#53 Ślepcy i słoń - ulubione fragmenty

 AWAKENING HYPOTHESIS

Have you ever carefully investigated exactly what happens when you wake up in the morning? What is the very first conscious experience, in the first fraction of a second, before you even remember who you are and what you will do today? I have found that part of the phenomenology of waking from dreamless deep sleep is a primordial sense of confidence that perceptual states will very soon occur, that one is now “open to the world” and knows about one’s epistemic capacity, and also that one can (and very soon will) know where one is, what time it is, and so on. In a few milliseconds, one will also know who one is: Phenomenologically, the gradual transition from unconsciousness to the wake state is characterized by another subtle and intuitive presentiment, something that one might perhaps term a phenomenal “foreshadowing of selfhood.” This is an expectation not merely of knowledge, but of egoic self-knowledge—but before it actually manifests.  Waking up involves an anticipation of mental agency and the capacity for global self-control. 

This is what I call the “foreshadowing of selfhood”: The (often very brief) phenomenal quality of subjective confidence that relates to knowledge about the environment and can also extend to the likelihood of egoic self-knowledge, to the capacity for “predicting oneself into existence.”

At this point, please recall my speculative but empirically testable hypothesis from earlier (call it the “awakening hypothesis”), which says that from an empirical perspective, MPE might actually be a prolonged version of what happens during the very first milliseconds of the process of waking up in the morning.

SILENCE

The American composer, artist, and music theorist John Cage (1912–1992) wrote about a sudden philosophical insight that he had in the late 1940s during an experiment in the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. He described it like this: “[S]ilence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around.” Philosophers and artists have ignored the phenomenology of silence for too long, and finally giving it serious attention raises many interesting questions. Can there be a kind of music that brings the silence between two sounds into the foreground? What exactly is common to all kinds of music that makes silence, the space between two notes, audible? More generally, are there forms of art that are able to “stage” MPE, to “orchestrate” the silence of pure awareness itself? Could there be an aesthetics of acoustic emptiness? 

If you are a practitioner of meditation yourself, you may have discovered that there exist two subtly but profoundly different variations on the experience of silence: experiencing the quality of silence and being silence itself. In my own practice, I have found that the transition cannot be constructed or fabricated in any way; unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing you can do to make it happen. But sometimes, unexpectedly, the difference can be discovered. Sometimes the moment of discovery turns into a form of mental noise that immediately terminates the silence that is about to disclose itself. Sometimes it doesn’t. Have you already noticed this difference? You do not have to be a meditator to know this difference. Who or what is noticing it? Who or what lets go of the noticing?

PARADOXICAL REPORTS

Emptiness—the epistemic openness of pure awareness discussed in chapters 4 and 5—means that this landscape has been flattened. Here, my main point is that this allows us to better understand the paradoxicality of many verbal reports. They are not caused by some poetic form of irrationality; it is just that the conceptual and cognitive instruments that have evolved alongside humankind, and that are now at our disposal to describe and imagine possible inner experiences, have been anchored in that mental landscape of useful shortcuts. For reasons of biological and cultural evolution, our linguistic and imaginative tools are firmly grounded in the terrain of mostly unconscious hyperpriors and beliefs about the structure of reality. We embody the world of our ancestors via our inner landscape of hyperpriors and background assumptions—and if this terrain suddenly turns into wide open space, then all we have left are three options: the noble silence of not speaking at all, the mysterious indeterminacy of neither-norness, or the formulation of blatant contradictions.

NOWNESS IS EMPTY

As I said in my book The Ego Tunnel, I very much like William James’s metaphor as a starting point: The present is not a knife-edge, but a saddleback with a breadth of its own, on which we sit perched, and from which we look into time in two directions. But the physical universe does not know what William James called the “specious present,” nor does it know an expanded, or “smeared,” present moment.

