Noises from the Darkroom
The Science and Mystery of the Mind
Guy Claxton

Table of Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Foreword

PART I: EVOLUTION OF THE MIND

Chapter 1 Science and Mystery

Chapter 2 Body-Building: The Origins of Life

Chapter 3 The Plastic Brain

Chapter 4 The Self-Organizing Organizer

Chapter 5 Mosaic Mind

Chapter 6 The Pressures of Society

Chapter 7 Languaging the Brain

PART II: THE STORY OF THE SELF

Chapter 8 The Language of the Self

Chapter 9 Affluence, Leisure and Learning

Chapter 10 Identity and Survival

Chapter 11 Accentuate the Permanent: the Narrative Self

PART III: THE EMERGENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Chapter 12 Alarums and Excursions

Chapter 13 Feelings and Seeings

Chapter 14 The Circumcision of Consciousness

Chapter 15 The Cultivation of Ignorance

Chapter 16 Stupidity: the Retardation of Perception

Chapter 17 Myths to Live By

PART IV: UNCONSCIOUSNESS REGAINED

Chapter 18 Myths of the Mind

Chapter 19 Unconsciousness — The Essential Mystery

Chapter 20 The Reconsecration of Unconsciousness

Chapter 21 The Restoration of Sanity

Notes

Index

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the publisher

Epigraph

Our minds lie in us like fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish.

Ted Hughes

It is the impossible job of the mystic, if he wishes to try to teach what he knows, to scrute the inscrutable, speak the unspeakable, and eff the ineffable.

Alan Watts

Foreword

The human mind is mysterious in two fundamentally different ways. It is mysterious in the sense that we do not yet have a clear understanding of how it works. Penetrating this mystery is the job of science, and there is, currently, a flurry of very fruitful and exciting activity going on in laboratories and seminar rooms around the world. One of the aims of this book is to provide a reader-friendly synthesis of, and some novel contributions to, this research. The approach of ‘cognitive science’, as it is called, sees the mystery of the mind as a temporary fog of incomprehension which precise experimentation and smart theorizing will eventually dispel.

But the mind is mysterious in a much more profound and indelible sense – and this meaning of mystery is not scientific but religious. The great spiritual traditions of the world agree that a brush with God is a close encounter of an essentially mysterious kind. The more clearly we see, the more obvious it becomes that at the very heart of human experience there is an ineffable Something, greater by far than the human mind could ever, in principle, encompass. ‘The peace of God passeth all understanding’, and ‘God moves in a mysterious way’, not because we don’t yet have enough data about the Almighty, but because He/She/It/They are fundamentally, intrinsically enigmatic. And that enigma, so the mystical explorers tell us, is not remote but present, accessible in every moment of mundane human experience. Thus the larger aim of this book is to bring these two meanings of ‘mystery’ into conjunction, and to show how science, by clarifying what it is to be a living human being, demands that we remember the invisible bedrock on which we are built. For our modern intuitive understanding of our own psychology leaves it out. And this oversight is not a matter of academic interest, but of vital personal and even global significance.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the world is in a mess because the human mind is in a mess. The problems we face are not at root technological, political or economic; they are psychological and spiritual. And the mind is in a mess because it misunderstands itself. We pollute the skies and ruin the earth because we are confused about who and what we are. It is because of our improper and unjust relationship with our own psychology that some of us plough up fields of good wheat while others of us are starving; some of us confess to murders that others of us have committed. Every culture lives within an invisible myth; and a central part of that myth, the most invisible of all, concerns human nature. Our culture has developed a particularly disastrous mind-myth, and while that myth remains unconscious and unexamined, we will continue to wreck the nest and hurt each other.

