
2174past): if asked how he came to be this way, he might say, “i don’t remember anything.” this is
2175overstating the case, for he must remember a thing or two (the english language, for instance) to
2176even make such a statement. but there is no reason to think that he is misusing the personal
2177pronoun i. his “i” seems to have survived the loss of his declarative memories as fully as his
2178body has. if we asked him, “where is your body?” he might say, “it’s here. this is it.” if we
2179questioned him further, asking, “and where are you? where is your self?” he would probably
2180say something like “what do you mean? i’m here too. i just don’t know who i am.” strange as
2181this conversation would be, there seems little doubt that our protagonist would feel as much like
2182a self as we do. only his memories are missing. he, as the subject of his experience, remains to
2183worry over their absence.
2184of course, as a person, this man is no longer himself. he doesn’t remember the names or the
2185faces of his closest friends. he may not know which foods he likes. his private fears and
2186professional goals have disappeared without a trace. we may say that he is scarcely a person at
2187all—but he is a self all the same, and one that is suffering a bewildering dissociation from both
2188past and future.
2189or consider the condition of a person who is having an “out-of-body experience” (obe).
2190the sense of leaving one’s body is a staple of mystical literature and has been reported across
2191many cultures. it is often associated with epilepsy, migraine, sleep paralysis, and, as we will
2192see in chapter 5, the “near-death experience.” it may occur in as much as 10 percent of the
2193population. during an obe, the subject feels that she has physically left her body—and this
2194often includes a sense that she can see her own body in full, as though from a point outside her
2195head. a brain area called the temporal-parietal junction—a region known to be involved in
2196sensory integration and body representation—seems to be responsible for this effect. whether
2197or not a person’s consciousness can really be displaced is irrelevant; the point is that it can
2198seem to be, and this fact draws yet another boundary between the self and the rest of our
2199personhood. it is possible to experience oneself as (apparently) outside a body.
2200the self, as the implied hub of cognition, perception, emotion, and behavior, can remain
2201stable across even wholesale changes in the contents of consciousness (unless the feeling of self
2202disappears). this is not surprising, because the self is the very thing to which these contents
2203seem to refer: not the body or mind per se but the point of view from which both body and mind
2204seem to be “mine” in every present moment.
2205thus, we can see that most scientific research on the self is too broad. if the self is the sense
2206of being the subject of experience, it should not be conflated with a wider range of experiences.
2207“i” refers to the feeling that our faculties have been appropriated, that a center of will and
2208cognition interior to the body, somewhere behind the face, is doing the seeing, hearing, and
2209thinking. and yet, in seeking to understand the self, many scientists study things such as spatial
2210cognition, voluntary action, feelings of body ownership, and episodic memory. while these
2211phenomena greatly influence our experience in each moment, they are not integral to the feeling
2212that we call “i.”
2213consider the sense of body ownership. it must be produced, at least in part, by the
2214integration of different streams of sensory information: we feel the position of our limbs in
2215space; we see them at the appropriate locations in our visual field; and our experience of
2216touching objects generally coincides with the sight of them coming into contact with our skin.
2217an analogous synchrony occurs whenever we execute a volitional movement. no doubt our
2218sense of body ownership is essential for our survival and for relating to others. any loss or
2219distortion of this sense can be profoundly disorienting. but disorienting to whom? when i am
2220lying on the operating table, feeling the first effects of intravenous sedation, and find that i can
2221no longer sense the position of my limbs in space, or even the existence of my body, who is it
2222that has been deprived of these inputs? it is i—the (almost) ever-present subject of my
2223experience. it should be obvious that no faculty of which i might be deprived, while i remain
2224the subject experiencing the results of such deprivation, can be integral to the self—though it
2225may be integral to my personhood in a wider sense.
2226several findings in the neuroscientific literature drive a wedge between body ownership and
2227the feeling of being a self. for instance, a person can lose the sense of owning a limb, a
2228condition known as somatoparaphrenia. conversely, a person’s body image can encompass the
2229limbs of others or even inanimate objects. consider the famous “rubber hand illusion”:
2230each of ten subjects was seated with their left arm resting upon a small table. a standing
2231screen was positioned beside the arm to hide it from the subject’s view and a life-sized
2232rubber model of a left hand and arm was placed on the table directly in front of the
2233subject. the subject sat with eyes fixed on the artificial hand while we used two small
2234paintbrushes to stroke the rubber hand and the subject’s hidden hand, synchronising the
2235timing of the brushing as closely as possible. . . . subjects experienced an illusion in
2236which they seemed to feel the touch not of the hidden brush but that of the viewed brush,
2237as if the rubber hand had sensed the touch.8
2238amazingly, through the use of head-mounted video displays, this illusion can be extended to the
2239entire body, yielding an experience of “body swapping.”9 it has long been known that vision
2240trumps proprioception (the awareness of the position of one’s body) when it comes to locating
2241parts of one’s body in space, but the “body swapping illusion” suggests that visual perception
2242may fully determine the coordinates of the self.
2243the point, however, is that this effect—dissociation from one’s own body and a false sense
2244of inhabiting the parts (or whole body) of another person—seems to leave the “self” very much
2245intact. experiments on proprioception tell us nothing about the feeling that we call “i.” and the
2246same can be said about almost every other aspect of personhood with which philosophers,
2247psychologists, and neuroscientists regularly bundle the self. the feeling of agency—the sense
2248that one is the author of one’s voluntary actions—may be as integral to our experience of the
2249world as body ownership, but it, too, fails to capture what we mean by “self.” a person could,
2250for instance, distinguish his bodily movements from those of another person without feeling a
2251sense of self at all, for to do so merely requires that he distinguish one body (as an object) from
2252another. likewise, he could fail to make such a distinction (in that he might misattribute his
2253actions to another person or ascribe the actions of another to himself) while feeling the embrace
2254of selfhood all the while.
2255ascriptions of agency do not define the contours of the self in the way that many people seem
2256to believe. while schizophrenics suffering from thought insertion, delusions of control, and
2257auditory hallucinations
225810 may be assailed by unusual mental phenomena, nothing suggests that
2259their sense of being a self has been altered or lost. a person can fail to distinguish between
2260self-generated and world-generated content, and thereby mistake her own internal imagery for
2261sense data. there is a difference, to be sure, between finding a rat in one’s bed and
2262hallucinating (or merely dreaming about) such an encounter. but the feeling of being a self
2263remains constant.
2264self-recognition
2265imagine that you awake from a heavy sleep to find yourself imprisoned in an unfamiliar,
2266windowless room. where are you? you haven’t the faintest idea. a mirror has been provided
2267for your edification, however, and you gaze into it. what do you see? a red dot has been
2268painted on your forehead, but for some reason you fail to notice it. in fact, you soon lose interest
2269in your reflection altogether and begin searching your room for food. you are, after all, a
2270gorilla, and quite unconcerned about your appearance.
2271in reviewing the literature on the self, one finds that much has been made of the fact that
2272some creatures will attend to their reflections in a mirror with all the vanity of an eighteenthcentury
2273lady-in-waiting, while others respond as they would to a fellow member of their
2274species.11 the “mirror test” has been a staple of primate and child development research for
2275many decades now, and it has made this simplest of all laboratory devices seem like a virtual
2276dowsing rod for the self—because only those creatures who comport themselves with the
2277requisite narcissism in front of the glass are believed to possess “self-knowledge” or even (and
2278here we are treated to an especially depressing misuse of the term) “consciousness.” while
2279mirror self-recognition and use of the personal pronoun seem to emerge at more or less the
2280same time in human development (fifteen to twenty-four months), there are many reasons to
2281believe that self-recognition and selfhood are distinct states of mind—and, therefore, that they
2282differ at the level of brain as well.12
2283self-recognition depends on context. there are neurological patients who cannot recognize
2284themselves in a mirror (a condition called the “mirror-sign delusion”) but can pick themselves
2285out in photographs,13 and these subjects show no evidence of having lost anything like a self, or
2286knowledge thereof. so what is the relationship between self-recognition and the feeling we call
2287“i”? the fact that the word self is generally used while making reference to these phenomena
2288does not suggest that any deep relationship exists between them. it seems quite possible, for
2289instance, that a person who cannot recognize his own face under any circumstances could have
2290a fully intact sense of self, just as your sense of self would remain unaltered by the sight of a
2291complete stranger. there is simply nothing about the experience of not recognizing a face, even
2292if it happens to be one’s own, that suggests a divestiture of self or anything like it.
2293theory of mind
2294one of the most important things we do with our minds is attribute mental states to other people,
2295a faculty that has been variously described as “theory of mind,” “mentalizing,” “mindsight,”
2296“mind reading,” and the “intentional stance.”14 the ability to recognize and interpret the mental
2297activity of others is essential for normal cognitive and social development, and deficits in this
2298area contribute to a variety of mental disorders, including autism. but what is the relationship
2299between an awareness of others and awareness of oneself? many scientists and philosophers
2300have suggested that the two must be deeply connected.15 if so, it seems natural that research on
2301theory of mind (tom) would shed some light on the structure of the self. unfortunately,
2302however, the model of tom that researchers generally work with cannot do this. consider the
2303following text, intended to evoke tom processing in experimental subjects:
2304a burglar who has just robbed a shop is making his getaway. as he is running home, a
2305policeman on his beat sees him drop his glove. he doesn’t know the man is a burglar, he
2306just wants to tell him he dropped his glove. but when the policeman shouts out to the
2307burglar, “hey, you! stop!” the burglar turns round, sees the policeman and gives himself
2308up. he puts his hands up and admits that he did the break-in at the local shop.
2309question: why did the burglar do that?16
2310the answer is obvious, unless one happens to be a young child or a person suffering from
2311autism. if one can’t take the point of view of the burglar in this story, it is impossible to know
2312why he behaved as he did. experimental stimuli of this kind are central to research on tom,
2313but they have very little to do with our most basic attribution of mindedness to others. although
2314we use our powers of inference to attribute complex mental states to other people, and the
2315phrase “theory of mind” captures this, it seems that we make a much more basic attribution first,
2316and perhaps independently: we recognize that other people are (or can be) aware of us.
2317explaining the burglar’s behavior requires a higher level of cognition than is necessary to
2318merely grasp that one is in the presence of a sentient other. and the feeling that another person
2319can see or hear me is quite distinct from my having any understanding of his beliefs or desires.
2320this more primitive judgment would seem to be tom at its most fundamental. it might also
2321have a deep connection to our sense of self.
2322the french philosopher jean-paul sartre believed that our encounters with other people
2323constitute the primal circumstance of self-formation.17 on his account, each of us is perpetually
2324in the position of a voyeur who, while gazing upon the object of his lust, suddenly hears the
2325sound of someone stepping up directly behind him. again and again, we are thrust out of the
2326safety and seclusion of pure subjectivity by the knowledge that we have become objects in the
2327world for others.
2328i believe that sartre was onto something. the primitive impression that another creature is
2329aware of us seems to be the point at which tom is relevant to the sense of self. if you doubt
2330this, i recommend the following exercise: go to a public place, select a person at random, and
2331stare at his face until he returns your gaze. to make this more than a pointless provocation,
2332observe the change that occurs in you the moment eye contact is established. what is this feeling
2333that obliges you to immediately look away or to begin speaking? the self-ramifying quality of
2334this form of tom seems indisputable, for without the attribution of awareness to others, you
2335have no sense of being looked at in the first place. there is a difference to be felt here—being
2336looked at just feels different from not being looked at—and the difference can be described, or
2337so i maintain, as a magnification of the feeling that we call “i.” it seems undeniable that selfconsciousness
2338and this more fundamental form of tom are closely related.18 the neurologist v.
2339s. ramachandran seems to have been thinking along these lines when he wrote, “it may not be
2340coincidental that [you] use phrases like ‘self conscious’ when you really mean that you are
2341conscious of others being conscious of you.”19
2342to better appreciate the distinction between fundamental tom and the tom that is current
2343in the scientific literature, consider what happens when we watch a film. the experience of
2344sitting in a darkened theater and seeing people interact with one another on the screen is a
2345social encounter of sorts—but it is one in which we, as participants, have been perfectly
2346effaced. this very likely explains why most of us find movies and television so compelling.
2347the moment we turn our eyes to the screen, we are in a social situation that our hominid genes
2348could not have foreseen: we can view the actions of others, along with the minutiae of their
2349facial expressions—even to the point of making eye contact with them—without the slightest
2350risk of being observed ourselves. movies and television magically transform the primordial
2351context of face-to-face encounters, in which human beings have always been subjected to
2352harrowing social lessons, allowing us, for the first time, to devote ourselves wholly to the act
2353of observing other people. this is voyeurism of a transcendental kind. whatever else might be
2354said about the experience of watching a film, it fully dissociates fundamental tom from
2355standard tom, for there is no doubt that we attribute mental states to the actors on the screen.
2356we make all the judgments that the standard concept of tom requires, but this does little to
2357establish our sense of self. indeed, it is difficult to find a situation in which we feel less selfconscious
2358than when sitting in a darkened theater watching a film, and yet, we are contemplating
2359the beliefs, intentions, and desires of other people the entire time.
2360ramachandran and others have noted that the discovery of “mirror neurons” offers some
2361support for the idea that the senses of self and other may emerge from the same circuitry in the
2362brain. some people believe that mirror neurons are also central to our ability to empathize with
2363others and may even account for the emergence of gestural communication and spoken language.
2364what we do know is that certain neurons increase their firing rate when we perform objectoriented
2365actions with our hands (grasping, manipulating) and communicative or ingestive
2366actions with our mouths. these neurons also fire, albeit less rapidly, whenever we witness the
2367same actions performed by other people. research on monkeys suggests that these neurons
2368encode the intentions behind an observed action (such as picking up an apple for the purpose of
2369eating it versus merely moving it) rather than the physical movements themselves. in these
2370experiments, a monkey’s brain seems to represent the purposeful behavior of others as if it
2371were engaging in this behavior itself. similar results have been obtained in neuroimaging
2372experiments done on humans.20
2373some scientists believe that mirror neurons provide a physiological basis for the
2374development of imitation and social bonding early in life and for the understanding of other
2375minds thereafter.21 and it is certainly suggestive that children with autism appear to have
2376diminished mirror neuron activity in proportion to the severity of their symptoms.22 as is now
2377widely known, people suffering from autism tend to lack insight into the mental lives of others.
2378conversely, a longitudinal study of compassion meditation, which produced a significant
2379increase in subjects’ empathy over the course of eight weeks, found increased activity in one of
2380the regions believed to contain mirror neurons.23
2381it may be that an awareness of other minds is a necessary condition for an awareness of one’s
2382own. of course, this does not suggest that the feeling we call “i” will disappear when we are
2383alone. if our knowledge of self and other is truly indivisible, our awareness of others must be
2384internalized early in life. in psychological terms, this certainly seems a plausible way of
2385describing the structure of our subjectivity. all parents have seen their children put their
2386growing powers of speech to use by maintaining running monologues with themselves. these
2387monologues continue throughout life as though they were, in fact, dialogues. the resulting
2388conversation seems both strange and unnecessary. why should we live in relationship to
2389ourselves rather than merely as ourselves? why should an “i” and a “me” be keeping each other
2390company?
2391imagine that you have lost your sunglasses. you search the house up and down, and finally
2392you spot them, lying on a table where you had left them the day before. you promptly think,
2393“there they are!” as you make your way across the room to retrieve them. but to whom are you
2394thinking this thought? you may even have uttered the phrase out loud: “there they are!” but who
2395needed to be informed in this way? you have already seen them. is there someone else in your
2396search party?
2397imagine that you are in a public place and happen to see a stranger locate his own lost
2398sunglasses. he exclaims, as you might, “there they are!” and snatches them from the tabletop. a
2399twinge of embarrassment often passes through all parties in such moments, but when the
2400utterance is confined to a short phrase and occasioned by such an innocuous event, the speaker
2401has done nothing out of the ordinary and bystanders are not yet gripped by fear. imagine,
2402however, if this person continued to address himself out loud: “where did you think they were,
2403you idiot? you’ve been wandering around this building for ten minutes. now i’m going to be
2404late for my lunch with julie, and she’s always on time!” the man need not speak another word
2405to secure our eternal mistrust of his faculties. and yet the condition of this person is no different
2406from our own—these are precisely the thoughts we might think in the privacy of our minds.
2407we have seen that the sense of self is logically and empirically distinct from many other
2408features of the mind with which it is often conflated. in order to understand it at the level of the
2409brain, therefore, we would need to study people who no longer experienced it. as we will see,
2410certain practices of meditation are very well suited to research of this kind.
2411penetrating the illusion
2412as a matter of neurology, the sense of having a persistent and unified self must be an illusion,
2413because it is built upon processes that, by their very nature as processes, are transitory and
2414multifarious. there is no region of the brain that can be the seat of a soul. everything that makes
2415us human—our emotional lives, capacity for language, the impulses that give rise to complex
2416behavior, and our ability to restrain other impulses that we consider uncivilized—is spread
2417across the entirety of the cortex and many subcortical brain regions as well. the whole brain is
2418involved in making us what we are. so we need not await any data from the lab to say that the
2419self cannot be what it seems.
2420the sense that we are unified subjects is a fiction, produced by a multitude of separate
2421processes and structures of which we are not aware and over which we exert no conscious
2422control. what is more, many of these processes can be independently disturbed, producing
2423deficits that would seem impossible if they were not so easily verified. some people, for
2424instance, are able to see perfectly but are unable to detect motion. others are able to see objects
2425and their motion but are unable to locate them in space. how the mind depends upon the brain,
2426and the manner in which its powers can be disrupted, defies common sense. here, as elsewhere
2427in science, how things seem is often a poor guide to how they are.
2428the claim that we can experience consciousness without a conventional sense of self—that
2429there is no rider on the horse—seems to be on firm ground neurologically. whatever causes the
2430brain to produce the false notion that there is a thinker living somewhere inside the head, it
2431makes sense that it could stop doing this. and once it does, our inner lives become more faithful
2432to the facts.
2433how can we know that the conventional sense of self is an illusion? when we look closely,
2434it vanishes. this is compelling in the same way that the disappearance of any illusion is: you
2435thought something was there, but upon closer inspection, you see that it isn’t. what doesn’t
2436survive scrutiny cannot be real.
2437the classic example from the indian tradition is of a coiled rope mistaken for a snake:
2438imagine that you spot a snake in the corner of a room and feel an immediate cascade of fear. but
2439then you notice that it isn’t moving. you look more closely and see that it doesn’t appear to
2440have a head—and suddenly you spot coiled strands of fiber that you mistook for a pattern of
2441scales. you move closer and can see that it is a rope. a skeptic might ask, “how do you know
2442that the rope is real and the snake an illusion?” this question may seem reasonable, but only to
2443a person who hasn’t had this experience of looking closely at the snake only to have it
2444disappear. given that the snake always collapses into being a rope, and not the other way
2445around, there is simply no empirical basis upon which to form such a doubt.
2446perhaps you can see the same effect in the above illusion. it certainly looks like there is a
2447white square in the center of the figure, but when we study the image, it becomes clear that there
2448are only four partial circles. the square has been imposed by our visual system, whose edge
2449detectors have been fooled. can we know that the black shapes are more real than the white
2450square? yes, because the square doesn’t survive our efforts to locate it—its edges literally
2451disappear. a little investigation and we see that its form has been merely implied. in fact, it is
2452possible to look closely enough at the figure to banish the illusion altogether. but what could
2453we say to a skeptic who insisted that the white square is just as real as the three-quarter
2454circles? all we could do is urge him to look more closely. this is not a matter of debating
2455third-person facts; it is a matter of looking more closely at experience itself.
2456in the next chapter, we will see that the illusion of the self can be investigated—and
2457dispelled—in just this way.
2458chapter 4
2459meditation
2460psychologists and neuroscientists now acknowledge that the human mind tends to wander,
2461engaging in what has been called “stimulus-independent thought.” the primary method of
2462studying mental phenomena of this kind outside the lab is a technique called “experience
2463sampling.” using a mobile phone or some other device, subjects are simply prompted to
2464describe what they are doing and how they feel at random intervals throughout the day. one
2465study found that when asked whether their mind was wandering—that is, whether they were
2466thinking about something unrelated to their current experience—subjects reported being lost in
2467thought 46.9 percent of the time.1 anyone who has trained in meditation will know that the true
2468figure is surely higher—especially if we were to count all the thinking that, while perhaps
2469superficially related to the task at hand, nevertheless constitutes an unnecessary distraction from
2470it. as unreliable as such self-reports must be, this study found that people are consistently less
2471happy when their minds are wandering, even when the contents of their thoughts are pleasant.
2472the authors concluded that “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an
2473unhappy mind.” anyone who has spent time on silent retreat will agree.
