Chapters

1. Introduction

2. Existence

3. The Mystery of Consciousness

4. Consciousness and Identity

5. Inscrutable Memory

6. Are You an Electrical Impulse?

7. My Genes Made Me Do It!

8. Beyond the Gene

9. Do You Have Free Will?

10. On Being Objective

11. A Broader View of Consciousness and Memory

12. Learning from the Wise

13. To Be Good

Introduction

What is the point of human life? Of much more immediate concern to you and me, what is the point of our lives; and of utmost concern for you, what will you organize your life around: Finding happiness, meaning, fulfillment? Having as many pleasurable experiences as possible? Feeling good physically as much as you can? Being productive? Having good relationships? Being creative? Fulfilling your duties? Finding love? Giving love and compassion to others? Improving your situation after this current life ends (getting to heaven, having a better reincarnation, getting off the wheel of rebirth, merging into the One, or whatever the reality turns out to be)?

Whatever your answer, starting from wherever you are right now, if you wish to have any conscious input into how your life will turn out from this point forward, the first order of business is a better understanding of how you got to be who you are. To “Know Thyself,” as Socrates counseled. My book, On Being Human: An Operator’s Manual, provides guidance for this task. It deals with the four major forces that shape our lives: basic urges and desires, the messages we received from the people around us growing up, human reason (the capacity to think through and consider options), and intuition (the ability to catch a glimpse of the broader picture or the flow of things).

On Being Human explores how the stories we were told as youngsters and the way we put those stories together into our personal story is the foundation of our sense of self and our current worldview. This mostly unconscious process produced the lives we are living. But the story of your life does not end there. The crucial point of the book is that you have the capacity to examine your stories and your worldview, to consider how they are serving you—as well as how they are the prisons within which you are trapped. The book suggests that those who develop an understanding of their stories and worldviews and the way they are creating their lives will be able to employ the incredible human capacity to make more conscious decisions and alter the course of their lives. And strategies are suggested for making decisions that will lead to a more fulfilling life.

My second book, Art, Science, Religion, Spirituality: Seeking Wisdom and Harmony for a Fulfilling Life, takes a wholistic look at the many facets of our lives and explores how these currents can be brought into better harmony with each other. We tend to compartmentalize our lives, thinking separately about relationships, finances, health, spiritual matters, career, sex, values, passions, goals, political views, group identities, finding pleasure, aesthetic interests, and on and on. At the living edge, however, where life happens, all these currents are not separate. Thus, to find meaning, to live a fulfilling life, requires that we discover how to integrate all these currents with each other harmoniously.

The book notes that the basic questions and motivations of human life have not changed much through the centuries, so the biggest challenge we each face, as was true with our ancestors, is to discover and put into practice wise responses to the core questions in relation to our personal motivations. As mentioned, in ancient Greece this quest for wisdom was exemplified by Socrates’ admonition: “Know Thyself.” Two thousand years later mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blasé Pascal said, “It is an extraordinary blindness to live without investigating what we are.”[1] Continuing this theme in the twentieth century, the humorist James Thurber advised, “All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.”[2]

Art, Science, Religion, Spirituality takes on the task of examining four of the most valuable ways we humans have sought wisdom and fulfillment: (1) Engagement with science; (2) Creating and experiencing art; (3) Following a religious tradition; and (4) Undertaking a spiritual journey. Although different on the surface, these four major areas of human exploration and expression are not so different underneath. As Albert Einstein succinctly put it: “All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.”[3] This book explores the commonalities between art, science, religion, and spirituality and the guidance they each provide for a fulfilling and meaningful life.

Since the publication of these two books, I have been writing three more that take up the story of life’s journey where these leave off. The next book in the sequence is this one, Consciousness and Memory: Two Great Mysteries. The next is Ego, Identity, and Beyond, and the final one is Embracing the Mystery: The Journey to Fulfillment. In addition, on my web site there are several series of essays that deal with specific topics such as the importance of Transformation in life’s journey, and the need to find balance in our lives between the pull of Freedom and the need for Community. To read these essays go to:     https://ameaningfullife.org

This book, Consciousness and Memory began long ago, when I first started to notice that I existed as a separate self. What follows is the culmination of more than fifty years of reflection and thought concerning what being aware of myself as a separate being suggests about life, its meaning, and its fulfillment.

Existence and Consciousness

Two core questions that have troubled and confounded human beings as long as there have been human beings are: 1) How did we come to exist? 2) What is consciousness and how did we come to have it?

Of course, most of us don’t sit around puzzling about these questions with the majority of our time—we are too busy looking for food, shelter, security, sex, various pleasures, adventure, comfort, power, wealth, fame, relationships, love (many different kinds), inner peace, and a feeling that our lives are worthwhile and meaningful.

In trying to fulfill these goals, we are sometimes brought face-to-face with the two core questions. When this happens, we usually fall back on the answers we were given while growing up, or on ideas we have read or heard from others since that time.

All the world’s wisdom traditions, however, going back thousands of years, arose from people who wrestled with these crucial questions and found answers that satisfied them. Moses, Jesus, the Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Mohammed, along with various Hebrew prophets, Christian mystics, Greek philosophers, Chinese sages, Sufi poets, ancient shamans, Hindu sannyasins and pandits—all attempted to come to satisfactory answers and share what they had discovered with the people of their times.

All the world’s major religions grew up around their insights. After someone had a profound personal experience of answers to the basic questions, religions grew up to share and perpetuate those answers. And, crucially, every major culture in the world has been organized around some combination of these answer systems. This is how beliefs, values, and ways of life have come to be established throughout history.

You might think, if all this time and energy over thousands of years has been spent trying to answer two fairly simple questions (simple in being stated, but not in their solutions), that by this time they would have been answered in a way that most humans could agree upon. But this is definitely not the case. These questions remain the most mysterious and difficult issues with which people grapple today, and no satisfactory resolution is on the horizon.

When science emerged as a separate power base in the last few hundred years and discovered that philosophy and theology had been unable to answer these basic questions, numerous scientists took up the challenge, using the tools of science. The result, however, has not been promising: No widely agreed upon answers have been forthcoming from science either.

This lack of definitive answers has persuaded some to simply throw up their hands (and thinking minds) in frustration and declare that the two questions are unanswerable and thus should be abandoned. And in the more practical-minded corners of the world, many have. Lots of people don’t actively think about these questions at all, either settling for answers they were given when young or cobbling together a patchwork of answers from ideas they heard or read—while pursuing full steam ahead toward one or more of the goals listed at the start of this chapter. (This, of course, requires pushing aside the nagging sense that there is something they have not yet understood).

My response to this lack of definitive answers to the core questions is different. I have come to realize that, for me, the point is not to discover if someone else has found the answers so we can all go contentedly on with our mundane lives. Rather, it seems to me these deep questions are the call life brings to each of us to encourage us to wrestle with what is truly important for ourselves. There is no formula, no ready-made set of answers. Each of us must go through the process of searching and seeking and asking and wrestling, and it is only through this process that we have a chance of finding solid ground on which to base our own lives. If we rely solely on the answers of others, or declare there are no answers, we never come to terms with the mystery of life for ourselves. But doing so is precisely the point! Each of us is called to find our own answers and to live them out fully. Anything less means failing to discover life’s meaning and promise for us.

Before we get to the issues that form the title of this book, consciousness and memory, the first question of all is existence. One of the greatest mysteries is that a universe containing billions of galaxies, extending trillions upon trillions of miles (or perhaps infinitely, as some recent research suggests); a universe made up of enigmatic black holes and composed mostly of things about which we know next to nothing (dark energy and dark matter—and the even more mysterious things such as antimatter and the zero-point field); that such a universe seems to be here, seems to exist. Where did such a vast universe come from?

If we look closer to home, in just our little corner of this gigantic universe, there are trillions of living things, which in turn are composed of countless trillions of cells, atoms, electrons, quarks, energy, superstrings—or whatever your preference for the best way to think about what matter consists of. You see, the deeper science penetrates the material stuff around us, the more rapidly theories change and the less we seem to truly understand what matter is, or how to think about it. This means—if you believe you are composed of matter, that you are made of material stuff—and the nature of matter itself is so much in question, how do you think about who you are? Are you made up of superstrings? How much of you is dark energy, or antimatter? How do we deal with thinking about ourselves in these ways?

Or consider that we are now told that the particles we thought were real things and of which all matter was built are not always particles, but sometimes waves. This is not to question the science, which is persuasive, but I personally find it very difficult to think of objects as waves, and I especially find it hard to think of my own body as being made up of waves. So let’s focus on the idea that we are each made up of made up of many infinitely tiny particles for a moment. But as soon as I say that I am made up of trillions of tiny particles myself, I immediately recognize that there are trillions of other living things within my ecosystem, all made up of the same very small bits of matter and energy, and that I am constantly exchanging bits of matter and energy with them, and all of them with each other. I am involved in complex exchanges with the world around me each time I breathe, eat, radiate heat from my body, send out sound waves, take in light, smell a pleasant or unpleasant odor—perhaps even each time I have a thought or feel and emotion. And beyond all these local exchanges, current theory suggests that some particles communicate instantly over limitless distances with each other—shattering the previous scientific understanding of the exchange of information in this vast, complex system.

So here we are, in this infinitely large universe, or almost infinite, depending on the theory you choose, for at this point we simply do not know, and the mainstream view keeps changing. So here we are—you and I experiencing existence among trillions of living things, each of which is made up of a swirling flux of waves and infinitesimally small particles that are constantly in exchange with each other. Yet, despite all this, we usually think of ourselves as separate individuals with individual identities! How on earth (thinking both literally and idiomatically) does that happen?

This book, then, will explore both existence and consciousness—and how coming to a better understanding of these two mysteries can lead to a more fulfilling life. It will consider the opportunities involved in living an ego life. Then, delving into the furthest reaches of what is possible, it will contemplate the implications of the fact that moments arise in which the nature of identity shifts significantly and the experience of who we are changes, sometimes dramatically. At such moments, sometimes that which lies beyond normal conceptions of identity and consciousness breaks through, the clouds part, and we recognize, at least for a moment, who we really are.

This, then, is the prologue, the beginning of a journey through existence, consciousness, identity, and whatever might lie beyond our normal understanding of who we are and what life is about. Come join me.

[1] Blaise Pascal, trans. W. F. Trotter, Thoughts, The Harvard Classics (New York, New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909-1914), Vol. 48, Part 1 of 51.

[2] James Thurber, Further Fables for Our Time, “The Shore and the Sea” (New York, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956, 1st edition).

[3] Albert Einstein, “Moral Decay” (1937); Later published in Out of My Later Year: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words (New York, New York, Citadel Press, 1957), 9.

For thousands of years, we humans have been looking toward the heavens with a sense of awe and wonder. Great monuments all over the earth, dating back perhaps as much as 10,000 years (such as Göbekli Tepe in Southeastern Turkey and human-created stone arrangements in Australia). Better known monuments, dating back several thousand years, such as the Pyramids in Egypt and Stonehenge in England demonstrate a remarkable knowledge of the movement of the celestial realm.[1] The great philosopher Immanuel Kant said: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”[2] For some, looking up at the heavens brings a feeling of how small and insignificant we—and our lives on this small planet—are. For others, the feeling is the opposite: There is a sense that being able to hold a conception of this vast universe in one’s consciousness gives a hint of the meaning of existence, perhaps even that being able to have that conception is necessary before the universe can exist.

Why is there anything at all?

Existence. What exactly is existence? And why? A number of the greatest minds in human history have pondered this puzzle: Why does a world exist at all? Where did it come from? If there was once nothing, how did something come to be? To paraphrase the great Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: Beyond the rational lies something mystical, and that mystical dimension has to do with the fact that the universe exists.[3] Or as Martin Heidegger said in his Introduction to Metaphysics: “Why is there anything at all rather than nothing? Obviously, this is the first of all questions.”[4] The great philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz put it the most succinctly: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”[5]

The fact that we are conscious of both ourselves and a world “out there,” separate from ourselves, has led western philosophers such as Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle to wrestle with this question and answer it in a variety of ways. Friedrich Schelling made it the core question of his lifelong exploration, believing it was the only place to ground the possibility of human freedom. In A Brief History of Time, the modern physicist Stephen Hawking wondered, “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” and “Why does the universe go through all the bother of existing?”[6] The answer, of course, is: No one knows. Or, as William James put it more poetically, “All of us are beggars here.”[7]

In modern times the popular answer is the “Big Bang,” but that is really no answer at all. As the poet and writer Wendell Berry quipped: “What banged? Before banging, how did it get there? When it got there, where was it?”[8] The “Big Bang” is not a rational or scientific answer but a metaphor. It is useful as a starting point for modern calculations and speculations concerning the expansion and development of the physical properties of the universe as we currently understand them. The metaphor works pretty well for those things. But it tells us absolutely nothing about existence itself. As Wendall Berry suggested, if you are going to have a “bang,” you first have to have something to “bang.” Furthermore, the theory says there was no time and no space before the bang occurred, so when did it happen? Where exactly did it happen? What existed before the “bang?” If, as is assumed in the theory, time did not exist before the bang, how did time just show up just at the precise nanosecond it was needed? In other words, where did time and space come from? How did they come to exist?

Just as perplexing with regard to the “Big Bang” theory is its assumption that all the laws of the universe where simply “there” from the moment of the “Bang.” Where did all those laws come from? How did a universe come into being with dozens (actually, hundreds) of precise laws that we assume to be fixed and immutable—forever? How does that fit with the idea that the universe is forever changing and evolving? How does it make sense that hundreds of very precise physical laws came into existence all at once—laws that our current science assumes never change—in a universe that is, itself, constantly changing? Yet this is the current assumption. There is no proof it is true; it is simply an assumption. But it is an assumption that our current science needs in order to operate. Why it might be true, however, or how it came to be in a universe that is changing and evolving is a total mystery.

Adding to the lack of clarity about these issues is that the nature of time and space themselves are very much in question. More than 200 years ago Immanuel Kant made a persuasive argument that time and space do not exist “out there,” but are constructs of the human mind, constructs the mind creates within itself to organize our lives in the practical world. His understanding has been supported over and over by modern physics, with Albert Einstein showing that time is relative, and therefore that our normal conception of time as a fixed and given thing is an illusion. And since Einstein’s insight a hundred years ago, this contradiction to our normal way of thinking has not been resolved. In his 2019 book The Order of Time, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli presents a strong case that recent evidence reinforces the idea that time as we commonly understand it is an illusion. Yet we do not live as if this is the case. If time is really an illusion, what would be the implication for you in how you live your life?

My point here is not to come to any conclusions regarding what time is or is not, or about where the universe came from, but simply to point out that our lack of understanding about these questions takes us directly back to the first core question, of existence itself. Why does anything exist? If there once was no time, where did it come from? If there once was nothing, how could something arise from that? The fact that these questions have not been answered through all these centuries of scientific and philosophical investigation suggests that we are unlikely to find answers through either of these methods of inquiry.

Examining what is

So let’s look elsewhere. Instead of contemplating the starry heavens, let us look much closer to home. Let us look at matter, the material stuff around us, something we can examine much more closely and intimately. Or can we?

All matter consists of atoms, which are made up of protons, neutrons, electrons—and 99.99999% empty space. What does that last part mean—the empty space part? Well, it turns out that if you had a giant vise, and could put the entire earth in it, and then squeezed all the empty space out of the earth, the amount of pure matter that would remain would be somewhere between the size of an apple and a bowling ball. Can you wrap your mind around that—that all the real, hard stuff in the earth is only about the size of a compact bowling ball (an actual bowling ball would be so small you could hardly find it with a microscope).[9]

The strangeness doesn’t stop there. In the last few decades we have learned that atoms are made up of quarks. But each time we think we have it figured out, it gets stranger. We have now learned there are six “flavors” of quarks: up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top. Besides quarks, though, we now have six types of leptons, including muons and tau neutrinos (don’t ask). Then there are twelve gauge bosons, including eight gluons, and most recently the Higgs boson. The smallest possible number of particles is currently estimated to be seventeen (but there could be many more). All this, by the way, is the result of the attempt to find the “simplest,” most basic form of matter! Whatever happened to “Occam’s razor,” so beloved by early scientists, and the idea that we were going to find the “basic building blocks” of all matter?

We are still not finished with the weirdness. In recent years we have learned that approximately 96% of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, about which we know virtually nothing. Then there is antimatter—and virtual particles in the zero-point field that pop in and out of existence for a billionth of a trillionth of a second. Unless they borrow energy from a “real” particle and become real themselves. As it turns out, all this “non-matter stuff” fills “empty” space. Empty space is not empty at all. In fact, it is now calculated that there is enough energy in one pint of completely “empty” space to boil away the entire Pacific Ocean in an instant.

Perhaps the most powerful lesson of modern science is that we actually know very little about the true nature of our “physical” world. If it is even physical at all. Some scientists now say that the smallest particles are not physical objects, but are superstrings, which are one-dimensional. But how can “matter” be matter if it has only one dimension? Well, it can’t. So perhaps it is better to think of “what is” as energy (or musical notes, as physicist and science writer Michio Kaku calls superstrings). So actually, at the most basic level, there aren’t any particles at all, there isn’t any “matter,” but energy, or vibrational waves. At the deepest level we are energy or waves in a field of multiple and overlapping waves—electro/magnetic waves, gravitational waves, light waves, etc.—all constantly flowing, moving, interacting. One way to think about all this was given by Einstein: “Matter is where the concentration of energy is great, field where the concentration of energy small,”[10] suggesting there is really no separation between matter and the field in which it exists. But what on earth does that mean?

If you’re trying to imagine all this: Stop. You can’t. It is math. It grows out of mathematical theories that no one can really imagine as real, tangible “things.” And besides, it will probably all change again in a few years anyway. The proof for these mathematical theories comes in experiments that measure possible traces of the actions of these incredibly small and often theoretical particles—and interpreting the traces is incredibly complex and filled with speculations.

Do these experiments reveal reality? A hundred years ago, when these speculations were just getting started, one of the greatest physicists of all time, Niels Bohr, said: “When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not measuring the world, we are creating it.”[11] In other words, we create instruments to find things we have speculated are there, and then those particular instruments “find them.” Then a new theory comes along, new instruments are created, and we find new and different things. So, what is really there? Stay tuned.