One of the symptoms of the mind’s disease is that it will go to great lengths to examine every conceivable option except the right one. It will think endless new thoughts, but has extreme difficulty in scrutinizing that-which-thinks. The fundamental strategic problem of our time, therefore, is how to get individual minds, in sufficient quantities and with sufficient speed, to embark enthusiastically on the requisite process of demythologization-brain-washing, in the sense of laundering away our misconceptions, you might say. If cognitive science can demonstrate to rational minds how and why they have expurgated their own mystery, and what it has cost them to do so; if it can open our ears to the noises from the darkroom and make us wonder about them, then it will have proved itself valuable as well as merely interesting.

The science on which we have to draw is biological and psychological. Twenty years ago, the dialogue between science and religion was revitalized by the appearance of Fritjof Capra’s classic The Tao of Physics, and since then there have been many attempts to account for the basic mysteries of human spirit and consciousness in terms of the fascinating concepts of cosmological and particle physics. But these accounts, it has turned out, while they offer intriguing metaphors and allegories, are not real explanations at all. Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’, however powerful in the world of the atomic nucleus, tells us nothing of interest about the emergent properties of brains and minds – just as the study of liver disease in principle cannot explain the Nuremberg rallies.¹ Spirituality is a phenomenon of whole human beings embedded in their biological and social worlds, and it is therefore from the shores of brain science, evolutionary biology, and transpersonal psychology that we have to build out towards the far bank of mystery.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge some of the major bridge-builders in this area, whose masterly construction work has enabled me to reach out as far as I have. Not all of them will approve of the uses to which I have put their work, but without them it would not have been possible. There are the founders of systems theory, such as Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and Gregory Bateson with his famous search for ‘the pattern which connects’. There are those who have forged links between religion (a word whose root meaning is itself ‘to bind back together’) – especially the Eastern traditions of Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism – and forms of Western psychology: most notably Alan Watts and his ‘dharma heir’ Ken Wilber. More recently there are the pioneers of ‘ecopsychology’ such as Warwick Fox and Theodore Roszak. And then there are psychologists such as Nicholas Humphrey and Robert Ornstein, whose informed speculations about the evolution of mind and consciousness have contributed much to the development of my own thought. The fact that I have come to the conclusion that the origins of the unconscious are much more important than those of consciousness in no way detracts from my debts to them. Finally there are the cognitive scientists, whose bold ideas about the nature of brain, mind and self have contributed perhaps most of all to the story that I want to tell. I am thinking especially of philosopher Daniel Dennett, and neuroscientists Gerald Edelman and Michael Gazzaniga. To all of these, and many others, my thanks for their building materials.

On a more personal note, I am most grateful to Jenny Edwards and Liz Puttick, my editor, both of whom read drafts of the book and made suggestions for improvement, the wisdom of which I could not deny. Thanks to Stephen Batchelor for sharing on many occasions his profound understanding of Buddhism. Though Buddhism as such hardly appears in this book, its insights permeate Parts II, III and IV.

Finally, a note on style. Because the web of ideas in this book is spun within a context of practical concern, I have endeavoured to write in an evocative, sometimes even jaunty, manner that will, I hope, engage both the general reader and the experts in the various fields on which I touch. Where this has meant throwing my more natural scholarly caution to the winds, I have done so. One of my draft-readers wrote to me: ‘I can’t remember ever having read another science book that made me laugh aloud!’ I admit that comment pleased me almost as much as any learned approbation. In keeping with this attempt to treat weighty matters with a light touch, the referencing is minimal and illustrative rather than comprehensive – though if you wrote to me I could give you chapter and verse and in the interests of good story-telling I have written as if I were propounding the absolute truth, rather than constructing a flexible, equivocal span of ideas.

Guy Claxton

Dartington, October 1993

1 Evolution of the Mind

ONE Science and Mystery

The mind is far too narrow to contain itself. But where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside and not in itself? How can it be, then, that the mind cannot grasp itself? A great marvel rises in me; astonishment seizes me. Men go forth to marvel at the height of mountains and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbit of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves.

St Augustine

Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

Ambrose Bierce

Pooh got up and began to look for himself.