2474the wandering mind has been correlated with activity in the brain’s midline regions,
2475especially the medial prefrontal cortex and the medial parietal cortex. these areas are often
2476called the “default-mode” or “resting state” network because they are most active when we are
2477just biding our time, waiting for something to happen. activity in the default-mode network
2478(dmn) decreases when subjects concentrate on tasks of the sort employed in most
2479neuroimaging experiments.2
2480the dmn has also been linked with our capacity for “self-representation.”3 for instance, if
2481a person believes that she is tall, the term tall should yield a greater signal in these midline
2482regions than the term short. similarly, the dmn is more engaged when we make such judgments
2483of relevance about ourselves, as opposed to making them about other people. it also tends to be
2484more active when we evaluate a scene from a first-person (rather than third-person) point of
2485view.4
2486generally speaking, to pay attention outwardly reduces activity in the brain’s midline, while
2487thinking about oneself increases it. these results appear mutually reinforcing and might explain
2488the common experience we have “losing ourselves in our work.”5 mindfulness and lovingkindness
2489meditation (pali: metta) also decrease activity in the dmn—and the effect is most
2490pronounced among experienced meditators (both while meditating and at rest).6 while it is too
2491early to draw strong conclusions from these findings, they hint at a physical connection between
2492the experience of being lost in thought and the sense of self (as well as a mechanism by which
2493meditation might reduce both).
2494long-term meditation practice is also associated with a variety of structural changes in the
2495brain. meditators tend to have larger corpora collosa and hippocampi (in both hemispheres).
2496the practice is also linked to increased gray matter thickness and cortical folding. some of
2497these differences are especially prominent in older practitioners, which suggests that meditation
2498could protect against age-related thinning of the cortex.7 the cognitive, emotional, and
2499behavioral significance of these anatomical findings have not yet been worked out, but it is not
2500hard to see how they might explain the kinds of experiences and psychological changes that
2501meditators report.
2502expert meditators (with greater than ten thousand hours of practice) respond differently to
2503pain than novices do. they judge the intensity of an unpleasant stimulus the same but find it to
2504be less unpleasant. they also show reduced activity in regions associated with anxiety while
2505anticipating the onset of pain, as well as faster habituation to the stimulus once it arrives.8 other
2506research has found that mindfulness reduces both the unpleasantness and intensity of noxious
2507stimuli.9
2508it has long been known that stress, especially early in life, alters brain structure. for
2509instance, studies both in animals and in humans have shown that early stress increases the size
2510of the amygdalae. one study found that an eight-week program of mindfulness meditation
2511reduced the volume of the right basolateral amygdala, and these changes were correlated with a
2512subjective decrease in stress.10 another found that a full day of mindfulness practice (among
2513trained meditators) reduced the expression of several genes that produce inflammation
2514throughout the body, and this correlated with an improved response to social stress
2515(diabolically, subjects were asked to give a brief speech and then perform mental calculations
2516while being videotaped in front of an audience).11 a mere five minutes of practice a day (for
2517five weeks) increased left-sided baseline activity in the frontal cortex—a pattern that, as we
2518saw in the discussion of the split brain, has been associated with positive emotions.12
2519a review of the psychological literature suggests that mindfulness in particular fosters many
2520components of physical and mental health: it improves immune function, blood pressure, and
2521cortisol levels; it reduces anxiety, depression, neuroticism, and emotional reactivity. it also
2522leads to greater behavioral regulation and has shown promise in the treatment of addiction and
2523eating disorders. unsurprisingly, the practice is associated with increased subjective wellbeing.13
2524training in compassion meditation increases empathy, as measured by the ability to
2525accurately judge the emotions of others,14 as well as positive affect in the presence of
2526suffering.15 the practice of mindfulness has been shown to have similar pro-social effects.16
2527scientific research on the various types of meditation is just beginning, but there are now
2528hundreds of studies suggesting that these practices are good for us. again, from a first-person
2529point of view, none of this is surprising. after all, there is an enormous difference between
2530being hostage to one’s thoughts and being freely and nonjudgmentally aware of life in the
2531present. to make this shift is to interrupt the processes of rumination and reactivity that often
2532keep us so desperately at odds with ourselves and with other people. no doubt many distinct
2533mechanisms are involved—the regulation of attention and behavior, increased body awareness,
2534inhibition of negative emotions, conceptual reframing of experience, changes in the view of
2535“self,” and so forth—and each of these processes will have its own neurophysiological causes.
2536in the broadest sense, however, meditation is simply the ability to stop suffering in many of the
2537usual ways, if only for a few moments at a time. how could that not be a skill worth
2538cultivating?
2539gradual versus sudden realization
2540we wouldn’t attempt to meditate, or engage in any other contemplative practice, if we didn’t
2541feel that something about our experience needed to be improved. but here lies one of the central
2542paradoxes of spiritual life, because this very feeling of dissatisfaction causes us to overlook the
2543intrinsic freedom of consciousness in the present. as we have seen, there are good reasons to
2544believe that adopting a practice like meditation can lead to positive changes in one’s life. but
2545the deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self—and to seek such
2546freedom, as though it were a future state to be attained through effort, is to reinforce the chains
2547of one’s apparent bondage in each moment.
2548traditionally, there have been two solutions to this paradox. one is to simply ignore it and
2549adopt various techniques of meditation in the hope that a breakthrough will occur. some people
2550appear to succeed at this, but many fail. it is true that good things often happen in the meantime:
2551we can become happier and more concentrated. but we can also despair of the whole project.
2552the words of the sages may begin to sound like empty promises, and we are left hoping for
2553transcendent experiences that never arrive or prove merely temporary.
2554the ultimate wisdom of enlightenment, whatever it is, cannot be a matter of having fleeting
2555experiences. the goal of meditation is to uncover a form of well-being that is inherent to the
2556nature of our minds. it must, therefore, be available in the context of ordinary sights, sounds,
2557sensations, and even thoughts. peak experiences are fine, but real freedom must be coincident
2558with normal waking life.
2559the other traditional response to the paradox of spiritual seeking is to fully acknowledge it
2560and concede that all efforts are doomed, because the urge to attain self-transcendence or any
2561other mystical experience is a symptom of the very disease we want to cure. there is nothing to
2562do but give up the search.
2563these paths may appear antithetical—and they are often presented as such. the path of
2564gradual ascent is typical of theravada buddhism and most other approaches to meditation in the
2565indian tradition. and gradualism is the natural starting point for any search, spiritual or
2566otherwise. such goal-oriented modes of practice have the virtue of being easily taught, because
2567a person can begin them without having had any fundamental insight into the nature of
2568consciousness or the illusoriness of the self. he need only adopt new patterns of attention,
2569thought, and behavior, and the path will unfold before him.
2570by contrast, the path of sudden realization can appear impossibly steep. it is often described
2571as “nondualistic” because it refuses to validate the point of view from which one would
2572meditate or practice any other spiritual discipline. consciousness is already free of anything
2573that remotely resembles a self—and there is nothing that you can do, as an illusory ego, to
2574realize this. such a perspective can be found in the indian tradition of advaita vedanta and in a
2575few schools of buddhism.
2576those who begin to practice in the spirit of gradualism often assume that the goal of selftranscendence
2577is far away, and they may spend years overlooking the very freedom that they
2578yearn to realize. the liability of this approach became clear to me when i studied under the
2579burmese meditation master sayadaw u pandita. i sat through several retreats with u pandita,
2580each a month or two in length. these retreats were based on the monastic discipline of
2581theravadan buddhism: we did not eat after noon and were encouraged to sleep no more than
2582four hours each night. outwardly, the goal was to engage in eighteen hours of formal meditation
2583each day. inwardly, it was to follow the stages of insight as laid out in buddhaghosa’s fifthcentury
2584treatise, the visuddhimagga, and elaborated in the writings of u pandita’s own
2585legendary teacher, mahasi sayadaw.17
2586the logic of this practice is explicitly goal-oriented: according to this view, one practices
2587mindfulness not because the intrinsic freedom of consciousness can be fully realized in the
2588present but because being mindful is a means of attaining an experience often described as
2589“cessation,” which is thought to decisively uproot the illusion of the self (along with other
2590mental afflictions, depending on one’s stage of practice). cessation is believed to be a direct
2591insight into an unconditioned reality (pali: nibbāna; sanskrit: nirvana) that lies behind all
2592manifest phenomena.
2593this conception of the path to enlightenment is open to several criticisms. the first is that it
2594is misleading with respect to what can be realized in the present moment in a state of ordinary
2595awareness. thus, it encourages confusion at the outset regarding the nature of the problem one
2596is trying to solve. it is true, however, that striving toward the distant goal of enlightenment (as
2597well as the nearer goal of cessation) can lead one to practice with an intensity that might
2598otherwise be difficult to achieve. i never made more effort than i did when practicing under u
2599pandita. but most of this effort arose from the very illusion of bondage to the self that i was
2600seeking to overcome. the model of this practice is that one must climb the mountain so that
2601freedom can be found at the top. but the self is already an illusion, and that truth can be
2602glimpsed directly, at the mountain’s base or anywhere else along the path. one can then return
2603to this insight, again and again, as one’s sole method of meditation—thereby arriving at the goal
2604in each moment of actual practice.
2605this isn’t merely a matter of choosing to think differently about the significance of
2606mindfulness. it is a difference in what one is able to be mindful of. dualistic mindfulness—
2607paying attention to the breath, for instance—generally proceeds on the basis of an illusion: one
2608feels that one is a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head, that can strategically pay
2609attention to the breath or some other object of awareness because of all the good it will do. this
2610is gradualism in action. and yet, from a nondualistic point of view, one could just as well be
2611mindful of selflessness directly. to do this, however, one must recognize that this is how
2612consciousness is—and such an insight can be difficult to achieve. however, it does not require
2613the meditative attainment of cessation. another problem with the goal of cessation is that most
2614traditions of buddhism do not share it, and yet they produce long lineages of contemplative
2615masters, many of whom have spent decades doing nothing but meditating on the nature of
2616consciousness. if freedom is possible, there must be some mode of ordinary consciousness in
2617which it can be expressed. why not realize this frame of mind directly?
2618nevertheless, i spent several years deeply preoccupied with reaching the goal of cessation,
2619and at least one year of that time was spent on silent retreat. although i had many interesting
2620experiences, none seemed to fit the specific requirements of this path. there were periods
2621during which all thought subsided, and any sense of having a body disappeared. what remained
2622was a blissful expanse of conscious peace that had no reference point in any of the usual
2623sensory channels. many scientists and philosophers believe that consciousness is always tied to
2624one of the five senses—and that the idea of a “pure consciousness” apart from seeing, hearing,
2625smelling, tasting, and touching is a category error and a spiritual fantasy. i am confident that
2626they are mistaken.
2627but cessation never arrived. given my gradualist views at that point, this became very
2628frustrating. most of my time on retreat was extremely pleasant, but it seemed to me that i had
2629merely been given the tools with which to contemplate the evidence of my nonenlightenment.
2630my practice had become a vigil—a method of waiting, however patiently, for a future reward.
2631the pendulum swung when i met an indian teacher named h. w. l. poonja (1910–97),
2632called “poonja-ji” or “papaji” by his students. poonja-ji was a disciple of ramana maharshi
2633(1879–1950), arguably the most widely revered indian sage of the twentieth century. ramana’s
2634own awakening had been quite unusual, because he had no apparent spiritual interests or
2635contact with a teacher. as a boy of sixteen, living in a middle-class family of south indian
2636brahmins, he spontaneously became a spiritual adept.
2637while sitting alone in his uncle’s study, ramana suddenly became paralyzed by a fear of
2638death. he lay down on the floor, convinced that he would soon die, but rather than remaining
2639terrified, he decided to locate the self that was about to disappear. he focused on the feeling of
2640“i”—a process he later called “self-inquiry”—and found it to be absent from the field of
2641consciousness. ramana the person didn’t die that day, but he claimed that the feeling of being a
2642separate self never darkened his consciousness again.
2643after fruitlessly attempting to behave like the ordinary boy he had once been, ramana left
2644home and traveled to tiruvannamalai, an ancient pilgrimage site for followers of shiva. he
2645spent the rest of his life there, in proximity to the mountain arunachala, with which he claimed
2646to have a mystical connection.
2647in the early years after his awakening, ramana seemed to lose his ability to speak, and he
2648was said to grow so absorbed in his experience of transfigured consciousness that he remained
2649motionless for days at a time. his body grew weak, developed sores, and had to be tended by
2650the few locals who had taken an interest in him. after a decade of silence, around 1906,
2651ramana began to conduct dialogues about the nature of consciousness. until the end of his life,
2652a steady stream of students came to study with him. these are the sorts of things he was apt to
2653say:
2654the mind is a bundle of thoughts. the thoughts arise because there is the thinker. the
2655thinker is the ego. the ego, if sought, will automatically vanish.18
2656reality is simply the loss of the ego. destroy the ego by seeking its identity. because ego
2657is no entity it will automatically vanish and reality will shine forth by itself. this is the
2658direct method, whereas all other methods are done, only retaining the ego. . . . no
2659sadhanas [spiritual practices] are necessary for engaging in this quest.
2660there is no greater mystery than this—that being the reality we seek to gain reality. we
2661think that there is something hiding our reality and that it must be destroyed before the
2662reality is gained. it is ridiculous. a day will dawn when you will yourself laugh at your
2663past efforts. that which will be on the day you laugh is also here and now.19
2664any attempt to make sense of such teachings in third-person, scientific terms quickly produces
2665monstrosities. from the point of view of psychological science, for instance, the mind is not just
2666“a bundle of thoughts.” and in what sense can reality be “simply the loss of the ego”? does this
2667reality include quasars and hantavirus? but these are the kinds of quibbles that will cause one to
2668miss ramana’s point.
2669while the philosophy of advaita, and ramana’s own words, may tend to support a
2670metaphysical reading of teachings of this kind, their validity is not metaphysical. rather, it is
2671experiential. the whole of advaita reduces to a series of very simple and testable assertions:
2672consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory
2673appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling “i,” and the feeling of being a
2674separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of
2675consciousness—free, undivided, and intrinsically uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents.
2676these are the simple truths that poonja-ji taught. in fact, he was even more uncompromising
2677than his guru in his nonduality. whereas ramana would often concede the utility of certain
2678dualistic practices, poonja-ji never gave an inch. the effect was intoxicating, especially to
2679those of us who had spent years practicing meditation. poonja-ji was also given to spontaneous
2680bouts of weeping and laughter—both, apparently, from sheer joy. the man did not hide his light
2681under a bushel. when i first met him, he had not yet been discovered by the throngs of western
2682devotees who would soon turn his tiny house in lucknow into a spiritual circus. like his
2683teacher ramana, poonja-ji claimed to be perfectly free from the illusion of the self—and by all
2684appearances, he was. and like ramana—and every other indian guru—poonja-ji would
2685occasionally say something deeply unscientific. on the whole, however, his teaching was
2686remarkably free of hindu religiosity or unwarranted assertions about the nature of the cosmos.
2687he appeared to simply speak from experience about the nature of experience itself.
2688poonja-ji’s influence on me was profound, especially because it came as a corrective to all
2689the strenuous and unsatisfying efforts i had been making in meditation up to that point. but the
2690dangers inherent in his approach soon became obvious. the all-or-nothing quality of poonjaji’s
2691teaching obliged him to acknowledge the full enlightenment of any person who was
2692grandiose or manic enough to claim it. thus, i repeatedly witnessed fellow students declare
2693their complete and undying freedom, all the while appearing quite ordinary—or worse. in
2694certain cases, these people had clearly had some sort of breakthrough, but poonja-ji’s
2695insistence upon the finality of every legitimate insight led many of them to delude themselves
2696about their spiritual attainments. some left india and became gurus. from what i could tell,
2697poonja-ji gave everyone his blessing to spread his teachings in this way. he once suggested that
2698i do it, and yet it was clear to me that i was not qualified to be anyone’s guru. nearly twenty
2699years have passed, and i’m still not. of course, from poonja-ji’s point of view, this is an
2700illusion. and yet there simply is a difference between a person like myself, who is generally
2701distracted by thought, and one who isn’t and cannot be. i don’t know where to place poonja-ji
2702on this continuum of wisdom, but he appeared to be a lot farther along than his students.
2703whether poonja-ji was capable of seeing the difference between himself and other people, i do
2704not know. but his insistence that no difference existed began to seem either dogmatic or
2705delusional.
2706on one occasion, events conspired to perfectly illuminate the flaw in poonja-ji’s teaching. a
2707small group of experienced practitioners (among us several teachers of meditation) had
2708organized a trip to india and nepal to spend ten days with poonja-ji in lucknow, followed by
2709ten days in kathmandu, to receive teachings on the tibetan buddhist practice of dzogchen. as it
2710happened, during our time in lucknow, a woman from switzerland became “enlightened” in
2711poonja-ji’s presence. for the better part of a week, she was celebrated as something akin to the
2712next buddha. poonja-ji repeatedly put her forward as evidence of how fully the truth could be
2713realized without making any effort at all in meditation, and we had the pleasure of seeing this
2714woman sit beside poonja-ji on a raised platform expounding upon how blissful it now was in
2715her corner of the universe. she was, in fact, radiantly happy, and it was by no means clear that
2716poonja-ji had made a mistake in recognizing her. she would say things like “there is nothing
2717but consciousness, and there is no difference between it and reality itself.” coming from such a
2718nice, guileless person, there was little reason to doubt the profundity of her experience.
2719when it came time for our group to leave india for nepal, this woman asked if she could join
2720us. because she was such good company, we encouraged her to come along. a few of us were
2721also curious to see how her realization would appear in another context. and so it came to pass
2722that a woman whose enlightenment had just been confirmed by one of the greatest living
2723exponents of advaita vedanta was in the room when we received our first teachings from tulku
2724urgyen rinpoche, who was generally thought to be one of the greatest living dzogchen masters.
2725of all the buddhist teachings, those of dzogchen most closely resemble the teachings of
2726advaita. the two traditions seek to provoke the same insight into the nonduality of
2727consciousness, but, generally speaking, only dzogchen makes it absolutely clear that one must
2728practice this insight to the point of stability and that one can do so without succumbing to the
2729dualistic striving that haunts most other paths.
2730at a certain point in our discussions with tulku urgyen, our swiss prodigy declared her
2731boundless freedom in terms similar to those she had used to such great effect with poonja-ji.
2732after a few highly amusing exchanges, during which we watched tulku urgyen struggle to
2733understand what our translator was telling him, he gave a short laugh and looked the woman
2734over with renewed interest.
2735“how long has it been since you were last lost in thought?” he asked.
2736“i haven’t had any thoughts for over a week,” the woman replied.
2737tulku urgyen smiled.
2738“a week?”
2739“yes.”
2740“no thoughts?”
2741“no, my mind is completely still. it’s just pure consciousness.”
2742“that’s very interesting. okay, so this is what is going to happen now: we are all
2743going to wait for you to have your next thought. there’s no hurry. we are all very patient
2744people. we are just going to sit here and wait. please tell us when you notice a thought
2745arise in your mind.”
2746it is difficult to convey what a brilliant and subtle intervention this was. it may have been the
2747most inspired moment of teaching i have ever witnessed.
2748after a few moments, a look of doubt appeared on our friend’s face.
2749“okay . . . wait a minute . . . oh . . . that could have been a thought there . . . okay . . .”
2750over the next thirty seconds, we watched this woman’s enlightenment completely unravel. it
2751became clear that she had been merely thinking about how expansive her experience of
2752consciousness had become—how it was perfectly free of thought, immaculate, just like space—
2753without noticing that she was thinking incessantly. she had been telling herself the story of her
2754enlightenment—and she had been getting away with it because she happened to be an
2755extraordinarily happy person for whom everything was going very well for the time being.
2756this was the danger of nondual teachings of the sort that poonja-ji was handing out to all
2757comers. it was easy to delude oneself into thinking that one had achieved a permanent
2758breakthrough, especially because he insisted that all breakthroughs must be permanent. what the
2759dzogchen teachings make clear, however, is that thinking about what is beyond thought is still
2760thinking, and a glimpse of selflessness is generally only the beginning of a process that must
2761reach fruition. being able to stand perfectly free of the feeling of self is the start of one’s
2762spiritual journey, not its end.
2763dzogchen: taking the goal as the path
2764tulku urgyen rinpoche lived in a hermitage on the southern slope of shivapuri mountain,
2765overlooking the kathmandu valley. he spent more than twenty years of his life on formal retreat
2766and was deservedly famous for the clarity with which he gave the “pointing-out instruction” of
2767dzogchen, a formal initiation in which a teacher seeks to impart the experience of selftranscendence
2768directly to a student. i received this teaching from several dzogchen masters, as
2769well as similar instructions from teachers like poonja-ji in other traditions, but i never met
2770anyone who spoke about the nature of consciousness as precisely as tulku urgyen. in the last
2771five years of his life, i made several trips to nepal to study with him.