If all that is not weird enough for you, there is more. Increasingly, quantum mechanics has been demonstrating that, at the basic level, there are no particles at all, only probabilities. Try to wrap your mind around the fact that you are made up of probabilities. Even energy waves aren’t really “there” (wherever there is); they are “probability waves.” They don’t exist anywhere until they are measured, or as it is also said, until consciousness observes them. Everything that “exists” is actually in a state of virtual possibility until observed. Until the observation, they are nowhere, or it could just as easily be said they are everywhere. So, what is reality? (That would be an excellent Zen koan.)

Surely science will eventually answer these questions. But the most accurate science ever created is quantum mechanics. It works. Its predictions have been almost unerring, and it has led to an endless stream of new technologies that have revolutionized the modern world. But will quantum science answer the basic questions about existence? Listen again to Niels Bohr, who was central to the creation of quantum physics: “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.”[12] Or this by Nobel Laureate physicist Richard Feynman: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”[13] At another time Feynman said:

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, “But how can it be like that?” because you will get “down the drain,” into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.[14]

But if the greatest physicists don’t even understand their own area of study, they most likely do not understand existence itself, or consciousness, love, beauty, values, relationships, or what life is about. Neither quantum mechanics nor any other area of science is likely to provide answers to these kinds of questions.

This does not mean that scientific studies are unimportant. They are very important. It is simply to realize that we can look to science to answer some kinds of questions, while refraining from placing on it the burden of answering all our questions, especially those it was not designed nor is equipped to answer. It is no accident that many thousands of years of human inquiry and thought have not removed the truth of Carl Jung’s brief, penetrating statement: “Life is a short pause between two mysteries.”

Where, then, shall we begin our exploration? One good place to begin is with that which we can never get behind: our own consciousness. Existence and consciousness are not separate, but deeply entwined, and while the question of existence is hard to approach directly (how could you personally directly explore existence, how everything came to be?), consciousness is always near at hand. It is available for my examination each and every moment, whenever I choose to turn my attention toward it. Thus, I prefer to start this journey with consciousness. Consciousness is right here, right now, and (if you think about it), there is no way to explore anything at all except through consciousness. So I take consciousness as the starting point for trying to understand my life, what is truly important, and how best to live.

Join me in this exciting exploration.

[1] Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia, Heaven’s Mirror Quest for the Lost Civilization (New York, New York: Three Rivers Press/Crown Publishing Group, 1998) provide convincing proof for sites several thousand years old, and there is a decent amount of more recent evidence that Göbekli Tepe, built at least 11,000 years ago, was aligned with the heavens. Stone alignments in Australia could be as old, or even much older, but it is very hard to establish actual dates. The aboriginal culture has been there at least 50,000 years, and we just don’t now the timeline of the development of their knowledge.

[2] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, (1788) 5:161. One of his most famous quotes, and inscribed on his tombstone in Kaliningrad, Russia.

[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), 6.44.

[4] Martin Heidegger, trans. Ralph Manheim, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1959), 1.

[5] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Principles of Nature and Grace” 1714. This was an essay written for Prince Eugene of Savoy.

[6] Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: The Updated and Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition (New York: Bantum Books, 1998). Need Rest of Information

[7] William James, need citation

[8] Wendell Berry, “On the Theory of the Big Bang as the Origin of the Universe,” Appalachian Heritage, The University of North Carolina Press vol. 34, no. 3, Summer/delete (2006), 46.

[9] Rather than give one citation, I will just direct you to the internet, where Googling the size of a totally compressed earth will bring hundreds of interesting articles. Have fun.

[10] Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics: The Growth of Ideas from Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938), 242.

[11] Quote by Niels Henrik David Bohr found in Robert Lanza, M.D. and Bob Berman, Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion (Dallas, Texas: Ben Bella Books, Inc., 2016), 94.

[12] Niels Henrik David Bohr, The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr (Woodbridge, Connecticut: Ox Bow Press, 1987). Also quoted in Karen Michelle Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007), 254.

[13] Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1995), 129.

[14] Richard P. Feynman, Probability & Uncertainty the Quantum Mechanical View of Nature (Newton, Massachusetts: Education Development Center, 1990), 129.

Among the many mysteries in which we are embedded, one the greatest is consciousness. There are many types and levels of consciousness, which has led to countless debates about whether plants or animals have it, and if so, which ones and how much. Depending on the definition you choose, any living thing can have consciousness, or it can be assigned only to organisms with complex brains. Whatever level you choose, the existence of consciousness has remained a mystery even after thousands of years of investigation. Here, we will focus on what is often described as the aspect that sets human beings apart from other beings, “self” consciousness. The awareness that of existing as an individual self.

There is little question that various animals are capable of many forms of consciousness: preparing for the future, communicating complicated messages, and remembering past events while bringing those memories to bear on current actions. They can form strong, lasting bonds with other creatures, and even have the capacity for humor. But few animals seem to think of themselves as having an individual self that can stop and reflect. To us, most animals seem to proceed more on the basis of instinct. (I am not completely opposed to the argument that some advanced animals can do some level of the things we sometimes think of as uniquely human. It is not clear. I have wondered at times how animals might be thinking about us, but I will leave that to others to imagine. We know so little about our own consciousness, let’s focus on that here, and leave the “what animals do and do not know” question for others to consider.)

But I do want to deal with the issue of time. Our relationship with time is one of the most distinctive aspects of being human. As individuals, we see that our lives have a unique past, that we have a personal history. We can examine its trajectory and then think about where it is headed, our personal future. With that awareness, we can think about where we would like to go, we create goals and plans for our personal future. To help accomplish these plans and goals, we developed complex languages, and then ways to use symbols into patterns that led to written languages. Reason developed as a tool to help us decide the best way to bring about the future we wished would occur, and mathematics grew out of this reasoning process.

I do not mean to present the above developments in a direct cause and effect way, for know one knows how it happened, or why. I only wish to suggest that our relationship with time, and the human ability to imagine complex futures and organize resources in complicated ways to bring them about led to many things that seem uniquely human, such as the creation of science and engineering. And these, in turn, made possible sophisticated structures, magnificent buildings of all kinds, as well as complex transportation systems. And our relationship with time is central to our desire to pass on, including to future generations, the ideas we have developed, and this gave rise to the creation of literature, philosophy, art, and theology.

And all the above require that we make conscious choices to deny immediate satisfactions for the sake of future goals (goals that can even reach into future generations). This is true for our personal goals, and also for any long-term project involving the well-being or satisfaction of groups of people we care about. Whether any other animals make such conscious choices when they undertake building projects, I do not, but it seems clear that we humans have developed the capacities for the written language, art, building projects, and communication systems far beyond any other species. We are now, of course, recognizing that this can be a curse, as well as a blessing, and what we will do with the incredible capacities we have developed remains to be seen. Perhaps only if we learn to pay more attention to the wisdom traditions that developed simultaneously with our other capacities will a healthy future be possible.

One trait that might be uniquely human is our ability to contemplate our own death, to consider what it means that sometime in the future we will die. The philosopher Martin Heidegger said that this capacity was crucial for being human, that the awareness of our own death set in motion all kinds of thoughts and choices, fears and anxieties, possibilities and dilemmas. Crucially, knowing that we will die means that we will never be able to fulfill everything we can imagine for our lives, because we recognize that our lives are finite, limited. Further, we know that loved ones will suffer and die—even that our actions or inactions might be the cause their suffering and death, or our own. Because we are conscious of time in this way, we have to contend with the burden of anxiety.

One of the most complex levels of human consciousness is the ability to stop and consider, to make choices about which actions we will take or not take, to consider options and chose from different alternatives, and make choices about which actions are right versus those that are wrong. This ability is crucial for the functioning of healthy societies and to the belief that codes of law matter. It is essential for the idea of justice to have any meaning, and it is the basis upon which court systems function, except those in the hands of tyrants who operate on raw power alone. The ultimate expression of this capacity is that we can choose what we believe or do not believe. This leads to our ability to contemplate the ultimate purpose and meaning of our existence, and to make fundamental choices about how we will live in relation to what we believe.

Another dramatic consequence of the ability to view ourselves as separate beings is our capacity to realize that other people have their own, differing perspectives. The next step along this path is to recognize that others can legitimately have different points of view, rather than assuming we are right and those who do not agree with us are wrong. Many people do not take this step, but a significant number do.

At its highest levels, this human capacity to recognize others have their own separate lives, and struggles, can lead compassion, forgiveness, and mercy, even to sacrificing own own physical well-being for a cause we believe in, or in service to people in need. And it can lead to a conscious commitment to love another person over time, even to try to love all others, through a decision that love is itself a virtue to be cultivated, practiced, and honored. Instincts sometimes lead to protecting our immediate family, or tribe, but having recognized our separateness, we can begin to consciously choose to honor and respect our connectedness with other people, far beyond anything that instincts alone can provide.

Most of us seldom stop and consider all these ramifications of the existence of consciousness, but we should. If we only take it for granted without realizing its power and possibility in our lives, we will be enslaved to our own whims and subject to the manipulation of others. No wonder Socrates said almost 2500 years ago that “an unexamined life is not worth living.”

Where did Consciousness Come From?

But let’s back. How did we come to be conscious, aware of our existence? No one knows. Did we create it, or was it there from the beginning? How did we come to think of ourselves as separate from the world in which we are embedded? Again, no one has any idea. Listen to the experts, such as Alva Noë, one of today’s leading thinkers in the field of consciousness studies (a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences):

After decades of concerted effort on the part of neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers, the only agreement about how the brain can make us conscious, how it can give rise to “sensation, feeling, and subjectivity” is: “We don’t have a clue.”

And Jerry Fodor, a cognitive scientist and leading philosopher of mind:

Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious.

Although we have no idea what it is, without consciousness there would be no science, no art, no religion, no friendship, no true romance, no questions to answer, no human life memory, no self-awareness, and no modern technology (at least as we usually think about these things). In fact, without consciousness, could there be a universe?

Skeptico:[A] Of course there could. I can imagine a universe in which there is no life or consciousness, but stars and planets and such floating in space.

Wisdom Seeker: With what are you imagining such a universe? Doesn’t this “imagining” require consciousness? If there were no conscious beings to imagine, what makes you “think” there would be a universe? And where would it be? Imagine that universe of yours for a moment. Then imagine you did not exist, and that no other conscious being existed to observe or imagine a universe: The lights go out, the theater goes dark. Where would a universe now be? Add to this the fact that modern science is telling us that space is a construct of the human mind. So if there were no human mind, where would a universe be?

The difficulty of these questions has led some reductionists to embrace the absurd, saying that consciousness does not exist. A strange argument, for anyone who makes it—who questions the existence of consciousness—is using consciousness to create an argument rejecting it.

Skeptico: What does that mean?

Wisdom Seeker: To question whether or not consciousness exists requires someone being conscious of existing, as well as someone who assumes there are other conscious beings who can hear and understand their arguments.

Skeptico: Why?

Wisdom Seeker: If a person is not conscious, how would he or she formulate an argument? And if a person did not believe there were other conscious beings to understand the arguments, why would they take the time to formulate them?

But leaving aside the absurd theories, for thousands of years the greatest minds in history have grappled with the question of consciousness, producing speculations ranging from the religious to the philosophical, from the scientific to the psychological. Besides the basic question of what it is, another eternally intriguing question has been: What does it “mean” for us that we are conscious? But although this question has been studied and debated for thousands of years, no answers have been forthcoming upon which the majority of people can agree. What is more, we do not seem to be making much progress toward an answer: we do not seem to be closer to agreement than we were two thousand, one thousand, or five hundred years ago. In fact, there is probably more disagreement today about what consciousness is than there has ever been.

Will we ever understand consciousness? It is hard to say. Will the answers come from modern research into the activities of the physical brain? Maybe, but as neuroscientist Sam Harris says, “There is nothing about a brain, studied at any scale, that even suggests that it might harbor consciousness.” [1]  And Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and Homo Deus, is even more explicit:

Science knows surprisingly little about mind and consciousness. Current orthodoxy holds that consciousness is created by electrochemical reactions in the brain, and that mental experiences fulfill some essential data-processing function. However, nobody has any idea how a congeries of biochemical reactions and electrical currents in the brain creates the subjective experience of pain, anger, or love. … We have no explanation and we had better be clear about that.[2]

What we know, so far, is that researching the physical brain has not led to answers to the core questions, but only to wildly differing opinions (as well as to the frustrated response by a few researchers mentioned earlier who say that since our mechanical instruments can’t find consciousness, it must not exist). Maybe in the end we will discover that the great 20^th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was exactly right when he said “Even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life [and therefore consciousness will] remain untouched.”[3]

The hopes stirred by brain research with regard to consciousness are similar to the hopes fueled a hundred years ago by the incredible sweep of success in physics.  Then, the idea became fashionable that with its awesome powers, physics would provide an answer to all the riddles of the universe, including consciousness. But such was not to be the case. Rather, the tables were turned, for the deeper physics went in its exploration of the material world, the more mysterious the world it discovered became, and the more consciousness escaped its grasp. Gradually, many physicists came to believe that consciousness would never be explained by physics, because consciousness was the starting point, the very source of the material world. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck, for instance, commented:

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.[4]

Many others joined Planck in this view, such as Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner: “It is not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”^[5] Sir James Jeans, thermodynamicist and astronomer, observed quite pithily the direction many physicists were going: “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.”[6]

This theme, that consciousness gives rise to, lies behind, and is necessary for the physical world to exist became a powerful idea among many physicists in the 20^th century. British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington reflected this view in Science And The Unseen World, saying that he had come to believe that more was necessary to explain the world than what was being discovered in physics and that he and many of his colleagues were turning to the one place “where more might become known,” to the “starting point,” which was “human consciousness.” Eddington felt consciousness was the crucial place to look for a deeper understanding, for “the stuff of the world is mind stuff.”[7] He was joined in this conclusion by the great mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, who stated emphatically that in the continuing development of physics, “I am arguing for some kind of active role for consciousness, and indeed a powerful one.”[8] Nobel-winning biologist George Wald put the matter succinctly: “Mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always.” It is “the source … of physical reality.”[9]

The purpose of this book, however, is not to focus on the many differing opinions about consciousness or the conflicts between science and theology concerning it. Neither is it to analyze the different philosophical positions regarding consciousness, nor to consider the many theories generated by current brain research, although we will do a little of both. But the main goal will be to explore and expand upon an idea articulated by Nobel-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli:

It would be most satisfactory of all if physics and psyche could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality.^[10]

Psyche as Pauli was using it here is the totality of the human mind, soul, and spirit. Pauli and Carl Jung were close friends and had discussed the relation between Jung’s ideas about the psyche and physics many times, and Pauli was very interested in how these two seemingly divergent streams in human understanding could be brought together. This will also be one of the main themes of this book.

Another exploration will be an idea going back to ancient times that became an important question to many of the greatest physicists of the past century: What is the connection between “consciousness” and each one of us? Are there many separate, individual consciousnesses, or are they connected in some way? In fact, are they really separate at all? Nobel-winning physicist Erwin Schrodinger didn’t think so:

To divide or multiply consciousness is something meaningless. There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousness … in truth there is only one mind.

And if this is even partially true, was Einstein correct when he concluded:

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us “universe,” a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as separated from the rest … but (this is) an optical delusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

I, for one, feel great excitement at undertaking Einstein’s challenge and widening my circle of compassion as far as possible. But whether that is the most important challenge of life, we will have to understand ourselves as well as the nature of our own consciousness much better that most of us do now. We will have to decide whether we believe we actually have the capacity to make conscious choices before it makes sense to ask the question of what might be the best path for our lives. And before we can develop sufficient determination to live toward whatever we conclude to be the highest and best possibility for our lives, we must come to believe that our choices will make any difference.

 

[A] If you haven’t met him in my previous books, let me introduce you to an old friend who often asks questions and sometimes challenges what I am writing. His name is Skeptico, and he is often in dialogue with Wisdom Seeker.

 

[1] Sam Harris, Waking Up, 60. (need more detailed information)

[2] Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus, 108-109. (need more detailed information)

[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951, 187.

[4] J. W. N. Sullivan, “Interview with Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck,” Series of Interviews with Leading Men of Science, no. 6, The Observer, January 25, 1931.

[5] Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, Quantum Enigma: Physcis Encounters Consciousness (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2011), 237.

[6] James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 139. First edition 1930.

[7] Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1928), 276.

[8] Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 446.

[9] George Wald, “Life and Mind in the Universe,” International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, vol. 26, Issue Supplement 11, March 12/15, 1984, Abstract.

[10] Wolfgang Pauli, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, Springer Science & Business Media, 1994, 260

 

Ask yourself: “Who am I?” Only by deeply exploring this question will you find the truth. —Ramana Maharshi

The Many Different Currents of “Me”

Many years ago, I awakened one morning, and “I” was here. I don’t remember exactly when this occurred, for it feels as if I have been here forever. Of course, this feeling of foreverness is not logical (history books tell me a lot went on before I was born). Still, when I woke that morning back at the age of two or three or four, my awareness seemed to coincide with existence itself. I can’t explain this, and the feeling has changed as I have gotten older, but somehow the feeling persists that existence and I are somehow deeply entwined.

This probably has something to do with consciousness, so let’s return to the question: What is consciousness? Galaxies and planets, rocks and water don’t have a conscious “I” (as far as we know). How, then, did my physical self, made from the same atoms, the same building blocks as rocks and planets, begin to think? Perhaps it is because we are “alive.” But how did that happen? What is life? Another great mystery. But we have enough questions on our plate for the moment, so let’s leave that one for another time. For now, the baffling question is consciousness. As Stanford physicist James Trefil put it: “The question of consciousness is the only major question in the sciences that we don’t even know how to ask.”[1]

We humans are composed of the same eukaryotic cells as all other living things, such as worms and robins. How, then, did we start to reason and organize memories into stories, while other creatures did not? (Assuming they didn’t, which is, of course, not certain.)

The existence of this thing called “I” or “me” is truly mysterious. How did it come to be? Where is it located? You can examine as many brain cells as you like under a microscope and you will not find an “I.” In all the brain studies to date, no one has found a trace of it. Or, approach this in a different way, whales and elephants have brains as complex as our own, and bigger: Do they have a sense of “I?” We really don’t know. But whether they do or don’t, no one can tell by examining their brains, or comparing their brains to ours. The human psyche is a wild and mysterious thing, and maybe that of whales and elephants is too, and nobody understands theirs, or ours, at all. Science certainly doesn’t.

Thought Experiment – When did you first become conscious of yourself?

What is the earliest moment you can remember of being consciously aware that you were an independent and separate being who had the power to make choices and create an independent life?