The early Dzogchen scholar–practitioners in Tibet knew all of this very well, but through their own meditation practice: “Nowness” is empty; it is just another virtual representation of time, one of “the three times.” I agree with the Tibetans on this point, and it may mean that some of our phenomenological reports contain a subtle conceptual ambiguity, perhaps even an inaccuracy. Perhaps many committed practitioners do see the virtuality of psychological time and actually experience timeless episodes, but later report “nowness” or “being fully in the present moment,” simply because they learned to speak in this manner when they first learned to meditate. Developing experimental and psychometric methods to resolve this ambiguity is one important research target for the future; creating a computational phenomenology of timeless change is another

VIRTUALITY

This “dreamlike” or “ephemeral” quality is what I have termed the phenomenology of virtuality. It means that things are experienced as neither real nor illusory. There is a context of lightness and beauty, plus a whole range of qualities that we know well from earlier chapters, like soundness, holism, weightlessness, unboundedness, and gratitude. In the following report, the distinct phenomenal character of “virtual” perceptual objects is described in terms of “holographic constructs”.

SPACE

It may turn out to be of central importance for philosophy of mind, for example because it points to a certain type of computational model. MPE could be a model of an epistemic space in which phenomenal reality appears. In the words of one of our meditators: “[. . .] it’s an all knowing, un-centered space that without doubt is behind every phenomenon that is ever experienced”

[Phenomenal report] I experienced myself as a collection of sensations and behavior patterns that, while normally occupying 100% of my awareness, suddenly were about 0.00000000000001% of my conscious experience. All these arisings of personality, fear, liking, protecting, thoughts, ideas, were just popping into being in a vast, vast, warm, infinite space of awareness. It had an absolutely hilarious quality to it also—the way I’d try to describe it is the realization that I’d spent all this time running around inside a tiny, compelling kaleidoscope looking for a doorway out, when in reality the kaleidoscope has no floor or ceiling.

TONIC ALERTNESS VS. PHASIC ALERTNESS

As I will explain in slightly greater detail in this discussion, neuroscientists use the term “tonic alertness” to describe that aspect of alertness that is sustained independently of external stimuli and not triggered by cues from the environment. This contrasts with what is called “phasic alertness,” which is caused by sudden events like a loud noise or salient and unexpected changes in brightness, contrast, and the like. A specific phenomenal quality goes along with the first variety—the subjective, conscious experience of cue-independent tonic alertness—and it has been largely ignored by the philosophy of mind and consciousness. From now on I will call this quality “wakefulness.”

ZERO PERSON PERSPECTIVE

This is what in chapter  3 I called the “zero-person perspective” (0PP). The word “perspective” comes from the Latin perspicere, originally meaning “to see through.” Having a perspective normally means having a form through which we experience the world, where the form itself is transparent and therefore usually invisible. Here, however, awareness of the old first-person perspective (1PP) is part of the experience because we look not through it, but at it. The conscious organism envelops it or views it from the infinity of all possible perspectives, suddenly realizing its constructed, virtual nature. If you will, the 1PP is now a part of the 0PP. 

NARRATIVE SELF

But likening selfless, dynamical self-organization in the embodied and enculturated brain to a work of literary fiction, inspiring as it may be, creates puzzles and paradoxes. For example: Can one simultaneously be an author of and a character in the same life story? “Narration” vaguely refers to a data format that appeals to us because in a certain way, we really seem to live through our own stories— externally as well as internally. Human beings are storytellers, and they stabilize the fabric of their long-term self-model by creating a permanent inner monologue. They identify themselves with Harding’s “little one”, the entity constantly chattering on about all its extremely interesting and important perceptions and thoughts and emotions to keep the long-term self alive. There is no better way to understand this fact, to observe its continuous fight for survival under the microscope of mindfulness, than to participate in a silent meditation retreat.

EPISTEMIC AGENT/FREE WILL

The dolphin (as discussed in chapter 10) just jumps into the air, and in the very beginning, there is always an element of surprise to it; the jumping itself always happens unexpectedly, spontaneously. The feeling of bodily agency and the “thinking self” are the brain’s tricks for explaining away the surprise. Elegantly surfing uncertainty, the brain swiftly hallucinates a disembodied Cartesian ego, creating the inner image of an abstract epistemic agent (which we will investigate two chapters down the road). 

