Noises from the Darkroom: The Science and Mystery of the Mind

1

Evolution

of the

Mind

ONE

Science and Mystery

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

St Augustine

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

Ambrose Bierce

Pooh got up and began to look for himself.

A.A. Milne

The Overestimation of Consciousness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creatures of Belief

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

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

The See-Through Mind

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

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

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

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

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

Reasonable Doubt

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

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

Science

The third and most recent source of information about the nature of mind comes from science; not the questionable analogies that have been drawn between mysticism and the speculative world of subatomic physics, but the emerging, biologically based investigations of systems theory, human evolution and the new hybrid discipline, comprising psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and artificial intelligence, known as ‘cognitive science’. What is emerging from this joint enterprise requires a startling reappraisal of the human mind; one which leads us to see the experiences of the mystics as no more and no less than a spontaneous ‘correction’ of the working of the brain.

Science is much revered, and equally maligned, at the present time, being seen as both villain of the ecological piece, and the only possible contender for the role of Saviour. Neither of these extreme reactions is justified, though each is true in part. It is true that the scientific world-view, by installing itself in our culture as the Only (Worthwhile) Epistemological Game in Town, has squeezed out of our minds other less explicit or articulate ways of knowing that are actually vital (as I shall argue in a moment) if we are to recover our ‘basic sanity’. And it is true that science has fathered the most unspeakable inventions of all time. But it is also true that science has provided us with a most powerful and elegant set of ways of thinking about the physical and biological worlds, and that this framework has made possible the development of technologies (of housing, transportation, medicine, communication…you name it) that have genuinely improved the quality of life for millions of people.

And science, however prone to witting or unwitting abuse, offers a powerful method for ‘sailing straight’; for getting our theories and assumptions to reveal their logical and practical conclusions, whether they suit us, whether we like them, or not. Common sense can happily and unwittingly sail round and round in circles, while convincing itself it is on a voyage of discovery. Rational thought by itself (contrary to its own Public Relations literature) is bound to follow the tracks laid down by our unconscious presuppositions, and being the servant of hidden dictates, its claims to objectivity are disingenuous. Science, for all its faults, though it zig-zags and falters, has the potential to help us to escape from the self-serving mental world of ‘common sense’. The inexorable power of its method can force us to think what had previously been unthinkable: what we had been prevented from even considering by the unconscious habits of thought on which we had been relying.

One of the contemporary misunderstandings of science is that it will relentlessly sweep away religion, spirituality and mysticism, like a bulldozer in a rain-forest, leaving only the flat and open land of Pure Reason. Nothing could be further from the truth. The value of science is in its ability to expose the shortcomings of ‘common sense’, and thereby to enable cultures to see, and to improve, their own myths. (Philosophers, shamans, poets and mystics are the traditional ‘scientists of the mind’ in this sense.) And having drawn attention to a limiting assumption, science can offer in its place not the ‘truth’ (for science can only ever deliver theories) but a more workable myth: a better model of some aspect of life. A scientist may be led by her theories to ask a question that ‘common sense’ would never have thought of, and if it had, would have written off as ridiculous. And every so often, the reply to such a question will challenge received wisdom, and make us think.

For example, take the simple word ‘see’. What could be more straightforward than the process of noticing what there is around, and acting in a way that takes account of what has been seen? Our common sense does not make a distinction between the conscious experience of seeing, and the more functional idea of ‘registering’ what is there, and incorporating that knowledge into our plans. It hardly makes sense to suppose that we could register anything if we could not ‘see’ it. Yet that is exactly what has been shown, by careful tests, to happen to patients who have suffered a certain kind of brain damage. They cannot ‘see’ anything in one part of their visual field, yet they can respond to questions in a way that they only could if they ‘knew’ what was there. They must be able to ‘see’, because they can act appropriately; yet they have absolutely no visual experience, and strongly deny that they ‘saw’.

