Noises from the Darkroom: The Science and Mystery of the Mind

Science

The third and most recent source of information about the nature of mind comes from science; not the questionable analogies that have been drawn between mysticism and the speculative world of subatomic physics, but the emerging, biologically based investigations of systems theory, human evolution and the new hybrid discipline, comprising psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and artificial intelligence, known as ‘cognitive science’. What is emerging from this joint enterprise requires a startling reappraisal of the human mind; one which leads us to see the experiences of the mystics as no more and no less than a spontaneous ‘correction’ of the working of the brain.

Science is much revered, and equally maligned, at the present time, being seen as both villain of the ecological piece, and the only possible contender for the role of Saviour. Neither of these extreme reactions is justified, though each is true in part. It is true that the scientific world-view, by installing itself in our culture as the Only (Worthwhile) Epistemological Game in Town, has squeezed out of our minds other less explicit or articulate ways of knowing that are actually vital (as I shall argue in a moment) if we are to recover our ‘basic sanity’. And it is true that science has fathered the most unspeakable inventions of all time. But it is also true that science has provided us with a most powerful and elegant set of ways of thinking about the physical and biological worlds, and that this framework has made possible the development of technologies (of housing, transportation, medicine, communication…you name it) that have genuinely improved the quality of life for millions of people.

And science, however prone to witting or unwitting abuse, offers a powerful method for ‘sailing straight’; for getting our theories and assumptions to reveal their logical and practical conclusions, whether they suit us, whether we like them, or not. Common sense can happily and unwittingly sail round and round in circles, while convincing itself it is on a voyage of discovery. Rational thought by itself (contrary to its own Public Relations literature) is bound to follow the tracks laid down by our unconscious presuppositions, and being the servant of hidden dictates, its claims to objectivity are disingenuous. Science, for all its faults, though it zig-zags and falters, has the potential to help us to escape from the self-serving mental world of ‘common sense’. The inexorable power of its method can force us to think what had previously been unthinkable: what we had been prevented from even considering by the unconscious habits of thought on which we had been relying.

One of the contemporary misunderstandings of science is that it will relentlessly sweep away religion, spirituality and mysticism, like a bulldozer in a rain-forest, leaving only the flat and open land of Pure Reason. Nothing could be further from the truth. The value of science is in its ability to expose the shortcomings of ‘common sense’, and thereby to enable cultures to see, and to improve, their own myths. (Philosophers, shamans, poets and mystics are the traditional ‘scientists of the mind’ in this sense.) And having drawn attention to a limiting assumption, science can offer in its place not the ‘truth’ (for science can only ever deliver theories) but a more workable myth: a better model of some aspect of life. A scientist may be led by her theories to ask a question that ‘common sense’ would never have thought of, and if it had, would have written off as ridiculous. And every so often, the reply to such a question will challenge received wisdom, and make us think.

For example, take the simple word ‘see’. What could be more straightforward than the process of noticing what there is around, and acting in a way that takes account of what has been seen? Our common sense does not make a distinction between the conscious experience of seeing, and the more functional idea of ‘registering’ what is there, and incorporating that knowledge into our plans. It hardly makes sense to suppose that we could register anything if we could not ‘see’ it. Yet that is exactly what has been shown, by careful tests, to happen to patients who have suffered a certain kind of brain damage. They cannot ‘see’ anything in one part of their visual field, yet they can respond to questions in a way that they only could if they ‘knew’ what was there. They must be able to ‘see’, because they can act appropriately; yet they have absolutely no visual experience, and strongly deny that they ‘saw’.

We can either mutter ‘weird’, and write this phenomenon off as another piece of psychological trivia; or we can ask what this does to our common sense, to our ‘obvious’ relationship to our own consciousness. Just how much interpreting and decision-making actually goes on without the intervention, or even the knowledge, of the Chief Executive? Is where ‘I’ am sitting really the seat of power, or am I just a puppet, fed not with high-grade intelligence but with a thoroughly expurgated version of events, and handing down edicts to which the unconscious company turns a collectively deaf ear?

The Miracle of Mindfulness

Scientific knowledge will not of itself correct the underlying faults in our inner-vision, any more than reading a textbook on optics will improve your eyesight. But it may well help us to understand and accept the diagnosis, and increase our willingness to seek a more powerful cure. For this we need more than rational understanding of the problem. We need methods for cleansing the ‘doors of perception’, and for these we shall have to turn back to the advice of the mystics again. They offer a bewildering variety of practices, but all share the view that wisdom arises not from more and more understanding, only through a personal programme of ‘perceptual re-education’. Scientific demonstrations, and reasonable argument, may take us to the brink of this process, but it cannot take us any further.