A.A. Milne

The Overestimation of Consciousness

When people talk about something being ‘second nature’, they are referring to what seems natural, obvious, or habitual – common sense. It is the business of both scientific and religious enquiry (in their very different ways) to keep showing us how far this second nature misrepresents and oversimplifies ‘first nature’: the reality of Nature and – more importantly in this book – Human Nature. We take our view of ourselves for granted. Yet what is second nature to us about ourselves is at least as suspect as our flawed intuitions about the natural world outside.

The two most vital ingredients of human nature, to which our ‘second nature’ does not do justice, are its mystery and its history. Instead of a core apprehension of the mystery we truly are, we have unwittingly constructed a bogus sense of self, full of hubris, that is closely identified with consciousness: so closely that we are no longer sensitive to the underlying, inaccessible layers and motions of mind, brain and body that form the moment-to-moment swell from which the breakers of consciousness emerge. It is as if we imagined that the drama of our lives were being played out on a brightly lit stage, oblivious to the wings, the dressing-rooms, the technicians, and all the invisible paraphernalia without which there could be no play.

We do not need to go back-stage, to know every detail of what goes on behind the scenes, in order to enjoy the production. But if we do not know, at some level, that there is a ‘behind-the-scenes’, then we confuse playing and reality. We become busy and anxious, forced to duck down in our seat when the villain pulls a gun, and to clamber on to the stage to rescue the heroine. When the mystery of the mind is unappreciated, people become compulsively drawn into the drama, as campaigners, insurers, money-makers and busybodies. When the dark surround is acknowledged, and the attempt to control everything is put in perspective, play is possible. God – or ‘enlightenment’, or the Tao – is essentially a sense of mystery; a mystery that is impenetrable, but entirely understandable. When Nietzsche wrote ‘God is dead’, he was declaring that humankind had lost its sense of mystery.

By identifying ourselves with a mobile pinprick of self-awareness, we overestimate the importance and the trustworthiness of the conscious mind, and we become out of touch with the invisible layers of brain and body on which it rests. This is unfortunate because while the modern conscious self is solitary, a candle in the night, the earlier evolutionary strata that continue to comprise the bulk of our being are ecological, connected, ‘at home’. The surface of our skin and the end of our driveway are not the limits of our personal terrain; they form our connection, our joints, the points at which each ‘member’ of the human race is connected to the wider body of nature and society. If we do not ‘re-member’ ourselves, we must continually strive to forge links of love (or, in desperation, domination) that are caricatures of what, in the mystery, is already, still, in place.

In the last three centuries, we have completed a complicated process of evolution, each individual step of which has helped us to survive, but which eventually has led us to lose our understanding of mystery, and with it our sense of wholeness, belonging and reverence. Consciousness has become the adopted seat of our identity. People nowadays do not just think a lot; they think that who they are is someone who is doing a lot of thinking. Cogito, ergo sum. We think that, if we do not notice something, it has no effect on us. We think that our deepest interests are served by pursuing those things that we are aware of wanting. We think that, if only we could figure things out carefully enough, most of life’s difficulties could be smoothed out. We take our perceptions for granted, and think that what we think matters frightfully.

We have been taught by Descartes and his heirs to be ignorant of those aspects of human life that are not easily available to conscious inspection. We inhabit a world made up of consciousness, and what cannot enter into that world is None of My Business. How the blood gets round the body, by what alchemy a cauliflower is transmuted into human flesh and bone: these may be miracles – they can intrigue me, as a Black Hole or a Desert Orchid may intrigue me – but I feel a bystander, not a participant. I do not, except rarely (on occasions such as this), even become aware of not being aware of the millions of processes that sustain me and comprise me. We do not even bother to think of such things as unconscious.

And when we do think of ‘the unconscious’ we have been taught by Freud to associate it with the murky bits of the mind; those aspects of emotion and personality from which we shy away in fright or revulsion. The unconscious is ‘The Little Shop of Horrors’; it is ‘Where the Wild Things Are’. It is the cellar in which we put everything about ourselves that we have (or had) good reason to forget. It is selfish, infantile and embarrassing. It wants to shout ‘I’M BORED’, ‘LET’S FUCK’ or ‘DON’T HURT ME’. If ‘I’, the conscious censor, were to let it, it might even erupt with hate or lust or sheer energy that would make me, the conscious me, think I was mad.

