consciousness

Science and Buddhism VII: Science and Rebirth
Dalai Lama at 2 (Sirensongs)

Buddhism at present diverges from science, in incorporating in its worldview various apparently out-of-body experiences, including the possibility of mental processes unlinking from a dying body, and relinking with a growing embryo — i.e. rebirth. See the formidable investigations of Ian Stevenson.[1]  Most schools discuss a period between death and rebirth known in Tibetan as the Bardo. Are these notions accessible to objective study? There is no need to debar science from the phenomena of the psyche, and even the suggestion of karmic links between one’s willed actions and later events should be, to some extent, testable scientifically.

Rebirth is coherent if the mind is not just physical events.  The mind is certainly very conditioned by the brain and the body.  Consciousness always finds itself in a body, but traditional Buddhism says it might not be a physical body. What would your mind without the vehicle of a physical body be like? It may be unencumbered by the burden of flesh, but it would also be, I guess, lacking in many abilities.  For example, the influence of the senses is quite mysterious.  In the Bardo, one probably can’t do anything to physical things — the body is the interface with a physical world.  One probably can’t think in a linear fashion — no plans, no thinking things out, no deliberate recall etc.  If you are unused to it, you are just swept along in a dreamlike condition — ‘why is all this happening to me?’  Or you are blissed out and thoughtless like the devas.

There isn’t even a persistent entity, a Self, during life, so there is definitely no soul that persists from one life to another.  But yet the Buddhist view is that the karmic processes that you have set in motion during your life don’t simply vanish at the moment when the body becomes a corpse.  Somehow they are still viable; they can germinate and have an influence over another person, newly conceived.  More than an influence — the view is that a foetus growing in its mother’s womb can’t survive without some non-physical contributions from a previous life.  So it’s not you that survives death, yet processes that have built up during your life do go on to have their own consequences in another future life.

This is the Dalai Lama on rebirth.  “The various instances of consciousness… come into being because of the presence of preceding instances of consciousness, and since matter and consciousness have totally different natures, the first moment of consciousness of the new being must be preceded by its substantial cause, which must be a moment of consciousness.  In this way, the existence of the previous life is affirmed.”[2]  Traditionally, rebirth is not seen as an issue of faith, but is something that can be verified through rational inference, according to the Dalai Lama, and I would add the testimony of others, and perhaps personal memory.

In any case, there is no doubt that mental processes influence the physical through karma — and eventually the whole universe will probably be radically affected by the presence in it of self-aware beings.[3]

[1] E.g. Ian Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (University press of Virginia, 1974).

[2] The Universe in a Single Atom, 141.

[3] See David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (Penguin, 1997).

Science and Buddhism V: The Niyamas
The primal drives at the centre of the Wheel of Life (Tom Knudsen)

Instead of a definite personality, and instead of intrinsically existing things interacting with each other, we have the notion of conditional arising (see post Science and Buddhism III).

To clarify it further, Pali Buddhism says there are a number of orders or categories of conditionality (niyamas) (using a modern re-framing of the terms, as developed by Caroline Rhys Davids[1]):

  1. Inorganic — traditionally seen as heat and cold, and the behaviour of the atmosphere.
  2. Organic –specifically the growth of plants from their seeds.
  3. Mental — basic psychology, covering anything with a mind, including animals.
  4. Karmic — one’s choice comes in, one can make ‘skilful’ or unskilful choices; the former are realistic, the latter try to fight reality for egoistic purposes, and thus cause huge problems, for self and others.
  5. Dharma — can be seen as the substrate of ineffable reality itself, never completely summed up in the ‘laws’ of the four other spheres.[2]

Inorganic and organic orders

Science rules in the inorganic order.

The organic or biological order has been greatly illuminated by science, which has established the fact of evolution, with all life interrelated through historic lineages. Science has investigated genetics and developmental biology; physiological processes and the maintenance and reproduction of life.

In Buddhism, three of the undetermined questions illuminate the first two niyamas:

  • What is the duration and size of the universe? 
  • Is the life force the same as the body or not?

Traditional Buddhism asserts that the universe has no beginning. If the big bang is an absolute beginning, then you need a transcendent principle as the cause of universe, some kind of godhead.  Like science, Buddhists do not postulate a transcendent being as the origin of all things.

But it’s interesting that the Buddhist origin myths include conscious beings from the very ‘beginning’.  It said that consciousnesses are left over from a previous world cycle, and they become attracted by the gradually condensing material universe, longing for some kind of embodiment, and their involvement influences the evolution of the new universe until eventually physically embodied self-aware beings appear.[3]  This is a long way from any scientific view! 