Because it has proven impossible (at least so far) to explore the “I” with instruments, the only way to do so is with consciousness itself—which seems to be where the “I” comes into existence. Without consciousness, there would be no “me,” at least not a “me” that knows it exists. Without consciousness there would be no questions, no philosophy, no science—for there would be no “beings” with the awareness needed to study the world or share the results of their study with others. Consciousness underlies everything we think and experience. Given its importance, it is quite amazing that not one of the great philosophers, psychologists, scientists, spiritual teachers, or wise elders with whom I have talked or studied has been able to give an explanation of consciousness that is broadly accepted. In fact, consciousness is like dark energy in physics: vast, assumed to exist, but no one can give a satisfactory accounting for what it is.

So many unanswered questions: What is included in this “I?” Is it just an isolated monad, fending for itself in a competitive universe, or does its very nature consist of connections and relationships? Is it drifting purposelessly in a meaningless void, or does it include direction and purpose within itself? Does it exist only for a brief time or does its existence somehow extend beyond this temporal body’s duration? After several thousand years of wrestling with these questions, the most we can honestly say is: We don’t know.

William James was highlighting how little we know when he said that consciousness is not static but constantly in motion, always trying to organize the “big blooming buzzing confusion” of sensations, the chaos of pure experience, into meaningful patterns. In A Pluralistic Universe he put the issue sharply: “My present field of consciousness is a centre surrounded by a fringe that shades … into a subconscious more.” We can use three terms or three hundred to describe the whole of consciousness, but words can never capture it, for ultimately it is “all shades and no boundaries.” In other words, there is no way to draw a line between what is part of my consciousness and what is not. What seems to constitute a boundary at this instant quickly takes in what I had thought was outside my consciousness a moment before. In James’ words: “Which part … is in my consciousness, which out? If I name what is out, it already has come in.”[2] Try it for yourself: Can you exclude something from your consciousness?

It is even more complicated, according to James. To paraphrase more of his ideas in A Pluralistic Universe: The center of consciousness at any given moment has a point of view, but there are always other points of view on which we are not focused right now, but that are part of who we are. As time passes, the point of view that was in the center of our awareness gives way to others that were in the margin; these other points of view move to the center and become dominant. This is one big reason we have so much trouble understanding ourselves. At any given moment, we identify with whatever is in the center—with the thoughts that are in focus—but our full self, who we really are, is the whole field, which includes many “radiating subconscious possibilities.” We sense the existence of these “subconscious possibilities,” but we cannot conceive them clearly and can barely even begin analyzing them. This is why we are often so confused as to who we really are, for “each part functions distinctly … and tends to draw us into that line.” Running counter to this fragmentation, though, is the fact that “the whole is somehow felt as one pulse of our life, — not conceived so, but felt so.”[3]

Skeptico: So, is James saying that there are many separate currents in me that tug in many different directions?

Wisdom Seeker: Yes.

Skeptico: And the reason it is so hard to know who I am and to make decisions is that I can’t hold all these different currents in my conscious processing at any one time; that at first one is the center of my attention, and then another, and there is no time when I can get them all in a clear relationship to each other.

Wisdom Seeker: Yes. James does give a hint at a broader possibility when he says that at times you can sense the wider picture, can sense the overall pattern of all that you are.

Skeptico: But even if I can sense this overall picture, if I can’t capture all of it at any one time in my thinking process, how do I go about living or making decisions?

Wisdom Seeker: That is exactly the problem with trying to make logical decisions. You have to exclude a lot of the currents in you, focus on some part of the available information to the exclusion of other streams to be able to decide things in an orderly way. Fortunately, though, you do not need to understand all the currents simultaneously or make only logical decisions to live your life. To live and experience life, you need consciousness, but you do not need to decide everything logically, and you do not need to have a theory to explain it all to yourself. Theories are different from experience. To make decisions and move through life, you do not need to understand rationally all the currents that are a part of you. (This is, of course, where intuition comes in—more on that later.)

To continue with James’ thought, and add ideas that Carl Jung borrowed from James and expanded, there are many different currents present in each of us: urges and desires, beliefs and fears, feelings and expectations, anxieties and dreams. All these are part of the whole, and the center of our attention shifts between them from moment to moment. We can be joyous one minute and irritated the next; serious for a while and playful soon after; deeply caring toward a friend and then inconsiderate a moment later.

Speaking from my own direct experience, I can be loving one moment, and then selfish; gentle, and then harsh. Especially fascinating is that most of the time I do not know which current is going to show up in the next moment of my life. For instance, I might be feeling terrible, the phone rings, there is good news, and I am filled with delight. Or I am happy and out of nowhere an old fear pops into my mind, and I feel terrible. Who is in control of this process? Who is making the decisions about what I will think or feel in the next minute or the next hour? Is it random, or do “I” have some input into the process? Perhaps “I” am merely an iPod, playing some preprogrammed playlist. But if so, where does the playlist come from?

Thought Experiment – The playground of your mind

Ask yourself: Do you know what you will be thinking or feeling five minutes from now? In an hour? Tomorrow at noon? How does what you will be thinking or feeling in the future happen? Where do all thoughts and feelings come from? And what role do “you” play in the process?

Feelings are hard to control. So are thoughts. Sometimes we choose to concentrate on something for a while and succeed in doing so. But anyone who has paid careful attention to the mind is aware that thoughts are constantly appearing and then disappearing. Studies have shown that the average person can concentrate on one thing for only a few seconds; after that, another thought breaks in, then another, then another. Sometimes we get back to the previous thought, but often we do not. (This aspect of the mind is one of the things that makes meditation difficult for many.) Our minds proceed through a chain of thoughts, one growing out of another, until we lose all track of where we began. Then, at a later point, we remember some part of the sequence, but have lost the original point that started the process in motion. Or we now have a different relationship in our minds to the original thought.

Given that all this seems to be human nature, a strong indicator of success in life is one’s capacity to concentrate, to return to a chosen topic over and over in spite of the interruptions that are continually trying to break into consciousness. When the ability to concentrate is absent, life is a mess. Personally, when I feel overwhelmed by this internal process, I attempt to clean it up by making lists and organizing myself with schedules, hoping to keep my attention focused on the things that are important. But this, too, is problematic. When I put myself on a schedule, it is because of a decision about what is important to me at that moment. But in the next moment, or next week, the same thing might not seem very important. I change, and what seems important changes—yet to stay on a schedule I can’t reevaluate past decisions every few seconds. But this means I am operating on a schedule that might not fit my current priorities. (This is getting ahead of the story, though. Again, more later.)

One thing is certain: If I want to significantly affect my experience of life, I need the ability to control my attention for longer than a couple of seconds. Fortunately, this can be done. People who have worked to develop this capacity can stay focused much longer. To do this, however, is not a matter of creating “brain diagrams,” as William James dismissively labelled any idea that leads us to believe that we can control our inner world by attempting to look at it from outside as if it is an objective machine. It isn’t, and we can’t. What is valuable is to work to become as conscious as possible of all the currents. This is where sensing the wider picture comes in. You can learn to work with your mind consciously (through prayer, reflection, and various concentration and meditative practices), and sometimes you will get a glimpse of the broader pattern. As you learn to trust your sense of when you are in touch with the broader picture, you can use such times to decide on and commit to a goal or purpose and set your intentions around those glimpses. Having done that, you consciously develop your will and use it to develop habits that will carry you in that direction. Then, with practice, practice, and more practice, you will be consciously participating in the creation of your life. A warning, though: Don’t assume you have ever gotten it exactly right. Every now and then, reevaluate, make an effort again to get in touch with the larger picture and make further course corrections.[4]

The Continuity of “I”

Let’s approach the inquiry into this “I,” this thing I think of as “me” from a different angle. No one knows what the “I” is or how it came to be. Nobel-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger said in his book What is Life?: “And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by ‘I’ is that ground-stuff upon which [data] are collected.”[5] His point is that all we can do is posit a nebulous term like “ground-stuff” as a way to think about the “I.” It is a vague image of the “I” being something like a mirror upon which the data of the world out there is reflected. With this statement, Schrödinger is suggesting something far different from a scientific theory or a definition based on rigorous logic. There is no explanation for how this mirror takes in or works with the information it receives. Thus, his statement is much more akin to images given by spiritual traditions than by science (which, I think, Schrödinger himself would fully acknowledge).

If we examine our direct experience, we discover that we take in data—information from a world that seems to be outside us—and then select and organize it into narratives in order to give it coherence and find its meaning for us. Then we use the organization of the data we have created, and the meaning we have given it, to make decisions. Thus, one way to think about the “I” is as the place in ourselves where we collect, sort, organize, and work with information, creating stories with it and assigning meanings in relation to it. How much this correspond to the processes going on in any other individual is impossible to know, and obviously different people come to radically different conclusions, sometimes based on very similar information.

All of which leads to the realization that a first step in the exploration of identity is recognizing that no one outside myself can provide answers about who I am. If “I” am the “ground-stuff” upon which my experiences are registered, then my particular “I” is uniquely determined by my experiences, how they are registered on my mirror, and how they are organized, interpreted, and stored. The best path forward for understanding my “I,” then, is to reflect on, to explore my personal experience, to observe myself.

When I do this, one of my first and clearest observations confirms exactly what James and Jung were saying: There are many different currents running through me. There are many different feelings, desires, thoughts, views of myself, and views about the world. But at the same time, at moments I catch a glimpse of recurring themes that create a sense of continuity. I catch a glimpse of the larger picture: I can sense a pattern, but it is very hard to hold on to and work with these glimpses.

For the most part, I did not consciously choose these patterns. They are just there. Just as I do not seem to have a great deal of control over when a particular feeling or thought will show up in my mind, or how long it will stay, I do not have much control over the main patterns or themes that are in me—they tend to pop up and go away of their own accord. With practice, I can learn to exercise some choice, but then I have to deal with the next issue: On what basis do I make these choices? Even if I have developed a great ability to direct my attention, how do I decide what to direct it toward? The range of possibilities upon which I might concentrate at any given moment is vast: Right now, I could read a novel, learn German, watch a television program (but which one?), do my taxes, solve a math problem, play a computer game, email or text a friend (but which friend?), write a book, invest my savings, help someone who is needy, try to invent something, and on and on. Endlessly.

So let’s start again, coming from a slightly different direction. In trying to understand who I am, I focus on my immediate stream of consciousness (to borrow another idea from William James). Examining what I am thinking and feeling, I discover a stream of urges and desires, thoughts and feelings, images and intentions arising one after another. They pour out, overlapping and running into each other, competing for time and attention. One minute I want an ice cream cone, the next I want to lose weight. One minute I want to accomplish great things, followed by an urge to see the latest movie or go to an interesting party. Sometimes I want a relationship with someone who shares my goals and values, at other times the urge is for a relationship that provides great sex—followed by the thought that celibacy would make life easier. At moments I want freedom, and then I get in touch with the value of commitment, loyalty, and a single, long-lasting relationship.

It can begin to seem that who I am is composed of snippets from various soap operas spliced together without any controlling narrative. But the interesting thing is, even though my thoughts and feelings are constantly changing, when I get up in the morning it still feels like the same “me” that went to bed last night. Exploring a typical day, when I wake up, it feels like the same “me” who was present several years ago, the same one who has always been here. My felt experience is that there is a coherent, continuous me. Is this an illusion? Biologists tell me that there is not one single cell present today that was present when I was two years old, or when I was twenty. This means that, if there is a continuous “me,” it cannot be located in any cell or in any specific group of cells. Further, most of my thoughts are different from those when I was two or twenty—so whoever this continuous me is, no one has any idea where it might be located, and it is not constituted by any specific thoughts.

Thought Experiment – Exploring Continuity

Are your thoughts and feelings the same right now as they were yesterday—or last week? Are they the same as they were 10 years ago? 25 years ago? If not, what is the same? What gives you the sense of a coherent, continuous “I-ness”?

As mentioned before, at times I do sense a few patterns in who I am. When I wake in the morning, it feels as if there are tasks to be done—either things I want to do or feel I need to do. But how was this to-do list put together? If I step back for a moment and look at the list, it is organized around goals that seemed—at some moment in the past—important. If, however, they were chosen in the past, which part of me was in charge when the list was created? Was the list determined by my whims, was it created to respond to what others said was important, or did it arise from my own intuition? What if Thomas Merton was right when he reflected on his life, saying: “The things I thought were so important … have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either measure or expect, were the things that mattered.”[6]

As I think about all this, I begin to wonder: Is my to-do list “me?” Does my list control me or do I control it? When should I follow it and when should I change it? Perhaps I should start a new list, right now, in the present moment. But if I decide to select new goals right now, how do I go about doing that, if I don’t know who “I” am? And if I start a new list in this moment, what will keep me from thinking that I should start another list five minutes from now, and another five minutes after that? Don’t I have to stick with one list if I am going to have a life? All this is beginning to feel like a dog chasing its tail, and it highlights the fact that Ramana Maharshi was onto something when he said the first imperative is to explore the question: “Who am I?” Having some sense of who “I” am is central to making decisions and finding the best way to live.

The Experience of Existence

One way to explore who I am is to focus on my immediate and direct experience, the feeling of existence. Everything starts here—with the feeling sense of my existence as separate from the people and things around me. Focusing on this feeling of an “I” that is a separate being is intimately connected to the sense that my I has continuity over time. Thoughts change from moment to moment. Feelings about people and events change. Interpretations change about events that happened in years gone by. Motivations change, as do the things that bring joy and sorrow. The world I perceive “out there” seems to be ever-changing. Through it all, however, there is a continuous sense of “I,” of someone being present to the unfolding events, of someone who remembers while also living the story. That feeling sense of someone being continually present persists. This is the experience of me as a being who remains present through it all like a deep current running beneath the ripples on the surface of a river. This deeper current is one important way I have found to get at who I am: I am the consciousness that experiences an existence over time; I am the direct experience of a separate entity that persists through time.

This thought leads back one major jumping-off point for modern philosophy, Renee Descartes’ core idea, “cogito, ergo sum,” (“I think, therefore I am”).[7] Yet his focus on who I am as only a thinking thing is problematic, for one could just as easily say, “I have feelings, therefore I am,” or “I have sensations, therefore I am.” Having sensations and feelings goes with existing as much as does thinking, yet most philosophers following Descartes focused on the word think in a way that emphasized rationality and logic (although it is not clear this is exactly what Descartes meant). Reason and logic, however, happen only after perception; immediate perceptions happen before we can think. A baby has many sensations and feelings before anything like reason or logic appears, and this goes on for years. By the time reason and logic become important in our lives, we have collected a vast array of sensations, feeling, enculturated beliefs, and opinions. All this is the raw material for the thinking process, and they cannot be separated.

So we could just as easily focus on feelings as the starting point for who I am. David Hume famously said: “Reason is … the slave of the passions.”[8] He was making the point that all our actions start with feelings, with a passion toward or away from something—just as the Buddha emphasized that cravings and aversions motivate human behavior. Both believed that we are enslaved by our cravings and aversions, at least most of the time.

Or we could start with sensations and perceptions. Edmund Husserl, the founder of the school of phenomenology, emphasized that the starting point for all philosophy, as well as for all science, are immediate sensations and perceptions.[9] Sensations and perceptions give rise to a flowing stream of inner awareness that is ever shifting, and it is impossible to define or fully capture that stream in a thinking, logical, or rational way. When we try to think rationally, we are attempting to organize those sensations and perceptions—as well as the feelings, thoughts, and images that grow out of them—into meaningful patterns. But in this view, everything starts with sensations and perceptions, and all attempts to organize them are always partial and incomplete.

But whichever comes first in trying to come to terms with who I am—sensation, perception, feeling, thinking—all involve a sense that there is a separate “I” who is viewing them from a unique perspective, experiencing them as a separate individual, and putting together a story of that unique individual as it moves through time.

Skeptico: You know, you lost me a good ways back there. Can’t you make it a little simpler?

Wisdom Seeker: I’m sorry, but probably not. It is all complicated and confusing. That is why the best minds humanity has ever produced have been struggling with these questions for thousands of years without coming to definitive answers. The best I can do is to say again that wrestling with these questions for yourself might be the point, and that is the only path to any deep understanding of who you are and what life is about will come from trying to work through all this for yourself.

Exploring identity

Circling in from another direction, I clearly remember one mid-afternoon the summer I was 12 years old. I was lying on my back on my bed, vaguely looking at the ceiling. My mother came in and asked: “Are you sick?” When I said, “No,” she quite reasonably asked: “Then what are you doing?” My response, without much hesitation, was: “I am thinking.”

I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I can see what I was doing: I was starting to think about life in a reflective way. But what exactly is this “reflective thinking”? What does it mean that we humans can reflect on our lives, our actions, our decisions? What is this thing called “consciousness” that allows us to be aware of ourselves as distinct entities, separate from others and our environment? And what is this thing called an “identity?”

I am conscious of existing—am aware that I am an individual, a separate human being. But this awareness again brings forward the mystery: What is this “I” of which I am aware? What is this thing called “myself,” or “David,” or “me,” or “ich”? Are they the same? (Ich is the German word for I in English. Freud’s early English translator wanted something sophisticated-sounding, so instead of the appropriate translation of Ich into I, he used the Latin word ego instead. Who could have guessed the consequences, for both good and ill, that would be wrought by this small decision by a translator? To get a sense of the effect, however, simply substitute Freud’s intended word “I” for “ego” in all English writing and discussion.)

But I digress. Back to the issue of “Who am I?” There are many different ways I can think about who I am. Am I my body? But, as mentioned before, all of the cells in my body and brain are constantly being replaced—all of them have been replaced many times over in my lifetime. So my “I” must not reside in particular cells of the body. Nor has it been found in any collection of cells, including the brain.

Or consider the fact that within your body there are trillions of separate living beings (bacteria, viruses, mitochondria) that are much more numerous than the cells of your body—one estimate is that your body contains ten times as many bacteria as cells. All these small living things are constantly interacting with your body as well as with each other—creating a whirling vortex of activity that influences you in complex ways no one understands.

And this is only the complexity at the level of your physical self. Additionally, your thoughts, understandings, and interpretations of the meaning of experiences have changed continually throughout your life. Another way you can understand who you are is as part of a family, tribe, team, club, community, or nation. Since you came into the world, you have been enmeshed in many ever-changing social systems, and all have dramatically influenced your self-understanding. Yet how all these forces coalesced to create your sense of an individual identity is unknown and mostly unknowable.