We can either mutter ‘weird’, and write this phenomenon off as another piece of psychological trivia; or we can ask what this does to our common sense, to our ‘obvious’ relationship to our own consciousness. Just how much interpreting and decision-making actually goes on without the intervention, or even the knowledge, of the Chief Executive? Is where ‘I’ am sitting really the seat of power, or am I just a puppet, fed not with high-grade intelligence but with a thoroughly expurgated version of events, and handing down edicts to which the unconscious company turns a collectively deaf ear?

The Miracle of Mindfulness

Scientific knowledge will not of itself correct the underlying faults in our inner-vision, any more than reading a textbook on optics will improve your eyesight. But it may well help us to understand and accept the diagnosis, and increase our willingness to seek a more powerful cure. For this we need more than rational understanding of the problem. We need methods for cleansing the ‘doors of perception’, and for these we shall have to turn back to the advice of the mystics again. They offer a bewildering variety of practices, but all share the view that wisdom arises not from more and more understanding, only through a personal programme of ‘perceptual re-education’. Scientific demonstrations, and reasonable argument, may take us to the brink of this process, but it cannot take us any further.

All these varied ‘technologies of transformation’, if they are to have a lasting effect, rely on a single potentiality: mindfulness.² It is fortunate indeed that evolution has equipped us with a tool to effect this perceptual cleansing, for it would have been quite possible for humankind to have painted itself into a psychological corner from which there was no escape. At the end of every episode Batman used to appear to have got himself into a hopeless position…only for some trick or gadget to save him at the start of the next programme. Luckily we have up our sleeves a particular reflexive use of consciousness that can help us too to escape. In our case the traps are of our own devising, and consist of assumptions and beliefs, dissolved in the very way we see the world, which create apparent problems, and prevent us both from solving them, and from seeing that they are of our own making. Mindfulness involves cultivating the knack of making them visible, and of freeing ourselves from the power they exert to make us ‘shrink to fit’.

In this ‘cleansing of the doors of perception’, as William Blake called it, the presence and the power of the unconscious is revealed. We cease being so eccentric, so displaced from our natural centre of gravity, and can relax into the unknowable heart. This, finally, is the revelation of divine truth: not a glimpse of any conceivable God, but a close encounter of an essentially mysterious kind. So spirituality, it turns out, resides in a simple correction of the brain – or perhaps we should say the ‘world-body-brain-mind’, as it becomes increasingly clear, as the story unfolds, that we cannot legitimately separate them from each other. Neuroscience, the scientific study of the brain and the nervous system, is now able to give us a working picture of the brain that can explain how mystical experience occurs, and why it takes the forms it does.

The mystics have talked of peacefulness and belonging, of wisdom and clarity, of an indiscriminate, impersonal love, of naturalness and simplicity, of knowing, without knowing what it is one knows, of a vivid and fiery quality to perception. Yet why just these qualities should appear together has itself been a mystery. Why should the body course with energy, and vision become luminous and penetrating, at the same time as one is suffused with tranquillity, understanding and compassion? The answer is to be found in the way the brain is built to work, and in the way its processes are corrupted by a small coterie of unrecognized beliefs (principally about the mind itself). When the ‘Self System’ is sidelined or shortcircuited, the brain instantaneously reverts to a more basic modus operandi, of which what we call ‘Buddha mind’, or ‘the grace of God’, is the natural efflorescence.

Evolutionary Beginnings

But let us start at the beginning, with a résumé of the evolutionary history of humankind – a fuller version of which comprises the first part of this book – to orientate you. The twists and turns of our long evolution have bequeathed us a mind that, below the surface, is a curious tangle of abilities and limitations, strengths and weaknesses. It is not an instrument of elegant design, but a ramshackled raft, constructed out of a hodge-podge of materials, each of which happened to float by at a time then they could be used. If we could put the human mind in dry dock, take it to bits, and start again from scratch, we would never come up with the Heath Robinson contraption that has been handed down to us.