2772the practice of dzogchen requires that one be able to experience the intrinsic selflessness of
2773awareness in every moment (that is, when one is not otherwise distracted by thought)—which is
2774to say that for a dzogchen meditator, mindfulness must be synonymous with dispelling the
2775illusion of the self. rather than teach a technique of meditation—such as paying close attention
2776to one’s breathing—a dzogchen master must precipitate an insight on the basis of which a
2777student can thereafter practice a form of awareness (tibetan: rigpa) that is unencumbered by
2778subject/object dualism. thus, it is often said that, in dzogchen, one “takes the goal as the path,”
2779because the freedom from self that one might otherwise seek is the very thing that one practices.
2780the goal of dzogchen, if one can call it such, is to grow increasingly familiar with this way of
2781being in the world.
2782in my experience, some dzogchen masters are better teachers than others. i have been in the
2783presence of several of the most revered tibetan lamas of our time while they were ostensibly
2784teaching dzogchen, and most of them simply described this view of consciousness without
2785giving clear instructions on how to glimpse it. the genius of tulku urgyen was that he could
2786point out the nature of mind with the precision and matter-of-factness of teaching a person how
2787to thread a needle and could get an ordinary meditator like me to recognize that consciousness
2788is intrinsically free of self. there might be some initial struggle and uncertainty, depending on
2789the student, but once the truth of nonduality had been glimpsed, it became obvious that it was
2790always available—and there was never any doubt about how to see it again. i came to tulku
2791urgyen yearning for the experience of self-transcendence, and in a few minutes he showed me
2792that i had no self to transcend.
2793in my view, there is nothing supernatural, or even mysterious, about this transmission of
2794wisdom from master to disciple. tulku urgyen’s effect on me came purely from the clarity of
2795his teaching. as it is with any challenging endeavor, the difference between being utterly misled
2796by false information, being nudged in the general direction, and being precisely guided by an
2797expert is difficult to overstate.
2798the direct perception of the optic blind spot again provides a useful analogy: imagine that
2799perceiving the blind spot will completely transform a person’s life. next, imagine that whole
2800religions such as judaism, christianity, and islam are predicated on the denial of the blind
2801spot’s existence—let us say that their central doctrines assert the perfect uniformity of the
2802visual field. perhaps other traditions acknowledge the blind spot but in purely poetical terms,
2803without giving any clear indication of how to recognize it. a few lineages may actually teach
2804techniques whereby one can see the blind spot for oneself, but only gradually, after months and
2805years of effort, and even then one’s glimpses of it will seem more a matter of luck than anything
2806else. in a more esoteric tradition still, a “blind spot master” gives the “pointing-out instruction”
2807but without much precision: perhaps he tells you to close one eye, for reasons that are never
2808made explicit, and then says that the spot you seek is right on the surface of your vision. no
2809doubt some people will succeed in discovering the blind spot under these conditions, but the
2810teacher could certainly be clearer than this. how much clearer? if tulku urgyen had been
2811pointing out the blind spot, he would have produced a figure like the one below and given these
2812instructions:
28131. hold this figure in front of you at arm’s length.
28142. close your left eye and stare at the cross with your right.
28153. gradually move the page closer to your face while keeping your gaze fixed on the cross.
28164. notice when the dot on the right disappears.
28175. once you find your blind spot, continue to experiment with this figure by moving the page
2818back and forth until any possibility of doubt about the existence of the blind spot has
2819disappeared.
2820it is considered bad form in most spiritual circles, especially among buddhists, to make
2821claims about one’s own realization. however, i think this taboo comes at a high price, because
2822it allows people to remain confused about how to practice. so i will describe my experience
2823plainly.
2824before meeting tulku urgyen, i had spent at least a year practicing vipassana on silent
2825retreats. the experience of self-transcendence was not entirely unknown to me. i could
2826remember moments when the distance between the observer and the observed had seemed to
2827vanish, but i viewed these experiences as being dependent on conditions of extreme mental
2828concentration. consequently, i thought they were unavailable in more ordinary moments, outside
2829intensive retreat. but after a few minutes, tulku urgyen simply handed me the ability to cut
2830through the illusion of the self directly, even in ordinary states of consciousness. this
2831instruction was, without question, the most important thing i have ever been explicitly taught by
2832another human being. it has given me a way to escape the usual tides of psychological suffering
2833—fear, anger, shame—in an instant. at my level of practice, this freedom lasts only a few
2834moments. but these moments can be repeated, and they can grow in duration. punctuating
2835ordinary experience in this way makes all the difference. in fact, when i pay attention, it is
2836impossible for me to feel like a self at all: the implied center of cognition and emotion simply
2837falls away, and it is obvious that consciousness is never truly confined by what it knows. that
2838which is aware of sadness is not sad. that which is aware of fear is not fearful. the moment i
2839am lost in thought, however, i’m as confused as anyone else.
2840given this change in my perception of the world, i understand the attractions of traditional
2841spirituality. i also recognize the needless confusion and harm that inevitably arise from the
2842doctrines of faith-based religion. i did not have to believe anything irrational about the
2843universe, or about my place within it, to learn the practice of dzogchen. i didn’t have to accept
2844tibetan buddhist beliefs about karma and rebirth or imagine that tulku urgyen or the other
2845meditation masters i met possessed magic powers. and whatever the traditional liabilities of
2846the guru-devotee relationship, i know from direct experience that it is possible to meet a teacher
2847who can deliver the goods.
2848unfortunately, to begin the practice of dzogchen, it is generally necessary to meet a qualified
2849teacher. there is a large literature on the topic, of course, and much of what i have written
2850throughout this book represents my own effort to “point out” the nature of awareness. but to
2851have their confusion and doubts resolved, most people need to be in a dialogue with a teacher
2852who can answer questions in real time. tulku urgyen is no longer alive, but i’m told that his
2853sons tsoknyi rinpoche and mingyur rinpoche generally teach in his style, and many other
2854tibetan lamas teach dzogchen as well. however, one can never be sure how much buddhist
2855religiosity one will be asked to imbibe along the way. my advice is that if you seek out these
2856teachings, don’t be satisfied until you are certain that you understand the practice. dzogchen is
2857not vague or paradoxical. it is not like zen, wherein a person can spend years being uncertain
2858whether he is meditating correctly. the practice of recognizing nondual awareness is called
2859trekchod, which means “cutting through” in tibetan, as in cutting a string cleanly so that both
2860ends fall away. once one has cut it, there is no doubt that it has been cut. i recommend that you
2861demand the same clarity of your meditation practice.
2862beyond duality
2863think of something pleasant in your personal life—visualize the moment when you
2864accomplished something that you are proud of or had a good laugh with a friend. take a
2865minute to do this. notice how the mere thought of the past evokes a feeling in the
2866present. but does consciousness itself feel happy? is it truly changed or colored by
2867what it knows?
2868in the teachings of dzogchen, it is often said that thoughts and emotions arise in
2869consciousness the way that images appear on the surface of a mirror. this is only a
2870metaphor, but it does capture an insight that one can have about the nature of the mind.
2871is a mirror improved by beautiful images? no. the same can be said for consciousness.
2872now think of something unpleasant: perhaps you recently embarrassed yourself or
2873received some bad news. maybe there is an upcoming event about which you feel
2874acutely anxious. notice whatever feelings arise in the wake of these thoughts. they are
2875also appearances in consciousness. do they have the power to change what
2876consciousness is in itself?
2877there is real freedom to be found here, but you are unlikely to find it without
2878looking carefully into the nature of consciousness, again and again. notice how
2879thoughts continue to arise. even while reading this page your attention has surely
2880strayed several times. such wanderings of mind are the primary obstacle to meditation.
2881meditation doesn’t entail the suppression of such thoughts, but it does require that we
2882notice thoughts as they emerge and recognize them to be transitory appearances in
2883consciousness. in subjective terms, you are consciousness itself—you are not the next,
2884evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind. not seeing it arise,
2885however, the next thought will seem to become what you are.
2886but how could you actually be a thought? whatever their content, thoughts vanish
2887almost the instant they appear. they are like sounds, or fleeting sensations in your
2888body. how could this next thought define your subjectivity at all?
2889it may take years of observing the contents of consciousness—or it may take only
2890moments—but it is quite possible to realize that consciousness itself is free, no matter
2891what arises to be noticed. meditation is the practice of finding this freedom directly, by
2892breaking one’s identification with thought and allowing the continuum of experience,
2893pleasant and unpleasant, to simply be as it is. there are many traditional techniques for
2894doing this. but it is important to realize that true meditation isn’t an effort to produce a
2895certain state of mind—like bliss, or unusual visual images, or love for all sentient
2896beings. such methods also exist, but they serve a more limited function. the deeper
2897purpose of meditation is to recognize that which is common to all states of experience,
2898both pleasant and unpleasant. the goal is to realize those qualities that are intrinsic to
2899consciousness in every present moment, no matter what arises to be noticed.
2900when you are able to rest naturally, merely witnessing the totality of experience, and
2901thoughts themselves are left to arise and vanish as they will, you can recognize that
2902consciousness is intrinsically undivided. in the moment of such an insight, you will be
2903completely relieved of the feeling that you call “i.” you will still see this book, of
2904course, but it will be an appearance in consciousness, inseparable from consciousness
2905itself—and there will be no sense that you are behind your eyes, doing the reading.
2906such a shift in view isn’t a matter of thinking new thoughts. it is easy enough to think
2907that this book is just an appearance in consciousness. it is another matter to recognize it
2908as such, prior to the arising of thought.
2909the gesture that precipitates this insight for most people is an attempt to invert
2910consciousness upon itself—to look for that which is looking—and to notice, in the first
2911instant of looking for your self, what happens to the apparent divide between subject
2912and object. do you still feel that you are over there, behind your eyes, looking out at a
2913world of objects?
2914it really is possible to look for the feeling you are calling “i” and to fail to find it in
2915a way that is conclusive.
2916having no head
2917douglas harding was a british architect who later in life became celebrated in new age
2918circles for having opened a novel doorway into the experience of selflessness. raised among
2919the exclusive plymouth brethren, a highly repressive sect of fundamentalist christians, harding
2920apparently expressed his doubts with a fervor sufficient to get himself excommunicated for
2921apostasy. he later moved his family to india, where he spent years on a journey of selfdiscovery
2922that culminated in an insight he described as the state of “having no head.” i never
2923met harding, but after reading his books, i have little doubt that he was attempting to introduce
2924his students to the same understanding that is the basis of dzogchen practice.
2925harding was led to his insight after seeing a self-portrait of the austrian physicist and
2926philosopher ernst mach, who had the clever idea of drawing himself as he appeared from a
2927first-person point of view: “i lie upon my sofa. if i close my right eye, the picture represented in
2928the accompanying cut is presented to my left eye. in a frame formed by the ridge of my eyebrow,
2929by my nose, and by my moustache, appears a part of my body, so far as visible, with its
2930environment.”20 harding later wrote several books about his experience, including a very
2931useful little volume titled on having no head. it is both amusing and instructive to note that his
2932teachings were singled out for derision by the cognitive scientist douglas hofstadter (in
2933collaboration with my friend daniel dennett), a man of wide learning and great intelligence
2934who, it would appear, did not understand what harding was talking about.
2935here is a portion of harding’s text that hofstadter criticized:
2936what actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: i stopped
2937thinking. a peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me.
2938reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. for once, words really failed
2939me. past and future dropped away. i forgot who and what i was, my name, manhood,
2940animal-hood, all that could be called mine. it was as if i had been born that instant, brand
2941new, mindless, innocent of all memories. there existed only the now, that present
2942moment and what was clearly given in it. to look was enough. and what i found was
2943khaki trouser legs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves
2944terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards
2945in absolutely nothing whatsoever! certainly not in a head.
2946it took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have
2947been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. on the contrary, it was very much
2948occupied. it was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything:
2949room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snow-peaks like a row of
2950angular clouds riding the blue sky. i had lost a head and gained a world. . . . here it was,
2951this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously
2952suspended in the void, and (and this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight) utterly
2953free of “me,” unstained by any observer. its total presence was my total absence, body
2954and soul. lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself. i was
2955nowhere around. . . . there arose no questions, no reference beyond the experience itself,
2956but only peace and a quiet joy, and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable
2957burden. . . . i had been blind to the one thing that is always present, and without which i
2958am blind indeed to this marvelous substitute-for-a-head, this unbounded clarity, this
2959luminous and absolutely pure void, which nevertheless is—rather than contains—all
2960things. for, however carefully i attend, i fail to find here even so much as a blank screen
2961on which these mountains and sun and sky are projected, or a clear mirror in which they
2962are reflected, or a transparent lens or aperture through which they are viewed, still less a
2963soul or a mind to which they are presented, or viewer (however shadowy) who is
2964distinguishable from the view. nothing whatever intervenes, not even that baffling and
2965elusive obstacle called “distance”: the huge blue sky, the pink-edged whiteness of the
2966snows, the sparkling green of the grass—how can these be remote, when there’s nothing
2967to be remote from? the headless void refuses all definition and location: it is not round,
2968or small, or big, or even here as distinct from there.21
2969harding’s assertion that he has no head must be read in the first-person sense; the man was not
2970claiming to have been literally decapitated. from a first-person point of view, his emphasis on
2971headlessness is a stroke of genius that offers an unusually clear description of what it’s like to
2972glimpse the nonduality of consciousness.
2973here are hofstadter’s “reflections” on harding’s account: “we have here been presented
2974with a charmingly childish and solipsistic view of the human condition. it is something that, at
2975an intellectual level, offends and appalls us: can anyone sincerely entertain such notions without
2976embarrassment? yet to some primitive level in us it speaks clearly. that is the level at which
2977we cannot accept the notion of our own death.”22 having expressed his pity for batty old
2978harding, hofstadter proceeds to explain away his insights as a solipsistic denial of mortality—
2979a perpetuation of the childish illusion that “i am a necessary ingredient of the universe.”
2980however, harding’s point was that “i” is not even an ingredient, necessary or otherwise, of his
2981own mind. what hofstadter fails to realize is that harding’s account contains a precise,
2982empirical instruction: look for whatever it is you are calling “i” without being distracted by
2983even the subtlest undercurrent of thought—and notice what happens the moment you turn
2984consciousness upon itself.
2985this illustrates a very common phenomenon in scientific and secular circles: we have a
2986contemplative like harding who, to the eye of anyone familiar with the experience of selftranscendence,
2987has described it in a manner approaching perfect clarity; we also have a scholar
2988like hofstadter, a celebrated contributor to our modern understanding of the mind, who
2989dismisses him as a child.
2990before rejecting harding’s account as merely silly, you should investigate this experience
2991for yourself.
2992look for your head
2993as you gaze at the world around you, take a moment to look for your head. this may
2994seem like a bizarre instruction. you might think, “of course, i can’t see my head.
2995what’s so interesting about that?” not so fast. simply look at the world, or at other
2996people, and attempt to turn your attention in the direction of where you know your head
2997to be. for instance, if you are having a conversation with another person, see if you can
2998let your attention travel in the direction of the other person’s gaze. he is looking at your
2999face—and you cannot see your face. the only face present, from your point of view,
3000belongs to the other person. but looking for yourself in this way can precipitate a
3001sudden change in perspective, of the sort harding describes.
3002some people find it easier to trigger this shift in a slightly different way: as you are
3003looking out at the world, simply imagine that you have no head.
3004whichever method you choose, don’t struggle with this exercise. it is not a matter of
3005going deep within or of producing some extraordinary experience. the view of
3006headlessness is right on the surface of consciousness and can be glimpsed the moment
3007you attempt to turn about. pay attention to how the world appears in the first instant, not
3008after a protracted effort. either you will see it immediately or you won’t see it at all.
3009and the resulting glimpse of open awareness will last only a moment or two before
3010thoughts intervene. simply repeat this glimpse, again and again, in as relaxed a way as
3011possible, as you go about your day.
3012once again, selflessness is not a “deep” feature of consciousness. it is right on the surface.
3013and yet people can meditate for years without recognizing it. after i was introduced to the
3014practice of dzogchen, i realized that much of my time spent meditating had been a way of
3015actively overlooking the very insight i was seeking.
3016how can something be right on the surface of experience and yet be difficult to see? i have
3017already drawn an analogy to the optic blind spot. but other analogies may give a clearer sense
3018of the subtle shift in attention that is required to see what is right before one’s eyes.
3019we’ve all had the experience of looking through a window and suddenly noticing our own
3020reflection in the glass. at that moment we have a choice: to use the window as a window and
3021see the world beyond, or to use it as a mirror. it is extraordinarily easy to shift back and forth
3022between these two views but impossible to truly focus on both simultaneously. this shift offers
3023a very good analogy both for what it is like to recognize the illusoriness of the self for the first
3024time and for why it can take so long to do it.
3025imagine that you want to show another person how a window can also function like a mirror.
3026as it happens, your friend has never seen this effect and is quite skeptical of your claims. you
3027direct her attention to the largest window in your house, and although the conditions are perfect
3028for seeing her reflection, she immediately becomes captivated by the world outside. what a
3029beautiful view! who are your neighbors? is that a redwood or a douglas fir? you begin to
3030speak about there being two views and about the fact that your friend’s reflection stands before
3031her even now, but she notices only that the neighbor’s dog has slipped out the front door and is
3032now dashing down the sidewalk. in every moment, it is clear to you that your friend is staring
3033directly through the image of her face without seeing it.
3034of course, you could easily direct her attention to the surface of the window by touching the
3035glass with your hand. this would be akin to the “pointing-out instruction” of dzogchen.
3036however, here the analogy begins to break down. it is very difficult to imagine someone’s not
3037being able to see her reflection in a window even after years of looking—but that is what
3038happens when a person begins most forms of spiritual practice. most techniques of meditation
3039are, in essence, elaborate ways for looking through the window in the hope that if one only
3040sees the world in greater detail, an image of one’s true face will eventually appear. imagine a
3041teaching like this: if you just focus on the trees swaying outside the window without
3042distraction, you will see your true face. undoubtedly, such an instruction would be an obstacle
3043to seeing what could otherwise be seen directly. almost everything that has been said or written
3044about spiritual practice, even most of the teachings one finds in buddhism, directs a person’s
3045gaze to the world beyond the glass, thereby confusing matters from the very beginning.
3046but one must start somewhere. and the truth is that most people are simply too distracted by
3047their thoughts to have the selflessness of consciousness pointed out directly. and even if they
3048are ready to glimpse it, they are unlikely to understand its significance. harding confessed that
3049many of his students recognized the state of “headlessness” only to say, “so what?” it is, in fact,
3050very difficult to deal with this “so what?” that is why certain traditions, like dzogchen,
3051consider teachings about the intrinsic nonduality of consciousness to be secret, reserving them
3052for students who have spent considerable time practicing other forms of meditation. on one
3053level, the requirement that a person have mastered other preliminary practices is purely
3054pragmatic—for unless she has the requisite concentration and mindfulness to actually follow the
3055teacher’s instructions, she is liable to be lost in thought and understand nothing at all. but there
3056is another purpose to withholding these nondual teachings: unless a person has spent some time
3057seeking self-transcendence dualistically, she is unlikely to recognize that the brief glimpse of
3058selflessness is actually the answer to her search. having then said, “so what?” in the face of the
3059highest teachings, there is nothing for her to do but persist in her confusion.
3060the paradox of acceptance
3061it would seem that very few good things in life come from our accepting the present moment as
3062it is. to become educated, we must be motivated to learn. to master a sport requires that we
3063continually improve our performance and overcome our resistance to physical exertion. to be a
3064better spouse or parent, we often must make a deliberate effort to change ourselves. merely
3065accepting that we are lazy, distracted, petty, easily provoked to anger, and inclined to waste our
3066time in ways that we will later regret is not a path to happiness.
3067and yet it is true that meditation requires total acceptance of what is given in the present
3068moment. if you are injured and in pain, the path to mental peace can be traversed in a single
3069step: simply accept the pain as it arises, while doing whatever you need to do to help your
3070body heal. if you are anxious before giving a speech, become willing to feel the anxiety fully, so
3071that it becomes a meaningless pattern of energy in your mind and body. embracing the contents
3072of consciousness in any moment is a very powerful way of training yourself to respond
3073differently to adversity. however, it is important to distinguish between accepting unpleasant
3074sensations and emotions as a strategy—while covertly hoping that they will go away—and truly
3075accepting them as transitory appearances in consciousness. only the latter gesture opens the
3076door to wisdom and lasting change. the paradox is that we can become wiser and more
3077compassionate and live more fulfilling lives by refusing to be who we have tended to be in the
3078past. but we must also relax, accepting things as they are in the present, as we strive to change
3079ourselves.