Still another way to think about yourself is in relation to the roles you play or have played within all your social groups. If I look at my own roles through the years, they include writer, entrepreneur, investor, workshop leader, business executive, rebel, seeker after wisdom, a loving person, an ambitious and striving person, and on and on. For most of us, our identity shifts many times through the years, and it even shifts from moment to moment as we wrestle with our unending choices and decisions.

All the above simply emphasizes this great mystery: Within the incredible scope of the universe, amidst the swirling flux—a world where energy, particles, fields, social forces, and cultural patterns are constantly changing, interacting, and intermingling—somehow within all this change I think of myself as having an individual identity. And so do you. During each person’s lifetime the body, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, relationships, goals, and understandings change continually—yet, somehow, we each experience ourselves as a unique self that has persisted through it all. But what is this self, this “I”? This has been a great mystery to the wisest among us for thousands of years, and it is no less so today.

Watching Consciousness

Let’s return to the recognition that there is an “I” who experiences, who has perceptions, feelings, and thoughts. I can observe that I have impressions of people and objects: I hear sounds, touch physical objects, register smells and tastes. At the most basic level, “I” seem to be this awareness, a screen or mirror upon which these impressions land. Many wise people have noticed that these impressions do not register randomly on the screen of my mind. Rather, as Immanuel Kant made vividly clear, my mind organizes the disorderly chaos of impressions it receives into intelligible patterns. To say this in a different way, my mind takes an incredible number of impressions and selects and organizes them into stories that provide a framework for understanding myself and the world. Further, this process started early in my life, before I was conscious of what I was doing. Early on, a character showed up in these stories, a character called “David,” and he became a big part of the movie of my life. In fact, he took on the central role: sometimes hero, sometimes villain, but most of the time the central character. I do not remember, however, creating this character; he has been around for a very long time. If I pay close attention, however, I can see that he was not the first thing to appear. Before his arrival there was a flux of sensations, impressions, and feelings. “David” came into being when this flux began to be organized into stories; David was created to serve as the central character in the stories.

If I pay very close attention, I notice that, with regard to the movie of my life, the everyday “I,” this character named “David,” is not the one watching the movie. David is playing the lead part in the story of my life, but whoever is watching, it is not David. Whoever is watching can focus on him, but can also choose not to focus on him and simply be aware of the direct experience of the flow of perceptions and thoughts and feelings. Sometimes, when “I” am absorbed in music, or nature, or passion, “David” does not seem to be present at all. Paying close attention, I see that the flow of thoughts and feelings is being organized into patterns, and that I can choose which impressions to focus on and make choices as to how they will be organized. But it is exceptionally difficult to look behind the screen and catch a glimpse of who or what is doing the organizing and making choices.

Saying this in a slightly different way, if I stop writing and focus on my primary experience right now, I am aware of the computer in front of me, trees and flowers out the window, and a mountain in the distance. These are the first things I notice, all coming from my senses. Quickly, however, my mind, freed from the concentration of writing, creates a cascade of thoughts: What am I going to do this afternoon? What will I have for lunch? Do I need to make a phone call right now?

As this goes on, if I let my mind drift for a little while, more and more thoughts with attached expectations, anxieties, hopes, ambitions, and fears present themselves. Rather than letting this random process continue, though, I can choose to focus on a pleasant experience from the past, on a positive feeling about a friend, or on any number of things. Whether I choose to focus or let my attention wander, however, there is always a sense that the same me is present. Yet this me is not “David.” If I organize the impressions into a pattern, into a story, David assumes the primary role, but if I simply let impressions arise, David fades away. Still, “I” seem always to be there. Thus, David, who I usually think of as “me,” and my deepest sense of existence do not appear to be the same.

Thought Experiment – Focusing on consciousness

Focus your attention on some object you can see and concentrate on it for a moment. Now shift your focus to a part of your body, looking at it intently. Next, turn your attention to a person you know who is not present. Now concentrate on an event that happened a few days ago. Next, focus on a sensation inside your body. Now focus on something you like. Then turn your attention to a plan for tomorrow.

Having done these things, can you turn your attention to the part of you that was able to direct your attention, to move it around so quickly? Who or what is that?

Some aspect of me can choose to focus my attention, can pick one thing from among a thousand possibilities upon which I will concentrate. Then, in a split second, it can change its focus. Yet if I try to turn and look at who or what is doing this, if I try to focus on the part of me that is capable of making choices about where to focus, I cannot find anything there. I am left with a will-o’-the-wisp, with words like “ground-stuff” and “mirror.” Who is this “I” that is choosing where I will place my attention?

Why is all this important for you and me?

Since my mother asked that question more than sixty years ago, when I was gazing at the ceiling rather than doing chores or playing games or studying, I have been aware that I am a thinking being. I could choose another figural moment for my personal starting point, but right now, I identify that day as the day I became aware of entering into a conscious, individual human life. And ever since I have reflected on what this might mean, and its significance.

Perhaps you have never thought about these questions. If not, this can only be so because you adopted a set of answers from others without thinking them through for yourself. If you do not see the relevance of the issues I have raised, it is because you are operating within an unconscious act of faith around which you organize your life as you decide how you spend the remaining time and energy of your days.

This is not necessarily bad—it is what most people do. If you feel your life is all it can be, if you feel happy, complete, and content, then there is no reason to think about these things at all. If at times, however, you feel there might be more to life than you have currently discovered, if a nagging sense keeps arising within you that your life is not yet fulfilled and is not on track to bring complete fulfillment, then the first corrective step is to recognize that you have put your act of faith in the views of other people—and they might be wrong.

To get a sense of this possibility, simply consider for a moment how people who are quite different from you are living, people in faraway places or in cultures close at hand that seem strange or mistaken to you. You can see that the views these people hold are different from yours. But how did they arrive at their beliefs? Most of them simply accepted the views they were taught. But if that is what you are doing, how can you be sure what you were taught is not misguided—after all, you are doing exactly what the people you disagree with are doing. At a minimum, you are making an act of faith that you got very lucky and were born into, or just happened by chance to encounter the “right” belief system among a new set of friends. But how can you know this, except through a naïve assumption about your good luck?

Of course, some people in every culture make an effort to work through the beliefs they were given and come up with their own views and understandings. Just making this effort, however, does not insure getting it right. Far from it. Anyone who has embarked on such a journey has quickly discovered that answers do not come easily, and the partial and false conclusions you can see that many people have come to make vivid the difficulty.

Eat, Drink, and Be Merry

In response to this dilemma, some people decide the deep questions are a waste of time and simply throw themselves into enjoyment: “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you will die.” The problem with this approach is that it is not so easy to “be merry.” Unless you know, at a deep level, the things that will make you truly happy and fulfilled, you end up spending your precious time frivolously, and before long you discover you are sad, empty, and depressed—while still furiously trying to “be merry.” For proof, simply look at all the people in the modern world who seem to have it all but who drink too much, take too many drugs and medications (both legal and illegal), use food as an escape rather than nourishment, and indulge in all kinds of unhealthy distractions, all in an attempt to feel better. Along this path, most end up feeling worse, while developing habits and lifestyles that cause ill-health and early death, not to mention the many harmful effects on the people around us, or the growing incidence of suicide.

What now?

So what to do? Although science and philosophy have had a rough time trying to answer the questions posed by existence, consciousness, and identity—all is not lost. The great wisdom traditions of the world have always used these questions as raw material for their endeavors—as the starting point for their inquiries into life and its meaning. In the best of the traditions, the goal has not been to find fixed and rigid answers but to use the questions themselves as springboards in search of the possibilities for a precious human life. The various traditions do suggest specific answers, of course, and some of these formulations are fixed and rigid answer systems, asking adherents to adopt specific beliefs and to mindlessly follow narrow prescriptions for living. In the wisest of the traditions, however, what is offered are the reasons a person should try to discover for themselves how to live a fulfilling life, with suggestions about how one might go about accomplishing this task. As Henry David Thoreau summed up his own quest, it was: “To drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience.”

To emphasize again, the reason questions about existence, consciousness, and identity are crucial for your life and mine, for every person’s life, is that what we believe about these things significantly affects how we will live, what we will see as important and find meaningful. These questions are always circling around when we reflect, so wise teachers have turned them into tools for edification—as exemplified by Ramana Maharshi when he suggested to those who came to him that they simply ask, over and over: “Who am I?” Ramana’s radical point was that it is only necessary to pursue this one question to its ultimate conclusion, to its core inside you, in order to discover not only who you really are, but also to understand the mysteries of existence.

Plotinus, the great Neoplatonist of the third century AD, was saying virtually the same thing—asking us to discover our own deepest nature—when he said, “Withdraw into yourself and look.” The words of Mencius, the best-known successor to Confucius, are an even earlier hint in the same direction: “Who knows his own nature, knows heaven.”[10] The great Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, is also saying it in this passage: “To get at the core of God at his greatest, one must first get into the core of himself … for no one can know God who has not first known himself.”[11] Isn’t this what Jesus was suggesting when, in Luke 17:21, he said: “The kingdom of God is within you.” Socrates was certainly making this point when he insisted, as mentioned before, that it was not only crucial to “know thyself” but that “an unexamined life is not worth living.” And the modern Sufi, Hazrat Inayat Khan (who was instrumental in bringing Sufism to America), was mining the same vein when he spoke these words: “I looked for Thee on earth; I searched for Thee in the heaven, my Beloved, but at last I have found Thee hidden as a pearl in the shell of my heart.”[12]

These quotes, and many similar ones from wise people of every age, make clear that exploring the nature of identity, as well as consciousness, has been at the heart of the human search for a fulfilling life since the dawn of history. Although this inquiry has not provided final answers one can simply take off a shelf and wear out of a philosophical or spiritual store, this questioning has radically shaped those who have undertaken it. Perhaps, in fact, this is the main reason for such questioning—to provide an ever-deepening experience of what it means to be conscious and alive, and ultimately, to provide a glimpse of what lies beyond the individual self and one’s individual identity. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke was suggesting as much when he advised a young man to “have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and … try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.” In the end, according to Rilke, it is through living the questions fully that one can gradually, “without even noticing it, live into the answers.”[13]

All this clearly suggests that in considering the most important questions about life, and especially its meaning and fulfillment, one good place to look is toward the great wisdom traditions that have been developed and handed down to us through the centuries, which we will do later. But first, let’s turn to the second core mental ability that creates who you are, memory.  What is human memory, how does it happen, and how is it related to living a fulfilling life?

 

[1] James Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know about Science and No One Else Does Either, p. 15

[2] William James, A Pluralistic Universe, Lecture VII: The Continuity of Experience (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). This whole paragraph is a paraphrase of several thoughts in this lecture, especially pages 288-289.

[3] ibid

[4] William James has a valuable discussion of these topics in “The Energies of Man,” Science 25, 1907, (No. 635), 331-332. It was the presidential address he gave to the American Philosophical Association and is also reprinted in the Philosophical Review (January 1907). All the suggestions in these two paragraphs are not directly from James, but are thoughts that grew up for me from thinking about what he has said about these things.

[5] Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches  (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 89.

[6] Thomas Merton, ed. Lawrence Cunningham Thomas Merton, Spiritual Master: The Essential Writings (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1992), 111.

[7] Rene Descartes, first appeared in Discourse on the Method written in French in 1637 and later in Latin in Principles of Philosophy in 1644.

[8] David Hume, ed. Sir Lewis Amherst Selby-Bigge, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, Book 2, section 3: The Influencing Motives of the Will (Oxford, United Kingdom: Clarendon Press, 1839), 413.

[9] Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 2005).

[10] Mencius, quoted by Rodney Leon Taylor and Howard Yuen Fung Choy in The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Confucianism: A-M, from the definition Chin ch’i hsin (Fully Realize the Heart-Mind), 81.

[11] Raymond B. Blankney, Meister Eckhart (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1941), 146.

[12] Hazrat Inayat Khan, Gayan: Song, Ragas: The human soul calling upon the beloved God, On-line, https://www.hazrat-inayat-khan.org/php/views.php?h1=1&h2=1&h3=7

[13] Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M. D Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton and Co.), 27. This is the fourth letter from Rainer Maria Rilke to Franz Xaver Kappus in Worpswede, Germany on July 16, 1903.

5 – Learning from the Wise

Existence. Consciousness. Identity. Three great mysteries at the heart of human life. It is not surprising their exploration has been considered vitally important in all the religious and spiritual traditions.

First, existence. Why is there something rather than nothing, the starting point for the human journey and a key part of any search toward understanding who we are and what life is about. As the great writer, philosopher, poet, statesman, and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe put it: “Bewilderment about the fact that there is anything at all, and curiosity about meeting that fact as a wonder, is the best part of us.”[1]  This bewilderment, this curiosity has given rise for millennia to the quest for wisdom and helped set in motion science, philosophy, religion, and many other disciplines of inquiry.

To consider the question of existence, though, must start with consciousness, for it is only because we are conscious that we are able to consider why there is existence: Until you have become aware of a separate self that is differentiated from the world, no “world” outside exists for you. To be conscious of yourself as separate is the prerequisite for the existence of a world “out there.” No individual consciousness, no world.[2]

In light of this, it is little wonder that all the wisdom traditions of the world suggest that the exploration of identity and consciousness are two of the best ways to arrive at an understanding of life and living. Through such questions as “How did this marvelous thing, the light of consciousness, come to me?” “How does my separate, personal consciousness relate to any other consciousness that might exist beyond me?”—the broadest issues of the spiritual search are opened.

The starting point for the spiritual search

These questions, then, are where a spiritual search often begins. Here are three much too brief summaries of how central and important such inquiries have been and are to the wisdom traditions:

1. Hinduism says that consciousness must be the starting point, because it came first. Consciousness existed before there was a material world and is necessary for there to be a material world. Thus, especially jnana yoga, the path of wisdom, uses consciousness itself as a primary path of opening into realization and liberation. By various methods developed over thousands of years, a seeker is given tools to discover the truth beyond individual identity, beyond egoic name and form, and to open into a greater realization of the deepest truth.

Ultimately, Hinduism asserts that we exist in an eternal state that begins and ends in satchitananda, Being, Consciousness, Bliss. Being is existence itself, Consciousness is knowing that existence, and Bliss is the result of Knowing It fully and completely. In this system, the goal is to use increasing penetration of the mysteries to open fully into satchitananda as your own, primary experience of life.

2. Buddhism says the world we perceive with our everyday senses is illusory, and that becoming conscious of this through learning to perceive more accurately leads to the deepest truths. Thus, cultivating conscious awareness is a skillful means to “wake up” to what really is and who we really are.

Buddhism goes on to say that the final possibility beyond the illusion of our daily life in the world is Nirvana. Of course, Nirvana is a mysterious word, and has been speculated about and debated endlessly since the Buddha first borrowed it from Hinduism to describe the ultimate goal toward which he was pointing. Whatever it is, it has something to do with the basic nature of existence, as well as with our true identity. Buddhism urges us to use the tools of consciousness and awareness to awaken to this highest possibility, and if we do, what we discover and become will be “timeless, deathless, permanent, imperishable, unborn, and unbecome.” Seems a worthy goal.

To think about this more playfully, we can, with that sometime Zen practitioner Alan Watts, try to discover the “which than which there is no whicher”?[3] And speaking of Zen, there is a famous phrase in the Heart Sūtra that has become a well-known chant: “Gone, Gone Beyond, Gone Beyond the Beyond. Hail to that Awakening.” What might this chant suggest for the possibility of human life? Whatever the answer, it certainly cannot be pinned down in discursive thought, nor put into normal intellectual categories. Yet perhaps reflecting on what is “Beyond the Beyond” is a doorway to a direct grasping of the ultimate nature of consciousness and identity.

3. Christianity says we each have the possibility of stepping into Christ Consciousness. From his earliest teachings, Jesus emphasized expanding our consciousness. Consider the critically important word metanoia, which had a crucial place in the message both Jesus and Paul delivered. “Repentance” is frequently used in English translations of the New Testament for the word metanoia that was used in the original texts. But the Greek word metanoia does not mean being sorrowful or having regrets as the word repentance is often understood in modern churches. Rather, metanoia as used in the earliest texts we have of the words of Jesus means “to change one’s mind” or “change one’s consciousness.” The message he delivered, then, that comes to us in the English=speaking world as “repent” meant to Jesus “to think differently,” to step into a different (and larger) frame of mind. The Apostle Paul was also very focused on this: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus”[4]—which I understand to mean that those who follow the way of Jesus must attempt to expand into the state of consciousness that Jesus exemplified. And Paul did not say this consciousness first appeared in Jesus. Rather, he said that it “was also in Christ Jesus,” suggesting that this Christ Consciousness existed outside and prior to Jesus being born on earth. For this reason, many spiritual traditions, including Christianity, have equated consciousness itself with God, the Divine, or with “Being.”.

Another relationship with our theme from Christianity is that Jesus often used the phrases “Kingdom of Heaven” or “Kingdom of God” to point to the ultimate fulfilment of our lives. Exactly what these phrases were suggesting has been hotly debated for two thousand years, but most agree that whatever they point to, it involves an “eternal” state—outside of time and space as we normally think about those things. And this eternal state—or place, or Beingness—is inseparable from any Christian understanding of existence and identity. All are intertwined. For me, the best understanding I can reach of the Kingdom of Heaven is not to think of it as a concept to be believed, but as a state of consciousness to live into and become.

Jesus said in Luke: “For, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”[5] Which means to me that if it is already within me, my task is simply to realize it, to become it. Among the earliest sayings of Jesus we have, found in the Gospel of Thomas in the Nag Hammadi cave discovery, Jesus says, “The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.”[6] Thus, again, it is already right here, right now, so our task is to realize and consciously become one with “what already is.”

Opium of the People

All this does raise another issue, though. Before using any wisdom tradition as a vehicle for awakening, freedom, or connection with something greater than our egoic selves we must make an act of faith in the possibility that one or more of the great teachers discovered something important you and I have not yet discovered. And some people have a problem with this. Consciously making an act of faith is not in vogue nowadays. The reason to do so becomes clearer, however, when you realize that the only alternative to a conscious act of faith is an unconscious one, for we each act and live on the basis of many acts of faith. You cannot live otherwise.

For example, a number of people in the modern world have made an act of faith (either consciously or unconsciously) that all religious and spiritual beliefs are delusions, illusions, or “opium of the people.” But they have done so in spite of the fact that there is not one shred of proof that such an act of faith fits reality. To deny the views of the wisdom traditions is an act of faith, just as much as to adopt one or more of them. Not only is there no proof, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that all the wisdom traditions are wrong or mistaken. Perhaps your understanding of one of the traditions is flawed. Maybe the version you were taught was distorted. You do not know for sure what the great wisdom teachers saw and understood, so to reject all their ideas can only be an act of faith.