(...)

Whenever the epistemic agent model is transparent, the result is an ego: an apparently immediate and direct experience of a knowing self with which we identify. What the phenomenology of meditation practice shows is that awareness can also occur without any explicit representation of subject and object. To use our brand-new conceptual tool, awareness can exist without an epistemic agent model.

INTUITIVE CARTESIANISM

Descartes formulated the classical modern variant of the mind/body problem. I still find his arguments for mind/body dualism intuitively attractive. They actually speak to a robust duality that I can experience within myself—for example, whenever I meditate. Why is this so? What exactly is it about Descartes’s ontological distinction between extended, material things (res extensa) and nonspatial, thinking things (res cogitans) that—even after centuries of philosophical criticism and an endless series of counterarguments—still has intuitive appeal? Where does the deeply rooted Cartesian intuition come from, the philosophical hunch that there is an important sense in which our conscious mind cannot be localized in physical space? The answer is that Cartesian ontology is phenomenologically plausible because it directly corresponds to distinct layers in our phenomenal self-model.

INSIDE/OUTSIDE

This is a special chapter. I want to draw your attention to three particularly interesting phenomenological aspects, and therefore I offer more extensive commentary than usual, in addition to our selection of experiential reports. In chapter 27, on nondual awareness, I said that ordinary consciousness is a nonconceptual mode of knowing one’s own inner model of reality. However, any time that this way of knowing is contracted into an ego and falsely experienced as direct and immediate, a large part of the model appears as an outer reality to us. We then have what the Finnish philosopher Antti Revonsuo has called a built-in “out-of-brain experience”; we experience ourselves as an embodied agent situated in some external environment. This makes good evolutionary sense: Our biological ancestors successfully learned to use different parts of their inner model as a proxy for parts of their environment. According to our ancestors’ subjective experience, models of trees turned into trees and models of wolves into real wolves. Their brains also learned to use the model of the body that carried them, including sensations like hunger, thirst, breath, and heartbeat, as a proxy for the body itself, improving the organism’s capacity for self-control. This is what it means to have a “transparent self-model”—that is, a conscious model of yourself as a whole that has become so reliable that you are unable to experience it as a model—and we will learn more about all this in the second half of this chapter. To stay alive, there was a boundary that had to be protected, or re-created from moment to moment. Conscious experience often includes an explicit representation of inside and outside (e.g., of the interior parts of my body, of inner feelings and emotions arising from them, and also of what appears as my “own” mind)—plus an outside world of mind-independent objects. What meditation practice shows is that awareness can also occur with no explicit representation of inside and outside. This can lead to a conscious model of reality in which, according to verbal description, everything is inside and outside at the same time—or in which it has neither quality.

TRANSPARENCY AS VR&SOCIAL MEDIA SLAVERY

Astonishingly, very few people seem to have realized that we have continual access to the richest, most robust, and closest-to-perfect VR experience currently imaginable: our very own ordinary biologically evolved form of waking consciousness. It creates a very robust place illusion (i.e., it involves a stable version of Revonsuo’s “out-ofbrain experience”) plus a fantastically realistic experience of embodiment with the help of a transparent body model that cannot be experienced as a model. And as the icing on the cake, it adds a virtual ego—the epistemic agent model that we normally identify with. As is well known, the algorithms behind today’s social media platforms try to maximize the user’s engagement with a website (by creating outrage and a sense of urgency, by encouraging constant social comparison and aspiration without fulfilment, by inducing compulsive multitasking, by systematically draining attentional resources, and so on). It is interesting to note that evolution discovered all this a long time ago: A mostly transparent model of reality also creates maximal engagement because it enslaves the organism via the nervous system from which this model arises. It creates a new level of fascination with reality by entangling the organism in a mesh of “immediate” experiences of salience and valence, attaching it to an inbuilt existence bias, thereby forcing the animal to act out the biological imperatives encoded in the model. The creature becomes fascinated by its own life.