3080chapter 5
3081gurus, death, drugs, and other puzzles
3082one of the first obstacles encountered along any contemplative path is the basic uncertainty
3083about the nature of spiritual authority. if there are important truths to be discovered through
3084introspection, there must be better and worse ways to do this—and one should expect to meet a
3085range of experts, novices, fools, and frauds along the way. of course, charlatans haunt every
3086walk of life. but on spiritual matters, foolishness and fraudulence can be especially difficult to
3087detect. unfortunately, this is a natural consequence of the subject matter. when learning to play
3088a sport like golf, you can immediately establish the abilities of the teacher, and the teacher can,
3089in turn, evaluate your progress without leaving anything to the imagination. all the relevant facts
3090are in plain view. if you can’t consistently hit the little white ball where you want it to go, you
3091have something to learn from anybody who can. the difference between an expert and a novice
3092is no less stark when it comes to recognizing the illusion of the self. but the qualifications of a
3093teacher and the progress of a student are more difficult to assess.
3094spiritual teachers of a certain ability, whether real or imagined, are often described as
3095“gurus,” and they elicit an unusual degree of devotion from their students. if your golf instructor
3096were to insist that you shave your head, sleep no more than four hours each night, renounce sex,
3097and subsist on a diet of raw vegetables, you would find a new golf instructor. however, when
3098gurus make demands of this kind, many of their students simply do as directed.
3099in the west, the term guru immediately conjures the image of a surrounding “cult” of
3100devotees—a situation known to give rise to terrifying social deformities. in cults and other
3101fringe spiritual communities, we often find a collection of needy and credulous dropouts ruled
3102by a charismatic psychotic or psychopath. when we consider groups like the people’s temple
3103under jim jones, the branch davidians under david koresh, and heaven’s gate under marshall
3104applewhite, it is almost impossible to understand how the spell was first cast, let alone how it
3105was maintained under conditions of such terrible deprivation and danger. but each of these
3106groups proved that intellectual isolation and abuse can lead even well-educated people to
3107willingly destroy themselves.
3108gurus fall at every point along the spectrum of moral wisdom. charles manson was a guru
3109of sorts. jesus, the buddha, muhammad, joseph smith, and every other patriarch and matriarch
3110of the world’s religions were as well. for our purpose, the only differences between a cult and
3111a religion are the numbers of adherents and the degree to which they are marginalized by the
3112rest of society. scientology remains a cult. mormonism has (just barely) become a religion.
3113christianity has been a religion for more than a thousand years. but one searches in vain for
3114differences in their respective doctrines that account for the difference in their status.
3115some gurus claim to channel the dead, to be poised to leave earth on an alien spacecraft, or
3116to have once ruled atlantis. others impart perfectly reasonable teachings about the nature of the
3117mind and the causes of human suffering—only to make ridiculous claims about cosmology or
3118the origins of disease. to hear that someone is a “guru” tells us almost nothing apart from the
3119fact that some students hold this person in high esteem. whether their reasons for doing so are
3120good or bad—and whether these people pose a danger to their neighbors—depends upon the
3121content of their beliefs.
3122teachers in any field can help or harm their students, and a person’s desire to make progress
3123and to win the teacher’s approval can often be exploited—emotionally, financially, or sexually.
3124but a guru purports to teach the very art of living, and thus his beliefs potentially encompass
3125every question relevant to the well-being of his students. apart from parenthood, probably no
3126human relationship offers greater scope for benevolence or abuse than that of guru to disciple.
3127unsurprisingly, therefore, the ethical failures of the men and women who assume this role can
3128be spectacular and constitute some of the greatest examples of hypocrisy and betrayal to be
3129found anywhere.
3130the problem of trust is compounded because the line between valid instruction and abuse
3131can be difficult to discern. given that the entire purpose of a devotee’s relationship to a guru is
3132to have his egocentric illusions exposed and undermined, any unwelcome intrusion into his life
3133can potentially be justified as a teaching.
3134whenever gutei oshō was asked about zen, he simply raised his finger. once a visitor
3135asked gutei’s boy attendant, “what does your master teach?” the boy too raised his
3136finger. hearing of this, gutei cut off the boy’s finger with a knife. the boy, screaming
3137with pain, began to run away. gutei called to him, and when he turned around, gutei
3138raised his finger. the boy suddenly became enlightened.1
3139if cutting off a child’s finger can count as compassionate instruction, it seems impossible to
3140predict just how fully a spiritual teacher might depart from conventional ethical norms. this is
3141both a theoretical problem in the literature and a psychological one in many spiritual
3142communities: a student’s moral intuitions and instincts for self-preservation can always be
3143recast as symptoms of fear and attachment. consequently, even the most extraordinarily cruel or
3144degrading treatment at the hands of a guru can be interpreted as being for one’s own good: the
3145master wants to have sex with you or your spouse—why would you resist? can’t you see that
3146your impulse to refuse such a generous overture rests on the very illusion of separateness
3147that you want to overcome? oh, you don’t fancy tithing 20 percent of your income to the
3148ashram? why are you so attached to the fruits of your own labor? what is enlightenment
3149worth to you anyway? you don’t like scrubbing toilets and doing yard work for hours at a
3150stretch? are you above performing such simple acts of service to the divine? don’t you see
3151that this feeling of self-importance is precisely what must be surrendered before you can
3152recognize your true nature? you found it humiliating when the master had you strip naked
3153and dance in front of your parents and the rest of the congregation? can’t you see that this
3154was just a mirror held up to expose your own egocentricity? oh, you don’t think an
3155enlightened adept would behave this way? well, what makes you think that your provincial
3156assumptions about enlightenment are true?
3157given the structure of this game, it is little wonder that many people have been harmed by
3158their relationships to spiritual teachers—or that many teachers, given so much power over the
3159lives of others, have abused it. this ethical terrain is all the more confusing because there is no
3160cult leader so deranged or sadistic, or whose fall from grace was so hideous, that one can’t find
3161students who will insist that he or she is the messiah. it is amazing to consider, but there are
3162people still walking this earth who believe that jim jones, david koresh, and marshall
3163applewhite were genuine saviors. it is also safe to say that no teacher has been so saintly and
3164impeccable that someone hasn’t left his company convinced that he was a dangerous lunatic. if
3165every guru were judged by the worst thing anyone has ever said about him, none would escape
3166hanging.
3167it is true, however, that the role of guru seems to attract more than its fair share of narcissists
3168and confidence men. again, this seems to be a natural consequence of the subject matter. one
3169can’t fake being an expert gymnast, a rocket scientist, or even a competent cook—at least not
3170for long—but one can fake being an enlightened adept. those who succeed in doing this are
3171often quite charismatic, because a person can’t survive long in this mode unless he can bowl
3172people over. g. i. gurdjieff set the standard here, and he may have been the first man to return
3173from his travels in the east and establish himself as a proper guru in the west. he was the
3174classic example of a gifted charlatan. he managed to attract a wide following of smart,
3175successful devotees, including the french mathematician henri poincaré, the painter georgia
3176o’keeffe, and the authors j. b. priestley, rené daumal, and katherine mansfield. he reached
3177other luminaries as well—including aldous huxley, t. s. eliot, and gerald heard—through
3178the efforts of his main disciple, p. d. ouspensky. frank lloyd wright once declared gurdjieff
3179“the greatest man in the world.”2 coming from a narcissist of wright’s caliber, this says quite a
3180lot about what sort of impression the man could make.
3181however, gurdjieff taught his students that the moon was alive, that it controlled the thoughts
3182and behaviors of unenlightened people, and that it devoured their souls at the moment of death.
3183he used to make visitors to his chateau in fontainebleau spend long days digging ditches in the
3184sun—only to have them immediately fill them in and begin digging elsewhere. he must have
3185made quite an impression in person, given how long he was able to get away with this mischief.
3186i’m confident that if i were to teach a similarly insane doctrine, all the while demanding painful
3187and pointless sacrifices from my students, i wouldn’t have a friend left on earth by the end of
3188the week.
3189i’m not saying that being forced to do hard and seemingly useless work cannot benefit a
3190person. consider the navy seals: to become a seal, every candidate must pass a qualifying
3191course so arduous that it would constitute torture if imposed on him against his will. this is a
3192selection process that allows the u.s. navy to produce the most elite special operations force
3193found anywhere. but it is also a bad selection process that serves primarily as a rite of passage.
3194it is well known, for instance, that some of the best recruits to the seal program are weeded
3195out owing to sheer bad luck. they simply suffer too many injuries to continue with the training
3196or to survive “hell week”—a five-and-a-half-day purgatory of wet sand, dangerous boat drills,
3197calisthenics, hypothermia, and sleeplessness. but those left standing have had an experience of
3198self-overcoming unknown to humanity outside ancient sparta—and they can be sure that
3199everyone else with whom they will serve in combat has survived the same ordeal.
3200one of the first things one learns in practicing meditation is that nothing is intrinsically
3201boring—indeed, boredom is simply a lack of attention. pay sufficient attention, and the mere
3202experience of breathing can reward months and years of steady vigilance. every guru knows
3203that drudgery can be a way of testing the strength of this insight. and, needless to say, this truth
3204about the human mind can be exploited. the journalist frances fitzgerald recounts meeting
3205many well-educated disciples of osho (bhagwan shree rajneesh)—doctors, lawyers,
3206engineers, professors—doing years of uncompensated menial labor at his oregon commune.3
3207all appeared quite happy with the work, presumably viewing it as an exercise in selfovercoming.
3208indeed, abandoning one’s worldly ambitions to do menial labor—attentively and
3209joyfully—can be an exercise in self-overcoming. here, two truths apparently collide: a person
3210can be exploited and still learn something valuable in the process.
3211but one must draw the line somewhere, and i think consent should be the governing
3212principle. seals in training can drop out at any time, and they are continually encouraged to do
3213so. the inner voice that says they might not have what it takes to be a seal is deliberately
3214amplified by their instructors—often by bullhorn—so that those who don’t have what it takes
3215will leave the program. that is what distinguishes seal training from actual torture. cults, by
3216contrast, often violate the principle of consent in many ways. i don’t deny that a truly
3217enlightened man or woman—that is, one who has fully and permanently unraveled the
3218conventional sense of self—might awaken his or her students by violating certain moral or
3219cultural norms. but extreme examples of such unconventional behavior—often referred to in the
3220literature as “crazy wisdom”—seem to produce the desired result only in the literature. every
3221modern instance of these shenanigans has seemed far more crazy than wise, attesting to nothing
3222so much as the insecurities and sensual desires of the guru in question. ancient tales of
3223liberating violence, as in the zen parable above, or of enlightening sexual exploits seem like
3224literary teaching devices, not accurate accounts of how wisdom has been reliably transmitted
3225from master to disciple.
3226it is usually easy to detect social and psychological problems in any community of spiritual
3227seekers. this seems to be yet another liability inherent to the project of self-transcendence.
3228many people renounce the world because they can’t find a satisfactory place in it, and almost
3229any spiritual teaching can be used to justify a pathological lack of ambition. for someone who
3230has not yet succeeded at anything and who probably fears failure, a doctrine that criticizes the
3231search for worldly success can be very appealing. and devotion to a guru—a combination of
3232love, gratitude, awe, and obedience—can facilitate an unhealthy return to childhood. in fact, the
3233very structure of this relationship can condemn a student to a kind of intellectual and emotional
3234slavery. the writer peter marin captured the mood perfectly:
3235obedience to a “perfect master.” one could hear, inwardly in them, the gathering of
3236breath for a collective sigh of relief. at last, to be set free, to lay down one’s burden, to
3237be a child again—not in renewed innocence, but in restored dependence, in admitted,
3238undisguised dependence. to be told, again, what to do, and how to do it. . . . the yearning
3239in the audience was so palpable, their need so thick and obvious, that it was impossible
3240not to feel it, impossible not to empathize with it in some way. why not, after all? clearly
3241there are truths and kinds of wisdom to which most persons will not come alone; clearly
3242there are in the world authorities in matters of the spirit, seasoned travelers, guides.
3243somewhere there must be truths other than the disappointing ones we have; somewhere
3244there must be access to a world larger than this one. and if, to get there, we must put
3245aside all arrogance of will and the stubborn ego, why not? why not admit what we do not
3246know and cannot do and submit to someone who both knows and does, who will teach us
3247if we merely put aside all judgment for the moment and obey with trust and goodwill?4
3248a relationship with a guru, or indeed with any expert, tends to run along authoritarian lines.
3249you don’t know what you need to know, and the expert presumably does; that’s why you are
3250sitting in front of him in the first place. the implied hierarchy is unavoidable. contemplative
3251expertise exists, and a contemplative expert is someone who can help you realize certain truths
3252about the nature of your own mind.
3253unfortunately, the link between self-transcendence and moral behavior is not as
3254straightforward as we might like. it would seem that people can have genuine spiritual insights,
3255and a capacity to provoke those insights in others, while harboring serious moral flaws. it is not
3256always accurate to call such people “frauds”: they aren’t necessarily pretending to have
3257spiritual insights or to be able to produce such experiences in others. but depending on the
3258level of their practice their insights may be an insufficient antidote to the rest of their
3259personalities. the resulting problems can be accentuated by cultural differences. for instance,
3260what is the age of consent for sex? one wouldn’t necessarily get the same answers in bombay
3261and boston. certain schools of buddhism focus on compassion, kindness, and nonharming to an
3262unusual degree, and this offers some protection against abuses of power. but even here one
3263occasionally finds a venerated master with the ethical intuitions of a pirate.
3264consider the case of the late tibetan lama chögyam trungpa rinpoche, who was an
3265inspired teacher but also an occasionally violent drunk and a philanderer. as guru to allen
3266ginsberg, trungpa attracted many of america’s most accomplished poets into his orbit. once,
3267at a halloween party for senior students—where w. s. merwin, the future poet laureate of the
3268united states, and his girlfriend, the poet dana naone, were guests—trungpa ordered his
3269bodyguards to forcibly strip a sixty-year-old woman of her clothing and carry her naked around
3270the meditation hall. this made merwin and naone more than a little uncomfortable, and they
3271thought it wise to return to their room for the rest of the night. noticing their absence, trungpa
3272asked a group of devotees to find the poets and bring them back to the party. when merwin and
3273naone refused to open their door, trungpa instructed his disciples to break it down. the
3274resulting forced entry led to chaos—wherein merwin, who was then famous for his pacifism,
3275fought off his attackers with a broken beer bottle, stabbing several in the face and arms. the
3276sight of blood, and his horror over his own actions, apparently collapsed merwin’s defenses,
3277and he and naone finally allowed themselves to be captured and brought before the guru.
3278trungpa, who was by then quite drunk, castigated the pair for their egocentricity and
3279demanded that they take off their clothes. when they refused, he ordered his bodyguards to strip
3280them. by all accounts, naone became hysterical and begged someone among the crowd of
3281onlookers to call the police. one student attempted to physically intervene. trungpa himself
3282punched this samaritan in the face and then ordered his guards to drag the man from the room.
3283predictably, many of trungpa’s students viewed the assault on merwin and naone as a
3284profound spiritual teaching meant to subdue their egos. ginsberg, who had not been present at
3285the time, offered the following assessment in an interview: “in the middle of that scene, to yell
3286‘call the police’—do you realize how vulgar that was? the wisdom of the east was being
3287unveiled, and she’s going ‘call the police!’ i mean, shit! fuck that shit! strip ’em naked, break
3288down the door!”5 apart from having produced a perfect jewel of hippie moral confusion,
3289ginsberg exposed the riddle at the heart of the traditional guru-devotee relationship. no doubt
3290merwin and naone’s preference to not dance naked in public had more than a little to do with
3291their attachment to their own privacy and autonomy. and it isn’t inconceivable that a guru could
3292operate in such a coercive and seemingly unethical way out of a sense of compassion. in fact, it
3293may have been conceivable to merwin and naone themselves, even in the aftermath of this
3294humiliating ordeal, because they remained at trungpa’s seminar for several more days to
3295receive further teachings. however, judging from the effect that trungpa’s wild behavior had
3296on both himself (he apparently died from alcoholism) and his students, it is very difficult to
3297view it as the product of enlightened wisdom.
3298the scandals surrounding trungpa’s organization did not end there. trungpa had groomed a
3299western student, ösel tendzin, to be his successor. tendzin was the first westerner to be
3300honored in this way in any lineage of tibetan buddhism. his appointment as “vajra regent”
3301had even been approved by the karmapa, one of the most revered tibetan masters then living.
3302as it happens, tendzin was bisexual, highly promiscuous, and rather fond of pressuring his
3303straight male devotees to have sex with him as a form of spiritual initiation. he later contracted
3304hiv but continued to have unprotected sex with more than a hundred men and women without
3305telling them of his condition. trungpa and several people on the board of his organization knew
3306that the regent was ill and did their best to keep it a secret. once the scandal broke, tendzin
3307claimed that trungpa had promised him that he would do no harm as long as he continued his
3308spiritual practice. apparently, the virus in his blood didn’t care whether he did his spiritual
3309practice or not. at least one of his victims later died of aids, having spread hiv to others.
3310what one encounters in a person like trungpa is a mind impressively free of shame. this can
3311be a good thing, provided that one happens to also be committed to the well-being of others. but
3312shame serves a crucial social function: it keeps us from behaving like wild animals. believing
3313in one’s own perfect enlightenment is rather like driving a car without brakes—not a problem if
3314you never need to stop or slow down, but otherwise a terrible idea. the belief that he could
3315live beyond conventional moral constraints is explicitly put forward in trungpa’s teaching:
3316[morality] or discipline is not a matter of binding oneself to a fixed set of laws or
3317patterns. for if a bodhisattva is completely selfless, a completely open person, then he
3318will act according to openness, [and] will not have to follow rules; he will simply fall
3319into patterns. it is impossible for the bodhisattva to destroy or harm other people, because
3320he embodies transcendental generosity. he has opened himself completely and so does
3321not discriminate between this and that. he just acts in accordance with what is. . . . if we
3322are completely open, not watching ourselves at all, but being completely open and
3323communicating with situations as they are, then action is pure, absolute, superior. . . . it is
3324an often-used metaphor that the bodhisattva’s conduct is like the walk of an elephant.
3325elephants do not hurry; they just walk slowly and surely through the jungle, one step after
3326another. they just sail right along. they never fall nor do they make mistakes.6
3327the state of freedom and effortless goodwill that trungpa describes here undoubtedly
3328corresponds to an experience that certain people have and to a perception (whether true or not)
3329that others can form about them. but boundless compassion is one thing; inerrancy is another.
3330the notion that one is incapable of making mistakes poses obvious ethical concerns, no matter
3331what one’s level of realization. anyone who has studied the spread of eastern spirituality in the
3332west knows that these elephants often stumble—even stampede—injuring themselves and many
3333others in the process.
3334a person’s eyes convey a powerful illusion of inner life. the illusion is true, but it is an
3335illusion all the same. when we look into the eyes of another human being, we seem to see the
3336light of consciousness radiating from the eyes themselves—there is a glint of joy or judgment,
3337perhaps. but every inflection of mood or personality—even the most basic indication that the
3338person is alive—comes not from the eyes but from the surrounding muscles of the face. if a
3339person’s eyes look clouded by madness or fatigue, the muscles orbicularis oculi are to blame.
3340and if a person appears to radiate the wisdom of the ages, the effect comes not from the eyes
3341but from what he or she is doing with them. nevertheless, the illusion is a powerful one, and
3342there is no question that the subjective experience of inner radiance can be communicated with
3343the gaze.
3344it is not an accident, therefore, that gurus often show an unusual commitment to maintaining
3345eye contact. in the best case, this behavior emerges from a genuine comfort in the presence of
3346other people and deep interest in their well-being. given such a frame of mind, there may
3347simply be no reason to look away. but maintaining eye contact can also become a way of
3348“acting spiritual” and, therefore, an intrusive affectation. there are also people who maintain
3349rigid eye lock not from an attitude of openness and interest or from any attempt to appear open
3350and interested but as an aggressive and narcissistic show of dominance. psychopaths tend to
3351make exceptionally good eye contact.
3352whatever the motive behind it, there can be tremendous power in an unwavering gaze. most
3353readers will know what i’m talking about, but if you want to witness a glorious example of the
3354assertive grandiosity that a person’s eyes can convey, watch a few interviews with osho. i
3355never met osho, but i have met many people like him. and the way he plays the game of eye
3356contact is simply hilarious.7
3357i confess that there was a period in my life, after i first plunged into matters spiritual, when i
3358became a nuisance in this respect. wherever i went, no matter how superficial the exchange, i
3359gazed into the eyes of everyone i met as though they were my long-lost lover. no doubt, many
3360people found this more than a bit creepy. others considered it a stark provocation. but it also
3361precipitated exchanges with complete strangers that were fascinating. with some regularity
3362people of both sexes seemed to become bewitched by me on the basis of a single conversation.
3363had i been peddling some consoling philosophy and been eager to gather students, i suspect that
3364i could have made a proper mess of things. i definitely glimpsed the path that many spiritual
3365imposters have taken throughout history.
3366interestingly, when one functions in this mode, one quickly recognizes all the other people
3367who are playing the same game. i had many encounters wherein i would meet the eyes of a
3368person across the room, and suddenly we were playing war of the warlocks: two strangers
3369holding each other’s gaze well past the point that our primate genes or cultural conditioning
3370would ordinarily countenance. play this game long enough and you begin to have some very
3371strange encounters.