Further, making this act of faith can be quite problematic for one’s life. Each of us was raised within a culture deeply influenced by one or more of the wisdom traditions, even those who were raised in a non-religious way, because every culture grew out of beliefs developed by the traditions. Every culture teaches to its young one set or another of ideas about how to live, values that are important, and images of what is meaningful, and each one is grounded in a wisdom tradition. Thus, even those who say they reject all the wisdom teachings can’t just throw them off, for they were steeped in one or more while growing up, and these teachings are embedded in the unconscious.

This is the “myth of the given” within which each of us lives. Each of us takes ideas and beliefs we absorbed when young as “truths,” often without knowing where they originated. In the final analysis, every person’s beliefs about “what is obviously true” came from one or more of the wisdom teachings passed down through the centuries. Go back far enough and you will find that every person’s myth about what is “given truth” originated in one of the wisdom traditions of the world. This doesn’t mean what each person was taught is true, because many of the teachings have been twisted and distorted through the centuries. But you and I, and every other person alive, was marinated in one of these systems, whether we realize it or not, so to think we can reject all the traditions is much harder than it at first might seem.

Further, on what base can one stand to reject all the systems? To make a judgment requires a starting place, and the wisdom tradition we were taught is our starting place.

Skeptico: Then I will use reason!

Wisdom Seeker: Sorry Skeptico, that isn’t possible. Reason doesn’t provide such a starting point. Reason can only start operating after a set of assumptions has been adopted to create the framework for its operation. For most of us, this is the “myth of the given” we were taught. If we reject that, the only path forward to adopt another set of assumptions—none of which can be proved. Further, as David Hume pointed out, and much recent research has shown, we mostly use reason to justify what we feel, want, or want to believe.

So even if you succeed completely in rooting out every single value and belief you were indoctrinated to accept while growing up, you must replace your “givens” with some other system, for no one can create a whole new set of beliefs starting at ground zero. So, if you are able to get rid of all your old beliefs, you will be forced to take new beliefs from people you consider “wise.” But how will you make this decision? And how will you know where these new beliefs came from? If you trace them back, you will discover they are always grounded in part on prior wisdom traditions. Except if you adopt the position of absolute and total nihilism. Even here, there is no argument to establish its truth, so to adopt a nihilistic worldview is just as much an act of faith as to adopt a religious one. There is no escape. Your only truly real choice is to consciously choose which belief systems to use as your starting point.

Choosing a path

In the final analysis, no one can give you a proven answer to the questions of where we came from, what is truly important, or how we should live—and anyone trying to answer these questions is led back to the fundamental issues of existence, consciousness, and identity. Further, whatever ideas you have about these issues was borrowed from others, or is something you worked out for yourself starting with the raw material you were given by others. Perhaps you have had an experience of knowing “the full truth” for yourself—a number of people have. But it is quite possible that your experience was partial, or even delusory, so you must make an act of faith as to whether it was really true and complete. All the most important issues of life eventually wind their way back to acts of faith as a starting point. Whether you make your acts of faith consciously or unconsciously is within your power, but whether you make one is not.

Once recognizing all this, the wisest path forward seems to be to study and practice the best suggestions the great teachers have passed on to us, and then to gradually work out the best answers you can for yourself. Nothing guarantees this approach will be free of mistakes, but using the guidance of those considered the wisest to have walked among us by the great traditions seems to me, well, wise.

This conclusion is strongly reinforced by studying history and there discovering that there have been thousands upon thousands of people through the ages, perhaps millions, who have found inner peace, joy, and a deep sense of fulfillment by following the guidance of one or more of the wisdom traditions. There are certainly errors and mistakes in much of what has been handed down to us, and any path you choose might be wrong. But the cumulative evidence of history is that many, many people have found fulfillment through following the guidance of the great traditions. There are more accounts than you will ever have time to read of people in all the traditions who came to great peace and joy. Not the majority of people in any tradition, by any means, but a significant number. I have read at least a thousand such reports.

Some might be exaggerated, some even delusory. But an important sign is that the wisest and most fulfilled figures in every culture had a profound positive effect on the people around them. Many people who were in their presence experienced a profound sense of peace, of love and compassion, joy and bliss. And when someone has this kind of effect on a significant number of other people, it is a clear signal that such a person’s understanding is real and true. On the other hand, I have found almost no reports of people who discovered deep fulfillment through sensory indulgence, by seeking wealth and power, by making a nihilistic act of faith, or among those whose act of faith was that all the traditions were delusions.

Further, those societies that abandoned rather than use the guidance of the great traditions, trying to form cultures without their guidance, have always crashed into the wall that Nietzsche foresaw—the only alternative to the teachings of the wisdom traditions is “raw power.” Nietzsche hoped that choosing to live from this “will to power” would bring beneficial results, but the experiments of Hitler in Germany, Lenin and Stalin in Russia, Mao in China, and Pol Pot in Cambodia are vivid examples of the danger of attempting to approach the creation of human cultures free of the traditions. (Nietzsche would certainly not have approved of any of the above-listed perverted manifestations of his ideas, but it is hard to discern a positive outcome for any culture that adopts his views. He looked back to the older Greek culture and the assertions of power from which that many of the major Greek figures, God and human alike, operated. But he failed to sufficiently acknowledge that all the humans operated within value systems given by those traditions, and all who ignored or transgressed those value systems eventually came to unhappy ends.)

To return to the central point: Although the teachings of the wisdom traditions have been distorted by those in power in the interest of self-centered and mean-spirited ends  many times in human history (bringing unhappy results), there are also many examples of cultures that used the values and ideals of the wisdom traditions in healthy ways, which resulted in civilizations that brought peace and fulfillment to many people over long periods of time and provided a framework within which many individuals found their way to peace, freedom, fulfillment, realization, and joy.

What now?

How does all this relate to you and me and the living of our individual lives?

To have the best chance of finding deep peace and joy for yourself, it is important to:

1) Be as clear as you can about the core beliefs that underpin your life;

2) Spend time examining whether these beliefs seem right for you now;

3) Pick one or more of the wisdom traditions that seem most vital to you right now and undertake a set of practices from that tradition;

4) Use the help of a teacher if you can find one who seems right for you now in your journey;

5) If at some point you have a direct experience of answers, or have had deep insights in the past, don’t dismiss or diminish the importance of such moments. At the same time, don’t rush to conclusions about what they mean—any one experience might be just a single step on a long journey to wholeness, love, peace, and joy.

As you follow the best path you can find, be open to change, but persevere. And always keep in mind that you are operating from a set of unproven assumptions, so keep digging deeper. It is only in the deepest ground that you will you ever find a firm place to stand.

 

[1] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quoted in Sam Keen, Hymns to an Unknown God: Awakening the Spirit in Everyday Life (New York: Bantam Books, 1995), 20.

[2] See the earlier chapter, “The Mystery of Consciousness,” p. 2

[3] Alan Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 75.

[4] Philippians 2:5 (King James Version).

[5] Jesus, Luke 17:20-21 King James Version

[6] Jesus, Gospel of Thomas, 113

Why do you insist the universe is not a conscious intelligence when it gives birth to conscious intelligence?  — Cicero, Roman philosopher, statesman, and lawyer

What we know

In the modern world, there are a number of popular theories about how consciousness and memory came about. One is that consciousness is created solely by electrical/biochemical impulses in the brain. For instance, in his influential book Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett dismisses the idea that consciousness could be anything but electrical/chemical impulses, and goes on “show” how consciousness is completely a matter of the development of these unconscious processes.

Unfortunately, much of the brain research going on today is based on this view, and it is hard to get a major grant unless the applicant seems to uphold it. As Ken Wilber put it, the current paradigm suggests: ““The brain itself is said to be a biomaterial information processor, explainable in scientific and objective terms, and the information it processes consists of nothing but representations of the empirical world.” In that light, Wilber went on to say that Dennett’s book,

might better have been entitled Consciousness Explained Away. In all of these approaches, the only difference, is the exact nature of the objective network through which information bits hustle in their appointed rounds of generating the illusion of consciousness.

The problem is, all such theories begin with the assumption that the electrical/chemical processes alone create consciousness—and that they can account for all our thoughts and feelings, all insights and intuitions, for the sense we have of a life trajectory or telos. But there is no proof for this theory at all; it is supported only by an act of faith by those who choose to start their exploration at this level. Looking at what we actually know, the current situation in scientific understanding is well summarized by biologist Dr. Robert Lanza:

Nothing in modern physics explains how a group of molecules in your brain create consciousness. The beauty of a sunset, the miracle of falling in love, the taste of a delicious meal—these are all mysteries to modern science. Nothing in science can explain how consciousness arose from matter. Our current model simply does not allow for consciousness, and our understanding of this most basic phenomenon of our existence is virtually nil.[1]

Looking at the science, there is no reason to make the act of faith that consciousness is solely created by electrical/biochemical firings in the brain, so this chapter will examine what this theory does and does not have to offer. Importantly, it will examine what can be learned from examining the one thing you can directly access, your own consciousness, and explore what might be learned in such an effort.

Skeptico: Examine my own consciousness? How is that relevant?

Wisdom Seeker: Look carefully at what you personally know. If you are like me, all you know is your direct experience of having thoughts, feelings, images, and sensations. You do not have any direct knowledge about how these things happen. You might have read or heard theories about it, but that is secondhand information. Further, theories change all the time, and researchers for thousands of years have continually disagreed. They disagree radically today.

So, right now, focus on what you directly know: Have you ever seen an electrical/chemical impulse in your brain? Have you ever seen such an impulse do anything? Have you ever had a direct experience of your brain creating thoughts and feelings? The idea that your brain is responsible for your thoughts and feelings is not something you know directly: It is a concept you have read or heard. It is, of course, true that we must rely on many concepts we do not personally have direct evidence for, but only if there is a consensus, and even then it is valuable to be open to discovering better ways of understanding. This is how all progress has been made in every area of knowledge.

Thought Experiment – Does everything come from the brain?

Relax and breathe deeply for a moment. Now see if you have any direct knowledge about your brain and what it is doing. Is it creating your thoughts and feelings? There are modern theories that the brain is solely responsible for these things, but do you have any direct knowledge that they are true?

Our human understanding of consciousness has changed many times, and will again, because we simply do not understand it. And the concept that the brain—all by itself—creates all thoughts and feelings will likely fall by the wayside, just like many other widely accepted “street views” that seem ridiculous to us now. (The sun travels around the earth. Disease is not caused by germs. Tobacco is safe. No meteors have ever hit the earth. The universe is contracting; no, it is static; no, it is expanding.) As Allan Wallace, a Buddhist philosopher and translator for the Dalai Lama (and who as a young man had a strong interest in science) said:

It’s absurd! Scientists have yet to explain the nature of consciousness. They have no means of objectively detecting it. They have not identified its necessary and sufficient causes. And yet, they ask us to wager everything on their belief that consciousness is solely a product of the brain.[2]

Opening to views beyond the narrow “the brain by itself creates consciousness,” one expansion involves growing evidence that the whole body is involved in sensing, experiencing, and thinking—the gut, the heart, probably much more. A further step includes research showing that consciousness is not located solely in a person’s isolated brain or body. But before we get to that, it is important to note that there is much evidence for correlations between activity in the brain and thoughts and feelings. But correlation is not causation. The brain plays a role in our thinking and experiencing, but there is no evidence that it is the sole cause of everything we think and experience. All you or I can directly know is that we are aware of having thoughts and feelings going on in our perceived experience, in our awareness. And since this is all we know directly, it is a very good starting point for understanding ourselves and exploring who we are.

To repeat, most everyone agrees there are correlations between electrical/chemical activity in the brain and our thoughts and feelings. We are dependent upon our brains for accessing thoughts and feelings (at least a lot of the time). If a brain is damaged, accessing information is often impaired. But this does not mean the brain creates thoughts and feelings all by itself. Even after many, many years of investigation, we have very little idea how thoughts and feelings happen, or how memories are stored. We know that the brain is usually a part of the process, but there is no evidence that it is all of the process.

A good image comes from Alva Noë, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California Berkeley: “Trying to understand consciousness in neural terms alone is like trying to understand a car driving down the road only in terms of the engine. It’s bad philosophy masquerading as science.”[3] In other words, if one looks only at the engine of a car in order to understand its functioning, there is no way to understand how the direction of travel is being determined. Riding in a car is certainly dependent upon the engine—if the engine is malfunctioning the car will not take us where we want to go. But this does not mean that we are sitting on the engine, that it can steer the car, and it certainly does not suggest that the engine is determining the destination of travel. Perhaps, like the engine of a car, the activity of the brain is necessary but not sufficient for our thoughts, feelings, and memories.

The gap between electrical/chemical activity and thoughts

If a researcher stimulates or measures electrical or biochemical activity in a person’s brain, certain kinds of thoughts can sometimes be correlated with specific regions. But the researcher has no idea what particular thought will arise, nor does he or she have a clue as to how the thought that did arise came into existence. And certainly there is no way for a researcher to make a specific thought arise.

A researcher might say: If I stimulate this area of the brain, the person will have a tendency to have fear, or sexually-tinged thoughts, or a memory in a certain category. But the researcher will have no idea which particular thought will arise, and can do nothing to determine what it will be. In this sense, stimulating areas of the brain is like tuning a radio: If you turn to a particular channel, you can know the type of music that is usually played on that channel, but you will have no idea which song will be playing at the moment you tune in. This analogy, that the brain is like a radio receiver, has been made often. Just like a radio, if a brain is not working properly, clear signals will not come through. But this does not suggest that the brain is creating the signals. If the brain is a tuning mechanism, the signals are being created elsewhere. If so, the fundamental question becomes, where?

Just asking this question drives brain-only theorists to distraction—they want to dismiss the receiver analogy out-of-hand. But there is no scientific basis to do so. William James was far ahead of his time when, more than a hundred years ago, he stated that whether the brain “produces” thoughts or merely “transmits” them is unknown. To those who replied at the time that they could not conceive of where thoughts came from, if they were not produced by the brain, James pointed out that it is just as difficult to envision how a purely material mechanism can create thoughts: “The theory of production [that thoughts are produced solely in the brain] is therefore not a jot more simple or credible in itself than any other conceivable theory.”[4]

A modern science fiction story by Terry Bisson playfully presents this issue in a way that James would have enjoyed. A spaceship from a distant galaxy has landed on Earth and captured several humans to discover how they have been able to send radio signals. Being able to send such signals, the aliens assume, means that humans can think. The aliens have examined the captured humans carefully, and the ship commander is reporting back to the home planet.

He says about the humans they have examined: “They’re made out of meat.” His superior is incredulous, refusing to believe that raw meat can think. He asks where the brain is and what it is made of, since he knows that physical matter can’t think.

The ship commander replies: “Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” The superior back on the home planet asks, with puzzlement in his voice: “So … what does the thinking?”

The commander replies: “You’re not understanding, are you? You’re refusing to deal with what I’m telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat.”

After a pause: “Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”[5]

This is exactly the point James is making. To argue that a brain made out of nothing but matter can produce thoughts and feelings is unbelievable, and so far has proven an unsolvable scientific mystery—which is the reason one of the leaders in consciousness studies, Professor David Chalmers, said it is “the hard problem” of consciousness—trying to understand how and why a physical person can have conscious experience at all.[6] And, to make an act of faith that consciousness is created by “meat” is as much of a stretch as believing that thoughts and feelings arise outside the material brain in ways we do not yet understand.

The brain as a reducing mechanism

Another way to think about how the brain works is that it is a reducing mechanism that filters out impressions so we can function in the everyday world. Actually, the brain must be limiting what we perceive or we would be overwhelmed with a flood of information all the time. The view that this is its main function has been championed by such luminaries as the noted philosopher Henri Bergson, author Aldous Huxley, Sir Cyril Burt (quoted in Chapter 2), and William James, and is now being supported by modern brain research such as that by Julio Martinez-Trujillo of McGill University in Montreal:

The brain doesn’t have enough capacity to process all the information that is coming into your senses. We found that there are some cells, some neurons in the prefrontal cortex, which have the ability to suppress the information that you aren’t interested in. They are like filters.[7]

So perhaps the brain’s main function is to filter out most of the information that is bombarding us all the time, otherwise we would be overwhelmed and unable to take care of ourselves. We can plan our everyday lives only because our minds dramatically limit what is let in. It has been estimated that you do not register 99.99 percent of the information that is available around you at any given moment. A significant factor is that the human mechanism developed to perceive only a very small part of the available information—we take in a limited portion of the sound spectrum, the light spectrum, and other energy waves that are around us (radio, ultraviolet, infrared, microwaves, gamma-rays, X-rays). All you normally see and experience is quite different from what other creatures take in; there is an enormous amount of information out there we humans cannot detect at all (through our normal five senses—perhaps we can and do at other levels of our consciousness).

Perhaps even more important is that each person only registers a very small portion of the information that could be detected by the senses. How do we select? How do we organize what is selected? It is an extraordinarily complex process that occurs mostly at the unconscious level. No one understands how this works, but one thing that has been discovered is that enculturation causes us to look for and take in some things and not others. Thus, we do not see the world as it is, but as we have been trained and conditioned to see it. What you see will be quite different from what other people see. What a forest-dweller in New Guinea sees and takes in will be quite different from what most of us in the modern world register. The crucial point: neither perspective is more accurate than the other; they are just different. An old Talmudic thought inspired Anaïs Nin to say it this way: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”[8]

As we go through the day, our biological urges constantly interact with our early conditioning to determine what we will take in through our senses. When you are afraid or insecure, most of what you will see “out there” in the world will have to do with danger or safety. If you are filled with sexual desire, you will mainly notice people who are sexually appealing. (Think back to a time when you entered a room in which a party was going on, and your attention was riveted on finding a potential partner. You probably did not notice the color of the floor, or even people who were not attractive to you.) And when you are hungry or thirsty, things you might eat or drink grab your attention.

This process of filtering out most of the available information happens, to a great extent, at the unconscious level. The brain is involved, but there is no reason to believe it is the only factor. Returning to the analogy that the brain is like a radio, the electronics of the radio are crucial for the signals to be received, but the signal might not originate inside the radio. It is possible the brain is creating as well as processing the signals to create consciousness, but we do not know that. There is no evidence for it. It is just as likely the signals originate elsewhere. This possibility fits all the facts as well as a brain-only theory.