The vast majority of this mental raft – and the vast majority of its intelligence – lies below the surface. Conscious awareness arrived, in the course of evolution, probably with the evolution of active hunting as a method of catching food, and probably earlier and more clearly in species that were prey than those that were predators. And it emerged as a corollary of a particular kind of ‘alarm reaction’. But with the development of social living, of language, and of the technology that could make life stable and relatively affluent, consciousness got appropriated by a variety of other systems within the mind, until today it has almost (but not quite) lost its original nature and purpose. In the detailed unravelling of this story, we can find an adequately complicated diagnosis of where and how the mind missed its way.

The mind is a specialized development of the brain, which is a specialized development of the body. The current myth of the body as a mobile pillar of meat piloted by an individual blip of conscious intelligence is false and harmful. Biology is telling us clearly that the body, with all its physical and psychological accoutrements, is a system, an intricate dance of processes and interactions that depends for its existence on continual penetration and perturbation by wider systems of which it is an inextricable part. The body ‘knows’ this; the brain ‘knows’ it’; the mind ‘knows’ it. Only the self-conscious ‘I’, sitting atop this mountain of interdependency, denies and ignores it. When ‘I’ is switched off, the brain-mind immediately recalls what it had affected to forget. ‘Ah yes,’ it whispers to itself; ‘I remember. I belong.’

If the essential mystery at the heart of human experience has somehow been squeezed out of the myths by which we are living, then science – twentieth-century empirical science – can re-mind us of this, just as powerfully as Mozart or meditation. ‘The mind’s new science’, as Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner has dubbed it, is doing just that. It shows us that mysticism is necessary, and mystery is logical.

TWO

Body-Building:

The Origins of Life

Evolution is a change from a no-howish untalkaboutable all-alikeness to a somehowish and in general talkaboutable not-all-alikeness by continuous sticktogetherations and something-elseifications.

William James

We Do Not Compute

The pickle in which humankind currently finds (and loses) itself is due to the mind, and the mind is due to evolution. The conscious human mind cannot be understood just by looking at the way it is now. It is the tip of a vast evolutionary iceberg that has taken millions of years to form. As in all evolution, the later builds on the earlier; it can modify what went before, but it can never replace it. We have become so preoccupied with consciousness that we have forgotten the unconscious bulk below the surface. Minds are merely the software of the intricate biocomputers we call brains. And brains are the central organizing systems, the communications rooms, of high-tech bodily communities that have multiple goals and needs, and which live in environments that afford almost limitless opportunities. And all this is in aid of smart, tenacious, replicating molecules, who have it in their nature to persist and to breed. The abilities to solve crossword puzzles, to bungee-jump, and to have rows with our children are recent curiosities, balanced precariously atop a tower of earlier discoveries and developments.

Already, in this very first paragraph, I have slipped into using the most widely used metaphor for the brain-mind – the computer. And while in the most general sense ‘computing’ is what the brain-mind does, the analogy can be terribly misleading. Computers have no intrinsic goals. The programs that tell the machinery what to do, and what to ‘want’ to do, arise not from an evolutionary source, but from the mind of the programmer. In the case of we human beings, however, the brain and its mind developed over millennia as tools for helping bodies, and the genes that designed them, to survive. Bodies are made of a kind of stuff that needs to keep trading, in a whole variety of different ways, with the world around it, if it is to persist. Computers can be left switched off for years and (all being well) will leap into action again, as if no time had passed at all, when they are next turned on.

Human beings and other animals grow and evolve. Computers get redesigned, sometimes from scratch. People need to eat to live. No computer has yet been discovered taking a bite out of its desk. There has been a film called The Cars that Ate Paris, but not yet one called The Laptops that Ate IBM. You can understand everything important about a computer by looking at it ‘now’. You can understand very little about the human mind without investigating how it came to be. Computers can be built out of a variety of different materials, and they may end up doing very similar kinds of things. The operation of brains and minds is entirely dependent on the stuff of which they are made, and the worlds they and their ancestors grew up in.

Yet the conscious mind’s view of itself downplays its evolutionary history, and its unconscious substratum, shamelessly. Part of the problem with the human brain-mind is that it has come to see itself as a kind of computer – without embodiment, without