Creatures of Belief

Because we are creatures of belief, what we believe – without knowing that we believe it – about our minds determines the reality we inhabit. It determines what we allow ourselves to see. It determines the goals we must pursue. It determines the laws we pass and the motorways we build and the forests we fell and the restaurants we frequent. Even the countryside, throughout vast areas of the world, is a monument to mind: a representation not only of what generations have believed in and lived for, but of the view they have had of themselves – of their emotions, memories, thoughts and identities. Our ‘folk psychology’, woven out of landscape, language and a million subliminal events, forms the invisible filter through which we have to look as we look inward.

We do not see this filter because we see through it. It is the unacknowledged background against which our mental life stands out in relief. We say ‘You make me mad’, without ever pausing to inspect the theory of emotion which this dubious claim demands. We say ‘I’m sorry – I wasn’t myself’, without noticing what a curious view of personality is being implied. We say ‘I changed my mind’, without wondering who exactly it is that changed what (or what it was that changed whom). We try in our courts to decide whether a mass murderer is mad, only rarely doubting the sanity of the question itself.

The See-Through Mind

The cornerstone of contemporary folk psychology is the assumption that the mind is see-through: that when we look inward, through the window of introspection, we see what is there. We imagine the mind to be like a clock in a glass case, with all its important workings available for inspection by its one privileged owner. We think we know ourselves already, or could know ourselves if we chose, if not completely, then at least intimately and directly. This is the cardinal misconception, and its appreciation forms the starting point for the exposé with which this book is concerned.

Contrary to popular opinion, the human mind is a closed book. The room behind the eyes is forever dark. No access is possible, either by thinking or via the senses – for thoughts and experiences are the produce of this obscure factory, not glimpses of its operation. As with the manufacture of Cointreau or Tabasco, what goes on behind the scenes is a jealously guarded trade secret. All we get to do is taste the concoction; to the world of the concocter we are not privy at all. In the mind feelings are fabricated, thoughts are marshalled, perceptual pictures are painted. But of the painter and the engineer we have no idea.

Or rather, we can only have ideas. We think we are looking at ourselves through transparent windows. We think that consciousness gives us privileged access to our process and our nature: that the dark-room of the mind is light and airy, and our natural home. We think that the stories it tells about itself are true. Yet we are not looking through clear glass. We are looking at a screen on which some rather special products of the mind’s activity are back-projected. Behind the screen there is a director producing a constant stream of interwoven films, one of which – one recurring theme – concerns the work of a director making a constant stream of interwoven films. As in Frederico Fellini’s masterpiece 8 ¹/₂, we are not seeing the director at work, but only the director’s partial and fictionalized view of a hypothetical director at work. We are invited to believe that the fictional and factual Fellinis are one and the same. But we have no right to do so, and we can never know the degree to which they really correspond—for the real Fellini remains always beyond the filmgoers’ ken.

If the images that the mind created of itself were truthful – if the pictures projected onto the blind showed what we would actually see if the blind were raised – then nothing would be lost by mistaking one for the other. If appearance matches reality, the distinction becomes unimportant, indeed loses its meaning. But if the mind dissembles, then the consequences of buying its pronouncements may be more interesting, perhaps more serious. If the mind tells you that you are 5 feet 3 inches tall, and take a 14 inch collar, when you are really 6 foot and a 16, then you are going to bang your head on a lot of lintels, and buy a lot of clothes that leave you with cold ankles and restricted breathing. Like the man suffering from a perpetual headache, the only doctor who is going to be able to help you is the one who persuades you to buy bigger shirts.

