Consciousness Without Faith
by Sam Harris, On Faith
Reposted from:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com
"I recently spent an afternoon on the northwestern shore of the Sea of
Galilee, atop the mount where Jesus is believed to have preached his
most famous sermon. It was an infernally hot day, and the sanctuary
was crowded with Christian pilgrims from many continents. Some
gathered silently in the shade, while others staggered in the noonday
sun, taking photographs.
As I sat and gazed upon the surrounding hills gently sloping to an
inland sea, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a
blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense
of being a separate self—an "I" or a "me"—vanished. Everything was as
it had been—the cloudless sky, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of
water—but I no longer felt like I was separate from the scene, peering
out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained. The
experience lasted just a few moments, but returned many times as I
gazed out over the land where Jesus is believed to walked, gathered
his apostles, and worked many of his miracles.
If I were a Christian, I would undoubtedly interpret this experience
in Christian terms. I might believe that I had glimpsed the oneness of
God, or felt the descent of the Holy Spirit. But I am not a Christian.
If I were a Hindu, I might talk about "Brahman," the eternal Self, of
which all individual minds are thought to be a mere modification. But
I am not a Hindu. If I were a Buddhist, I might talk about the
"dharmakaya of emptiness" in which all apparent things manifest. But I
am not a Buddhist.
As someone who is simply making his best effort to be a rational human
being, I am very slow to draw metaphysical conclusions from
experiences of this sort. The truth is, I experience what I would call
the "selfessness of consciousness" rather often, wherever I happen to
meditate—be it in a Buddhist monastery, a Hindu Temple, or while
having my teeth cleaned. Consequently, the fact that I also had this
experience at a Christian holy site does not lend an ounce of
credibility to the doctrine of Christianity.
There is no question that people have "spiritual" experiences (I use
words like "spiritual" and "mystical" in scare quotes, because they
come to us trailing a long tail of metaphysical debris). Every culture
has produced people who have gone off into caves for months or years
and discovered that certain deliberate uses of
attention—introspection, meditation, prayer—can radically transform a
person's moment to moment perception of the world. I believe
contemplative efforts of this sort have a lot to tell us about the
nature of the mind.
There are, in fact, several points of convergence between the modern
sciences of the mind—psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science,
etc.—and some of our contemplative traditions. Both lines of inquiry,
for instance, give us good reasons to believe that the conventional
sense of self is kind of cognitive illusion. While most of us go
through life feeling like we are the thinker of our thoughts and the
experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know
that this is a false view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking
like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of
cortex or stream of neural processing that occupies a privileged
position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging
"center of narrative gravity" (to use Daniel Dennett's fine phrase).
In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one—to most of us,
most of the time. But our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist,
Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also attest, to varying degrees and
with greater or lesser precision, that this point of view is
vulnerable to inquiry.
Consider, what the brain is doing, as a matter of conscious
representation. What are we conscious of? We are conscious of the
world; we are conscious of our bodies in the world; and we are—we
think—conscious of our selves in our bodies. After all, most of us
don't feel merely identical to our bodies. We feel, most of the time,
like we are riding around inside our bodies, as though we are an inner
subject that can utilize the body as a kind of object. This last
representation is an illusion, and can be dispelled as such.
Selflessness is a quality of consciousness that can be subjectively
discovered. Indeed, it is in plain view in every present moment, and
yet it remains difficult to see. If this seems like a paradox,
consider the following analogy:
The optic nerve passes through the retina, so as to create a point in
each of our visual fields where we are effectively blind. Most of us
had this demonstrated to us in school: one marks a piece of paper,
closes an eye, and then moves the paper into a position where the mark
disappears. Of course, only a small minority of people in history have
been aware of their blind spots. And even those of us who know about
them go for decades without noticing them as a matter of direct
perception. And yet they are always there, available to be noticed.
There is an analogous insight into the nature of consciousness—too
near to us, in a sense, to be easily seen. For most people it requires
considerable training in meditation to catch a glimpse of it. But it
is possible to notice that consciousness—that in you which is aware of
your experience in this moment—does not feel like a self. It does not
feel like "I."
As a critic of religious faith, I am often asked what will replace
organized religion. The answer is: many things and nothing. Nothing
need replace its ludicrous and divisive elements. Nothing need replace
the idea that Jesus will return to earth wielding magic powers and
hurl unbelievers into a lake of fire. Nothing need replace the notion
that death in defense of Islam is the highest good. These are
baseless, dangerous, and demeaning ideas. But what about ethics and
spiritual experience? For many, religion still appears the only
vehicle for what is most important in life—love, compassion, morality,
and self-transcendence. To change this, we need a way of talking about
human well-being that is as unconstrained by religious dogma as
science is.
As I write, the second in a series of meditation retreats for
scientists is just getting underway, sponsored by the Mind and Life
Institute. One hundred scientists will spend the next week in silent
meditation, to see whether, and to what degree, this technique of
sustained introspection can inform their thinking about the human
mind. There are also several neuroscience labs now studying the
effects of meditation on the brain. Western interest in meditation has
opened a dialogue between scientists and contemplatives about how the
data of first-person experience can be brought into the charmed circle
of third-person experiment. The goal is to understand the
possibilities of human well-being a little bit better than we do at
present.
I believe that most people are interested in spiritual life, whether
they realize it or not. Every one of us has been born to seek
happiness in a condition that is fundamentally unreliable. What you
get, you lose. We are all (at least tacitly) interested in discovering
just how happy a person can be in such a circumstance. On the question
of how to be most happy, the contemplative life has some important
insights to offer."
Posted by Sam Harris on January 6, 2007 5:34 PM
"On Faith" panelist Sam Harris is the author of the best-selling books
Letter to a Christian Nation (2006) and The End of Faith (2005), which
won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction and has been translated into
many foreign languages.
--
.
|