CONTROLLED HALLUCINATION

A fruitful way of looking at the human brain, therefore, is as a system which, even in ordinary waking states, constantly hallucinates at the world, as a system that constantly lets its internal autonomous simulational dynamics collide with the ongoing flow of sensory input, vigorously dreaming at the world and thereby generating the content of phenomenal experience.

MIND=COGNIZANT EMPTINESS=/=SPACE

Space is the example for mind essence, because space is unmade. But mind essence is not totally like space, in that space cannot think. Space has no knowing. Our mind is cognizant emptiness—empty like space, but with a natural knowing. That union of cognizance and emptiness is seen when recognizing. It is immediate, like the example I mentioned of pointing into mid-air. You do not have to wait to raise your arm for your finger to touch space—you are already touching space, all the time. You do not have to move your hand forward; the contact is already occurring and has been your entire life. All you have to do is recognize that it is taking place. It’s the same with mind essence.

—Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche (1920–1996), As It Is, II

REINTERPRETATION OF EMPTINESS=>EPISTEMIC OPENNESS

My second concluding point is that the notion of epistemic openness can offer a modern reinterpretation of the ancient Buddhist notion of “emptiness.” I will say more about “emptiness” in chapter 17. For now, we need only distinguish between a metaphysical and a phenomenological reading of this very special concept—one of the most interesting concepts ever developed in the history of human philosophy. As always, I am not at all interested in metaphysics.15 I am interested only in the fine structure of consciousness itself. If the phenomenology of epistemic openness is closely related to an abstract space of epistemic possibilities, then the phenomenology of emptiness could be interestingly related to a maximally simple and entirely unstructured inner representation of exactly this space. Phenomenologically, this is not some nihilistic void, nor is it a dead form of cold, empty space. Rather, the experience of epistemic openness can be described as a space of nonegoic knowing, of pure aliveness and spontaneous presence. 

VITREOUS FLOATERS

Vitreous floaters are impurities in the eye’s vitreous humor, which is normally transparent. They can become particularly noticeable when looking at the open blue sky or a monochromatic surface. (...) Can you imagine a global mode of conscious experience in which all the contents of your experience have turned into one single mouche volante? How would it feel to suddenly enter a phenomenological mode in which what you previously took to be the world with yourself at the center has turned into a floater, a flying Ego Tunnel in the field of pure awareness?

KRISHNAMURTI ON PITFALLS ON MEDITATION PRACTICE

It must have been around 1980 when, in Chalet Tanneg in the Swiss village of Gstaad, I had the chance to talk to Jiddu Krishnamurti all by myself. For the previous four years or so, I had practiced yoga, breathing exercises, and meditation systematically and regularly. I told K about all the positive effects that this had had in my life, on many levels at once. Then he asked me a question that tore into my heart like a dagger—one of the deadliest, meanest questions I have ever been asked. It was a question I had never thought of, a question that at first hurt me but that also proved to be extremely helpful and reverberated through my life for many years to come: “Can you find out—not intellectually, but in your own direct experience—which of all these positive effects came from the actual meditation practice itself and which came from the fact that you found something?”

Many of us try to find something: something that allows us to live in an insane world without going insane ourselves. Something that creates coherence. Something truly sustainable that functions as a normative metacontext, some overarching theme or highest-level goal. Something that reenchants our world, a reliable long-term perspective. The process of meaning-making is this attempt to find something; it is the search for coherence, for something that holds steady in a world where everything else is impermanent. My first  point is that, for many committed practitioners, the core motivation allowing them to sustain a regular practice over many years may consist to a considerable degree in the fact that they have found something, that they have adopted a certain belief system (or joined a group or spiritual movement, identified with a certain lineage or teacher, etc.), and not solely in the intrinsic force of the pure-awareness experience itself. This belief system, the sense of community, the acceptance of an authority, and the ongoing project of meaning-making may be among the major sources of motivation.