Inside the dark-room, inscrutable though it is, are collected all the data and beliefs that give life its meaning and construct its purpose. Buried there are the files that tell us how to be happy, who and what to care about, when to react and when to keep still; the programs that enable us to understand language, to record the past, to spin fantasies, and to tell the ‘real’ from the ‘imaginary’. Manifesting indirectly, in attractions and expectations, spontaneous allegiances and solitary dreams, there are the casts of mind that tell us how to recognize a human being who will take care of us, or give us sexual pleasure; how to feel when Arsenal lose the Cup (‘Ecstatic’, ‘Destroyed’, ‘What’s “arsenal”? What “cup”?’) And somewhere right at the centre of operations is the unarticulated specification of what it means to be a person: what kind of a being is a human being. From the frisson of an impulse buy, to the image of a Good Death, all is fashioned by the back-room boys and girls of the human mind.

Reasonable Doubt

There are three potential sources of information which could give us cause to doubt this picture: everyday experience, the reports of the mystics, and science. What about the many occasions on which we have suddenly ‘come to’, and realized that we have been carrying out complicated tasks requiring accurate perception, subtle action, and intelligent judgement – driving, say, or even walking along a crowded pavement – without any conscious knowledge or memory? While consciousness has been occupied with important affairs unconsciousness seems to have been coping very nicely on its own. What about the times when we have reacted instantaneously to a sudden event—a dog runs under the wheels, a fierce backhand from an opponent comes hurtling at your face – and before the conscious mind has even taken in what is happening the brakes are applied, or a winning volley is played? The excitement may be all over before consciousness comes puffing along with its self-centred commentary and its post hoc efforts to take the credit or shift the blame.

For 2,500 years at least there has been another source of evidence for the power of the unconscious: the writings of the mystics. As we shall see, they have couched their experiences in very different terms, drawing on whatever images were provided by their diverse cultures in their attempts to convey what they have seen. But time and again they describe their experience in terms of an abrupt shift in their relationship to the unconscious. Using theistic imagery, as most of them in the Western world were bound to do, they claim a direct encounter with a God who is, paradoxically, absolutely unknowable; whose being is to be found not in some remote heaven, but at a person’s innermost core, prior to any form of knowing or conceptualization. From ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ to Rilke’s ‘no matter how deeply I go into myself my God is dark’, they agree that the most profound experience of truth is to be found by diving into the silent spring, the well-head, from which all consciousness arises. If you can but let yourself be sucked into the Black Hole at the centre of your being – if you can walk boldly into the darkroom – then an enormous weight of anxious, self-centred concern will drop away, and a light and kindly wisdom will immediately emerge to take its place.

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.

What is Evolution?

It will be obvious that I am assuming the general validity of an enlightened neo-Darwinian view of evolution. There may have been a few amino acids or simple proteins that arrived on the earth via meteorites, and these may even have helped to kick-start the evolution of self-replicating molecules. But within a scientific context we are not yet obliged to take seriously such imaginative fancies as the arrival of fully-fledged life-forms from other planets, or the guiding hand of a Cosmic Architect in whose eyes humanity is the highest pinnacle of Creation. To a shark, a beaver, a cockroach or a bacterium, it must also look as if they are the target towards which evolution has been unerringly aimed, and the species for whom the world has been designed.

The increasing complexity of the living world is real enough, but any ‘intention’, any overall ‘design’ or ‘purpose’, can only be conceived, and projected backwards into history, with the benefit of hindsight. We can say, in general, that it is in the nature of a world that contains self-replicating entities subject to the developmental constraints of natural selection, that things are going to diversify, become more intricate, colonize more inhospitable habitats, and develop greater flexibility in the face of environmental change; but how that is going to pan out would be in (if there were any) the laps of the Gods. As Graham Cairns-Smith puts it: ‘What does happen in evolution depends so much on particular circumstances that the course of evolution over the long term is about as predictable as the meandering form of a river or the exact shape of tomorrow’s clouds: one can only illustrate possibilities and indicate general expectations.’⁸