All these varied ‘technologies of transformation’, if they are to have a lasting effect, rely on a single potentiality: mindfulness.2 It is fortunate indeed that evolution has equipped us with a tool to effect this perceptual cleansing, for it would have been quite possible for humankind to have painted itself into a psychological corner from which there was no escape. At the end of every episode Batman used to appear to have got himself into a hopeless position…only for some trick or gadget to save him at the start of the next programme. Luckily we have up our sleeves a particular reflexive use of consciousness that can help us too to escape. In our case the traps are of our own devising, and consist of assumptions and beliefs, dissolved in the very way we see the world, which create apparent problems, and prevent us both from solving them, and from seeing that they are of our own making. Mindfulness involves cultivating the knack of making them visible, and of freeing ourselves from the power they exert to make us ‘shrink to fit’.

In this ‘cleansing of the doors of perception’, as William Blake called it, the presence and the power of the unconscious is revealed. We cease being so eccentric, so displaced from our natural centre of gravity, and can relax into the unknowable heart. This, finally, is the revelation of divine truth: not a glimpse of any conceivable God, but a close encounter of an essentially mysterious kind. So spirituality, it turns out, resides in a simple correction of the brain – or perhaps we should say the ‘world-body-brain-mind’, as it becomes increasingly clear, as the story unfolds, that we cannot legitimately separate them from each other. Neuroscience, the scientific study of the brain and the nervous system, is now able to give us a working picture of the brain that can explain how mystical experience occurs, and why it takes the forms it does.

The mystics have talked of peacefulness and belonging, of wisdom and clarity, of an indiscriminate, impersonal love, of naturalness and simplicity, of knowing, without knowing what it is one knows, of a vivid and fiery quality to perception. Yet why just these qualities should appear together has itself been a mystery. Why should the body course with energy, and vision become luminous and penetrating, at the same time as one is suffused with tranquillity, understanding and compassion? The answer is to be found in the way the brain is built to work, and in the way its processes are corrupted by a small coterie of unrecognized beliefs (principally about the mind itself). When the ‘Self System’ is sidelined or shortcircuited, the brain instantaneously reverts to a more basic modus operandi, of which what we call ‘Buddha mind’, or ‘the grace of God’, is the natural efflorescence.

Evolutionary Beginnings

But let us start at the beginning, with a résumé of the evolutionary history of humankind – a fuller version of which comprises the first part of this book – to orientate you. The twists and turns of our long evolution have bequeathed us a mind that, below the surface, is a curious tangle of abilities and limitations, strengths and weaknesses. It is not an instrument of elegant design, but a ramshackled raft, constructed out of a hodge-podge of materials, each of which happened to float by at a time then they could be used. If we could put the human mind in dry dock, take it to bits, and start again from scratch, we would never come up with the Heath Robinson contraption that has been handed down to us.

The vast majority of this mental raft – and the vast majority of its intelligence – lies below the surface. Conscious awareness arrived, in the course of evolution, probably with the evolution of active hunting as a method of catching food, and probably earlier and more clearly in species that were prey than those that were predators. And it emerged as a corollary of a particular kind of ‘alarm reaction’. But with the development of social living, of language, and of the technology that could make life stable and relatively affluent, consciousness got appropriated by a variety of other systems within the mind, until today it has almost (but not quite) lost its original nature and purpose. In the detailed unravelling of this story, we can find an adequately complicated diagnosis of where and how the mind missed its way.

The mind is a specialized development of the brain, which is a specialized development of the body. The current myth of the body as a mobile pillar of meat piloted by an individual blip of conscious intelligence is false and harmful. Biology is telling us clearly that the body, with all its physical and psychological accoutrements, is a system, an intricate dance of processes and interactions that depends for its existence on continual penetration and perturbation by wider systems of which it is an inextricable part. The body ‘knows’ this; the brain ‘knows’ it’; the mind ‘knows’ it. Only the self-conscious ‘I’, sitting atop this mountain of interdependency, denies and ignores it. When ‘I’ is switched off, the brain-mind immediately recalls what it had affected to forget. ‘Ah yes,’ it whispers to itself; ‘I remember. I belong.’

If the essential mystery at the heart of human experience has somehow been squeezed out of the myths by which we are living, then science – twentieth-century empirical science – can re-mind us of this, just as powerfully as Mozart or meditation. ‘The mind’s new science’, as Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner has dubbed it, is doing just that. It shows us that mysticism is necessary, and mystery is logical.

TWO Body-Building: The Origins of Life

Evolution is a change from a no-howish untalkaboutable all-alikeness to a somehowish and in general talkaboutable not-all-alikeness by continuous sticktogetherations and something-elseifications.

