The End of Faith (26 page)

But, of course, your body is itself an environment teeming with creatures, in relation to
which you are sovereign in name alone. To examine the body of a person, its organs and
tissues, cells and intestinal flora (sometimes fauna, alas), is to be confronted by a
world that bears no more evidence of an overriding conscious intel- ligence than does the
world at large. Is there any reason to suspect, when observing the function of
mitochondria within a cell, or the twitching of muscle fibers in the hand, that there is a
mind, above and beyond such processes, thinking, “L'Žtat c'est moi”? Indeed, any privilege
we might be tempted to accord the boundary of the skin in our search for the physical self
seems profoundly arbitrary.

The frontiers of the mental self are no easier to discern: memes, taboos, norms of
decorum, linguistic conventions, prejudices, ideals, aesthetic biases, commercial
jinglesthe phenomena that populate the landscape of our minds are immigrants from the
world at large. Is your desire to be physically fitor your taste in clothing, your sense
of community, your expectation of reciprocal kindness, your shyness, your affability, your
sexual quirks, etc.something that originates with you? Is it something best thought of as
residing in you? These phenomena are the direct result of your embeddedness in a world of social
relationships and culture (as well as a product of your genes). Many of them seem to be no
more “you,” ultimately, than the rules of English grammar are.

And yet, this feeling of being a self persists. If the term “I” refers to anything at all, it does not refer simply to the body. After all, most of us feel individuated as a self within the body. I speak of “my” body more or less as I speak of “my” car, for the simple reason
that every act of perception or cognition conveys the tacit sense that the knower is
something other than the thing known. Just as my awareness of my car demonstrates that I, as a subject, am something other than it, as an object, I can
be aware of my hand, or an emotion, and experi- ence the same cleavage between subject and
object. For this reason, the self cannot simply be equated with the totality of a person's
men- tal life or with his personality as a whole.6 Rather, it is the point of

view around which the changing states of his mind and body appear to be constellated.
Whatever the relationship between consciousness and the body actually is, in experiential
terms the body is something to which the conscious self, if such there be, stands in relation. Exactly when, in evolutionary or developmental terms, this point of view emerges is not
known, but one thing is clear: at some point in the first years of life most human beings
are christened as “I,” the perennial subject, for whom all appearances, inside and out,
become objects of a kind, waiting to be known. And it is as “I” that every sci- entist begins his inquiry into the nature of the world and every pious man
folds his hands in prayer.7

THE sense of self seems to be the product of the brain's representing its own acts of
representation; its seeing of the world begets an image of a one who sees. It is important to realize that this feeling the sense that each of us has of appropriating, rather than merely being, a sphere of experienceis not a necessary feature of con- sciousness. It is, after all,
conceivable that a creature could form a representation of the world without forming a
representation of itself in the world. And, indeed, many spiritual practitioners claim to experience the world in
just this way, perfectly shorn of self.

A basic finding of neurophysiology lends credence to such claims. It is not so much what
they are but what they do that makes neurons see, hear, smell, taste, touch, think, and feel. Like any other
function that emerges from the activity of the brain, the feeling of self is best thought
of as a process. It is not very surprising, therefore, that we can lose this feeling, because processes, by
their very nature, can be interrupted. While the experience of selflessness does not
indicate anything about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world (and
is thus mute on the question of what happens after death), it has broad implications for
the sciences of mind, for our approach to spirituality, and for our conception of human
happiness.

As a mental phenomenon, loss of self is not as rare as our schol- arly neglect of it
suggests. This experience is characterized by a

sudden loss of subject/object perception: the continuum of experi- ence remains, but one
no longer feels that there is a knower stand- ing apart from the known. Thoughts may
arise, but the feeling that one is the thinker of these thoughts has vanished. Something
has definitely changed at the level of one's moment-to-moment experi- ence, and this
changethe disappearance of anything to which the pronoun “\” can be faithfully attachedsignals that there had been a conscious experience of selfhood
all the while, however difficult it may be to characterize.

Look at this book as a physical object. You are aware of it as an appearance in consciousness. You may feel that your consciousness is one thingit
is whatever illuminates your world from some point behind your eyes, perhapsand the book
is another. This is the kind of dualistic (subject/object) perception that characterizes
our normal experience of life. It is possible, however, to look for your self in such a
way as to put this subject/object dichotomy in doubtand even to banish it altogether.

The contents of consciousnesssights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, moods, etc.whatever
they are at the level of the brain, are merely expressions of consciousness at the level of our experi- ence. Unrecognized as such, many of these
appearances seem to impinge upon consciousness from without, and the sense of self
emerges, and grows entrenched, as the feeling that that which knows is circumscribed, modified, and often oppressed by that which is known. Indeed, it is likely that our parents found us in our cribs long before we found ourselves
there, and that we were merely led by their gaze, and their pointing fingers, to coalesce
around an implied center of cognition that does not, in fact, exist.8 Thereafter, every maternal caress, every satisfaction of hunger or thirst, as well as the
diverse forms of approval and rebuke that came in reply to the actions of our embodied
minds, seemed to confirm a self-sense that we, by example, finally learned to call “I”and thus we became the narrow locus around which all things and events, pleasant and
unpleasant, continue to swirl.

In subjective terms, the search for the self seems to entail a

paradox: we are, after all, looking for the very thing that is doing the looking.
Thousands of years of human experience suggests, however, that the paradox here is only
apparent: it is not merely that the com- ponent of our experience that we call “I” cannot
be found; it is that it actually disappears when looked for in a rigorous way.