Using this model, your awareness is moved from channel to channel by urges, desires, fears, and enculturations you received while growing up, and for most people most of the time it happens at an unconscious or semi-conscious level. But this process does not have to remain unconscious. You can learn to turn the dial more consciously, to tune to higher levels of yourself, to develop greater and greater levels of awareness. As you develop this capacity, you can learn to tune into channels beyond the ego self, and then learn to consciously turn the knob and switch channels to inputs from beyond the five senses. As you learn to do this, you can develop the power to choose what you will focus on, where your attention will be, and even what your identity will be (this takes a lot of practice). Eventually, you might even be able to tune into the highest levels of reality and discover that there are things going on in your consciousness beyond what is generated by the physical brain alone. Importantly, developing such abilities is precisely what many of the concentration and meditative practices of the world’s wisdom traditions have always taught.

Insofar as this theory has validity, it means we have the capacity to know and understand much more than we normally do in the everyday course of our lives. It even suggests that we have the capacity to absorb knowledge in ways beyond simply thinking with our isolated brains. One of the great brain researchers of the 20^th century, Wilder Penfield, came to just this conclusion on the basis of a lifetime of study, saying that the ability to make judgments and exercise will are not in the brain, but somehow “transcendent” functions that are not reducible to physiology.[9]

Skeptico: What does that mean?

Wisdom Seeker: To me it suggests that our minds are more than just the physical brain; that there is something going on with regard to consciousness beyond the biological level; that our thoughts and feelings are connected to and intertwined with something beyond the firing of neurons. And this view aligns with all the great wisdom traditions of history. Aldous Huxley was reflecting on those traditions when he called this greater capacity “Mind at Large.” In his view, when we are focused on functioning in the world, the larger mind is mostly not being accessed, for everything is being “funneled through the reducing value of the brain and nervous system.” At such times, we are aware of only “a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness” contained in “Mind at Large.”[10] But much is possible, and could explain why saints and sages seem to access broader perspectives during mystical experience—they have temporarily removed the reducing value. And this can also happen to normal people—during a crisis, when praying or meditating, under the influence of mind-altering drugs, when caught up in passion, experiencing beauty, or during a near-death experience.

Can we study consciousness objectively?

Skeptico: I know you talked about this before, but I have to go back to an earlier question. I thought brain research, with all its new tools over the last twenty or thirty years, had cleared up most of the questions about how the brain works.

Wisdom Seeker: Some interesting things have been learned. MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) studies have revealed a great deal about correlations between the brain and thoughts and emotions. But very little progress had been made in discovering how thoughts are created or where they are located, which is the reason it is “the hard problem” of consciousness.

Skeptico: But haven’t researchers at least demonstrated that specific emotions are located in specific areas of the brain?

Wisdom Seeker: There were claims along those lines a few years ago, but as with so many other theories about how the brain works, this one is falling apart too. First, keep in mind that when a person reports having an emotion, activity in a specific area of that person’s brain might indicate it is involved, but this provides no evidence that the emotion is being caused or even initiated there. That specific area of the brain might be reacting to something caused somewhere else (in the gut, or even outside the brain). The fact that an area of the brain is involved in a process provides no evidence that the cause lies in the brain.

And devastating to the theory that specific emotions are located in specific areas of the brain is the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett, professor of psychology at Northeastern University and the author of How Emotions Are Made: The New Science of the Mind and Brain. Dr. Barrett’s lab (the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory) analyzed over two hundred brain-imaging studies published over the last twenty years and found that “no brain region was dedicated to any single emotion.” Further, they discovered that every region of the brain previously associated with a particular emotion also increased its activity when other emotions were aroused. Her conclusion: Specific regions of the brain do not have “a distinct psychological purpose.” For example, fear has in the past been attributed to the amygdala, but it does not seem to be located there. “Instead, a single brain area like the amygdala participates in many different mental events, and many different brain areas are capable of producing the same outcome.”[11] Her work also corresponds to the growing evidence that when one area of the brain is injured or destroyed, other areas of the brain begin to pick up many of those functions. This is even true of the two sides for the brain which used to be considered a distinct dividing line. No more. Recent research shows that when one side of the brain is not functioning properly, in some cases the other side begins to take up those functions of the other half.

And although Dr. Barrett does not make this point, let me emphasize again that there is no evidence that emotions are created by the brain alone. This is a possibility, but only one out of several. There is no clear evidence as to how emotions arise. Although there are correlations between brain activity and emotions, the belief that emotions are caused by the brain has no scientific basis.

There is another major problem that must be dealt with in any attempt to understand consciousness through brain research alone: A brain researcher has no objective way to know what is happening in a subject’s consciousness. A researcher can view a brain scan while observing the actions of a subject, but neither of these provides direct knowledge of what the subject is thinking or feeling. A researcher can guess, but there is no objective way for a researcher to know what thoughts are going on within a person. No machine can determine what thought has occurred in a person’s consciousness. When a researcher stimulates a monkey’s brain, does the monkey have a thought? How about a dog—or a goldfish?

In all these cases, with humans or animals, there is no objective way for a researcher to know whether a thought has occurred. No one can say whether the brain impulses in a monkey’s brain recorded by an MRI indicate that a thought was created. The same is true for humans—and goldfish. An MRI does not reveal thoughts. An MRI of a human brain, just like that of a monkey’s, does not tell a researcher whether there has been a thought or feeling. The reason there seems to be a difference between monkeys and humans is that humans can communicate to the researcher what has happened. The researcher cannot know this without the report of the subject. Because we do not know how to communicate with monkeys about such things, they can’t give us a report about their thoughts and feelings, but they might be having as many as we do. Registering this fully makes vivid the crucial subjective element, the necessity of human reports, in all research about brain activity as it relates to where thoughts and feelings originate or might be located in the brain.

Skeptico: I’m really confused now. What about all those pictures of parts of the brain lighting up when a researcher does specific things?

Wisdom Seeker: Studying this kind of brain activity is far, far removed from direct knowledge of what thoughts and feelings are, or what causes them. To emphasize again, this kind of research reveals physiological correlates, not thoughts or feelings, and certainly not consciousness. The only way a researcher can know the thoughts or feelings of a person being studied is through that person’s personal, subjective report. Compounding the difficulty is that a person will have different thoughts and feelings when undergoing the same experiment a second time, and different again every time thereafter. And different subjects will have decidedly different thoughts and feelings when undergoing similar experiments. They will also use different words to describe what they have experienced, and similar words will have somewhat different meanings for each subject.

All this means that, to draw conclusions from the cumulative evidence of several brain studies, a researcher will have to make a subjective judgment about how to compare and interpret the varying subjective reports of the persons being studied. After such judgments are made, data can be organized into patterns and the process can become a bit more objective. Other researchers can then do similar experiments and compare their results to the first. But the next set of researchers will have to start with subjective reports from their subjects, and will have to make their own subjective judgments in interpreting the words they hear. Thus, in studying consciousness, everything begins with the subjective reports of those being studied and moves along through subjective decisions by the researchers about how to interpret the data they are collecting. In the end, all such research is filled with subjective interpretations and judgments.

Skeptico: Why can’t a researcher draw objective conclusions by looking at the actions of a subject while looking at a scan of that person’s brain?

Wisdom Seeker: Any time one person observes the actions of another, the one drawing conclusions must interpret what the other’s actions are conveying. The starting point for any research is the observer’s subjective view of what is happening. To understand this point you need only to remember that ten observers at an accident will report ten different things, some of them quite different from the reports of the others. Or consider what happens when two researchers look at a possible paranormal happening—one who believes such things are possible and one who does not. It is highly likely that the two researchers will report what they saw in two very different ways.

Another way to get at this is through the work of Max Velmans, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of London. Velmans points out that if the subject in an experiment were to start observing the researcher, there is no way we could objectively determine which one was being the most objective in their report. We tend to “define” a researcher as “objective” because of the role they have subjectively chosen for themselves, but there is no “objective” way to know if that person is truly being objective.[12] All observations involve an inner, subjective registering of some facts out of the many that are available, and then an ordering of the facts that were accepted into awareness. Both the taking in and ordering happen, at least in part, unconsciously. Then, after these steps, there remains the interpretation, which is always at least partly subjective.

All this brings us back to William James and his contention that there is no greater reason to believe that thoughts are produced by the brain than that they are received and organized by it. In response to those who think they have objective knowledge about how the brain works, consider James’ observation in The Will to Believe, that being convinced “that the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is only one more subjective opinion.”[13] In other words, the belief that you have enough hard evidence to bestow the label “objective” on your view is based on only on your subjective opinion.

Is the brain made of matter, energy, both, or neither?

Skeptico: You’ve said a lot about what we can’t know. Is there anything positive coming out of all the current explorations of consciousness?

Wisdom Seeker: One thing that is becoming increasingly clear is that there are several different levels to consider when thinking about the brain, the mind, and consciousness, and a lot of the confusion today comes from failing to take these different levels into consideration. At the outer physical level, the brain is just three pounds of meat, constructed of the same primary building blocks as everything else in the universe—over 99% carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. These atoms are billions of years old, and each has been in countless configurations through the eons, all over the universe (and will be in countless other configurations eons into the future). They are special (at least to us) because they have come together for a short time to be a part of the thinking process of human beings, one of the most marvelous and complex things the universe has ever seen (no one knows why, or how).

These atoms have come together to form neuronal cells. In fact, the average human brain is made up of 86 billion neurons, give or take a few (in my case, it has recently felt like more taking than giving has been going on). Each neuron is quite complex: each can have thousands of connections to other neurons, so there are trillions upon trillions of such connections in your brain (a typical brain has well over 100 trillion synapses—points of connection—up to 1,000 trillion by some estimates). And parts of this marvelous thing are always active—buzzing, humming, sensing and receiving, sorting and organizing—even when we are asleep. But how does all that buzzing and humming give rise to a thought or feeling; how is it all being organized, coordinated? No one has any idea.

Going back to an earlier point, if all the atoms in the Earth were collapsed to just its “solid stuff,” the whole Earth would be about the size of a bowling ball. Then what would be the size of all the material stuff in my brain? It would be much smaller than a pinhead (no jokes please). If compacted, it would be very hard to find all the physical stuff of my brain with a powerful microscope. The rest of the space in my head (and yours too) is not matter, but a swirling vortex of energy, waves, anti-matter, and who knows what else.

At a deeper level still, there is a growing understanding that no “objects” are solid matter at all, so even that compacted, miniscule sub-pinhead, is not really material stuff, but is itself interconnected fields of energy, or probability waves, or something even more mysterious. In 1938, Einstein was already saying:

Matter is where the concentration of energy is great, field where the concentration of energy small. … There is no sense in regarding matter and field as two qualities quite different from each other. We cannot imagine a definite surface separating distinctly field and matter. … What impresses our senses as matter is really a great concentration of energy into a comparatively small space. We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong.[14]

Think about that for a moment! If what we perceive as matter is simply a concentration of energy within a larger field of energy, then the brain is but a concentration of energy. It is not a physical thing, even at the deepest level; it is a concentration of energy within a larger field of energy. Crucially, Einstein emphasizes there is no “definite surface separating” the brain from the energy field in which it exists. And outside the swirling, radiating fields that make up your head are many complex and active fields all around you, and the fields inside are interacting with the fields outside all the time. With this image, you have arrived at the third level of how to understand yourself and your brain.

You can therefore consider your thinking apparatus at one level as being the physical meat of the brain, at another level as being made of up mostly of large cells called neurons, at a smaller level still as trillions tiny particles such like electrons and protons constantly moving and interacting, or at another level as having no physical substance at all, but simply being a field of energy within ever-larger fields of energy. Given this emerging picture of reality (and it is definitely the established view of modern physics), then thoughts must arise in ways far different from how it has been postulated by those who are focused on the brain as an electrical or mechanical mechanism. All these levels must be included when we try to understand how the brain works. Each has value, but focusing on one at the exclusion of the others (even those we don’t yet know about) is not the way to truth. There is, therefore, no reason to limit our understanding of who we are as human beings to one level. Instead, let us be creative and open-minded, exploring and considering all the possibilities.

Thought Experiment – Getting in touch with the energy field, and beyond

Realize that cutting edge science is telling you that your brain, far from being just physical matter, is made up of fields of energy, with everything moving at incomprehensible speeds. Then register that at another level still, science is saying your brain is made up of probability waves, with everything interacting with everything else—not only inside your head but outside as well. Holding these thoughts, consider for a moment that the range of possible information exchange open to you is potentially much vaster that you might have so far understood. Be open to the possibility that there is much more information available to you than you have assumed.

One noted scientist who developed an interesting way to think about all this was physicist David Bohm. He was a close friend of Einstein’s (Einstein at one point said he looked on Bohm as his “spiritual son”[15]), and Bohm shared Einstein’s view that the universe is not a random process. In Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Bohm presents reasons for believing there is an unseen order in which the physical world is embedded. He calls this the Implicate Order, which lies behind but constantly interacts with the Explicate Order of our everyday world. This Implicate Order, however, cannot be detected by our five senses, because it is outside their range. As mentioned earlier, our five physical senses can only detect a very small amount of the information out there. And crucially, there are many, many levels of reality and types of information beyond the electromagnetic spectrum that our senses can’t perceive at all, such as probability waves, dark energy, neutrinos, the quantum foam, the zero point field, and who knows how many other realities that lie beyond our perceptual field.

All these realms are one way to think about the Implicate Order, but even they are not a stopping point for our explorations. Bohm did not think he had understood what reality truly was—he saw his efforts as a starting point only. He did, however, develop sophisticated mathematical demonstrations for why something must be going on in other realms that affect the realm of our reality, and he made persuasive arguments for why our thoughts and feelings are interacting with this unseen Implicate Order. And for Bohm, all his work lead him inexorably back to consciousness:

I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole.[16]

Bohm’s suggestions have much potential for helping us understand who we are, how thoughts arise, and what life is about. His work (and that of many others exploring the cutting edge) is making it increasingly clear that you and I are being influenced all the time by a vast array of forces and fields surrounding us. Trillions of waves are constantly interacting with our bodies and brains all the time (sound waves, visible and ultraviolet light, radio waves, microwaves, X-rays, gamma rays, gravity waves, and much more—beyond our conscious awareness. Trillions of neutrinos are passing through my brain every second (yes, and yours too). All these forces and energies are constantly passing through and affecting the various parts of our bodies and brains in ways that no one even begins to grasp. Are they affecting our thoughts and feelings? No one knows. As Nobel Laureate physicist Max Born put it:

We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe; all is rushing about and vibrating in a wild dance.[17]

Besides Bohm, numerous other scientists, physicians, psychologists, and philosophers are offering ways to think about how our minds are related to and interact with the broader world beyond the range of the five senses.

Karl Pribram, neurosurgeon and long-time professor at Yale and Stanford, has, over many years, developed a holonomic model of the brain, in which the brain is understood as a hologram rather than an electrical/biochemical machine. His theory, set forth most fully in his book The Form Within, and discussed more fully in the next chapter, describes how information is not stored or processed in fixed areas of the brain but is distributed throughout the brain (in the way a hologram exists as a semi-transparent three-dimensional image). A number of researchers have added to Pribram’s work, suggesting that (as more and more recent evidence suggests) the world outside the brain is also a hologram, and the two holograms are very likely interacting with each other in ways than previous theories have not taken into account.

Michio Kaku is the Henry Semat Professor in Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York. He is one of the leading theorists of string theory and the author of several best-selling books on physics and the implications of how the emerging ideas in science affect our thinking about life and the nature of the universe. (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny, and The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything.) Along with many other scientists, he has come to the conclusion that there is a dimension of reality beyond the random and strictly mechanistic world of materialism. He summarizes: “To me it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance.”[18]

Brian Swimme, whose doctorate was in mathematics and whose life work involves the study of evolutionary cosmology, has numerous books and TV programs about understanding life and the universe within a larger picture. Journey of the Universe and the newly revised Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story expand on David Bohm’s idea that nothing we perceive as physical reality is solid matter, but is make up of infinitesimally small particles or waves that are constantly being absorbed into and then “foaming forth” from the quantum vacuum—thousands of times a second (much faster, actually).

Crucially, in this quantum realm time and space do not exist, so information can be exchanged in ways far beyond our understanding. And keep in mind that everything, including your mind and body, is composed of stuff that is continually being absorbed into and foaming forth from this background world, which Swimme calls the “all-nourishing abyss,” for it gives rise to everything and yet is unfathomable to us. But through it, each of us is deeply connected to all things. A fascinating possibility is that this unperceived realm is exactly the mysterious realm of dark matter and dark energy, about which we know almost nothing, but seems to make up about 95% of the universe. Come to think of it, how can our current theories about existence, matter, consciousness, or anything else explain anything until we can account for how we might be interacting with the 95% of the universe about which we know so little.

Dean Radin received advanced degrees in electrical engineering and educational psychology, worked as a researcher at Bell Labs, GTE Laboratories, and Princeton, and then became the Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. In several books such as Entangled Minds and The Conscious Universe, as well as numerous studies and articles, he presents the current theory that previously entangled particles can communicate over vast distances almost instantaneously (which Einstein disliked intensely but which has become the prevailing view in physics today). Radin goes on to provides much evidence that our minds are interconnected through this mysterious mechanism in ways that provide us with information going far beyond communication just limited to our five senses, which has dramatic consequences for understanding consciousness itself.

I will expand on some of these fascinating theories and ideas more in Chapter 12, and include others such as Carl Jung, best-selling philosopher Ken Wilber, noted stem-cell biologist Robert Lanza, acclaimed systems theorist Ervin László, noted Bernardo Kastrup (who holds a PhD in both computer engineering and philosophy), Alexander Wendt (one of the leaders in the development of the new field of quantum social science), and Arthur M. Young, famous inventor, helicopter pioneer, cosmologist, philosopher, astrologer, and author.

The above theorists do not agree with each other about everything (although there is much convergence between them), but they are unified in presenting interesting ideas that go beyond materialism and make an effort to include consciousness in an understanding of who we human beings might be.

But my intention here is not to settle on one definitive view among many fascinating possibilities, nor is it to reject all the important things we are learning about the brain’s electrical/biochemical processes in more traditional research. That, too, has great value. My interest here is to make vivid that, if we are to come to a full and true understanding of who we are and what life is about, we must understand the limitations of narrow, mechanistic approaches. Such views have their role to play, but are not the final story—not by a long shot.