3372i don’t remember consciously deciding to stop behaving this way, but stop i did.
3373nevertheless, it is worth paying attention to the type of eye contact one makes. as i already
3374noted, the discomfort one feels when meeting another’s gaze seems like nothing more than a
3375ramification of the very feeling of being a self. for this reason, open-eyed meditation with
3376another person can be a very powerful practice. when one overcomes the resistance to staring
3377into another person’s eyes, the absence of self-consciousness can be especially vivid.
3378eye contact meditation
33791. sit across from your partner and simply stare into each other’s eyes. (depending on
3380how far apart you sit, you might have to pick one eye to focus on.)
33812 continue to hold each other’s gaze, without speaking.
33823. ignore laughter and other signs of discomfort.
3383this practice can be combined with the other techniques described in this book,
3384especially mindfulness of breathing and douglas harding’s inquiry into
3385“headlessness.”
3386witnessing the misadventures of supposedly enlightened adepts and their devotees can be
3387depressing. but it can also be amusing. i wrote about one such instance in my first book, the
3388end of faith:
3389i know a group of veteran spiritual seekers who, after searching for a teacher among the
3390caves and dells of the himalayas for many months, finally discovered a hindu yogi who
3391seemed qualified to lead them into the ethers. he was as thin as jesus, as limber as an
3392orangutan, and wore his hair matted, down to his knees. they promptly brought this
3393prodigy to america to instruct them in the ways of spiritual devotion. after a suitable
3394period of acculturation, our ascetic—who was, incidentally, also admired for his
3395physical beauty and for the manner in which he played the drum—decided that sex with
3396the prettiest of his patrons’ wives would suit his pedagogical purposes admirably. these
3397relations were commenced at once, and endured for some time by a man whose devotion
3398to wife and guru, it must be said, was now being sorely tested. his wife, if i am not
3399mistaken, was an enthusiastic participant in this “tantric” exercise, for her guru was both
3400“fully enlightened” and as dashing a swain as lord krishna. gradually, this saintly man
3401further refined his spiritual requirements, as well as his appetites. the day soon dawned
3402when he would eat nothing for breakfast but a pint of häagen-dazs vanilla ice cream
3403topped with cashews. we might well imagine that the meditations of a cuckold,
3404wandering the frozen-food aisles of a supermarket in search of an enlightened man’s
3405enlightened repast, were anything but devotional. this guru was soon sent back to india
3406with his drum.8
3407ice cream for breakfast. that may tell us everything we need to know. and yet there is no way
3408around the fact that in spiritual matters, as in all others, we must seek instruction from those
3409whom we deem to be more accomplished than ourselves, and the signs of accomplishment are
3410not always clear. with spirituality, the subject matter and the apparent distance between teacher
3411and student seem to create the perfect conditions for self-deception—and thus for misplaced
3412and exploited trust. it is possible, however—with a bit of luck and discrimination—to bypass
3413such problems while still receiving teachings from those who are wiser and more experienced
3414in these matters than oneself.
3415i offer my own case as a not entirely unusual example. throughout my twenties, i studied
3416with many teachers who functioned as gurus in the traditional sense, but i never had a
3417relationship with any of them that i find embarrassing in retrospect or that i wouldn’t currently
3418recommend to others. i don’t know whether to attribute this to good luck or to the fact that there
3419was a line of devotion i was never tempted to cross. traditionally, one is admonished to view
3420one’s guru as perfect. i confess that i could never take this advice seriously—other than in the
3421trivial sense that consciousness itself might be considered perfect in some way, or that a perfect
3422realization of its intrinsic freedom might be possible. despite how impressive many of my
3423teachers were, they were undoubtedly human and susceptible to the same cultural biases and
3424physical infirmities that define the lives of ordinary people.
3425for instance, when it came time for poonja-ji to marry off his niece, he could think of
3426nothing more enlightened than to publish her picture in the singles section of the local
3427newspaper, after having paid a photographer to lighten the color of her skin by several shades.
3428this practice was ubiquitous in india at the time and considered entirely normal. to my eye,
3429however, it was at once deceitful, demeaning, and expressive of bigotry toward people with
3430dark skin. i could only conclude that either enlightenment failed to clear the mind of such
3431cultural residues or poonja-ji had yet to achieve full enlightenment. in either case, i couldn’t
3432view his solution to the problem of marriage as “perfect.”
3433the gurus i have met personally, as well as those whose careers and teachings i have studied
3434at a distance, range from crooks who could be quickly dismissed to teachers who were brilliant
3435but flawed, to those who, while still human, seemed to possess so much compassion and clarity
3436of mind that they were nearly flawless examples of the benefits of spiritual practice. this last
3437group is of obvious interest, and these are surely the people one hopes to meet, but the middle
3438group can be helpful as well. some teachers about whom depressing stories are told—men and
3439women whose indiscretions may seem to discredit the very concept of spiritual authority—are,
3440in fact, talented contemplatives. many of these people get corrupted by the power and
3441opportunities that come from inspiring devotion in others. some may begin to believe the myths
3442that grow up around them, and some are guilty of ludicrous exaggerations of their own spiritual
3443and historical significance. caveat emptor.
3444of course, there can be clear indications that a teacher is not worth paying attention to. a
3445history as a fabulist or a con artist should be considered fatal; thus, the spiritual opinions of
3446joseph smith, gurdjieff, and l. ron hubbard can be safely ignored. a fetish for numbers is
3447also an ominous sign. math is magical, but math approached like magic is just superstition—
3448and numerology is where the intellect goes to die. prophecy is also a very strong indication of
3449chicanery or madness on the part of a teacher, and of stupidity among his students. one can
3450extrapolate from scientific data or technological trends (climate models, moore’s law), but
3451most detailed predictions about the future lead to embarrassment right on schedule. anyone who
3452can confidently tell you what the world will be like in 2027 is delusional. the channeling of
3453invisible entities, whether broadcast from beyond the grave or from another galaxy, should
3454provoke only laughter. j. z. knight, who has long claimed to be the mouthpiece for a 35,000-
3455year-old entity named ramtha, is the ultimate example of how you don’t want your teacher to
3456sound. and any suggestion that a guru has influenced world events through magic should also
3457put an end to the conversation. sri aurobindo and his partner, known as “the mother,”
3458apparently claimed to have decided the outcome of world war ii with their psychic powers. 9
3459(in that case, one wonders why they weren’t held morally responsible for not having ended it
3460sooner.) yet another reason to ignore aurobindo’s long, unreadable books.
3461generally speaking, you should head for the door at any sign of deception on the part of a
3462teacher. admittedly, you might want to make certain allowances for cultural differences and for
3463the harmlessness of the lie. on one occasion, a very great dzogchen master—truly one of the
3464most inspiring people i have ever met—declared that a certain day of our retreat would be one
3465of vegetarian austerity (which, from a tibetan point of view, is an actual sacrifice). sometime
3466after lunch i entered his room and caught him in flagrante delicto, furtively eating a steak out of
3467tinfoil. the moment he saw me, this devilish old lama wadded the foil into a ball and chucked it
3468to his wife like a quarterback delivering a lateral pass. she then hurled it across the room,
3469where it made a distinctly moist thud in the back of a closet. needless to say, we all had a very
3470good laugh over these machinations, and it was not the sort of deception that seemed calculated
3471to manipulate students or to falsely elevate the status of the teacher. in fact, this teacher did not
3472elevate himself at all—a quality that can compensate for many other sins.
3473i have never encountered a spiritual teacher who i thought was fully enlightened in the sense
3474that many buddhists and hindus imagine is possible—that is, stably free of the illusion of self
3475and endowed with clairvoyance and other miraculous powers. while i remain open to evidence
3476of psi phenomena—clairvoyance, telepathy, and so forth—the fact that they haven’t been
3477conclusively demonstrated in the lab is a very strong indication that they do not exist.
3478researchers who study these things allege that the data are there and that proof of psi can be
3479seen in departures from randomness that occur over thousands of experimental trials.10 but
3480people who believe that their guru has supernormal powers aren’t thinking in terms of weak,
3481statistical effects. they believe that a specific person can reliably read minds, heal the sick, and
3482work other miracles. i have yet to see a case in which evidence for such abilities was presented
3483in a credible way. if one person on earth possessed psychic powers to any significant degree,
3484this would be among the easiest facts to authenticate in a lab. many people have been duped by
3485traditional evasions on this point; it is often said, for instance, that demonstrating such powers
3486on demand would be spiritually uncouth and that even to want such empirical evidence is an
3487unflattering sign of doubt on the part of a student. except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not
3488believe (john 4:48). a lifetime of foolishness and self-deception awaits anyone who won’t call
3489this bluff.
3490but one need not believe in psychic powers to cut through the illusion of the self.
3491accomplishing this can be elusive enough. if i’ve met a person who has done so perfectly, i am
3492unaware of it. i have studied with several people who were assumed to be fully enlightened in
3493that sense, and even some who made the claim explicitly. but as far as i can tell, this added
3494nothing of value to their teachings, while introducing a distracting note of grandiosity into the
3495conversation. whether or not it’s possible for someone to have a permanent experience of selftranscendence,
3496a student’s conviction that a teacher is fully enlightened seems superfluous—and
3497it is usually cast in doubt by something silly the teacher says or does in any case.
3498once again, i believe that too much can be made of the failures of specific spiritual teachers
3499or of the pathologies found among their followers, as though such pratfalls discredit the gurudisciple
3500relationship in principle. one might draw a useful analogy to marriage here: examples
3501of bad marriages, or at least unenviable ones, are everywhere to be seen, and few seem to live
3502up to the institution’s promise. focusing on scenes of domestic misery, one might easily
3503conclude that the very idea of marriage is flawed and that human beings should find a better
3504way to arrange themselves and to raise children. i think this conclusion would be reckless.
3505although i have yet to find a spiritual community that appeared worth joining, and signs of
3506trouble are very easy to spot, i have known many people who learned a great deal by spending
3507extended periods of time in the company of one or another spiritual teacher. and i have learned
3508indispensable things myself.
3509all this may raise a concern about whether the ideal of enlightenment is a false one. is true
3510freedom even possible? it certainly is in a momentary sense, as any mature practitioner of
3511meditation knows, and those moments can increase in both number and duration with practice.
3512therefore, i see no reason why a person couldn’t perfectly banish the illusion of the self.
3513however, just the ability to meditate—to rest as consciousness for a few moments prior to the
3514arising of the next thought—can offer a profound relief from mental suffering. we need not
3515come to the end of the path to experience the benefits of walking it.
3516mind on the brink of death
3517one cannot travel far in spiritual circles without meeting people who are fascinated by the
3518“near-death experience” (nde). the phenomenon has been described as follows:
3519frequently recurring features include feelings of peace and joy; a sense of being out of
3520one’s body and watching events going on around one’s body and, occasionally, at some
3521distant physical location; a cessation of pain; seeing a dark tunnel or void; seeing an
3522unusually bright light, sometimes experienced as a “being of light” that radiates love and
3523may speak or otherwise communicate with the person; encountering other beings, often
3524deceased persons whom the experiencer recognizes; experiencing a revival of memories
3525or even a full life review, sometimes accompanied by feelings of judgment; seeing some
3526“other realm,” often of great beauty; sensing a barrier or border beyond which the person
3527cannot go; and returning to the body, often reluctantly.11
3528such accounts have led many people to believe that consciousness must be independent of the
3529brain. however, these experiences vary across cultures, and no single feature is common to
3530them all. one would think that if a nonphysical domain were truly being explored, some
3531universal characteristics would stand out. hindus and christians would not substantially
3532disagree—and one certainly wouldn’t expect the after-death state of south indians to diverge
3533from that of north indians, as has been reported.12 it should also trouble nde enthusiasts that
3534only 10 to 20 percent of people who approach clinical death recall having any experience at
3535all.13
3536but the deepest problem with drawing sweeping conclusions from the nde is that those who
3537have had one and subsequently talked about it did not die. indeed, many of them appear to have
3538been in no actual danger of dying. and those who have reported leaving their bodies during a
3539true medical emergency—after cardiac arrest, for instance—did not suffer a complete loss of
3540brain activity. even in cases where the brain is alleged to have shut down, its activity must
3541return if the subject is to survive and describe the experience. in such cases, there is generally
3542no way to establish that the nde occurred while the brain was offline.
3543many students of the nde claim that certain people left their bodies and perceived the
3544commotion surrounding their near death: the efforts of hospital staff to resuscitate them, details
3545of surgery, the grief of family members. some subjects even say that they learned facts while
3546traveling beyond their bodies that would otherwise have been impossible to know—for
3547instance, a secret told by a dead relative, the truth of which was later confirmed. reports of this
3548kind seem especially vulnerable to self-deception, if not deliberate fraud. there is another
3549problem, however: even if true, such phenomena might suggest only that the human mind
3550possesses powers of extrasensory perception (clairvoyance or telepathy, for example). this
3551would be an astonishing discovery, but it wouldn’t demonstrate the survival of death. why?
3552because unless we could know that a subject’s brain was not functioning when the impressions
3553were formed, the involvement of the brain must be presumed.14
3554what is needed to establish the mind’s independence from the brain is a case in which a
3555person has an experience—of anything—without associated brain activity. from time to time,
3556someone will claim that a specific nde meets this criterion. one of the most celebrated cases
3557in the literature involves a woman, pam reynolds, who underwent a procedure known as
3558“hypothermic cardiac arrest,” in which her core body temperature was brought down to 60
3559degrees, her heart was stopped, and blood flow to her brain was suspended so that a large
3560aneurysm in her basilar artery could be repaired. reynolds reports having had a classic nde,
3561complete with an awareness of the details of her surgery.
3562her story presents several problems, however. the events in the world that reynolds claims
3563to have witnessed during her nde occurred either before she was “clinically dead” or after
3564blood circulation had been restored to her brain. in other words, despite the extraordinary
3565details of the procedure, we have every reason to believe that reynolds’s brain was functioning
3566when she had her experiences. also, her case wasn’t published until several years after it
3567occurred, and its author, dr. michael sabom, is a born-again christian who had been working
3568for decades to substantiate the otherworldly significance of the nde. the possibility that
3569experimenter bias, witness tampering (however unconscious), and false memories intruded into
3570this best of all recorded cases is painfully obvious.
3571the latest nde to receive wide acclaim was featured on the cover of newsweek magazine:
3572“heaven is real: a doctor’s experience of the afterlife.” the great novelty of this case is that
3573its subject, eben alexander, is a neurosurgeon who, we might presume, is competent to judge
3574the scientific significance of his experience. alexander also wrote a book, proof of heaven: a
3575neurosurgeon’s journey into the afterlife , which became an instant bestseller. as it happens,
3576it displaced one of the bestselling books of the past decade, heaven is for real, yet another
3577account of the afterlife, based on the near-death adventures of the four-year-old son of a
3578minister. unsurprisingly, the two books offer incompatible views of what awaits us beyond the
3579prison of the brain. (colorful as his account is, alexander neglects to tell us that jesus rides a
3580rainbow-colored horse or that the souls of dead children must still do homework in heaven.) at
3581the time of this writing, alexander’s book is ranked #1 on the new york times paperback
3582bestseller list, and it has been on the list for fifty-six weeks. the psychologist raymond moody,
3583who coined the phrase “near-death experience,” called alexander’s account “the most
3584astounding i have heard in more than four decades of studying this phenomenon. [he] is living
3585proof of an afterlife.”15 well then, prepare to be astounded.
3586once upon a time, a neurosurgeon named eben alexander contracted a bad case of bacterial
3587meningitis and fell into a coma. while immobile in his hospital bed, he experienced visions of
3588such intense beauty that they changed everything—not just for him but for all of us, and for
3589science as a whole. according to alexander, his experience proves that consciousness is
3590independent of the brain, that death is an illusion, and that heaven exists—complete with the
3591usual angels, clouds, and departed relatives but also butterflies and beautiful girls in peasant
3592dress. our current understanding of the mind “now lies broken at our feet,” for, alexander
3593declares, “what happened to me destroyed it, and i intend to spend the rest of my life
3594investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more,
3595than our physical brains as clear as i can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.”16
3596as should be clear from the preceding chapters, unlike many scientists and philosophers, i
3597remain agnostic on the question of how consciousness is related to the physical world. there
3598are good reasons to believe that it is an emergent property of brain activity, just as the rest of
3599the human mind is. but we know nothing about how such a miracle of emergence might occur.
3600and if consciousness were irreducible—or even separable from the brain in a way that would
3601give comfort to saint augustine—my worldview would not be overturned. i know that we do
3602not understand consciousness, and nothing that i think i know about the cosmos or about the
3603patent falsity of most religious beliefs requires that i deny this. so, although i am an atheist who
3604can be expected to be critical of religious dogma, i am not reflexively hostile to claims of the
3605sort alexander has made. in principle, my mind is open. (it really is.)
3606however, almost nothing about alexander’s account withstands scrutiny—and this is
3607especially insidious, given that he claims to be a scientist. many of his errors are glaring but
3608immaterial. in his book, for instance, he understates the estimated number of neurons in the
3609human brain by a factor of 10. others are utterly damning to his case. whatever his
3610qualifications on paper, alexander’s evangelizing about his experience in coma is so devoid of
3611intellectual sobriety, to say nothing of rigor, that i would see no reason to engage with it—if not
3612for the fact that his book has been read and believed by millions of people. one of the greatest
3613obstacles i see to our fashioning a rational approach to spirituality is to have religious
3614superstition and self-deception masquerade as science. hence, it is worth considering
3615alexander’s case in detail.
3616first, there are some troubling signs that the good doctor is just another casualty of
3617american-style christianity, for though he claims to have been a nonbeliever before his
3618adventures in coma, he offers the following self-portrait:
3619although i considered myself a faithful christian, i was so more in name than in actual
3620belief. i didn’t begrudge those who wanted to believe that jesus was more than simply a
3621good man who had suffered at the hands of the world. i sympathized deeply with those
3622who wanted to believe that there was a god somewhere out there who loved us
3623unconditionally. in fact, i envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt
3624provided. but as a scientist, i simply knew better than to believe them myself.
3625what it means to be a “faithful christian” without “actual belief” is not spelled out, but few
3626nonbelievers will be surprised that our hero’s scientific skepticism proves no match for his
3627religious conditioning. most of us have been around this block often enough to know that many
3628“former atheists,” like francis collins, spent so long on the brink of faith and yearned for its
3629emotional consolations with such vampiric intensity that the slightest breeze would send them
3630hurtling into the abyss. for collins, you may recall, all it took to establish the divinity of jesus
3631and the coming resurrection of the dead was the sight of a frozen waterfall. as we will see,
3632alexander seems to have required a ride on a psychedelic butterfly. in either case, it’s not the
3633perception of beauty we should begrudge but the utter absence of intellectual seriousness with
3634which the author interprets it.
3635everything in alexander’s account rests on his repeated and unwarranted assertion that his
3636visions of heaven occurred while his cerebral cortex was “shut down,” “inactivated,”
3637“completely shut down,” “totally offline,” and “stunned to complete inactivity.” he claims that
3638the cessation of cortical activity was “clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis,
3639and from the global cortical involvement documented by ct scans and neurological
3640examinations.” to his editors, this presumably sounded like science.
3641unfortunately, the evidence alexander offers—in the article, in a subsequent response to my
3642public criticism of it, in his book, and in multiple interviews—suggests that he doesn’t
3643understand what would constitute compelling evidence for his central claim of cortical
3644inactivity. the proof he offers is either fallacious (ct scans do not measure brain activity) or
3645irrelevant (it does not matter, even slightly, that his form of meningitis was “astronomically
3646rare”)—and no combination of fallacy and irrelevancy adds up to sound science. alexander
3647makes no reference to functional data that might have been acquired by fmri, pet, or eeg—
3648nor does he seem to realize that this is the sort of evidence necessary to support his case. the
3649impediment to taking alexander’s claims seriously can be simply stated: there is no reason to
3650believe that his cerebral cortex was inactive at the time he had his experience of the
3651afterlife. the fact that alexander thinks he has demonstrated otherwise—by continually
3652emphasizing how sick he was, the infrequency of cases of e. coli meningitis, and the ugliness of
3653his initial ct scan—suggests a deliberate disregard of the most plausible interpretation of his
3654experience.
3655apparently, alexander’s cortex is functioning now—he has, after all, written a book—so
3656whatever structural damage appeared on ct could not have been “global.” otherwise he would
3657be making the quite crazy claim that his entire cortex was destroyed and then grew back. coma
3658is not associated with the complete cessation of cortical activity in any case. in fact,
3659neuroimaging studies show that comatose patients (like patients under general anesthesia) have
366050 to 70 percent of the normal level of cortical activity.17 and to my knowledge, almost no one
3661thinks that consciousness is purely a matter of what happens in the cortex.