William James

We Do Not Compute

The pickle in which humankind currently finds (and loses) itself is due to the mind, and the mind is due to evolution. The conscious human mind cannot be understood just by looking at the way it is now. It is the tip of a vast evolutionary iceberg that has taken millions of years to form. As in all evolution, the later builds on the earlier; it can modify what went before, but it can never replace it. We have become so preoccupied with consciousness that we have forgotten the unconscious bulk below the surface. Minds are merely the software of the intricate biocomputers we call brains. And brains are the central organizing systems, the communications rooms, of high-tech bodily communities that have multiple goals and needs, and which live in environments that afford almost limitless opportunities. And all this is in aid of smart, tenacious, replicating molecules, who have it in their nature to persist and to breed. The abilities to solve crossword puzzles, to bungee-jump, and to have rows with our children are recent curiosities, balanced precariously atop a tower of earlier discoveries and developments.

Already, in this very first paragraph, I have slipped into using the most widely used metaphor for the brain-mind – the computer. And while in the most general sense ‘computing’ is what the brain-mind does, the analogy can be terribly misleading. Computers have no intrinsic goals. The programs that tell the machinery what to do, and what to ‘want’ to do, arise not from an evolutionary source, but from the mind of the programmer. In the case of we human beings, however, the brain and its mind developed over millennia as tools for helping bodies, and the genes that designed them, to survive. Bodies are made of a kind of stuff that needs to keep trading, in a whole variety of different ways, with the world around it, if it is to persist. Computers can be left switched off for years and (all being well) will leap into action again, as if no time had passed at all, when they are next turned on.

Human beings and other animals grow and evolve. Computers get redesigned, sometimes from scratch. People need to eat to live. No computer has yet been discovered taking a bite out of its desk. There has been a film called The Cars that Ate Paris, but not yet one called The Laptops that Ate IBM. You can understand everything important about a computer by looking at it ‘now’. You can understand very little about the human mind without investigating how it came to be. Computers can be built out of a variety of different materials, and they may end up doing very similar kinds of things. The operation of brains and minds is entirely dependent on the stuff of which they are made, and the worlds they and their ancestors grew up in.

Yet the conscious mind’s view of itself downplays its evolutionary history, and its unconscious substratum, shamelessly. Part of the problem with the human brain-mind is that it has come to see itself as a kind of computer – without embodiment, without any history other than its own experience, without ecology. It has even come to identify only with what comes up on the screen of consciousness, and to ignore its own circuit boards and microchips. To straighten the mind out, it is necessary to remind it of its relationship to its brain, its body, its world and its ‘unconscious’. That is where we have to start.

A Brief History of Slime

Let us briefly go back right to the beginning of life: to the primaeval ooze. A very long time ago – 4 billion years or so – there was no life; only an atmosphere containing simple molecules such as methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water vapour. There was no free oxygen, no ozone layer between the Earth and the sun, so powerful ultraviolet rays could enter the atmosphere unfiltered. Since Stanley Lloyd Miller’s classic experiment in the early 1950s, it has been known that some at least of the basic molecular building blocks of life – the amino acids – can be produced by subjecting mixtures of these gases to the levels of ultraviolet radiation and the types of electrical discharge that would have been around in those early days. Simple chemical processes would have enriched the prehistoric broth to the point where it contained several of the necessary chemical ingredients of life.4

It is a long way, though, from simple proteins and sugars to the molecules and structures that are characteristic of all living systems, from amoebas to Buddhas. There are 200 or so of these essential ‘molecules of life’, and they collaborate with each other in such intricate and self-supporting ways that the whole structure of relationships on which life depends seems to hang together like a multidimensional archway – remove one piece and the whole thing collapses. And while some of them can be found in different brands of primordial soup, many of them, in order to be synthesized, seem to need exactly the kind of environment provided by the living cellwhose origins we are eventually trying to account for. We are faced with a classic ‘Chicken and Egg’ situation: in order to explain how cells were made, we seem to need to postulate the existence of cells!

There are a number of ingenious theories about how the bridge between simple molecules, and life, was built. Graham Cairns-Smith of the University of Glasgow has suggested that, just as an archway needs a temporary support while it is under construction, which can then be taken away when the arch is finished, so the first molecules of life were able to be synthesized and concentrated within the tiny cell-like cavities that are present in certain types of clay. Once these carbon-based molecules had formed their mutually supportive society, they were then able to kiss the clay goodbye.5 However it happened, there emerged, amongst these molecules of life, the ones that were to serve as the powerhouse for the whole of evolution: the self-replicating molecule known as DNA. Each DNA molecule is like a long message, an instruction manual for making all the different constituents of living matter, written in an alphabet comprising only four letters. A simple bacterium needs a manual equivalent to about 1000 book pages to make it and keep it going. The ‘library’ needed to construct and run a human being, contained within the 46 chromosomes of every cell in the body, is equivalent to about a million pages. And, of course, each of these chromosomes is able to photocopy itself with incredible accuracy and elegance, whenever its parent cell divides.