ANOTHER PITFALL: SPIRITUAL SUPER-EGO

The qualities of intrinsic existential seriousness, sincerity, and often admirable discipline manifested by people highly preoccupied with a search for meaning can create their own pitfalls, however, because the sense of commitment may often be anchored in an ideology, authority, or other form of attachment to a metaphysical belief system that cannot be supported by rational argument or empirical evidence. In these cases, as practice progresses, personality changes will gradually ensue. The interaction of meditative practice and ideology is likely to lead to the construction of an alternative life story, and the practitioner may get entangled in an evolving narrative identity. Some give themselves a new name; others begin to wear funny clothes or even begin to act as spiritual teachers. (People have been known to actually write books.) In sum, the process may create a new kind of personal-level self-model, of the kind that Loch Kelly called a “spiritual ego-manager.” This may involve contraction into a spiritual superego—a more or less fundamentalist know-it-all who constantly labels, judges, and controls.

TRUE BELIEVER

At what point in the lifetime of a long-term practitioner will theory contamination reach its peak? This is an open question. It is certainly possible that some motivating belief systems are actually self-reinforcing, becoming stronger over time and gradually turning the meditator into a pious, intellectually narrow-minded “true believer.”

Obviously, all this is not to say that ancient theories of pure awareness—based on millions of hours spent in silent meditation by the serious scholar–practitioners who came before us—do not have great value. To quote the old analogy coined by Bernard of Chartres (who died after 1124), in this domain of research, too, we are truly standing on the shoulders of giants. I think that the phenomenological depth of these traditional systems is often enormous, and it’s positively embarrassing that Western science has failed to acknowledge their value for so long. But a fresh, bottom-up approach in a new historical context, spanning many countries and invading intellectual taboo zones, will have its own value. Such an approach helps to weaken the influence of theory contamination (which creates positive biases) on the one hand and taboo zones (which create theoretical blind spots) on the other. 

THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO DO

Interestingly, many meditators report that during an episode of pure awareness, their goal hierarchy dissolves: All is well; there is nothing left to do. There is a quality of acceptance and contentment, and sometimes it begins to extend into the practitioner’s life as a whole. This quality of acceptance and contentment overlaps significantly with the phenomenology of “existential ease” introduced in chapter 1. The need for “narrative self-deception” (chapter 17) may be attenuated, gradually liberating the meditator from her constant urge to stabilize the long-term self-model by constructing a thematically coherent life story in a never-ending search for meaning. 

WHEN MEDITATION BECOMES AN IMMORTALITY PROJECT

My first point is that for some meditators, their own practice may be part of such an immortality project, and this fact may at times distort how they choose to speak about their own inner experience. Here is how Wikipedia explains one of Becker’s central insights: “By successfully living under the terms of the immortality project, people feel they can become heroic and, henceforth, part of something eternal: something that will never die as compared to their physical body.”14 If Becker is right, there may be a specific form of mortality denial that we could call “contemplative heroism.” Meditation practice would be part of a larger project, the heroic battle against finitude, an epic quest to discover that part of yourself that you can firmly believe will never die.

MEDITATION, MORTALITY DENIAL AND NARRATIVE SELF-DECEPTION

Again, let us ask: What does all this have to do with meditation practice and the problem of theory contamination? The bad news is that for many meditators, their practice is likely tied to a wider context of mortality denial: using the phenomenology as proof of the existence of an afterlife, interpreting it in a way that confirms some organized system of mortality denial. (...)

I am aware that all this may sound harsh. But the good news is that there is probably no better tool for really confronting one’s own mortality and the fear of death than meditation practice itself. This is what goes to the root of the problem. It takes more courage, but it may also be more efficient than any form of intellectual gymnastics. (...) If there are toxic epistemic states, maybe there are also liberating epistemic states?