3662why doesn’t alexander know these things? he is, after all, a neurosurgeon who now claims
3663to be upending the scientific worldview on the basis of the fact that his cortex was totally
3664quiescent at the precise moment he was enjoying the best day of his life in the company of
3665angels. even if his entire cortex did truly shut down (again, an incredible claim), how can he
3666know that his visions didn’t occur in the minutes and hours after its functions returned? the very
3667fact that alexander remembers his nde suggests that the cortical and subcortical structures
3668necessary for memory formation were active at the time. how else could he recall the
3669experience?
3670not only does alexander appear ignorant of the relevant science, he doesn’t realize how
3671many people have experienced visions similar to his while under the influence of psychedelics
3672such as dmt or anesthetics such as ketamine. in fact, he has said that any suggestion of
3673similarity between the effect of such compounds on the brain and his experience is “not even in
3674the right ballpark.” but here is alexander’s description of the afterlife (as told in an interview):
3675i was a speck on a beautiful butterfly wing; millions of other butterflies around us. we
3676were flying through blooming flowers, blossoms on trees, and they were all coming out as
3677we flew through them. . . . [there were] waterfalls, pools of water, indescribable colors,
3678and above there were these arcs of silver and gold light and beautiful hymns coming
3679down from them. indescribably gorgeous hymns. i later came to call them “angels,” those
3680arcs of light in the sky. i think that word is probably fairly accurate. . . .
3681then we went out of this universe. i remember just seeing everything receding and
3682initially i felt as if my awareness was in an infinite black void. it was very comforting but
3683i could feel the extent of the infinity and that it was, as you would expect, impossible to
3684put into words. i was there with that divine presence that was not anything that i could
3685visibly see and describe, and with a brilliant orb of light. . . .
3686they said there were many things that they would show me, and they continued to do
3687that. in fact, the whole higher-dimensional multiverse was this incredibly complex
3688corrugated ball and all these lessons [were] coming into me about it. part of the lessons
3689involved becoming all of what i was being shown. it was indescribable.18
3690“not even in the right ballpark”? his experience sounds so much like a dmt trip that we are
3691not only in the right ballpark, we are talking about the stitching on the same ball. everything
3692that alexander describes about his experience, including the parts i have left out, has been
3693reported by dmt users. the similarity is uncanny. here is how terence mckenna described
3694the prototypical dmt trance:
3695under the influence of dmt, the world becomes an arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more
3696than possible martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex
3697and wordless awe. color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the
3698experience. there is a sense of other times, and of one’s own infancy, and of wonder,
3699wonder and more wonder. it is an audience with the alien nuncio. in the midst of this
3700experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding gates that seem surely to
3701open on the howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness between the stars, is the
3702aeon.
3703the aeon, as heraclitus presciently observed, is a child at play with colored balls.
3704many diminutive beings are present there—the tykes, the self-transforming machine elves
3705of hyperspace. are they the children destined to be father to the man? one has the
3706impression of entering into an ecology of souls that lies beyond the portals of what we
3707naïvely call death. i do not know. are they the synesthetic embodiment of ourselves as the
3708other, or of the other as ourselves? are they the elves lost to us since the fading of the
3709magic light of childhood? here is a tremendum barely to be told, an epiphany beyond our
3710wildest dreams. here is the realm of that which is stranger than we can suppose. here is
3711the mystery, alive, unscathed, still as new for us as when our ancestors lived it fifteen
3712thousand summers ago. the tryptamine entities offer the gift of new language, they sing in
3713pearly voices that rain down as colored petals and flow through the air like hot metal to
3714become toys and such gifts as gods would give their children. the sense of emotional
3715connection is terrifying and intense. the mysteries revealed are real and if ever fully told
3716will leave no stone upon another in the small world we have gone so ill in.
3717this is not the mercurial world of the ufo, to be invoked from lonely hilltops; this is
3718not the siren song of lost atlantis wailing through the trailer courts of crack-crazed
3719america. dmt is not one of our irrational illusions. i believe that what we experience in
3720the presence of dmt is real news. it is a nearby dimension—frightening, transformative,
3721and beyond our powers to imagine, and yet to be explored in the usual way. we must send
3722fearless experts, whatever that may come to mean, to explore and to report on what they
3723find.19
3724alexander believes that his brain could not have produced his visions because they were too
3725“intense,” too “hyper-real,” too “beautiful,” too “interactive,” and too drenched in significance
3726for a brain to conjure. he also thinks that his visions could not have arisen in the minutes or
3727hours during which his cortex (which surely never went off) switched back on. but he has
3728simply ignored what people with working brains experience under the influence of
3729psychedelics. and he does not appear to know that visions of the sort that mckenna describes,
3730although they may seem to last for ages, require only a brief span of biological time. unlike
3731lsd and other long-acting psychedelics, dmt alters consciousness for only a few minutes.
3732alexander would have had more than enough time to experience a visionary ecstasy as he was
3733coming out of his coma (whether or not his cortex was rebooting).
3734alexander knows that dmt already exists in the brain as a neurotransmitter. did his brain
3735experience a surge of dmt release during his coma? in his book, he discounts this possibility
3736by reiterating the unfounded claim upon which his entire account rests: dmt would require a
3737functioning cortex upon which to act, whereas his cortex “wasn’t available to be affected.”
3738similar experiences can be had with ketamine, a surgical anesthetic that is occasionally used to
3739protect a traumatized brain. did alexander by any chance receive ketamine while in the
3740hospital? did he have some other anesthetic that might produce a similar spectrum of effects at
3741low doses? would he even think it relevant if he had? his assertion that a psychedelic like
3742dmt or an anesthetic like ketamine could not “explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity,
3743the layer upon layer of understanding” he experienced is perhaps the most amazing thing he has
3744said since returning from heaven. such compounds are universally understood to do the job.
3745and most scientists believe that the reliable effects of psychedelics indicate that the brain is at
3746the very least involved in the production of visionary states of the sort alexander is talking
3747about.
3748the knowledge of the afterlife that alexander claims to possess also depends upon some
3749extraordinarily dubious methods of verification. while in his coma, he saw a beautiful girl
3750riding beside him on the wing of a butterfly. we learn in his book that he developed his
3751recollection of this experience over a period of months—writing, thinking about it, and mining
3752it for new details. it would be hard to imagine a better way to engineer a distortion of memory.
3753alexander also tells us that he had a biological sister he never met, who died some years
3754before his coma. seeing her picture for the first time after his recovery, he judged this woman to
3755be the girl who had joined him for the butterfly ride. he sought further confirmation of this by
3756speaking with his biological family, from whom he learned that his dead sister had, indeed,
3757always been “very loving.” qed.
3758as i’ve said throughout this book, i have spent much of my life studying and seeking
3759experiences of the kind alexander describes. i haven’t contracted meningitis, thankfully, nor
3760have i had an nde, but i have experienced many phenomena that often lead people to believe in
3761the supernatural. for instance, i once had an opportunity to study with the great tibetan lama
3762dilgo khyentse rinpoche in nepal. before making the trip, i had a dream in which he seemed
3763to give me teachings about the nature of the mind. the dream struck me as interesting for two
3764reasons: the teachings i received were novel, useful, and convergent with what i later
3765understood to be true, and i had never met khyentse rinpoche, nor was i aware of having seen
3766a photograph of him. (this preceded my access to the internet by at least five years, so the
3767belief that i had never seen his picture was more plausible than it would be now.) i also recall
3768that i had no easy way of finding a picture of him for the sake of comparison. but because i was
3769about to meet the man himself, it seemed that i would be able to confirm whether he had really
3770been in my dream.
3771first, the teachings: the lama in my dream began by asking who i was. i responded by
3772telling him my name. apparently, this wasn’t the answer he was looking for.
3773“who are you?” he said again. he was now staring fixedly into my eyes and pointing at my
3774face with an outstretched finger. i did not know what to say.
3775“who are you?” he said again, continuing to point.
3776“who are you?” he said a final time, but here he suddenly shifted his gaze and pointing
3777finger, as though he were now addressing someone just to my left. the effect was quite startling,
3778because i knew (insofar as one can be said to know anything in a dream) that we were alone.
3779the lama was pointing to someone who wasn’t there, and i suddenly noticed what i would later
3780understand to be an important truth about the nature of the mind: subjectively speaking, there is
3781only consciousness and its contents; there is no inner self who is conscious. the sense of
3782looking over one’s own shoulder, as it were, is an illusion. the lama in my dream seemed to
3783dissect this very feeling of being a self and, for a brief moment, removed it from my mind. i
3784awoke convinced that i had glimpsed something quite profound.
3785after traveling to nepal and encountering the arresting figure of khyentse rinpoche
3786instructing hundreds of monks from atop a brocade throne, i was struck by the sense that he
3787really did resemble the man in my dream. even more apparent, however, was the fact that i
3788couldn’t know whether this impression was veridical. no doubt, it would have been more fun
3789to believe that something magical had occurred and that i had been singled out for some sort of
3790transpersonal initiation—but the allure of this belief suggested only that the bar for proof should
3791be raised rather than lowered. and even though i had no formal scientific training at that point, i
3792knew that human memory is unreliable under conditions of this kind. how much stock could i
3793put in the feeling of familiarity? was i accurately recalling the face of a man i had met in a
3794dream, or was i engaged in a creative reconstruction of it? if nothing else, the experience of
3795déjà vu proves that one’s sense of having experienced something previously can jump the tracks
3796of genuine recollection. my travels in spiritual circles had also brought me into contact with
3797many people who seemed all too eager to deceive themselves about experiences of this kind,
3798and i did not wish to emulate them. given these considerations, i did not believe that khyentse
3799rinpoche had really appeared in my dream. and i certainly would never have been tempted to
3800use this experience as conclusive proof of the supernatural.
3801i invite the reader to compare this attitude to the one that dr. eben alexander will most
3802likely exhibit before crowds of credulous people for the rest of his life. the structure of our
3803experiences was similar: we were each given an opportunity to compare a face remembered
3804from a dream/vision with a person (or photo) in the physical world. i realized that the task was
3805hopeless. alexander believes that he has made the greatest discovery in the history of science.
3806again, nothing can be said against alexander’s experience. and such ecstasies do tell us
3807something about how good a human mind can feel. the problem is that the conclusions
3808alexander has drawn from his experience—as a scientist, he continually reminds us—are
3809based on flagrant errors in reasoning and misunderstandings of the relevant science.
3810the enthusiastic reception alexander has enjoyed also suggests a general confusion about
3811the nature of scientific authority. much of the criticism i have received for dismissing his
3812account focuses on what appear to be his impeccable scientific credentials. however, when
3813debating the validity of evidence and arguments, the point is never that one person’s credentials
3814trump another’s. credentials merely offer a rough indication of what a person is likely to know
3815—or should know. if alexander were drawing reasonable scientific conclusions from his
3816experience, he wouldn’t need to be a neuroscientist to be taken seriously; he could be a
3817philosopher—or a coal miner. but he simply isn’t thinking like a scientist, and so not even a
3818string of nobel prizes would shield him from criticism.20
3819such is the perennial problem with reports of this kind. some people are so desperate to
3820interpret the nde as proof of an afterlife that even those whom one would expect to have a
3821strong commitment to scientific reasoning toss their better judgment out the window. the truth is
3822that, whatever happens after death, it is possible to justify a life of spiritual practice and selftranscendence
3823without pretending to know things we do not know.
3824the spiritual uses of pharmacology
3825everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. we form friendships so that we
3826can feel love and avoid loneliness. we eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our
3827tongues. we read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. every waking moment
3828—and even in our dreams—we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition
3829toward states of consciousness that we value.
3830drugs are another means toward this end. some are illegal; some are stigmatized; some are
3831dangerous—though, perversely, these categories only partially intersect. some drugs of
3832extraordinary power and utility, such as psilocybin (the active compound in “magic
3833mushrooms”) and lysergic acid diethylamide (lsd), pose no apparent risk of addiction and are
3834physically well tolerated, and yet one can be sent to prison for their use—whereas drugs such
3835as tobacco and alcohol, which have ruined countless lives, are enjoyed ad libitum in almost
3836every society on earth. there are other points on this continuum: mdma, or ecstasy, has
3837remarkable therapeutic potential, but it is also susceptible to abuse, and some evidence suggests
3838that it can be neurotoxic.21
3839one of the great responsibilities we have as a society is to educate ourselves, along with the
3840next generation, about which substances are worth ingesting and for what purpose and which
3841are not. the problem, however, is that we refer to all these biologically active materials by a
3842single term, drugs, making it nearly impossible to have an intelligent discussion about the
3843psychological, medical, ethical, and legal issues surrounding their use. the poverty of our
3844language has been only slightly eased by the introduction of the term psychedelics to
3845differentiate certain visionary compounds, which can produce extraordinary insights, from
3846narcotics and other classic agents of stupefaction and abuse.
3847however, we should not be too quick to feel nostalgia for the counterculture of the 1960s.
3848yes, crucial breakthroughs were made, socially and psychologically, and drugs were central to
3849the process, but one need only read accounts of the time, such as joan didion’s slouching
3850towards bethlehem, to see the problem with a society bent upon rapture at any cost. for every
3851insight of lasting value produced by drugs, there was an army of zombies with flowers in their
3852hair shuffling toward failure and regret. turning on, tuning in, and dropping out is wise, or even
3853benign, only if you can then drop into a mode of life that makes ethical and material sense and
3854doesn’t leave your children wandering in traffic.
3855drug abuse and addiction are very real problems, the remedy for which is education and
3856medical treatment, not incarceration. in fact, the most abused drugs in the united states now
3857appear to be oxycodone and other prescription painkillers. should these medicines be made
3858illegal? of course not. but people need to be informed about their hazards, and addicts need
3859treatment. and all drugs—including alcohol, cigarettes, and aspirin—must be kept out of the
3860hands of children.
3861i discuss issues of drug policy in some detail in my first book, the end of faith, and my
3862thinking on the subject has not changed. the “war on drugs” has been lost and should never
3863have been waged. i can think of no right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward
3864the contents of one’s own consciousness. the fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of
3865nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great
3866moral failures of our time. (and the fact that we make room for them in our prisons by paroling
3867murderers, rapists, and child molesters makes one wonder whether civilization isn’t simply
3868doomed.)
3869i have two daughters who will one day take drugs. of course, i will do everything in my
3870power to see that they choose their drugs wisely, but a life lived entirely without drugs is
3871neither foreseeable nor, i think, desirable. i hope they someday enjoy a morning cup of tea or
3872coffee as much as i do. if they drink alcohol as adults, as they probably will, i will encourage
3873them to do it safely. if they choose to smoke marijuana, i will urge moderation. tobacco should
3874be shunned, and i will do everything within the bounds of decent parenting to steer them away
3875from it. needless to say, if i knew that either of my daughters would eventually develop a
3876fondness for methamphetamine or heroin, i might never sleep again. but if they don’t try a
3877psychedelic like psilocybin or lsd at least once in their adult lives, i will wonder whether they
3878had missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience.
3879this is not to say that everyone should take psychedelics. as i will make clear below, these
3880drugs pose certain dangers. undoubtedly, some people cannot afford to give the anchor of sanity
3881even the slightest tug. it has been many years since i took psychedelics myself, and my
3882abstinence is born of a healthy respect for the risks involved. however, there was a period in
3883my early twenties when i found psilocybin and lsd to be indispensable tools, and some of the
3884most important hours of my life were spent under their influence. without them, i might never
3885have discovered that there was an inner landscape of mind worth exploring.
3886there is no getting around the role of luck here. if you are lucky, and you take the right drug,
3887you will know what it is to be enlightened (or to be close enough to persuade you that
3888enlightenment is possible). if you are unlucky, you will know what it is to be clinically insane.
3889while i do not recommend the latter experience, it does increase one’s respect for the tenuous
3890condition of sanity, as well as one’s compassion for people who suffer from mental illness.
3891human beings have ingested plant-based psychedelics for millennia, but scientific research on
3892these compounds did not begin until the 1950s. by 1965, a thousand studies had been published,
3893primarily on psilocybin and lsd, many of which attested to the usefulness of psychedelics in
3894the treatment of clinical depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, alcohol addiction, and the
3895pain and anxiety associated with terminal cancer. within a few years, however, this entire field
3896of research was abolished in an effort to stem the spread of these drugs among the public. after
3897a hiatus that lasted an entire generation, scientific research on the pharmacology and therapeutic
3898value of psychedelics has quietly resumed.
3899psychedelics such as psilocybin, lsd, dmt, and mescaline all powerfully alter cognition,
3900perception, and mood. most seem to exert their influence through the serotonin system in the
3901brain, primarily by binding to 5-ht2a receptors (though several have affinity for other
3902receptors as well), leading to increased activity in the prefrontal cortex (pfc). although the
3903pfc in turn modulates subcortical dopamine production—and certain of these compounds, such
3904as lsd, bind directly to dopamine receptors—the effect of psychedelics appears to take place
3905largely outside dopamine pathways, which could explain why these drugs are not habit-forming.
3906the efficacy of psychedelics might seem to establish the material basis of mental and
3907spiritual life beyond any doubt, for the introduction of these substances into the brain is the
3908obvious cause of any numinous apocalypse that follows. it is possible, however, if not actually
3909plausible, to seize this evidence from the other end and argue, as aldous huxley did in his
3910classic the doors of perception, that the primary function of the brain may be eliminative: its
3911purpose may be to prevent a transpersonal dimension of mind from flooding consciousness,
3912thereby allowing apes like ourselves to make their way in the world without being dazzled at
3913every step by visionary phenomena that are irrelevant to their physical survival. huxley thought
3914of the brain as a kind of “reducing valve” for “mind at large.” in fact, the idea that the brain is
3915a filter rather than the origin of mind goes back at least as far as henri bergson and william
3916james. in huxley’s view, this would explain the efficacy of psychedelics: they may simply be
3917a material means of opening the tap.
3918huxley was operating under the assumption that psychedelics decrease brain activity. some
3919recent data have lent support to this view; for instance, a neuroimaging study of psilocybin22
3920suggests that the drug primarily reduces activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region
3921involved in a wide variety of tasks related to self-monitoring. however, other studies have
3922found that psychedelics increase activity throughout the brain. whatever the case, the action of
3923these drugs does not rule out dualism, or the existence of realms of mind beyond the brain—but
3924then, nothing does. that is one of the problems with views of this kind: they appear to be
3925unfalsifiable. physicalism, by contrast, could easily be falsified. if science ever established the
3926existence of ghosts or reincarnation or any other phenomenon that placed the human mind (in
3927whole or in part) outside the brain, physicalism would be dead. the fact that dualists can never
3928say what might count as evidence against their views makes this ancient philosophical position
3929very difficult to distinguish from religious faith.
3930we have reason to be skeptical of the brain-as-barrier thesis. if the brain were merely a
3931filter on the mind, damaging it should increase cognition. in fact, strategically damaging the
3932brain should be the most reliable method of spiritual practice available to anyone. in almost
3933every case, loss of brain should yield more mind. but that is not how the mind works.
3934some people try to get around this by suggesting that the brain may function more like a
3935radio, a receiver of conscious states rather than a barrier to them. at first glance, this would
3936appear to account for the deleterious effects of neurological injury and disease, for if one
3937smashes a radio with a hammer, it will no longer function properly. there is a problem with
3938this metaphor, however. those who employ it invariably forget that we are the music, not the
3939radio. if the brain were nothing more than a receiver of conscious states, it should be
3940impossible to diminish a person’s experience of the cosmos by damaging her brain. she might
3941seem unconscious from the outside—like a broken radio—but, subjectively speaking, the music
3942would play on.
3943specific reductions in brain activity might benefit people in certain ways, unmasking
3944memories or abilities that are being actively inhibited by the regions in question. but there is no
3945reason to think that the pervasive destruction of the central nervous system would leave the
3946mind unaffected (much less improved). medications that reduce anxiety generally work by
3947increasing the effect of the inhibitory neurotransmitter gaba, thereby diminishing neuronal
3948activity in various parts of the brain. but the fact that dampening arousal in this way can make
3949people feel better does not suggest that they would feel better still if they were drugged into a
3950coma. similarly, it would be unsurprising if psilocybin reduced brain activity in areas
3951responsible for self-monitoring, because that might, in part, account for the experiences that are
3952often associated with the drug. this does not give us any reason to believe that turning off the
3953brain entirely would yield an increased awareness of spiritual realities.
3954however, the brain does exclude an extraordinary amount of information from
3955consciousness. and, like many who have taken psychedelics, i can attest that these compounds
3956throw open the gates. positing the existence of a mind at large is more tempting in some states
3957of consciousness than in others. but these drugs can also produce mental states that are best
3958viewed as forms of psychosis. as a general matter, i believe we should be very slow to draw
3959conclusions about the nature of the cosmos on the basis of inner experiences—no matter how
3960profound they may seem.