The course of true love between species and habitat never runs smooth for very long, however, because the incumbents themselves are changing the environment – using up resources, creating waste, building nests or commuter towns. And other tribes or other species are learning new tricks that will keep you on your evolutionary toes. Gradual changes of cooling or warming are happening on a local or a planetary scale. Huge lumps of flying rock – meteorites, or more likely, comet showers – occasionally land in your back garden. And so on. As Cairns-Smith goes on to say: ‘Any theory that is to explain the variety and complexity of living things must also take into account the varied and varying challenges sat up by a varied and varying environment. Nature, as breeder and show judge, is continually changing her mind about which types should be awarded first prize.’⁹

Another vital constraint on evolution is its inability to subtract. It is never possible for evolution to reconsider an earlier ‘decision’ in the light of subsequent experience. Each step can only modify the existing gene-pool; it can never rub it out and start again. A favourite example of Stephen Jay Gould’s is the giant panda, a beast that is evolved from carnivorous stock, yet now has a vegetarian lifestyle. The carnivore’s paw comprises five equivalent fingers or toes, and has no ‘thumb’, as the primates do, which can move independently of the fingers to provide a powerful grasp or a precise grip. Yet this is just what the panda now needs; its diet requires it constantly to strip the leaves from young bamboo shoots – a job for which an opposable thumb would have been ideal. Trapped by its pre-set evolutionary trajectory, the best the panda can do is develop a clumsy pseudo-thumb out of one of its fingers. As Gould says: ‘If God had started from scratch to construct a panda to eat bamboo he would have built it differently…The world is full of these imperfections, and they record the path of history’.¹⁰

Just as the path of evolution is littered with these awkwardnesses, so is it full of serendipity. Structures, faculties and behaviours arise as an ‘answer’ to a local ‘question’, and then may turn out to have more potential than met the original eye – or, to take a different sense, the tongue. This may have originally evolved as part of the drinking mechanism, as a device for moving food around in the mouth, as the prime site of the taste buds, or as part of the apparatus for making sure that the intake of food and air do not get muddled up. It probably did not originally develop as part of the Fur Insulation System of the ancestors of the cat family. Yet, once in existence, it came, opportunistically, to play an important role in keeping the fur clean. Dirty, matted fur insulated much less well, and the job of keeping it clean may well have stimulated the tongue to become rougher, in order to make a better brush. But such a development would have only have been ‘allowed’ to the extent that it enabled the tongue to continue to play its role as part of the Food Processing System.¹¹

Other species have capitalized on the tongue in different ways. Dogs use it to help reduce body heat by panting, while human beings, in certain cultures, use it for exactly the reverse purpose – as an essential component of the Sexual Arousal System. Not to mention the fact that without it we would all be speaking in sign language, and there would be no singing. As I shall argue later, we can only understand the evolution of consciousness if we look at it in the same way. What it is and what it does now have to preserve the function for which it was first evolved. But there have been so many twists and turns to the evolutionary tale since then that this original function has become quite obscured by later developments.

Contrary to popular belief, natural selection does not pit every individual against each other in a ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ kind of way. If cooperation helps individuals to stay alive long enough to breed, and to increase the chances of their genes, through their offspring, surviving, well and good. Neo-Darwinism is quite at home with the principle of enlightened self-interest; in fact co-operation and collaboration both within and between species are turning out to be the rule rather than the exception. Sophisticated flowers make nectar for the bees, but they also make sure that their visitors leave with a good blob of pollen on their backsides. Big fish allow little fish to clear up their leftovers (without the tiddlers fearing that they themselves are on the menu) provided they floss their host’s teeth while they are about it.

The balance between ‘selfish’ and ‘altruistic’ behaviour emerges as a pragmatic issue of genetic survival long before it surfaces as a moral question or a cultural concern. Indeed there may still be within human beings a biological morality which we have, in our enchantment with consciousness and spoken language, forgotten; which our explicit ethical codes are a poor substitute for; and which it might be possible, if we were to relocate our personal centres of gravity, to re-experience. At the very least the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution advises us to keep this an open question.

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