However in one Buddhist scripture, there is a teaching about particles of pure energy subsisting in the empty period between the destruction of one universe and the beginning of another, from which all the matter in the new universe is formed, which the Dalai Lama thinks could be rather like the origins of the universe in the fluctuations of the quantum vacuum.[4]

It is certainly true that some ancient Buddhist descriptions of the Cosmos are surprisingly close to modern scientific discoveries.  But so what?  Is this just a coincidence?  If not, does it imply that an advanced and trained introspective mind can have insights into structures far beyond the possibility of its sensory perceiving?

Mental order

It is very fruitful to compare Buddhist and scientific psychologies, and allow a synthesised new psychology to emerge.  For example, Daniel Goleman has attempted to do this in his study of the emotions.[5]

Note the Wheel of Life — the three central animals as the primordial drives (craving, aversion and active ignoring); and consider the six realms.

Is Buddhist psychology scientific?  It has never used the techniques of performing carefully recorded and repeatable experiments, observing only countable variables and measurable quantities.  Traditional Buddhist writers based their conclusions upon reported experiences (so can be accused of relying on anecdotal evidence).  They tended to give weight to experiences reported a) by practitioners regarded as spiritually advanced, and b) in older, authoritative texts.  Nevertheless, early versions of Buddhist psychology were subjected to criticism by later thinkers, and the discipline (not that it was ever regarded as a field separate from the religion as a whole) progressed.

We’ll look at the Karmic order in the next post.

[1] C A F Rhys Davids, Buddhism (1912).

[2] See Subhuti’s 2010 paper.  http://www.sangharakshita.org/pdfs/revering-and-relying-upon-the-dharma.pdf The dharma-niyama can also be seen as spiral conditionality. The names for 1-3 are based on Caroline Rhys David’s alignment of the niyamas with a western classification of scientific knowledge, and don’t directly translate the Pali terms, utu- bija- and chitta-niyama; and dhamma-niyama is traditionally described quite differently.

[3] Agañña Sutta, Digha Nikaya 27.

[4] Dalai Lama, The Universe in a Single Atom, 90.

[5] Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama, by Daniel Goleman (Bantam, 2002).

Science and Buddhism II: Understanding One’s Mind

Scientists themselves have increasingly seen the importance of ‘the observer’.  Science is for human beings, so it needs to understand what it is to be human, what self-awareness is, and what the range of human needs are (scientists tend to stop at the survival (medicine), and material (technology) needs.)  But above all because immediate experience is all we have!  All else is inferred, models, theories, assumptions, attempts at communication etc.

So take mental processes seriously.  And take seriously the mental processes of others — there is a real possibility of empathy.  (Note how primitive Western philosophy and psychology can be here, without ‘contemplative’ disciplines.)

Can consciousness be studied scientifically (i.e. objectively)?  Of course it can.  But one can miss what it actually is — and think that consciousness is a thing, rather than it being ‘actual awareness’ – a ‘light’ you and I are immersed in now, in a rolling present.  The structures that I use to make sense of the ‘contents’ of this illumination (which ‘I’ think of as partly inner, partly outer) can be studied.

Real empathetic communication implies different people’s described worlds can be compared.  One can even construct highly simplified circumstances amenable to careful measurement (experimentation) as in brain imaging, and correlate measured variations with reported mental states, and with observable body responses or actions.

Actual experience and the states of the brain act reciprocally upon one another, so that it is incoherent to say that brain states simply cause mental events.  Perception (says the Buddhist neuroscientist Francisco Varela) can be regarded as subsidiary to the mental function of imagination.  Perception refers to what is present, imagination to what is not present, and the two mix so that in every moment they are emerging into awareness from an unconscious background, as a living present. 

It is still the case that the dominant view among neuroscientists is, in effect, that processes in the body cause the mind.  But neuroscientists such as Varela have shown that one’s state of mind can access local neural processes, so that neither can be reduced to the other.  The mental state corresponds to a particular neural state, and actively incorporates or discards any contemporary neural activity in the relevant brain region, evaluating many potential neural states, “until a single one is transiently stabilised and expressed behaviourally”[1].  Mental states (says Varela) require both a phenomenological and a biological account.  The neural elements and the global cognitive subject are co-determined; the subject is emergent, not just from the brain, but also from preceding mental states.  Buddhism extends this account by offering its pragmatic consequences, showing how the living present, with imagination active, is a means for human transformation. 

[1] Varela and Depraz, in Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, B. Alan Wallace (editor), Columbia University Press, New York, 2003. 213.  See also Varela, Thomson, and Rosch, The Embodied Mind (MIT press, 1993), 22.

Is Ken Wilber mistaken? Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

ken wilber

Ken Wilber

This is a rather critical book review I wrote for the Buddhist magazine Golden Drum in the 90s. Fans of Wilber, please forgive me!

Review of SEX, ECOLOGY, SPIRITUALITY. THE SPIRIT OF EVOLUTION.

Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. The Spirit of Evolution, by Ken Wilber, published by Shambhala (Boston and London, 1995).

‘I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man’s,’ wrote William Blake. Ken Wilber has created a grand system of evolutionary connections. Here is yet another book, his fattest yet, expounding it.

There is an X-shaped diagram of Wilber’s system on the end-papers. Levels of consciousness, their individual and collective physical structures, and cultures or shared world-views each have an arm of the X, and evolve in correlation with each other. For example, as conceptual thought became possible in consciousness, new brain mechanisms supported it, and it was reflected in village societies, with magical world-views.

Wilber’s synthesis, with its wealth of fascinating details, is extremely well thought out. If you are a believer in the idea that all spiritual schemes reflect intuitions of the same Great Chain of Being, then you will forgive his long-windedness, repetitiveness, jargon, surfeit of long supporting quotations, and his obsession with reducing every other analysis to its spot on the great X. But what I appreciated most was Wilber’s uncompromising evolutionary vision. We can indeed evolve as individuals and as a human world, and there are pioneers of consciousness who can show us the way.

What I think is Wilber’s biggest mistake stems from the rigidity of his X diagram. To fit the model, evolution must continue in the collective sphere, after the arising of self-awareness. So in general, a later society is likely to reflect a higher average form of consciousness than an earlier society. In recent centuries, he claims, the mental and biological parts of human experience have been differentiated on a large scale for the first time, a step forward allowing rationality to produce all its benefits. (Wilber’s mission is to encourage the next development: the re-integration of mind and nature on a higher level, in a global awareness and a global culture.) But is it really true that most people of today are more rational and independent-minded than most people in India or Greece (say), 2500 years ago? Is it easier to make spiritual progress now, and are we all starting from a higher base?

It would seem that with self-awareness, further evolution focused on the individual. Societies and world-views now only evolve if they are reformed by self-aware individuals, the number of which does not necessarily grow steadily. Cultures are not caught up in Wilber’s grand current of evolution. It is true that science is genuinely cumulative in its discoveries, and this fact may have misled Wilber. The progress that science makes, in extending the scope of models of the physical universe and making more sophisticated technologies possible, cannot be ranked in alignment with advances in consciousness.

Wilber’s method leads him to judge Buddhism on the basis of the type of language used in its writings, though he comes to mistaken conclusions through relying on modern commentators rather than the original sources. His image of evolution is still a Hindu one of consciousness emerging from a Ground of Being (or World Spirit, or Emptiness: terms from diverse traditions are bunched as ‘identical’ by Wilber), and passing through an arc of development until it can reunite with this Ground (from which it has never separated). Statements couched in ‘non-dual’ terms must, Wilber seems to believe, have come from this ultimate state of being, and he implies that he can recognise their authenticity because he has been there himself. Actually, blarney is all you need to pen don-dual paradoxes.

Blarney or not, this language is what he seeks in Buddhism, so he approves of Nagarjuna and Zen, and disapproves of early Buddhism. The Buddha encouraged a radical renunciation of the deluded, cyclical habits of life, because the ‘ground of being’ for Buddhism is ignorance, something to be transcended, and it is frustration that emerges from ignorance, something to be eradicated. So Buddhists have used the ‘dualistic’ language of transcending and developing (‘follow this path to this goal’) more than the language of paradox or of immanence (‘uncover your existing Buddha-Nature’), something that Wilber sees as a limitation.

Similarly, Wilber dismisses the teaching of no-Self, incorrectly seeing it as a dualistic denial of the ‘stable cohesive self’ that one should strengthen to progress psychologically. No, the Buddha was concerned to identify ‘wrong views’ – attitudes which impede the evolution of one’s consciousness by tying one to a limited sense of one’s own identity. ‘No-Self’ is no more, or less, dualistic than ‘no-duality’ (or indeed ‘no-World-Spirit’). The Buddha wasn’t bothered about fitting into a grand system or abiding by a metaphysical taboo against dualism. He was concerned to promote provisional right views which helped people to transcend themselves until they could dwell in ‘no-view’. Later, the increasing sophistications of the deluded mind called for more sophisticated countervailing right views, such as Nagarjuna’s.

Buddhism can be presented in many formats. Wilber’s system may lead you to believe that the later ones must supersede the earlier, and the linguistically non-dual ones must be higher than those that teach a path. On the contrary, an effective path of practice is essential, I would say, and the best way to choose a system of spiritual discipline is not to collect from a warehouse of words teachings that fit our preconceptions, but to meet the people who tread a coherent path. Are they kind? Are they deeply sensible?

Reading Ken Wilber is rather like being drawn to listen to a brilliant, manic and rather tipsy monologue at a party. As we imbibe the system of another man, I think it is worth taking care. Is it liberating, or is it enslaving?