3961one thing is certain: the mind is vaster and more fluid than our ordinary, waking
3962consciousness suggests. and it is simply impossible to communicate the profundity (or seeming
3963profundity) of psychedelic states to those who have never experienced them. indeed, it is even
3964difficult to remind oneself of the power of these states once they have passed.
3965many people wonder about the difference between meditation (and other contemplative
3966practices) and psychedelics. are these drugs a form of cheating, or are they the only means of
3967authentic awakening? they are neither. all psychoactive drugs modulate the existing
3968neurochemistry of the brain—either by mimicking specific neurotransmitters or by causing the
3969neurotransmitters themselves to be more or less active. everything that one can experience on a
3970drug is, at some level, an expression of the brain’s potential. hence, whatever one has seen or
3971felt after ingesting lsd is likely to have been seen or felt by someone, somewhere, without it.
3972however, it cannot be denied that psychedelics are a uniquely potent means of altering
3973consciousness. teach a person to meditate, pray, chant, or do yoga, and there is no guarantee
3974that anything will happen. depending upon his aptitude or interest, the only reward for his
3975efforts may be boredom and a sore back. if, however, a person ingests 100 micrograms of lsd,
3976what happens next will depend on a variety of factors, but there is no question that something
3977will happen. and boredom is simply not in the cards. within the hour, the significance of his
3978existence will bear down upon him like an avalanche. as the late terence mckenna never tired
3979of pointing out, this guarantee of profound effect, for better or worse, is what separates
3980psychedelics from every other method of spiritual inquiry.23
3981ingesting a powerful dose of a psychedelic drug is like strapping oneself to a rocket without
3982a guidance system. one might wind up somewhere worth going, and, depending on the
3983compound and one’s “set and setting,” certain trajectories are more likely than others. but
3984however methodically one prepares for the voyage, one can still be hurled into states of mind
3985so painful and confusing as to be indistinguishable from psychosis. hence the terms
3986psychotomimetic and psychotogenici are occasionally applied to these drugs.24
3987i have visited both extremes on the psychedelic continuum. the positive experiences were
3988more sublime than i could ever have imagined or than i can now faithfully recall. these
3989chemicals disclose layers of beauty that art is powerless to capture and for which the beauty of
3990nature itself is a mere simulacrum. it is one thing to be awestruck by the sight of a giant
3991redwood and amazed at the details of its history and underlying biology. it is quite another to
3992spend an apparent eternity in egoless communion with it. positive psychedelic experiences
3993often reveal how wondrously at ease in the universe a human being can be—and for most of us,
3994normal waking consciousness does not offer so much as a glimmer of those deeper
3995possibilities.
3996people generally come away from such experiences with a sense that conventional states of
3997consciousness obscure and truncate sacred insights and emotions. if the patriarchs and
3998matriarchs of the world’s religions experienced such states of mind, many of their claims about
3999the nature of reality would make subjective sense. a beatific vision does not tell you anything
4000about the birth of the cosmos, but it does reveal how utterly transfigured a mind can be by a full
4001collision with the present moment.
4002however, as the peaks are high, the valleys are deep. my “bad trips” were, without
4003question, the most harrowing hours i have ever endured, and they make the notion of hell—as a
4004metaphor if not an actual destination—seem perfectly apt. if nothing else, these excruciating
4005experiences can become a source of compassion. i think it may be impossible to imagine what it
4006is like to suffer from mental illness without having briefly touched its shores.
4007at both ends of the continuum, time dilates in ways that cannot be described—apart from
4008merely observing that these experiences can seem eternal. i have spent hours, both good and
4009bad, in which any understanding that i had ingested a drug was lost, and all memories of my
4010past along with it. immersion in the present moment to this degree is synonymous with the
4011feeling that one has always been and will always be in precisely this condition. depending on
4012the character of one’s experience at that point, notions of salvation or damnation may well
4013apply. blake’s line about beholding “eternity in an hour” neither promises nor threatens too
4014much.
4015in the beginning, my experiences with psilocybin and lsd were so positive that i did not see
4016how a bad trip could be possible. notions of “set and setting,” admittedly vague, seemed
4017sufficient to account for my good luck. my mental set was exactly as it needed to be—i was a
4018spiritually serious investigator of my own mind—and my setting was generally one of either
4019natural beauty or secure solitude.
4020i cannot account for why my adventures with psychedelics were uniformly pleasant until they
4021weren’t, but once the doors to hell opened, they appeared to have been left permanently ajar.
4022thereafter, whether or not a trip was good in the aggregate, it generally entailed some
4023excruciating detour on the path to sublimity. have you ever traveled, beyond all mere
4024metaphors, to the mountain of shame and stayed for a thousand years? i do not recommend it.
4025on my first trip to nepal, i took a rowboat out on phewa lake in pokhara, which offers a
4026stunning view of the annapurna range. it was early morning, and i was alone. as the sun rose
4027over the water, i ingested 400 micrograms of lsd. i was twenty years old and had taken the
4028drug at least ten times previously. what could go wrong?
4029everything, as it turns out. well, not everything—i didn’t drown. i have a vague memory of
4030drifting ashore and being surrounded by a group of nepali soldiers. after watching me for a
4031while, as i ogled them over the gunwale like a lunatic, they seemed on the verge of deciding
4032what to do with me. some polite words of esperanto and a few mad oar strokes, and i was
4033offshore and into oblivion. i suppose that could have ended differently.
4034but soon there was no lake or mountains or boat—and if i had fallen into the water, i am
4035pretty sure there would have been no one to swim. for the next several hours my mind became a
4036perfect instrument of self-torture. all that remained was a continuous shattering and terror for
4037which i have no words.
4038an encounter like that takes something out of you. even if lsd and similar drugs are
4039biologically safe, they have the potential to produce extremely unpleasant and destabilizing
4040experiences. i believe i was positively affected by my good trips, and negatively affected by the
4041bad ones, for weeks and months.
4042meditation can open the mind to a similar range of conscious states, but far less haphazardly.
4043if lsd is like being strapped to a rocket, learning to meditate is like gently raising a sail. yes,
4044it is possible, even with guidance, to wind up someplace terrifying, and some people probably
4045shouldn’t spend long periods in intensive practice. but the general effect of meditation training
4046is of settling ever more fully into one’s own skin and suffering less there.
4047as i discussed in the end of faith, i view most psychedelic experiences as potentially
4048misleading. psychedelics do not guarantee wisdom or a clear recognition of the selfless nature
4049of consciousness. they merely guarantee that the contents of consciousness will change. such
4050visionary experiences, considered in their totality, appear to me to be ethically neutral.
4051therefore, it seems that psychedelic ecstasies must be steered toward our personal and
4052collective well-being by some other principle. as daniel pinchbeck pointed out in his highly
4053entertaining book breaking open the head, the fact that both the mayans and the aztecs used
4054psychedelics, while being enthusiastic practitioners of human sacrifice, makes any idealistic
4055connection between plant-based shamanism and an enlightened society seem terribly naïve.
4056the form of transcendence that appears to link directly to ethical behavior and human wellbeing
4057is that which occurs in the midst of ordinary waking life. it is by ceasing to cling to the
4058contents of consciousness—to our thoughts, moods, and desires—that we make progress. this
4059project does not in principle require that we experience more content. the freedom from self
4060that is both the goal and the foundation of spiritual life is coincident with normal perception and
4061cognition—though, as i have already said, this can be difficult to realize.25
4062the power of psychedelics, however, is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours,
4063depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime. william james said
4064it about as well as anyone:26
4065one conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has
4066ever since remained unshaken. it is that our normal waking consciousness, rational
4067consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it,
4068parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness
4069entirely different. we may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the
4070requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of
4071mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. no
4072account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of
4073consciousness quite disregarded. how to regard them is the question—for they are so
4074discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. yet they may determine attitudes though they
4075cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. at any rate, they
4076forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.27
4077i believe that psychedelics may be indispensable for some people—especially those who,
4078like me, initially need convincing that profound changes in consciousness are possible. after
4079that, it seems wise to find ways of practicing that do not present the same risks. happily, such
4080methods are widely available.
4081this chapter has taken us along the edge of a precipice. there is no question that novel and
4082intense experiences—whether had in the company of a guru, on the threshold of death, or by
4083recourse to certain drugs—can send one spinning into delusion. but they can also broaden one’s
4084view.
4085the aims of spirituality are not exactly those of science, but neither are they unscientific.
4086search your mind, or pay attention to the conversations you have with other people, and you
4087will discover that there are no real boundaries between science and any other discipline that
4088attempts to make valid claims about the world on the basis of evidence and logic. when such
4089claims and their methods of verification admit of experiment and/or mathematical description,
4090we tend to say that our concerns are “scientific”; when they relate to matters more abstract, or
4091to the consistency of our thinking itself, we often say that we are being “philosophical”; when
4092we merely want to know how people behaved in the past, we dub our interests “historical” or
4093“journalistic”; and when a person’s commitment to evidence and logic grows dangerously thin
4094or simply snaps under the burden of fear, wishful thinking, tribalism, or ecstasy, we recognize
4095that he is being “religious.”
4096the boundaries between true intellectual disciplines are currently enforced by little more
4097than university budgets and architecture. is the shroud of turin a medieval forgery? this is a
4098question of history, of course, and of archaeology, but the techniques of radiocarbon dating
4099make it a question of chemistry and physics as well. the real distinction we should care about
4100—the observation of which is the sine qua non of the scientific attitude—is between demanding
4101good reasons for what one believes and being satisfied with bad ones. spirituality requires the
4102same commitment to intellectual honesty.
4103once one recognizes the selflessness of consciousness, the practice of meditation becomes
4104just a means of getting more familiar with it. the goal, thereafter, is to cease to overlook what
4105is already the case. paradoxically, this still requires discipline, and setting aside time for
4106meditation is indispensable. but the true discipline is to remain committed, throughout the
4107whole of one’s life, to waking up from the dream of the self. we need not take anything on faith
4108to do this. in fact, the only alternative is to remain confused about the nature of our minds.
4109consciousness is the basis of both the examined and the unexamined life. it is all that can be
4110seen and that which does the seeing. no matter how far you have traveled from the place of
4111your birth, and however much you now understand about the world, you have been exploring
4112consciousness and its changes. why not do so directly?
4113i. these terms refer to substances that seem to mimic or cause the symptoms of psychosis.
4114conclusion
4115sometime around her third birthday, my daughter asked, “where does gravity come from?”
4116after talking about how objects attract each other—and wisely ignoring the curvature of spacetime—my
4117wife and i arrived at our deepest and most honest answer: “we don’t know. gravity
4118is a mystery. people are still trying to figure it out.”
4119this type of answer continues to divide humanity. we could have said, as billions of people
4120would have, “gravity comes from god.” but this would have merely stifled our daughter’s
4121intelligence—and taught her to stifle it. we could have told her, “gravity might be god’s way
4122of dragging people to hell, where they burn in fire. and you will burn there forever if you doubt
4123that god exists.” no christian or muslim can offer a compelling reason why we shouldn’t have
4124said such a thing—or the moral equivalent—and yet that would have been nothing less than the
4125emotional and intellectual abuse of a child. i have now heard from many thousands of people
4126who were oppressed in this way, from the moment they could speak, by the terrifying ignorance
4127and fanaticism of their parents. the reason for this widespread mistreatment of children is
4128clear: most people still believe that religion provides something essential that cannot be had
4129any other way.
4130twelve years have now passed since i first realized how high the stakes are in this war of
4131ideas. i remember feeling the jolt of history when the second plane crashed into the world
4132trade center. for many of us, that was the moment we understood that things can go terribly
4133wrong in our world—not because life is unfair or moral progress impossible but because we
4134have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions and animosities of our ignorant
4135ancestors. the worst ideas continue to thrive—and are still imparted, in their purest form, to
4136children.
4137what is the meaning of life? what is our purpose on earth? these are some of the great,
4138false questions of religion. we need not answer them, for they are badly posed, but we can live
4139our answers all the same. at a minimum, we can create the conditions for human flourishing in
4140this life—the only life of which any of us can be certain. that means we should not terrify our
4141children with thoughts of hell or poison them with hatred for infidels. we should not teach our
4142sons to consider women their future property or convince our daughters that they are property
4143even now. and we must decline to tell our children that human history began with bloody magic
4144and will end with bloody magic in a glorious war between the righteous and the rest.
4145such sins against reason and compassion do not represent the totality of religion, but they lie
4146at its core. as for the rest—charity, community, ritual, and the contemplative life—we need not
4147take anything on faith to embrace those goods. it is one of the most damaging lies of religion—
4148whether liberal, moderate, or extreme—to insist that we must.
4149spirituality remains the great hole in secularism, humanism, rationalism, atheism, and all the
4150other defensive postures that reasonable men and women strike in the presence of unreasonable
4151faith. people on both sides of this divide imagine that visionary experience has no place within
4152the context of science—apart from the corridors of a mental hospital. until we can talk about
4153spirituality in rational terms—acknowledging the validity of self-transcendence—our world
4154will remain shattered by dogmatism. this book has been my attempt to begin such a
4155conversation.
4156there is experience, and then there are the stories we tell about it. at its best, religion is a set
4157of stories that recount the ethical and contemplative insights of our wisest ancestors. but these
4158stories come to us bundled with ancient confusion and perennial lies. and they invariably
4159harden into doctrines that defy revision, generation after generation. the great pressure of
4160accumulating knowledge—in science, medicine, history—has begun to scour our culture of
4161many of these ideas. with the force of a glacier, perhaps, but at a similar pace. the exponential
4162increase in the power of technology brings with it a commensurate increase in the consequences
4163of human ignorance. we do not have centuries to wait for our neighbors to come to their senses.
4164religious stories may bring meaning to people’s lives, but some meanings are patently false
4165and divisive. what does a spiritual experience mean? if you are a christian sitting in church, it
4166might mean that jesus christ survived his death and has taken a personal interest in the fate of
4167your soul. if you are a hindu praying to shiva, you will have a very different story to tell.
4168altered states of consciousness are empirical facts, and human beings experience them under a
4169wide range of conditions. to understand this, and to seek to live a spiritual life without
4170deluding ourselves, we must view these experiences in universal and secular terms.
4171happiness and suffering, however extreme, are mental events. the mind depends upon the
4172body, and the body upon the world, but everything good or bad that happens in your life must
4173appear in consciousness to matter. this fact offers ample opportunity to make the best of bad
4174situations—changing your perception of the world is often as good as changing the world—but
4175it also allows a person to be miserable even when all the material and social conditions for
4176happiness have been met. during the normal course of events, your mind will determine the
4177quality of your life.
4178of course, the mind is as contingent as the body—and the limits of the body are obvious: i
4179am precisely as tall as i am, and not an inch taller. i can jump as high as i can, and no higher. i
4180can’t see what is behind my head. my knee hurts. the boundaries of my mind are just as clear: i
4181cannot speak a word of korean. i don’t remember what i did on this date in 2011, or the last
4182words i read of dante, or even the first words i spoke to my wife this morning. although i can
4183alter my mood and states of attention, i can do so only within a narrow range. if i am tired, i can
4184open my eyes a little wider and try to perk myself up, but i cannot completely banish the feeling
4185of fatigue. if i am slightly depressed, i can brighten my mood with happy thoughts. i can even
4186access a feeling of happiness directly by simply recalling what it is like to be happy—
4187deliberately putting a smile in my mind—but i cannot reproduce the greatest joy i have ever felt.
4188everything about my mind and body seems to feel the weight of the past. i am just as i am.
4189but consciousness is different. it appears to have no form at all, because anything that would
4190give it form must arise within the field of consciousness. consciousness is simply the light by
4191which the contours of mind and body are known. it is that which is aware of feelings such as
4192joy, regret, amusement, and despair. it can seem to take their shape for a time, but it is possible
4193to recognize that it never quite does. in fact, we can directly experience that consciousness is
4194never improved or harmed by what it knows. making this discovery, again and again, is the
4195basis of spiritual life.
4196as we have seen, there is no compelling reason to believe that the mind is independent of the
4197brain. and yet the deflationary attitude toward consciousness taken by many scientists—
4198wherein reality is considered only from the outside, in third-person terms—is also
4199unwarranted. a middle path exists between making religion out of spiritual life and having no
4200spiritual life at all.
4201we have long known that how things seem in the world can be misleading, and this is no less
4202true of the mind itself. and yet many people have found that through sustained introspection,
4203how things seem can be brought into closer register with how they are. in one sense, the science
4204that underlies this claim is in its infancy—but in another, it is complete. although we are only
4205beginning to understand the human mind at the level of the brain, and we know nothing about
4206how consciousness itself comes into being, it isn’t too soon to say that the conventional self is
4207an illusion. there is no place for a soul inside your head. consciousness itself is divisible—as
4208we saw in the case of split-brain patients—and even in an intact brain consciousness is blind to
4209most of what the mind is doing. everything we take ourselves to be at the level of our
4210subjectivity—our memories and emotions, our capacity for language, the very thoughts and
4211impulses that give rise to our behavior—depends upon distinct processes that are spread out
4212over the whole of the brain. many of these can be independently interrupted or extinguished.
4213the sense, therefore, that we are unified subjects—the unchanging thinkers of thoughts and
4214experiencers of experience—is an illusion. the conventional self is a transitory appearance
4215among transitory appearances, and it vanishes when looked for. we need not await any data
4216from the lab to say that self-transcendence is possible. and we need not become masters of
4217meditation to realize its benefits. it is within our capacity to recognize the nature of thoughts, to
4218awaken from the dream of being merely ourselves and, in this way, to become better able to
4219contribute to the well-being of others.
4220spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and
4221experiences that are anything but ordinary. and the conventional opposition between humility
4222and hubris has no place here. yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal
4223schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. in subjective terms, each of
4224us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. experiencing this directly
4225—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.
4226we are always and everywhere in the presence of reality. indeed, the human mind is the most
4227complex and subtle expression of reality we have thus far encountered. this should grant
4228profundity to the humble project of noticing what it is like to be you in the present. however
4229numerous your faults, something in you at this moment is pristine—and only you can recognize
4230it.
4231open your eyes and see.