Besides the fact that they will almost certainly be changed in the future, we should listen to the words of another Nobel Prize–winning physicist, Werner Heisenberg, who said: “The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite.”[19] So, my intent here is simply to point to the vast range of new, creative ways of thinking that are emerging as the old paradigms crumble.

Skeptico: But that is frustrating. Tell me what your conclusions are.

Wisdom Seeker: I don’t have a final picture to give you. But one thing I know is that allowing ourselves to explore the broadest possibilities will bring us closer to a true understanding than if we limit ourselves to narrow, reductionist thinking. By exploring the work and ideas of scholars, scientists, physicians, and psychologists such as those mentioned above, we will begin to develop a more wholistic understanding of the nature of existence, of consciousness, and of our own identity. The great minds of human history did not achieve their remarkable insights and discoveries by thinking small. Let us join them in considering the broadest horizons in our efforts to find the best way to understand who we are and what life is about.

Is everything connected?

An important possibility arising from the thought of the creative explorers mentioned above, and many others as well, is that, at the most fundamental level, all things are part of one single field—are a part of one, interconnected whole. Almost a hundred years ago, the great mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said in his book Process and Reality that we, along with all other things, cannot best be understood as material objects, but as processes; we are more like whirlpools in a stream than isolated monads. An image is to think of everything that exists as part of a great river, with everything connected and flowing as that one river. Then, objects are temporary collections that have come together for a time as whirlpools, but retain their connection to everything else in the river. Add to this model that everything is continuously entangled in some way with everything else at the quantum level, and the possibility emerges that—just as particles are connected over vast stretches of space and can communicate instantly no matter the distance between them—perhaps our minds are entangled with other minds and can communicate in similar ways that we do not yet understand.

In sum, developments in physics and other studies suggest that information and energy are shared constantly throughout all the fields within which we exist, and we as individuals are not separate from this sharing of information and energy. At the most fundamental level, this sharing and exchange is who and what we are. Perhaps the new paradigm will be as Ervin Laszlo (discussed in Chapter 12) describes it:

We are beginning to see the entire universe as a holographically interlinked network of energy and information, organically whole and self-referential at all scales of its existence. We, and all things in the universe, are non-locally connected with each other and with all other things in ways that are unfettered by the hitherto known limitations of space and time.[20]

David Bohm’s work points in just this direction. The Implicate Order he posits is outside space and time, and is totally interconnected. Further, it underlies and gives rise to the everyday world, to the Explicate Order—is constantly and continually giving it shape and form. This idea points back to Immanuel Kant’s profound insight more than 200 years ago that space and time are not real things—not “out there” in some external world—but are constructs of the human mind. According to Kant, the concepts “space” and “time” are simply ways we organize our thinking so we can function in the daily world. Further, for Kant, behind this everyday reality is the “numinous” realm, which exists in a separate domain but can affect our normal reality. (Kant, though, unlike a number of modern thinkers, believed we could never know or perceive this numinous realm).

To me, this overlap of views between a great philosopher writing 200 years ago (without the tools of modern science) and several outstanding modern physicists and thinkers is confirming of many of the emerging ideas about existence, consciousness, and who we are.

And far earlier than Kant, there are powerful antecedents for the ideas I have been outlining here. All the great wisdom traditions speak of the interconnectedness of all things, and of a dimension of reality behind the physical—whether it be called the numinous, the Tao, Great Spirit, Brahman, Nirvana, or God. Interconnectedness is central to all the traditions, as exemplified by the ancient Buddhist and Hindu image of the Net of Gems, in which the universe is seen as a vast net—with a jewel located at each intersection. Because every jewel is highly reflective, each reflects all the others around it. Further, each jewel reflects the reflections on the jewels close by, so every jewel contains a trace of every other jewel in the whole net, symbolizing the infinite interconnection of all things. In Buddhism, this idea is further developed in the teaching of no-self, or emptiness, based on the realization that there is no such thing as a separate self, for each person is an intricate and inseparable part of the whole.

This interconnectedness is certainly present in Christianity, with Jesus saying, “I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you,” an image of a unitary, shared reality and being. St. Paul reinforces this understanding, suggesting that there is one great consciousness, the mind of Christ, which we each have the opportunity to share in: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”

I could, of course, provide quotes from every other tradition. For instance, the Sufi poet Rumi says, in his poem “Admit It and Change Everything”:

You say you see my mouth, ears, eyes, nose—they are not mine.

I am the life of life.

I am that cat, this stone,

No one.

But this is once again getting ahead of the story. Going back to consciousness, many spiritual teachers have suggested that one way to think about the reality lying behind the everyday world of appearances is that it can best be thought of as consciousness itself, or as others have named it, Cosmic Consciousness. Many scientists have voiced opinions resonant with this possibility, several of whom I have already mentioned. Other voices that can be added to that chorus are John von Neumann (a leading mathematician and physicist, sometimes called the last representative of the great mathematicians), and John Wheeler, one of the greatest physicists of the last few decades. Both came to the conclusion that consciousness, from the point of view of modern physics, is necessary for matter to exist at all, because consciousness is necessary to collapse the wave function and turn possibility waves into that which we can measure as matter. Thus, in their view, consciousness must exist before matter as we know it can exist.

Skeptico: I have to say that all this is pretty frustrating. What have we learned in recent times about where thoughts come from, and about consciousness?

Wisdom Seeker: Let me remind you of something I said before: The human species has been pondering the mysteries of consciousness for thousands of years, and no one has been able to pin it down or give a widely accepted explanation in all that time. Yet, in the process of seeking answers, a goodly number of us have developed wisdom about how to live, and a significant number have had fulfilled and meaningful lives.

Perhaps the essential thing is for each of us to study, reflect, and gradually let a personal understanding grow up within us—while letting go of the desire for hard and fixed knowledge in these areas. Perhaps a little humility is in order; perhaps wanting fixed knowledge about consciousness is a barrier rather than a help in the pursuit of true understanding. Maybe the process of reflecting for ourselves is the crucial thing, and attempting to live into our own answers, rather than having final answers served to us on a platter.

 

[1] Robert Lanza, Bob Berman, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe (Dallas, Texas, BenBella Books, 2010), 2.

[2] Alex Tsakiris, Why Science Is Wrong…About Almost Everything (San Antonio, TX: Anomalist Books, 2014), 7-8.

[3] Alva Noë, author of Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Macmillian: Hill and Wang, 2010). This quote is from an interview of Noë about the book by Gordy Slack published in online Salon Magazine, March 25, 2009.

[4] William James, “Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine”, The Ingersoll Lectures on Human Immortality (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1897).

[5] Terry Bisson, “They’re Made Out Of Meat,” Omni Magazine, April 1991.

[6] David Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3), (1995): 200-19.

[7]

[8]

[9] Wilder Penfield, The Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1975).

[10] Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (United Kingdom: Harper and Brothers,1954), 20.

[11] Lisa Feldman Barrett, “What Emotions Are (and Aren’t),” New York Times, July 31, 2015.

[12] Max Velmans, Understanding Consciousness (United Kingdom, Routledge, 2000)

[13] William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, “Is Life Worth Living?” (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1912), 16.

[14] Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics: The Growth of Ideas from Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938), 242.

[15] Internet post by friend and colleague of Bohm, David Peat: http://thebohmdocumentary.org/bohm-and-einstein/ Accessed August 26, 2015.

[16]

[17]

[18] Michio Kaku, Geophilosophical Association of Anthropological and Cultural Studies

[19]

[20] Ervin Laszlo and Jude Currivan. Cosmos: A Co-creator’s Guide to the Whole-World. ReadHowYouWant, 2013, xiii

One day, walking on a trail in the mountains, I exchanged greetings with a passing hiker. Suddenly, the image of someone I had known 40 years before came to mind, and with that image, a series of memories. The strange thing is that the person who came to mind from all those years before had not been a close friend, and the memories that flooded in did not seem very important. (Alas, this is not the story of a long-lost friendship renewed. The hiker on the trail was not the person from my past.)

The fascinating part of this story is that, while reflecting on what had just happened, I couldn’t remember thinking about that particular person for many years. Even more, some of the memories that flooded back had not been conscious to me for 40 years. So, does this mean that every experience of my life is stored somewhere, waiting for the proper trigger to bring it to consciousness? If they are all there, how is access to all my memories determined? And if all memories are not stored, which ones have I kept and which ones not? Whatever the answers, “I” don’t seem to be in control of the functioning of my memory. Sometimes recent facts elude me, yet I will spontaneously remember an event from long ago. Sometimes a song title will pop into my head that I hadn’t thought of for years, and other times I have will have difficulty remembering the name of someone I talked to yesterday.

Another dramatic point: I do not remember creating most of my memories. I occasionally make a conscious decision to try to remember something, but the great majority of what I have access to just seems to be there, often appearing without any intention on my part (a song will spontaneously trigger a memory, or a taste, or a face, or a smell). How, then, are countless decisions about what will be stored in my memory being made? What I remember is crucial to who I am, thus how these decisions are made is pretty important.

Equally perplexing is the realization that many things that seemed important to me when I was five—or twenty-five—often do not seem very important today. Yet a memory that was filed away when I was five has the perspective of that five-year-old attached to it—so how much significance should I give to memories from an earlier period of time if those memories come with old feelings and judgments attached? Especially if my perspective has changed a lot since that time?

Can I even count on my memory of facts being accurate? Are they stored exactly as things happened? Since I did not make a conscious decision about what was to be stored, was there any judgment being made to insure the accuracy of the facts? If so, by whom? Further, if my conscious mind was not in charge, how could reason have been involved in the process? Or is reason irrelevant to memory?

One further puzzle: I have come to see that my memories often differ substantially from those of others who experienced the same event. Are their memories wrong? Are mine? Or perhaps my memories, as well as theirs, are being rewritten continuously as time passes to fit the constantly updated stories we each are telling ourselves about who we are and what the world is like. But if so, who is doing this rewriting, and how much can I count on the accuracy of the rewrites? To make sure they are accurate, perhaps I should take charge of my memory process. But how on earth would I do that?

The Mystery of Memory

All these questions about memory tie into and are a part of the many questions about consciousness. Memory, just like consciousness, is central to the experience of being human, yet we do not know how we create memories or how they are brought back into consciousness. Are they filed away as discreet units? That used to be a prominent theory, but has fallen out of favor. Recent research strongly suggests that, wherever memories are, they aren’t stored like files in a file drawer. Rather, they are diffuse; distributed. That is, there is a field of memory, and the entire field carries memories. Where this field might be, and how it is created, however, no one knows.

At the same time, who we are is completely dependent on memory. Without memory we would have no past, no way to learn, and no relationships. Further, there would be no science, no civilization, and no culture. There would be no identity, no “you” and no “I.” Yet memory is a complete mystery. No one has ever found a memory in the brain. (Pause for a second and ask yourself: “Can I envision where a memory is, what it is, how it is stored?”)

Skeptico: How can that something this important is so little understood?

Wisdom Seeker: A very good question. I have tried to come to some understanding by studying what others have written as well examining my own internal process, but I cannot discover how I create memories. Further, I have no idea what is stored in my memory banks. If, in a flash, I can remember something in great detail that happened forty years ago, something I had not thought of in the intervening years, I have to wonder how much else is stored I am unaware of?

I have looked carefully to discover if researchers today understand how memory works, but real understanding in incredibly sparse. On the other hand, a handful of people with abilities far greater than normal hint at amazing possibilities. The most dramatic example—twenty-five people in the world have been confirmed as having hyperthymesa, the ability to recall on command an endless number of the details of their lives. One of these individuals is Brad Williams, a newsman from Wisconsin who has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to quickly recall what he was doing on any specific day in his past. In a few seconds, Brad can tell you where he was, what he was doing, and even the major news events of any date that is named. And he can do this for each of the twenty thousand days he has lived since he was eight years old.

Brad’s ability is especially pertinent because there is no evidence that his brain is different from yours or mine; rather, he simply seems to have the capacity to access what is stored more readily than most of us. Perhaps, then, this information is somehow available to each of us if we just knew how to access it. Is it possible that a memory of everything that has ever happened to you is all there, but inaccessible most of the time. If this is the case, we are back to the issue of how we access our memories, and why we choose some and not others. Who or what determines which memories we will recall? Can recall? How does this happen? Once again, this seems pretty important.

But no one know how Brad does what he does. Brad doesn’t know. Yet his ability suggests that the brain is more like an accessing mechanism than a filing cabinet. Perhaps the brain is like a radio that tunes into channels or fields of information. A fascinating example of a person who tuned in to a whole field of information in an instant comes from Marcel Proust. In his famous novel he writes:

I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure invaded my senses.[1]

The inspiration of this one moment brought back memories that resulted in a seven-volume novel (4,300 pages in the Modern Library’s English translation), filled with memories that, by Proust’s report, were triggered by that instant. The broader implication of his experience is that, with the right trigger, an amazing amount of information is available to each of us. Interestingly, his novel includes an exploration of memory itself, how it interacts with and affects our lives. And before you dismiss this example and its suggestion of the existence of prodigious amounts of memory in us, keep in mind that the novel itself is the evidence—and it is considered one of the greatest novels of all time.

Reinforcing the idea that much lies dormant in our memory is the way we can remember a great deal more in any area upon which we chose to focus. Wherever we turn our attention, an increasing number of memories are available in that area. When I first start thinking about a topic, there are often a few memories, but not many. If I stay focused, however, more and more facts, ideas, and images appear. At any given moment, each of us is focused on a few areas of interest, and we recall a good bit of information in those areas. But if we change our focus, memories grow in number and detail in the areas to which we have shifted our attention, and diminish in the old areas. You can get a sense of the vast field of memory available to you if you simply practice tuning into different topic areas in your life.

Yet another hint that a vast memory field is available to us (of which we are usually unaware) is the oft-reported phenomenon of one’s whole life flashing before a person on the verge of death. Although these reports are anecdotal, they are significant because that are so widespread—this phenomenon has been reported by many different people in many cultures over thousands of years. Where these elaborate life memories have been stored up to the “dramatic” moment of recall, however, is completely unknown. Increasing the mystery is the fact that a number of such reports have come from people with significant loss of brain function, some whose brains had deteriorated for years before the recall event. On additional thought to ponder: Since only a few people survive who are about to die, I often wonder how many have this experience right before they die but did not live to tell us it happened.

Thought Experiment – How are memories created and stored

Do you have any idea how you create memories or how you store them? We clearly have the ability to select a few specific things to remember, but do you have any idea how you have stored those memories? Even more, since what you consciously choose to remember constitutes only a very small part of everything in your memory system, do you have any idea how the rest of the information was selected and then stored? (Some of it for decades.)

Examining my own memory process, focusing as intently as I can, I cannot discover how I create most of my memories. I intentionally memorized the multiplication tables many years ago, and those memories have been available to me ever since. A few other things are like that, things I chose to memorize. But most of my memories just seem to be there—millions of pieces of information organized into patterns and sequences in various categories. Yet I did not choose these things to be memories, I did not choose the categories or the patterns; somehow it all just happened. There are many theories about how it happens, but I have been unable to find anyone who really understands how this process works. The mystery of memory remains as elusive in the modern era as ever. We have some idea about why particular events are more likely to become significant memories than others (emotional impact, figural life moments, connection to ambitions and fears, etc.), but we do not know how they are created, where they are stored, or how we access them.

The “Cloud” of Memory

A new development in the computing world provides one useful way to think about memory, the cloud. Perhaps memory is like the much-discussed “cloud,” where data is distributed and stored in various off-site locations. This is an analogy, of course, but a corrective to past analogies that compare the brain to a stand-alone computer where all our memories stored inside the box.

The cloud analogy fits with the ideas of a number of scientists who have suggested that memories are not located in specific parts of the brain, but instead are distributed throughout. One such expert, neurosurgeon Karl Pribram, postulated that memory is like a hologram.[2] When a small photographic impression is cut from a holographic film, and an appropriate light is shone through that small piece of film, the whole image appears. The image from the small piece is less distinct than the image created when all the film is used, but the whole image is in each piece, no matter how small. Pribram thinks that memory functions in this way—rather than discreet bits of data being located in specific areas of the brain, memories are distributed as fields of memory.

One piece of evidence for this theory arose from Pribram’s work with people who had brain damage. He discovered that subjects did not forget all the information in one category and remember all the information from another; instead, the memories of those with brain damage was fuzzier overall, but all areas of memory were available. Pribram’s holographic model, when introduced, was at odds with the mainstream view that memories reside in particular locations, so many attempts were made to prove him wrong. Experimenters destroyed parts of many rats’ brains that they believed were the location of specific memories (we will not deal here with the moral questions involved in such experiments), but the end result of all these experiments were supportive of Pribram’s view.

Somehow, then, each of our memories does not exist in one place, but seems to be distributed in some way. But if this is the case, how are they distributed? Where is this memory “cloud” and how does it work? No one knows. We do not even know whether it is located in the physical brain. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has assembled a vast amount of evidence suggesting that memories reside in a morphogenetic field external to the physical brain. He sums up his years of research by saying that, “Memory seems to be both everywhere and nowhere in particular.”[3]

Pribram’s holographic theory and Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field theory are not the only alternatives available. Carl Jung suggested that some information is stored outside the individual in a shared “collective unconscious,” and physicist David Bohm developed the idea that the universe has an “implicate order,” parallel to and simultaneous with the “explicate order” of the universe of our everyday experience. Bohm’s research suggested that memory exists in the implicate domain as well as the everyday world, and at times we can access the information contained in the implicate realm. Going back much further, for thousands of years shamans have talked about having access to a field of memory, and the Hindu philosophy of Samkhya speaks of an Akashic record that contains information from the distant past.[4] (These theories do not necessarily conflict with each other; there is much overlap between them.)

Returning to the ideas of David Bohm, it is crucial to understand that the implicate order he suggests is not separate from the material world; rather, one is enfolded in the other. Although we cannot directly see the implicate dimension, it is there, and within it everything is in contact with everything else. Ultimately, at the implicate level nothing is separate from anything else; each and every thing is connected and in communication at the implicate level. There, our sense of being separate is but an illusion, an illusion that arises because we are usually perceiving the world through the narrow window of our position within the explicate order, and from that position we can see only a very small part of the whole.