Science and meditation are both epistemic practices; narrative self-deception and mortality denial aren’t. We have explored some of the ways in which meditation proper is an epistemic practice, and how it goes far beyond stress reduction, well-being, capitalist imperatives of self-optimization, or vague ideas of “self-actualization.” (...)

There is also a deeper phenomenological discovery to be made, which I would say that you can verify through the practice of meditation: Reflexive MPE, the timeless experience of nonegoic self-awareness (see chapter 30 for more), is free of the almost all-pervading, global affective tone of futility and absurdity that was mentioned earlier in this chapter and that needs to be repressed in the egoic self-model. The Sisyphean quality is not part of its phenomenal character. On the other hand, MPE is positively characterized by what in chapter 1 was termed the experiential quality of “existential ease.” Ultimately, therefore, meditation may be capable of dissolving the need for narrative self-deception, mortality denial, and all heroic forms of absurdity management.

MORTALITY DENIAL AND POPULISM

Mortality denial has many other facets and consequences beyond personal immortality projects. For example, populism is directly related to meaning-making and mortality denial. If you are a politician, offering a tribal narrative plus a form of symbolic identity that allows people to identify with something greater, with something that extends far beyond their physical death, then you will typically be more successful than any secular or intellectually honest competitor you may have. If you are one of the many new entrepreneurs in the global attention economy (or an algorithm aimed at extracting attention from human brains), then you will always be more successful when you learn how to play to your audience’s unconscious needs by offering an interesting new strategy for narrative self-deception or a particularly clever route to mortality denial. And if you are a philosopher, you will always have more readers if you manage to subtly include some new and clever backdoors for mortality denial in.

POOR MAN'S NONDUAL AWARENESS

Let us take the example of panpsychism. I would claim that what people really find so fascinating about the topic of panpsychism is not the philosophical debate as such, but rather an emotionally attractive, intuitive feeling that they get when they try to imagine their own world with the added extra of panpsychism being true. The fascination is generated by a phenomenological inkling, a glimpse of the profundity and deep relevance of a global mode of experience that really exists (chapter 27). Philosophical panpsychism is the poor man’s nondual awareness.

OBSERVATION WITHOUT OBSERVER

A mistake frequently made by Christian theologians has been to think that just because they take themselves to be persons, God must be a person too. But the notion of ideal observation does not need to be reified into the concept of a personal God. My main point is that both concepts—the witness and the personal God—are metaphysical reifications of what originally was a phenomenological process—namely, the process of “ideal observation,” of “observing without an observer.”

This leads to the interesting possibility that human beings have experienced the ideal observation of selfless witness consciousness for millennia, and that some cultural contexts led to the creation of an egoic interpretation (like early European Christianity, in which a personal God sees everything, all the time), whereas others developed a more abstract metaphysical theory of consciousness, including nonegoic models of witnessing (like Advaita Vedanta in India, the famous nondualistic school of philosophy propounded by Gaudapada and Adi Shankara in the seventh and eighth centuries).

OBSERVATION WITHOUT OBSERVER

A mistake frequently made by Christian theologians has been to think that just because they take themselves to be persons, God must be a person too. But the notion of ideal observation does not need to be reified into the concept of a personal God. My main point is that both concepts—the witness and the personal God—are metaphysical reifications of what originally was a phenomenological process—namely, the process of “ideal observation,” of “observing without an observer.”

This leads to the interesting possibility that human beings have experienced the ideal observation of selfless witness consciousness for millennia, and that some cultural contexts led to the creation of an egoic interpretation (like early European Christianity, in which a personal God sees everything, all the time), whereas others developed a more abstract metaphysical theory of consciousness, including nonegoic models of witnessing (like Advaita Vedanta in India, the famous nondualistic school of philosophy propounded by Gaudapada and Adi Shankara in the seventh and eighth centuries).

EVASIVENESS OF NONDUAL AWARENESS

Any attempt to “hold” MPE plus any other conscious content “before our minds and to compare them” necessarily creates an epistemic agent model. You can never be “dead on target,” because you are the occluder.