Under the conditions that might have been expected 3,500 million years ago, amino acids have been shown to form into primitive celllike structures. By 3,000 million years ago, cells had developed which were able to generate energy from light: they were capable of photosynthesis. As this process consumes carbon dioxide, and liberates oxygen gas, the composition of the atmosphere was slowly but radically changed. The development of the ozone layer meant further reductions in the amount of ultraviolet radiation penetrating through to the Earth’s surface, and increasingly hard times for the original bacterial or prokaryotic cells. In order to take advantage of the changing conditions, much more complex kinds of cells developedthe eukaryotic cells, from which all multicellular species are derived. These basic building blocks of animal tissue are themselves comprised of collections of different kinds of simpler prokaryotes.6 Each of our human cells, for example, contains mitochondria, which were originally completely independent little creatures. They still have their own DNA which is quite different from that contained within the nucleus of their adopted parent cells, yet have chosen to settle down and work as the energy factories of the cell in return for board, lodging and protection.

The first multi-cellular organisms began to appear on the Earth about 700 million years ago. The basic design of the animal body has over millions of years ramified into the galaxy of different species of which television nature programmes constantly remind us. But the fundamental specification has remained surprisingly constant. Just as city society has evolved in strikingly similar ways all over the world, so the body has come to delegate its necessary functions to a familiar repertoire of subsystems. Like a colony of ants, but more compact and sticky, cells cling together, throwing their lot in with each other, and contributing their specialized talents to the overall good of society, in the hope that ‘All for One and One for All’ will turn out to be a successful strategy.

For example, all bodies develop subsystems whose job it is to turn food into a usable form, transport it round the far-flung part of the empire, and deal with waste disposal. Some citizens roll themselves into a tube, the walls of which learn to weep lubricants that soften the food and start the process of converting raw antelope or sunflower seeds into a usable nutritious juice. To make use of a greater variety of raw materials, some of them quite tough, other brave citizens build themselves into hard white rocks at the entrance to the tunnel, and crush the ore that passes between them. Constant supplies of fresh water are needed by the food processors, and the development of a flappy pink proboscis helps to flip moisture into the front end of the tunnel. While at the other end, sewage operatives divide the waste products into liquids and solids, and develop short-term holding capacities, so that the garbage can be dumped when it is safe, and smart, to do so. If you are evolving into a fish, it does not matter too much if you leak as you go; but if you are on your way to becoming a bird, you are at an evolutionary advantage if you can learn the trick of not fouling the nest.

To work properly cells, like cars, need not only suitable liquid fuel but air, so another subsystem evolves to extract the vital ingredients of air and deliver them. The body grows an internal complex of beaches, a vast coastline along which the air can continually lap, and where chemicals can trap the precious oxygen. In order to maximize the vigour and intimacy of this contact, the enfolded coastline develops into an internally-regulated bellows that constantly exchanges used air with fresh. While inside the body there develops an intricate network of canals that make Venice look like the Sahara desert, again with a central pumping station that keeps the currents flowing, and ensures that supplies reach every nook and cranny.

Ingestion is a crude process, and sometimes things get sucked in at the front end of the tube that interfere with or threaten the smooth workings of the community. Gradually some residents are delegated to lookout duty, their task to discover, through evolutionary trial and error, how to predict by sight or smell or taste what is wholesome and what it is better to avoid or spit out. But mistakes are still made, and so other members of the commune are bred for fighting, forming a territorial army that constantly patrols the system, riding shotgun on the precious supplies, detecting and overpowering intruders and dissidents before they can throw a spanner in the works. And this immune system has to develop the ability to tell, with great accuracy, friend from foe, so that it does not inadvertently submit innocent but unrecognized members of its own family to ‘friendly fire’. Chilean neuroscientist Francisco Varela has shown that these internal defenders of the community must possess, like the Freemasons, an increasingly sophisticated repertoire of secret handshakes which will unmask the imposters – increasing because the ranks of the potential invaders are always changing, and their powers of penetration and impersonation are always growing.7

Unless the whole body is fortunate enough to find itself rooted in the Promised Land, where abundant supplies of milk and honey naturally and continually drift into the open end of its tube, it may well discover the advantages of arms and legs. With arms (and especially with hands on the ends of them) that are hooked up to your lookouts, you are able to reach out and grab passing morsels that would not otherwise have fallen into the top of your tube. (A long sticky tongue that you can aim and flick does the same trick.) Legs expand your hunting ground even further, as well as enabling you to take some evasive action when you find that you have unwittingly strayed into someone else’s. Both attack and escape are hit and miss affairs, of course, and it will have taken hundreds of generations, and many of its great uncles starved or eaten, to get to the point where any animal is as skilled as it is. And each species is of course never a finished product, but just one snap-shot of the continually unfolding evolutionary drama.