4232acceptance, 148–49
4233addiction, 122
4234advaita vedanta, 10, 26, 32, 132, 210n
4235consciousness in, 21–22, 23, 129
4236illusion of self in, 31
4237nongradualism in, 125
4238alcohol, 3, 187, 188, 189
4239alexander, eben, 174–83, 185–86, 236n
4240alexander the great, 23
4241alexithymia, 70
4242al-hallaj, 22
4243amnesia, 77
4244global retrograde, 104–5
4245amygdala, 76
4246anesthesia awareness, 53
4247anesthetics, 179, 182, 237n
4248anger, 99, 137, 224n
4249anxiety, 121, 122, 190, 192
4250aphasia, 68
4251applewhite, marshall, 152, 155
4252apraxia, 68
4253arunachala, 128
4254ascended masters, 24
4255atheism, atheists, 18, 176
4256animosity toward spirituality by, 6, 11, 202
4257attention, 12, 123
4258augustine, saint, 176
4259autism, 110, 111, 114
4260autonomy, 161
4261awareness (rigpa), 134, 216n
4262aztecs, 197
4263backward masking, 76
4264bergson, henri, 190
4265bhagavad gita, 24
4266binocular rivalry, 61
4267blake, william, 195
4268blavatsky, helena petrovna, 24–26
4269blindsight, 226n
4270bliss, 9, 83, 140, 226n–27n
4271body, 204
4272ownership of, 106–8
4273body awareness, 36, 104–5, 123
4274disappearance of, 127
4275boredom, 156–57
4276brain, 10, 63, 63
4277anterior cingulate cortex of, 191
4278consciousness in, 59–62
4279cortex of, 116
4280dual processes in, 76–77
4281electrochemical activity of, 90
4282eliminative function of, 190–91
4283functionalspecialization of hemispheres of, 64–72
4284medial parietal cortex of, 120, 120
4285medial prefontal cortex of, 120, 120
4286meditation and, 46
4287midline regions of, 120
4288mind and, 55
4289mirror neurons in, 113–14
4290prefrontal cortex (pfc) of, 190
4291primary visual cortext of, 226n
4292right basolateral amygdala of, 122
4293sense of self and, 113–14
4294soul and, 116
4295split in normal, see split brain
4296structural changes in, 121–22
4297structure and function of, 68–72
4298subcortical regions of, 116
4299subliminal responses by, 76–77
4300temporal-parietal junction of, 105
4301unconscious processes in, 75–77
4302visual perception in, 61
4303branch davidians, 152
4304breaking open the head (pinchbeck), 197
4305breath, in meditation, 40, 126
4306britton, willoughby, 211n
4307broad, c. d., 219n
4308buddha, 5, 8, 24, 152
4309historical (siddhartha gautama), 26, 30, 42–43
4310parable of, 82–83
4311buddhaghosa, 125
4312buddhas of bamiyan, 78
4313buddhism, 10, 32, 82, 148, 210n
4314cessation in, 125, 126
4315consciousness in, 23
4316dzogchen, see dzogchen buddhism
4317empirical teachings of, 28–30, 32
4318enlightenment in, 42–43, 48, 170, 211n–12n
4319ethics and, 159
4320greek philosophy and, 24
4321on the human mind, 20, 29–31
4322illusion of self in, 31
4323meditation in, 26, 29
4324metta meditation in, 44
4325mindfulness in, 34–40
4326nondualism in, 21–22, 125
4327as non-faith based, 28, 209n
4328omniscience in, 42–43
4329religiosity in, 137–38
4330scientists on, 28–29
4331self in, 87
4332superstition in, 30, 43
4333taboos in, 136
4334tantra in, 227n
4335theravada, 34–35, 124, 125
4336tibetan, 137, 161
4337western responses to, 24, 26
4338zen, 138, 153, 157
4339burma, 125
4340callosotomy, 64, 70, 88
4341cancer, 190
4342cannabis, 237n
4343cats, optic chiasma in, 72
4344causation, 217n, 221n
4345central nervous system, 192
4346cerebral cortex, 72
4347cerebral hemispheres, separate consciousness between, 72–75
4348cerebrum, 63
4349cessation, 125–27
4350chalmers, david, 213n, 221n
4351children, mindfulness in, 47
4352chögyam trungpa rinpoche, 159–63
4353christianity, 9, 18, 19–23, 30, 67, 70, 81–82, 91, 135, 152, 201, 203
4354american-style, 176–77
4355divinity of jesus in, 19
4356fundamentalist, 141, 174
4357ndes and, 172
4358churchland, paul, 213n
4359clairvoyance, 170, 212n
4360cognition, 16, 111
4361collins, francis, 77
4362commissures, 63–65, 71
4363compassion, 9, 159
4364compassion meditation, 122
4365consciousness, 9, 14–15, 20, 32–33, 204–5, 212n, 216n–17n, 226n
4366altered, 179–83, 186–98, 203
4367of animals, 51–52, 212n–13n, 215n
4368birth of, 53
4369brain processes in, 59–62
4370cerebral hemispheres and, 72–75
4371divisibility of, 70–72
4372in dzogchen, 138–41
4373in eastern religions, 21–23
4374emergence of, 55–60, 218n–19n
4375experience and, 34, 77–78
4376five senses and, 127
4377language and, 67, 213n
4378meditation and, 126, 171
4379moral dimension of, 78–79
4380multiple realizability of, 220n
4381nature of, 45–46, 51–62
4382nonduality of, 132, 148
4383ontology of, 212n
4384physical world and, 46, 175–76, 214n–15n
4385as prior condition of experience, 129
4386pure, 127
4387quantum mechanics and, 55
4388ramana maharishi on, 128–29
4389reality of, 53–54
4390science on, 51–52, 205
4391seeming displacement of, 105–6
4392selflessness of, 82, 103, 123–25, 128, 146, 148, 199–200
4393sense of self and, 116, 227n–28n
4394sleep and, 61–62
4395subjective experience and, 212n, 213n
4396unified neural process of, 217n–18n
4397contemplation, contemplatives, 3, 6–7, 8, 10, 79, 93, 123, 126, 159, 193
4398solitude and, 13–14
4399control, delusion of, 229n
4400corpus callosum, 63–64, 63, 70–75, 121
4401cortical folds, 121
4402ct scans, 177, 178
4403cults, 152, 157
4404dalai lama, 29
4405darwin, charles, 62, 229n
4406davidson, donald, 220n
4407default-mode network (dmn), 120–21, 120
4408dementia, advanced, 86
4409dennett, daniel, 142, 212n, 213n, 225n
4410depression, 122, 189, 204, 223n
4411descartes, rené, 213n
4412dharma (truth, way), 212n
4413dialogues, 114–15
4414didion, joan, 187
4415dilgo khyentse rinpoche, 183–85
4416diving bell and the butterfly, the (dominique-bauby), 213n
4417dmt, 179–82, 190, 236n–37n
4418dominique-bauby, jean, 213n
4419doors of perception, the (huxley), 190–91
4420dopamine, 190
4421dreaming, 71–72, 183–85
4422drugs, 179–83, 186–98
4423abuse of, 188
4424author’s experiences with, 3–5, 195–97, 236n
4425dualism, 21–22, 191, 212n–14n
4426dukkha, 38, 41
4427dzogchen buddhism, 131–34, 137–41, 146–48, 169
4428pointing-out instruction of, 134, 147
4429eastern spirituality, 29, 101
4430consciousness regarded by, 21–23
4431eastern critique of, 27–28
4432western engagement with, 23–33, 130, 166
4433eccles, john, 70
4434eckhart, meister, 22
4435ecstasy (mdma), 3–5, 44, 187
4436eddington, arthur, 54, 214n
4437edelman, gerald, 217n–18n
4438ego, see self
4439emotions:
4440cognition and, 16
4441mindfulness of, 36
4442reactivity of, 122–23
4443ridding oneself of negative, 98–100
4444empathy, 122
4445end of faith, the (harris), 31, 165–66, 188, 197
4446enlightenment, 42–49, 170–71
4447danger in believing in one’s, 162
4448path to, 124, 125–26
4449poonja-ji’s student and false, 131–33
4450stress reduction in, 48
4451supernormal powers attributed to, 211n–12n
4452epilepsy, 64, 105
4453ethics, 14–15, 18
4454experience:
4455conceptual reframing of, 123
4456consciousness as prior condition of, 129
4457experience sampling, 119
4458explanatory gap, 56
4459eye contact, 163–65
4460fitzgerald, frances, 156–57
44615–ht2a receptors, 190
4462fluidity, 57–58
4463free will, as illusion, 83
4464freud, sigmund, 75
4465gaba, 192
4466galileo galilei, 93
4467gallup, gordon, 229n
4468genghis khan, 48–49
4469genomes, sequencing of, 62
4470ginsberg, allen, 159–61
4471god, 19, 77
4472consciousness and, 21–22
4473goldstein, joseph, 37
4474gradualism, 124–27
4475gratitude, practice of, 96
4476gravity, 201
4477gurdjieff, g. i., 155–56, 168
4478gurus, 137, 151–71, 198
4479gutei oshō, 153
4480gymnosophists, 23
4481haldane, j. s., 58–59
4482happiness, 131–32
4483elusive nature of, 12–13, 15–17, 41–42
4484genghis khan on, 48–49
4485as goal of meditation, 44–45
4486thoughts and, 119
4487harding, douglas, 141–48, 165
4488hatha yoga, 26–27
4489headlessness, 141–48, 165
4490health, mindfulness and, 122
4491heaven is for real (burpo), 175
4492heaven’s gate, 152
4493heisenberg, werner, 54, 214n
4494hemispherectomy, 70
4495heraclitus, 180–81
4496heroin, 189
4497hinduism, 9, 27–28, 32, 82, 130, 166, 172, 203
4498enlightenment in, 170
4499as polytheistic, 19
4500tantra in, 227n
4501see also advaita vedanta
4502hippocampus, 121
4503hitchens, christopher, 29, 209n
4504hiv, 161–62
4505hofstadter, douglas, 142, 144–45
4506hubbard, l. ron, 168, 210n
4507hume, david, 221n, 227n–28n
4508huxley, aldous, 20–21, 22, 155, 190–91
4509“i,” see self
4510imitation, 114
4511india, 23, 26, 28, 125, 131, 141, 167, 172
4512individuality, as illusion, 23
4513intelligibility, 57–58
4514intentionalstance, 110
4515introspection, 8
4516islam, 9, 19–23, 30, 67, 135, 201
4517jainism, 20
4518james, william, 75, 190, 197–98, 215n, 237n
4519japan, 26
4520jeans, james, 54, 214n
4521jesus christ, 5, 9, 19, 23, 25, 30, 67, 81, 152, 176, 203
4522jones, jim, 152, 155
4523judaism, 19–23, 30, 135, 209n
4524jung, carl, 54
4525karma, 19, 137
4526karmapa, 161
4527kathmandu, 97–98, 131, 134
4528ketamine, 179, 182, 237n
4529kindness, 159
4530knight, j. z., 169
4531koch, christof, 61
4532koestler, arthur, 26–27, 210n
4533koresh, david, 152, 155
4534krauss, lawrence, 214n
4535lao tzu, 5
4536left hemisphere, 63–64, 88, 223n–24n
4537advantages of, 68–69
4538errors and confabulations of, 73
4539speech in, 65–66, 68, 71, 73–75
4540life, external criteria in, 59
4541locked-in syndrome, 213n
4542lotus and the robot, the (koestler), 26–27
4543love, 4–5, 9
4544boundless, 14–15, 140
4545self-transcending, 9, 44
4546loving-kindness meditation (metta), 121
4547lsd (lysergic acid diethylamide), 182, 187, 189–90, 193, 195–96, 237n
4548lucknow, 130, 131
4549mcgin, colin, 57
4550mach, ernst, 141, 215n
4551mckenna, terence, 180, 182, 193, 236n–37n
4552manson, charles, 152
4553marijuana, 3, 188
4554marin, peter, 158–59
4555matter, properties of, 57
4556mayans, 197
4557mdma (ecstasy), 3–5, 44, 187, 236n
4558medicine, eastern vs. western, 31
4559meditation, 6, 12, 82, 119–49, 199
4560boredom lacking from, 156–57
4561buddhist, 26, 29, 44
4562cautions surrounding, 33
4563compassion, 122
4564contemplative insights in, 46
4565eye contact, 165
4566goals of, 43–46, 124
4567gradual vs. sudden realization in, 123–33
4568and illusion of self, 82
4569instructions for, 39–40
4570loving-kindness (metta), 121
4571mentalstate and, 96–97
4572mindfulness in, 36–39
4573negative emotions controlled by, 98–100
4574pathological responses to, 210n–11n
4575psychedelics and, 193, 196–98
4576psychological benefits of, 8
4577selflessness and, 146
4578solitude and, 14
4579stress reduction in, 47–48
4580structural changes in brain from, 121–22
4581suffering relieved by, 171
4582thought in, 100, 101–2
4583memory, 87, 104–5
4584distortion of, 183
4585divided brain and, 70–72
4586episodic, 106
4587memory formation, 179
4588meningitis, 175, 177–78, 183
4589mental illness, 189
4590mentalstates, impermanence of, 45–46
4591merwin, w. s., 160–61
4592mescaline, 190
4593methamphetamine, 189
4594mind, 2, 204
4595buddhism on nature of, 29
4596division of, 62–68
4597mindfulness of, 34–40
4598spirituality and, 62
4599theory of (tom), 110–13
4600unity of, 72
4601wandering, 119–20, 139
4602mindfulness (sati), 34–40, 136
4603brain and, 121–22
4604cessation and, 125–27
4605children and, 47
4606dualistic, 126
4607experiencing in, 36
4608four foundations of, 35–36
4609health and, 122
4610and illusion of self, 126
4611positive habits and, 47
4612secular, 34–35
4613thoughts as distraction from, 36–39, 45, 93–104, 130–33, 148
4614mingyur rinpoche, 138
4615mirror-sign delusion, 109
4616mirror test, 109–10, 229n
4617monoaminoxidase, 237n
4618moody, raymond, 175
4619moral goodness, 9
4620moral landscape, the (harris), 48, 78
4621mormonism, 152
4622moses, 77
4623muhammad, 152
4624muscle fibers, 90
4625mysticism, 3, 6–7, 11, 13, 22, 124
4626nagel, thomas, 51–53, 212n, 215n–16n
4627naone, dana, 160–61
4628navy seals, 156–57
4629near-death experience (nde), 105, 172–86
4630nepal, 131, 183–84, 196
4631neurochemistry, 193
4632neurodegenerative diseases, 86
4633neuroimaging, 8, 76, 113, 191
4634neurology, 177
4635and illusion of self, 115–18
4636neurons, 72, 86, 90, 176, 236n
4637intentions and, 113
4638mirror, 113–14
4639motor, 90
4640neurophysiology, 55
4641neuroscience, 9, 58–59, 70, 212n, 217n–18n, 236n
4642binding in, 60
4643consciousness in, 61–62, 75
4644and the soul, 62
4645stimulus-independent thought and, 119
4646neuroticism, 122
4647neurotoxins, 187
4648neurotransmitters, 90, 192–93, 237n
4649neutral monism, 215n–16n
4650new age, 19, 141, 235n
4651quantum mechanics and, 54–55
4652and spirituality, 7–8, 15
4653newsweek, 174, 236n
4654newton, isaac, 25
4655nibbana, nirvana, 36, 125
4656nitrous oxide, 237n
4657nondualistic path, 124–26, 132, 135, 138–41, 148
4658nonharming, 159
4659numinousness, 209n
4660obsessive-compulsive disorder, 189
4661occultism, 25
4662on having no head (harding), 141–45
4663on the origin of species (darwin), 62
4664optic blind spot, 103–4, 135–36
4665osho (bhagwan shree rajneesh), 157, 164, 235n
4666ouspensky, p. d., 155
4667out-of-body experience, 105
4668oxycodone, 188
4669pain, meditation and responsiveness to, 121
4670pali, 34, 36, 38, 121, 125
4671pali canon, 26, 35
4672parfit, derek, 84–87
4673pauli, wolfgang, 54, 214n
4674peace, conscious, 127
4675people’s temple, 152
4676perennial philosophy, 20–21
4677phencyclidine hydrochloride (pcp), 237n
4678phewa lake, 196
4679philosophy, 212n
4680physical continuity, 85
4681physicalism, 191, 220n
4682physics, modern, 54–56
4683pinchbeck, daniel, 197
4684pinker, steven, 57
4685pleasure, 16–17
4686pokhara, 196
4687poonja, h. w. l. (poonja-ji), 127, 129–34, 167–68
4688prayer, 12
4689prefrontal cortex (pfc), 190
4690present moment, 3
4691priming, 76
4692proof of heaven (alexander), 174–75
4693proprioception, 107–8
4694psilocybin, 187, 189, 190–92, 195, 237n
4695psi phenomena, 170
4696psychedelics, 179, 183, 187, 189–98, 236n
4697huxley on, 190–91, 210n
4698meditation and, 193, 196–98
4699psychological continuity, 85–86, 89
4700psychology, 9
4701conscious and unconscious in, 75
4702experimental, 76
4703on mind, 129
4704sense of self in, 33
4705stimulus-independent thought and, 119
4706psychopaths, 69
4707psychosis, 84
4708psychotogenics, 194
4709psychotomimetics, 194
4710puccetti, roland, 73
4711pyrrho, 23–24
4712quantum mechanics, 54–55
4713ramachandran, v. s., 112–13
4714ramana maharshi, 127–30
4715rationality, 14, 82, 202–3
4716rebirth, 137, 235n
4717in hinduism, 19
4718religion, 79
4719author’s critique of, 5, 7, 9, 15, 79, 137, 176, 201–3
4720boundless love and, 14–15
4721cults and, 152
4722esoteric, 10
4723incompatibility of different, 18–22
4724psychological truths in, 5
4725spirituality vs., 6, 8–10, 18
4726virtues and, 9–10
4727see also specific religions
4728rem sleep, 72
4729reynolds, pam, 173–74
4730ricard, matthieu, 44
4731right hemisphere, 63–64, 66, 88, 223n–24n
4732advantages of, 68–70, 71
4733independent consciousness in, 67, 70, 73–75
4734silent intelligence in, 66, 73
4735rigpa (awareness), 134
4736rope-snake illusion, 117–18
4737rumi, jalal-ud-din, 11
4738sabom, michael, 174
4739sadhanas, 128
4740sagan, carl, 209n
4741sanskrit, 24, 36, 125
4742sartre, jean-paul, 111
4743sati, see mindfulness
4744satipatthana sutta, 35
4745sayadaw, mahasi, 125
4746schizophrenia, 33
4747schrödinger, erwin, 54, 214n
4748science:
4749buddhism and, 28–29
4750consciousness and, 51–52, 205
4751eastern, 28
4752meditation and, 47–48
4753nineteenth-century, 25
4754self and, 104–5, 106
4755spirituality and, 7–8, 198–99
4756western, 31
4757scientology, 25–26, 152
4758sea of galilee, 81
4759searle, john, 213n
4760secularists, secularism:
4761and interfaith dialogue, 19
4762spirituality and, 10, 14–15, 202
4763self:
4764in amnesiacs, 104–5
4765challenge of studying, 104–8, 128
4766consciousness without, 92–93, 104–5, 124–25, 135
4767illusion of, 9, 10, 31, 81–118, 123, 125, 126, 128–30, 137, 140–41, 145, 170, 171
4768as product of thought, 92–93, 104
4769recognition of, 108–10, 114
4770science on, 104, 106
4771sense of, 33, 106–8, 114–15, 230n
4772stability of, 105–6
4773self-consciousness, 230n
4774absence of, 165
4775self-formation, 111
4776self-inquiry, 128
4777self-knowledge, 109
4778selflessness, 133, 146, 148, 162
4779of consciousness, 82, 103, 123–25, 128, 146, 148, 199–200
4780self-overcoming, 156, 157
4781self-recognition, 104–5
4782mirror, 109
4783self-representation, dmn and, 120
4784self-transcendence, 9, 14, 18, 124, 125, 134–37, 145, 148, 203, 206
4785in abrahamic religions, 22
4786liabilities with, 158
4787moral behavior and, 159
4788sentience, 216n
4789serotonin, 236n, 237n
4790shame, 137, 162–63
4791shankara, 210n
4792shannon, claude, 43
4793shiva, 128, 203
4794shivapuri mountain, 134
4795siddhartha gautama, see buddha
4796siddhis (powers), 212n
4797silver, lee, 70
4798skeptics:
4799animosity toward spirituality by, 6
4800greek, 23–24
4801meditation and, 47–48
4802sleep, consciousness and, 61–62
4803slouching towards bethlehem (didion), 187–88
4804smith, joseph, 25, 152, 168
4805social bonding, 114
4806sodium amobarbital, 223n
4807solitude, 1–2, 13–14
4808somatoparaphrenia, 107
4809soul, 91, 116
4810as illusion, 23, 62, 83
4811sperry, roger, 72
4812spiritual authority, 151–71
4813spiritual development, stages of, 46–47
4814spirituality, 7, 10, 205, 209n
4815atheist animosity toward term, 6, 11, 202
4816common lack of interest in, 83
4817enlightenment in, 49
4818epiphany in, 84
4819happiness and, 17–18, 226n
4820and the illusion of the self, 9, 82
4821mind and, 46, 62
4822religion vs., 6, 8–9, 19–23
4823science vs., 7–8
4824solitude and, 13
4825split brain, 62–68, 72–75, 223n–24n
4826and personal identity, 84, 88–89
4827sri aurobindo, 169
4828sri lanka, 26
4829stimulus-independent thought, 119
4830stress, brain structure and, 121–22
4831stroke, 223n
4832subjectivity, 53, 91, 205, 212n, 216n
4833subliminal responses, 76–77
4834sudden realization, 124–25
4835suffering, 38, 40–42, 137
4836meditation as relief for, 171
4837sufism, 22
4838talking to oneself, 93–94, 100–101
4839telekinesis, 212n
4840telepathy, 170
4841tendzin, ösel, 161
4842theory of mind (tom), 110–13
4843theosophical society, 24–26
4844theravada buddhism, 34–35, 124, 125
4845thermodynamics, second law of, 89
4846thought insertion, 108, 229
4847thoughts:
4848as distraction from mindfulness, 36–39, 45, 93–104, 130–33, 148
4849happiness and, 119
4850meditation and, 100, 101–2
4851mentalstate and, 96–97
4852self and, 128
4853spontaneous appearance in consciousness of, 101
4854stimulus-independent, 119
4855subsidence of, 127
4856suffering vs. calm in, 95–96
4857tibetan language, 138
4858tiruvanamali, 128
4859tobacco, 187, 188
4860tononi, giulio, 217n–18n
4861transcendence, 7, 209n
4862trekchod, 138
4863tsoknyi rinpoche, 138
4864tulku urgyen rinpoche, 132, 134–38
4865unconscious:
4866freud and, 75
4867processing in brain, 75–77, 215n, 226n
4868u pandita, sayadaw, 125–26
4869vedanta, see advaita vedanta
4870vipassana, 34–35, 136
4871vishnu, 19
4872visuddhimagga, 125
4873vitalism, 219n
4874vivekananda, swami, 26
4875volition, 104
4876wada test, 223n
4877well-being, human, 48
4878west:
4879eastern spirituality in, 23–33, 130, 166
4880gurus in, 152, 159–63
4881self-representation in, 232n
4882wilkins, charles, 24
4883world parliament of religions (1893), 26
4884wright, frank lloyd, 155
4885yoga, 12, 23, 47, 193
4886hatha, 26–27
4887zen buddhism, 138, 153, 157