THE foregoing is just a gloss on the phenomenology here, but it should be sufficient to
get us started. The basic (and, I think, uncon- testable) fact is that almost every human
being experiences the dual- ity of subject and object in some measure, and most of us feel
it powerfully nearly every moment of our lives. It is scarcely an exag- geration to say
that the feeling that we call “I” is one of the most pervasive and salient features of
human life: and its effects upon the world, as six billion “selves” pursue diverse and
often incompatible ends, rival those that can be ascribed to almost any other phe- nomenon
in nature. Clearly, there is nothing optimalor even nec- essarily viableabout our present form of subjectivity. Almost every problem we have can be ascribed to
the fact that human beings are utterly beguiled by their feelings of separateness. It
would seem that a spirituality that undermined such dualism, through the mere
contemplation of consciousness, could not help but improve our sit- uation. Whether or not
great numbers of human beings will ever be in a position to explore this terrain depends
on how our discourse on religion proceeds. There is clearly no greater obstacle to a truly
empirical approach to spiritual experience than our current beliefs about God.

The Wisdom of the East

Inevitably, the foregoing will strike certain readers as a confusing eruption of
speculative philosophy. This is unfortunate, for none of it has been speculative or even
particularly philosophicalat least

not in the sense that this term has acquired in the West. Thousands of years have passed
since any Western philosopher imagined that a person should be made happy, peaceful, or
even wise, in the ordinary sense, by his search for truth.9 Personal transformation, or indeed liberation from the illusion of the self, seems to have
been thought too much to ask: or rather, not thought of at all. Consequently, many of us
in the West are conceptually unequipped to understand empir- ical claims of the sort
adduced above.

In fact, the spiritual differences between the East and the West are every bit as shocking
as the material differences between the North and the South. Jared Diamond's fascinating
thesis, to sum it up in a line, is that advanced civilization did not arise in sub-Saharan
Africa, because one can't saddle a rhinoceros and ride it into battle.10 If there is an equally arresting image that accounts for why nondualistic, empirical
mysticism seems to have arisen only in Asia, I have yet to find it. But I suspect that the
culprit has been the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim emphasis on faith itself. Faith is
rather like a rhinoceros, in fact: it won't do much in the way of real work for you, and
yet at close quarters it will make spectacular claims upon your attention.

This is not to say that spiritual realization has been a common attainment east of the
Bosporus. Clearly, it has not. It must also be conceded that Asia has always had its fair
share of false prophets and charlatan saints, while the West has not been entirely bereft
of wis- dom.11 Nevertheless, when the great philosopher mystics of the East are weighed against the
patriarchs of the Western philosophical and theological traditions, the difference is
unmistakable: Buddha, Shankara, Padmasambhava, Nagarjuna, Longchenpa, and countless others
down to the present have no equivalents in the West. In spir- itual terms, we appear to
have been standing on the shoulders of dwarfs. It is little wonder, therefore, that many
Western scholars have found the view within rather unremarkable.12

While this is not a treatise on Eastern spirituality, it does not seem out of place to
briefly examine the differences between the Eastern and the Western canons, for they are
genuinely startling. To

illustrate this point, I have selected a passage at random from a shelf of Buddhist
literature. The following text was found with closed eyes, on the first attempt, from
among scores of books. I invite the reader to find anything even remotely like this in the
Bible or the Koran.

[I]n the present moment, when (your mind) remains in its own condition without
constructing anything,

Awareness at that moment in itself is quite ordinary. And when you look into yourself in
this way nakedly (without

any discursive thoughts), Since there is only this pure observing, there will be found a
lucid

clarity without anyone being there who is the observer; Only a naked manifest awareness is
present. (This awareness) is empty and immaculately pure, not being cre-

ated by anything whatsoever. It is authentic and unadulterated, without any duality of
clarity

and emptiness. It is not permanent and yet it is not created by anything. However, it is
not a mere nothingness or something annihilated

because it is lucid and present. It does not exist as a single entity because it is
present and clear

in terms of being many. (On the other hand) it is not created as a multiplicity of things

because it is inseparable and of a single flavor. This inherent self-awareness does not
derive from anything out-

side itself. This is the real introduction to the actual condition of things.

One could live an eon as a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew and never encounter any teachings
like this about the nature of consciousness. The comparison with Islam is especially
invidious, because Pad- masambhava was virtually Muhammad's contemporary.14 While the

meaning of the above passage might not be perfectly apparent to all readersit is just a
section of a longer teaching on the nature of mind and contains a fair amount of Buddhist
jargon (“clarity,” “emptiness,” “single flavor,” etc.)it is a rigorously empirical doc-
ument, not a statement of metaphysics. Even the contemporary lit- erature on
consciousness, which spans philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience,
cannot match the kind of precise, phe- nomenological studies that can be found throughout
the Buddhist canon. Although we have no reason to be dogmatically attached to any one
tradition of spiritual instruction, we should not imagine that they are all equally wise
or equally sophisticated. They are not. Mysticism, to be viable, requires explicit instructions, which need suffer no more ambiguity or artifice in their exposition than we
find in a manual for operating a lawn mower.15 Some traditions realized this millennia ago. Others did not.

Meditation

Most techniques of introspection that aim at uncovering the intrin- sic properties of
consciousness are referred to as methods of medita- tion. To be told that a person is
“meditating,” however, is to be given almost no information at all about the content of
his experience. “Meditation,” in the sense that I use it here, refers to any means whereby
our sense of “self”of subject/object dualism in percep- tion and cognitioncan be made to
vanish, while consciousness remains vividly aware of the continuum of experience.16

Inevitably, the primary obstacle to meditation is thinking. This leads many people to assume that the goal of meditation is to pro- duce a
thought-free state. It is true that some experiences entail the temporary cessation of
thought, but meditation is less a matter of suppressing thoughts than of breaking our
identification with them, so that we can recognize the condition in which thoughts
themselves arise. Western scientists and philosophers generally imagine that