Do you see this ultimate reality as some sort of being or intelligence out there?
Well, if you look cross-culturally, what you'll find is that spirit or godhead can be looked at either through first-person, second-person or third-person perspectives. The third-person perspective is to see spirit as a grand "it." In other words, a vast web of life. Gaia in this third person is the sum total of everything that exists. A second-person way of looking sees spirit as a "thou," as an actual intelligence that is present and is something you can, in a sense, have a conversation with, keeping in mind the ultimately unknowable nature of godhead. Many of the contemplative traditions go further and say you can approach spirit as a first person. So that spirit is "I." Or that would be Big Self.
This means "I am God."
That's right. This first-person perspective is an experience of pure "I-am-ness," behind your relative ego. Discovering your Big Self comes directly in the contemplative state of non-dual awareness. This means subject and object are one. It's not that you're looking at the mountain when you're going on a nature walk. You are the mountain. You're not listening to the river anymore. You are the river.
You are a longtime meditator. You've written about having sustained experiences of this nondual awareness. What does it feel like?
[Laughs] It's very simple. It's something that's already present in one's awareness but it's so simple and so obvious that it's not noticed. Zen refers to it as the "such-ness" of reality. [The Christian mystic] Meister Eckhart called it "thus-ness." These states of consciousness are temporary, peak experiences. There's no bliss. Rather, it's an absence of any constriction, including feelings of bliss. The feeling is vast openness and freedom and lightness. You don't have a sense that I'm in here and the world is out there.
You were a budding scientist at one point, a graduate student in biochemistry. Why did you give up the scientific track to study these spiritual matters?
I had a scientific orientation. I think I was a born scientist. In fact, I was one of those kids with the early science labs -- all the frogs you cut up, the explosions in the basement. I went to Duke University in the medical track. And then I decided I wanted to do something more creative, so I switched to biochemistry at Nebraska. But as I moved into young adulthood, mere rationality didn't really seem to be answering the questions that were arising in that stage of my life: Why am I here? What's it all about? What's the nature of reality?
What changed for you?
I realized that exterior science wasn't working. So I turned to Zen Buddhism. To me it was very scientific. It's a practice, an actual experiment. If you do this experiment, you'll have some sort of experience, and you'll get some data. William James defined data as an experience. Then you check your direct experience with other people to make sure you didn't goof up. Some sort of consensual evidence is required. There are several schools of thinking about how to evaluate scientific evidence. One of the most famous is Karl Popper's, where you try to disprove it. So this process is exactly what I was doing in Zen Buddhism. You have to train your mind. And frankly, this mind training was more difficult than anything I did in graduate school.
What about Karl Popper's objection: If you can't disprove something, then it's not science. Can you disprove the effects of meditation? How far can you take this scientific analogy when you're talking about a contemplative practice?
Pretty far, I think. These meditative disciplines have been passed down for hundreds of years, sometimes thousands of years. Much like judo, there are actual techniques that you can learn and pass on. In Zen, you have the practice of zazen. You have to sit and count your breath for up to an hour and concentrate on an object for at least five minutes without losing track. The average American adult can do it for 18 seconds. Then you have the data, what's called satori. Once you train your mind and look into your interior, you investigate the actual nature and structure of your interior consciousness. If you do this intensely enough, you'll get a profound aha experience, a profound awakening. And that satori is then checked with others who've done this practice.
But I doubt many scientists would accept this as proof of science because, ultimately, people are left to describe their own experiences. You can't measure this with any conventional scientific instruments.
You move in the realm of phenomenology. And you either accept phenomenology or you don't. This also applies to psychoanalysis. You get the same complaints that it's not real science, that you can't prove it. Well, fine, but then you can't prove any interior experience you're having. You can't prove you're loving your wife, you can't prove you're happy. Forget all of that, it's not real. If that's the mind-set you have, nobody's going to convince you otherwise. It really comes down to whether there are interior sciences. These interior sciences use the same principles as the exterior sciences. If you define science as based on sensory experience, then these interior endeavors are not science. But if you define science as based on experience, then these interior ones are.
What about brain-imaging studies? Various neuroscientists are hooking up Buddhist monks and Christian nuns to brain-scanning technology, and they see changes in brain activity during meditation or prayer. But can they tell us anything fundamental about the nature of consciousness?
Yes and no. What's starting to show up are significant and unique fingerprints of these meditative states on the brain. That's been demonstrated with people who do a type of meditation that's said to increase compassion -- imagining someone else who's in pain and breathing in their pain, creating a feeling of oneness with that person. These people start showing distinctive gamma wave patterns. These gamma waves show up almost no place else. But let me tell you what it doesn't prove. The claim that it's a higher mental state can only be made if you're looking at it from the inside. We say that waking is more real than dreaming. But brain waves won't tell you that. The brain waves are just different. You can't say one is more real than the other.
This raises a fundamental question about the whole mind-brain problem. Virtually all neuroscientists say the mind is nothing more than a 3-pound mass of firing neurons and electrochemical surges in the brain. Why do you think this view is wrong?
It reduces everything. And you can make no distinctions of value. There's no such thing as love is better than hate, or a moral impulse is better than an immoral impulse. All those value distinctions are erased.
But is that scientific view wrong?
At this point, you enter the philosophy of science, and the argument is endless. Is there nothing but physical stuff in the universe? Or is there some sort of interiority? We're not talking about ghosts and goblins and souls and all that kind of stuff. Just: Is there interiority? Is there an inside to the universe? And if there is interiority, then that is where consciousness resides. You can't see it, but it's real. This is the claim that phenomenology makes.
For example, you and I are attempting to reach mutual understanding right now. And we say, aha, I understand what you're saying. But you can't point to that understanding. Where does it exist? But if you take a phenomenology of our interior states, then you look at them as being real in themselves. And that's where values lie and meaning lies. If you try to reduce those to matter, you not only lose all those distinctions, but you can't even make the claim that some are right and some are wrong.
But somewhere down the road -- 50 years from now, 500 years from now -- once neuroscience becomes much more advanced, will scientists be able to pinpoint where these values and thoughts come from?
I'm saying we'll never understand it. The materialists keep issuing promissory notes. They always promise they're going to do it tomorrow. But interior and exterior arise together. You can't reduce one to the other. They're both real. Deal with it.
You're saying there's no way we can map what's happening in our brains -- the neuronal activity, the synaptic connections -- to explain what's going on in our inner experience.
That's right. All you can do is map certain correlations. You can say that when a person's thinking logically, certain parts of the brain light up. But you can't determine what the person is thinking. More important, you can't reproduce the reality of the person thinking because that's a first-person experience. This first-person reality can't be reduced to third-person material entities. What that means is that consciousness can't be reduced to matter. You can't give a material explanation of how the experience of consciousness arises.
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