As Bohm developed his ideas, he came to believe that, besides matter and energy, there is a third element, parallel and equally important to them, which he called “active information.” His idea is that everything in nature, including consciousness, is constantly interacting with this field of information. In this field, everything is connected instantaneously, which gives us a way to understand many of the abilities people have demonstrated through the ages that have previously been hard to explain (such as how people sometimes seem to know things they have no way of knowing through the normal five senses). Could this Bohn’s field of information be the brain’s “cloud?” I don’t know, but I do know we need to explore Bohm’s views and those of others who are taking a broader perspective if we are ever to understand what memory really is and how it works. (For more on these ideas, a good book is The Holographic Universe: The Revolutionary Theory of Reality by Michael Talbot, in which he extensively discusses the ideas of Pribram and Bohm.)

Skeptico: Given all this, why do some people still insist that memories must be located in specific areas of the brain?

Wisdom Seeker: Those who have made materialism their act of faith want to downplay how mysterious memory is because, if memories cannot be explained by their theory, many questions arise about the theory itself. Within the worldview of materialism there is no inherent point to life, no values with any deep basis, and there is no room for anything beyond the mindless, meaningless interaction of matter and energy. This is, of course, just one of many different metaphysical belief systems, ways of thinking about how the universe came to be and how it functions. This one is fairly unique in holding that everything can be explained on the basis of the interaction of tiny bits of matter. (In recent decades, the terms physicalism and naturalism have been used in place of materialism, but all three insist that the universe is only material “stuff” and mindless energy.) But for this faith system to be true, memory and consciousness must be able to be explained by mechanical or chemical processes.

Thus, when broader possibilities for how memory might work are suggested, materialists fear that if they open that door even slightly, all kinds of other ideas and possibilities could rush through. This fear has led to a parade of reductionistic attempts to show how memory is only a mechanical process, but none of these attempts are convincing, and none have garnered broad agreement. The “mechanistic brain will eventually explain memory” advocates have tried to use Charles Darwin to bolster their position, but this effort has mostly shown the limitations of their approach. Darwin’s ideas, and those of his followers, are very important, and have helped us understand many things. Evolutionary theory has revolutionized modern thought. But Darwin’s ideas have been unsuccessful in explaining memory.

Darwin himself recognized this, which is the reason he did not mention human memory once in either of his most important books, On the Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man. He makes one passing reference to animal memory: “Animals have excellent memories for persons and places.”[5] But there is no attempt by Darwin to explain how memory came to exist, how it developed, or where memories are stored. This suggests he understood the limits of his theory and recognized there were many things they could not explain. Because Darwin’s ideas have been widely accepted, however, there is power in invoking his name, so materialists haven’t resisted the urge to claim that his theories can explain many things they cannot, such as memory.

Skeptico: But Darwin is ancient history. What about modern theorists; haven’t they dealt with this?

Wisdom Seeker: Well, no. Consider Stephen Jay Gould, one of the greatest evolutionary scholars of the modern era. Gould wrote 1,433 pages about evolution in his monumental work, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory,.[6] yet memory is not mentioned once in all those pages!

Skeptico: Not once?

Wisdom Seeker: Not once. And this complete absence of a topic as essential as memory highlights the fact that evolution simply cannot explain everything. Darwin himself understood this. He was quite open-minded, demonstrated by his deep interest in the role of morality in human life, even though he made no effort to explain it through his theory of evolution. In fact, he spent more time in The Descent of Man discussing the importance of morality than “the survival of the fittest.” In The Origin of the Species Darwin focused primarily on the forces that affect the development of the animal kingdom, but the Descent is dealing more with human beings, and in that book he continually stressed the importance of love and the mysteriousness of how love arises. (Darwin only mentions “survival of the fittest” twice in Descent, but speaks of love ninety-five times.) As for memory, Darwin clearly did not think he could explain it, for he didn’t even try.

Modern Research to the Rescue?

Skeptico: What about recent brain research? What does it have to say about memory?

Wisdom Seeker: The history of the once popular but now questionable view that memories are stored as files in specific locations in the brain is instructive. The great neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield held this view early in his career; even identified certain parts of the temporal cortex as the center of memory. As he continued his research, however, this assumption did not hold, and Penfield had the courage to admit that this theory was mistaken.[7]

Even though an expert as influential as Penfield changed his position, however, this did not end the debate; researchers keep trying to find specific locations where memories are stored. One group set out with that intention, trying to make it very simple by creating a specific memory in day-old chicks. At first the researchers were excited when brain scans revealed that nerve cells in a particular area of the brain had undergone a burst of growth when the chicks were trained to avoid pecking at colored lights. They thought they had found the place this memory was stored—until this area of the chicks’ brains was surgically removed and the chicks still retained the memory.[8] This experiment demonstrates the problem with much modern brain research—too many researchers start with the “assumption” that memory resides in the brain, and their starting assumption leads them to the “conclusion” that were hoping to find.

This is, of course, circular thinking, and it is amazing how many scientific projects fall victim to such a basic error of reasoning (training in rigorous philosophical thought is not a strong point in most educational programs today). An example is an article in Nature[9] a few years ago, in which the researchers reported creating a conditioned reflex in a mouse, and then used that reflex as stand-in for memory. The problem is, although a conditioned reflex has some things in common with memory, the two are not the same thing. Or more specifically, a learned reflex cannot serve as an analogy for all aspects of memory. If you reflexively pull back your hand from a spider you see beside your hand, the motivation for that action does not encompass the full range of memory.

Even less does a conditioned reflex in a mouse represent the full range of memory in human beings, which the article seems to suggest. Humans sometimes act in a reflexive way, just as mice do, but memory is much more than reflexive action. To create reflexive actions in a mouse and then make the gigantic leap to the conclusion that this explains how human memory works is, to put it generously, a fantastic leap of faith. It is like assuming that when a camel falls to its knees, it is praying.

This article in Nature is a striking example of the tendency of some researchers to define memory simplistically rather than dealing with its true complexity; to define it in a reductionistic way so it can be studied more easily. But studying human memory, and human consciousness in general is different from any other scientific pursuit, because memory and consciousness are the tools with which scientific research has to be conducted. In essence, to study these things requires turning around and examining the instrument being used to do the study. This is why it is such a hard problem, and why memory and consciousness remain a mystery to us even after centuries of research.

When the researchers in this study designed their experiment, they were using human memory and consciousness to create the experiment. If they had truly wished to study human memory, they would have had to explore how they, themselves, remembered all the things they had learned during their lives, and how they had been able to put those memories together into a coherent plan to be able to create the experiment. This is the essence of the difficulty of studying human memory and consciousness as compared to other things—the researchers themselves must use as tools for the study the things being studied. And this is in addition to the difficulty that memory and consciousness are not material objects that can be observed directly, cannot be weighed or measured directly, which is how science usually operates.

To get around this difficulty, the approach of the researchers in the study in Nature was simply to start with the reductionistic view that a mouse’s reflexive action is the same as all memory. But as Arthur Schopenhauer said many years ago, “materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.” Experimenting with a mouse’s reflexes has some value, but it is a far cry from dealing with human memory or consciousness, and the value of such a limited study can only be gained if the researchers understand the limits of their approach.

Skeptico: You are moving pretty fast here. Let me step into my skeptical frame of mind for a moment. How would a materialist explain these things?

Wisdom Seeker: In recent years the primary path has been the theory that memory is somehow stored in the synaptic connections between neurons. Ever since Donald Hebb published his research 70 years ago showing there were synaptic adaptations in the brain while learning was taking place, this possibility has been an enormous amount of attention. A great deal of research has been focused on synaptic plasticity, with accompanying speculation that changes in the synapses can account for all of memory. There is no question that the synapses do change, and there is evidence that they change while we are learning. That these changes are memories, in the way we think of our memories, is a total speculation with no evidence. The fact that we can measure the heart speeding up when we see someone we love does not mean that our love is contained in the faster pulse, or explained by it.

In the same way, no one has even begun to demonstrate how changes in brain synapses become memories. To say that synaptic changes become and hold extended, detailed memories of childhood adventures, vacations, and special moments with someone you love is magical thinking: somehow billions of slight synaptic shifts magically transform into complex memories that last through a lifetime, although no one has any idea how they do that, nor even if these synaptic changes are memories. The only thing that is known is that there is synaptic plasticity, changes occur there, sometimes when learning seems to be happening. But whether those changes become memories is not known, or how. To assert they are is to confuse correlation with causation. If someone walks into your bedroom unannounced when you are naked, you might blush, but the blush does not explain your reaction, but is simply correlated with it. Today, evidence that synaptic plasticity can explain all of memory is totally lacking. As Austrian researcher Patrick C. Trettenbrein put it:

To sum up, it can be said that when it comes to answering the question of how information is carried forward in time in the brain we remain largely clueless… the case against synaptic plasticity is convincing.[10]

Or as stated in an article in 2019 about the view that synapses are the principal site of information storage in the brain, it was noted that this view has received much attention and research, and that most studies show that there is probably some role for synapse memory-storage ideas to play in discovering what memory is, “Yet, despite the neuroscience community’s best efforts, we are still without conclusive proof that memories reside at synapses.”[11]

To continue to explore the role of neuronal synapses in memory is worthwhile, and might provide valuable information in future understandings. But given what is now known, the only reason anyone would hold the view that all of memory is contained in or will be explained by synaptic changes comes down to an act of faith that memories must be in the physical brain, and that this speculative theory is the best hope to support that materialistic belief.

There is one further challenge to modern attempts to explain memory as residing in the physical brain: There is no physical brain. Quantum theory has demonstrated pretty conclusively that atoms are not physical objects, molecules are not physical objects—thus neurons are not physical objects. And neither are synapses. Ultimately, all are indeterminate clouds of possibility that take on the forms we see because we observe them. Behind that physical façade are fields of energy, or the quantum vacuum, or the zero-point field, or David Bohm’s implicate order, or morphic fields, or … . Basically, we do not know what is behind matter, we only know that more and more quantum theory is suggesting that physical matter is created by consciousness in some way, rather than the other way around (more later). And a great deal of evidence is accumulating that this field, or cloud, or whatever you wish to call it, is interacting with everything around it, and perhaps entangled with everything everywhere.

Skeptico: So, you are saying that materialists have no good explanation for memory.

Wisdom Seeker: That is absolutely right! They just leave the problems dangling out there, like a pink elephant in the room that everyone ignores. Or else they claim all will be explained at some point in the future, which amounts to a “promissory note” without any collateral, to use the delightful image of Sir John C. Eccles, a neurophysiologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine. Eccles used the phrase “promissory materialism” to highlight the fact that brain research has not begun to solve the riddle of the human mind, and that claiming it will do so in the future “must be classed as a superstition.”[12] For Eccles, this is a “superstition without a rational foundation.” He continues:

The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena [his way of referring to a broader mind]. … Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists … who often confuse their religion with their science.[13]

Possibilities

Some important things about memory are known, or are being discovered, however. One is that memories are powerfully affected by the emotional content of the things that happen to us. We tend to remember intense emotional moments, both good and bad, much more readily than those with little emotional content: Intense moments come back to us more often and more powerfully. This is, of course, another nail in the coffin of materialistic theories, for emotions are not material things.

One brilliant researcher who has studied memory extensively is Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who has focused on the differences between what we experience and what we remember. One example he gives is that you might thoroughly enjoy several days of a vacation, but if a disagreeable event happens at the end, your memory of the whole vacation will be negatively impacted. The tendency will be to create a story about the vacation that gives little attention to the many days of pleasurable experiences, but a lot of attention to the final negative moment. Of course, this process can happen the other way: A wonderful moment at the end of a vacation, perhaps an intense romantic experience, can crowd out the negative things that happened earlier.[14]

Overlapping this area of research is the growing understanding being developed about the strong tendency we humans have to remember things that support our present opinions, desires, and judgments—and not to remember things that go against what we want or already believe. Jonathan Haidt documented this extensively in his book, The Righteous Mind, and, crucially, his work shows that this processing occurs to a great extent at the unconscious level. Similarly, psychology professor Drew West has done a great deal of work demonstrating how we tend to select what we will remember, and that we so mostly at the unconscious level of our minds.[15] This means that, for those who wish to truly understand memory, they must do the hard work of overcoming their personal preconceptions and preferences. They must come to “know themselves” at a very deep level, as sages and saints have been telling us for thousands of years. This wisdom most definitely applies to modern scientists who wish to understand memory and consciousness. Without deep self-understanding, they will simply find evidence in support of whatever they already believe.

Daniel Kahneman and others have also shown that, as our lives move forward, we constantly rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about the past. Our memories change all the time; the stories are rewritten, often at the unconscious level. Again, it is becoming increasingly clear that memories are not stored facts, but much more complex things. To appreciate the difficulty of explaining this observation requires fully acknowledging that all we have been able to discover about how the brain functions has to do with electrical and chemical impulses that last for less than a millisecond—and then are gone. As far as we know, these impulses cannot be stored, so how can they be the location of memories? No other storage location has been found, however (which is another reason the human brain is not like a computer, which has a very specific location for its memory).

The understanding that our memories change with time is a large problem for all theories suggesting that memories are stored in a mechanistic or electronic way. If memories change, they cannot be facts located somewhere that we retrieve. If they change, they are not fixed, but fluid. At this point, no one has come up with a good idea about how to explain this in a mechanical or electronic way. And this doesn’t even get to the deeper question of who/what is managing the process of reorganizing and changing our memories.

That our memories change, however, does fit with the growing understanding that memories are not a bunch of facts, but are put together into stories. I organize fragments of my past into stories that have a meaning for me. I say ”I” do this but, once again, most of this happens of its own accord, at the unconscious level. Or to say this a bit differently, our memories are organized into stories by the unconscious part of ourselves. Somehow, our unconscious minds create stories, and these stories are the framework within which we think about and understand the past. The things we remember are the events and facts that have been put into our meaning stories, and we tend to forget all those things that have not been made a part of the stories (the rest might still be in there, but is harder to access).

That we do not remember everything that has happened to us is good in many ways. I have no desire to remember all the peripheral facts of each day of my life. But the crucial questions, since this mostly happens at an unconscious level, are: Who puts the stories together? How is what is “important” decided? On what basis are these decisions made? Who changes the stories? And where are they located? All we can say at this point is that we tend to remember those things that have strong emotional content, that our memories are organized primarily as stories, and all this happens in a mostly unconscious process. This leaves an awful lot that is unknown.

Most of the understandings that are emerging out of this large realm of the unknown tend to support the direction of thinking put forward by physicist David Bohm, neurosurgeon Karl Pribram, psychologist Carl Jung, and biologist Rupert Sheldrake, all of whom suggest that memory is best thought of as contained in a field. Where this field is, no one knows. It might not be in the physical brain only. In fact, there is little to support the theory that memories are contained within the physical brain alone. This might turn out to be the case, but at this point it is a speculative, metaphysical theory based on an act of faith about the nature of the world. For instance, one leading researcher in this area (Rudolf Tanzi, who holds the Joseph Kennedy Chair in Neurology at Harvard), said in a recent speech that memory doesn’t seem to “live in the brain.” Where is it, then? He doesn’t know. I don’t know. That is why I am not making an argument here for where memory is located. The only thing I am strongly asserting is that no one knows how memory works or where it is located, and all good research leading forward from where we are now will begin with an open mind. (For a good discussion of these issues, see Chapters 4, 5, and 6 in Chris Carter’s Science and the Near-Death Experience.)[16]

One assertion I can make is that each of us has the capacity to gain understanding about what memory is and how it works by observing ourselves, by exploring within our own minds how memory works within us. When I do this, I thing I have discovered is that I have the ability to affect what I will remember. I can focus on names, and that aids in remembering. There are mnemonic tricks that can help me consciously remember. Focus and attention are important tools to increase memory. I have intentionally made an effort for many years to focus on and understand the major currents of history, philosophy, science, psychology, and spirituality, and having chosen these areas of focus has had an effect on what I remember. In this way I have participated in, but not controlled, my memory creation process.

Another thing I have discovered is that I can bring conscious intention to rewriting my stories. I can look carefully at the stories I am telling myself about the world, about who I am, and about other people, and I can begin to see how my fears, anxieties, ambitions, and expectations had a lot to do with the stories that were created. The more clearly I see this, the more I am able to make a more conscious decision about the stories I will reinforce in myself, and the ones I will challenge as no longer being helpful or healthy. And these revelations make clear that my stories are not “the truth.” That are not right or wrong. They are simply the way my unconscious processes put together my understanding, and I can work with them to come to a healthier place. This, however, is not an easy process, for it requires working with my unconscious, and to do that, I must truly “know myself.” Any effort to paste a better story on the surface, without working it through at the deepest levels of my psyche will inevitably backfire.

In the end, I realize my personal investigations and study of memory have only carried me a short distance into understanding its mysteries. The only way forward for me, for you, for all researchers interested in this topic, and their own health and well-being, is to continue to explore, as much as possible, with an uncluttered mind, using reason as a tool, as well as intuition and self-examination. To always stay open to new insights rather than trying to prove to oneself and others your old ideas were right.

There is much, much more to be understood. The quest to understand memory has only just begun.

 

[1] Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume 1- Swann’s Way and Within a Budding Grove (New York: Vintage Books, 1982).

[2] Karl Pribram, Biology of Memory (Waltham, Massachusetts: Academic Press, 1970).

[3] Rupert Sheldrake – Science Set Free: 191.

[4] Cheryl Trine, The New Akashic Records: Knowing, Healing and Spiritual Practice (Portland, Oregon: Essential Knowing Press, 2010), 143.

[5] Charles Darwin, Descent of Man (London: John Murray Publishers, 1871).

[6] Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Boston, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002).

[7] Wilder Penfield, Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), 30.

[8] Rupert Sheldrake, – Science Set Free: 191-192).

[9] Christof Koch and R. Clay Reid, “Neuroscience: Observatories of the Mind,” Nature, 483, March 22, 2012, 397–398.

[10] Patrick C. Trettenbrein, article in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience entitled “The Demise of the Synapse As the Locus of Memory”  17 November 2016 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2016.00088/full

[11] Wickliffe C. Abraham, Owen D. Jones & David L. Glanzman, Nature

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-019-0048-y

[12] Sir John C. Eccles, Evolution of the Brain, Creation of the Self (London, United Kingdom: Routledge Publishing, 1989), 241.

[13] Sir John C. Eccles and Daniel N. Robinson, The Wonder of Being Human: Our Brain and Our Mind (New York: Free Press/Collier Macmillan, 1984), 36.

[14] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Originally published: October 25, 2011  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

[15]  Drew Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation

 

[16] Chris Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death (Rochester, Vermont, Inner Traditions International, 2010), Chapters 4, 5, 6.