Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (49 page)

Many other metaphors have been proposed over the centuries. In the ancient world, we encounter images like Plato's Cave with its primitive, projective “movie technology” (a background fire casting shadows of objects on a cave wall, distracting chained prisoners from the transcendent Sun completely outside the cave), the Upanishadic passage on the
atman
or transcendent Self and the ego as two birds sitting on the same tree, or the gnostic teaching of the
syzygos
or angelic Twin. In the modern world,
we
have models like Abbot's nineteenth-century Flatland, Fort's projecting Martian X, and Philip K. Dick's Valis.

Personally speaking now, I find Plato's Cave, Abbot's Flatland, Fort's X, and Dick's Valis far more “accurate” descriptions of what consciousness and the human brain are up to in a real-world mystical event than some of the present talk of task-oriented modules, cognitive templates, attribution theory, folk theories, and domain specificity,
not
because the former are literally true (they are not)
or
because the latter are false (they no doubt capture something important), but because the theological, mystical, and literary metaphors deliver far more imaginative impact. They are closer to the lived experience of things. They capture something of the wonder, awe, and sheer terror of a real-world psychical or paranormal event, when Mind beams through the brain with a force and power that can only be approximated by ecstatic, mystical, or sci-fi language.

The cognitive scientific computer metaphors appear much too abstract and “dry” in comparison. They also happen to be unbelievably boring, a fact that, all humor aside, carries real philosophical weight for me. In other words, I find the cognitive scientific models incredibly useful and even convincing as explanatory models for the commonplace (boring) functioning of the brain and the social construction and stabilization of the ego, that is, of the normal sense of self and identity, including and especially religious identity.
⁷
But I find these models virtually useless when it comes to admitting, much less understanding and explaining, the wilder data of comparative mystical literature with which I am the most familiar. They just don't work.

Philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists do not
have
to be this boring. Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, for example, anthologized portions of a beautiful little book entitled
On Having No Head
by D. E. Harding in their classic volume
The Mind's I
. The essay treats the day, Harding explains, “when I found I had no head.” “This,” he insists with complete clarity, “is not a literary gambit, a witticism designed to arouse interest at any cost. I mean it in all seriousness:
I have no head
.”
⁸
How did he come to this impossible conclusion? Harding was trekking in the Himalayas when he suddenly discovered that he was not at all who he thought he was. He explains:

Somehow or other I had vaguely thought of myself as inhabiting this house which is my body, and looking out through its two round windows at the world. Now I find it isn't like that at all. . . . Victim of a prolonged fit of madness, of a lifelong hallucination. . . . I had invariably seen myself as pretty much like other men, and certainly never as a decapitated but still living biped. I had
been
blind to the one thing that is always present, and without which I am blind indeed—to this marvelous substitute-for-a-head, this unbounded clarity, this luminous and absolutely pure void, which nevertheless is—rather than contains—all things.
⁹

Now staring into a mirror, he puzzles again at the sheer lunacy of confusing consciousness with the brain, the ego, or the body:

In my saner moments I see the man over there [in the mirror] . . . as the opposite in every way of my real Self here. I have never been anything but this ageless, adamantine, measureless, lucid, and altogether immaculate Void: it is unthinkable that I could ever have confused that staring wraith over there with what I plainly perceive myself to be here and now and forever!
¹⁰

Similar insights into the nature of the Human as Two have recently come from a Harvard-trained brain anatomist by the name of Jill Bolte Taylor. On the morning of December 10, 1996, Taylor experienced a massive stroke that shut down the left hemisphere of her brain. As a neuroanatomist, she knew exactly what was happening as it happened. She watched her linguistic, memory, and identity processing disappear like cotton candy on a tongue. Deprived of its neurological base, it just all melted away. But as these cognitive capacities blipped out, something else blipped in, something stunning. In my own terms now, she knew consciousness as consciousness instead of as culture. In her own neuroanatomical (and religious) language, as her left side gradually came back online over the next eight months, Taylor found herself alternating “between two distinct and opposite realities: the euphoric nirvana of the intuitive and kinesthetic right brain, in which she felt a sense of complete well-being and peace, and the logical, sequential left brain.”
¹¹
Consciousness and culture were gradually coming back together, and with them, her sense of social reality and personal identity.

This still sounds more than a bit like the reduction of Mind to brain, even if it is to two brains now. But there was more, and Taylor seems to find religious language the only really adequate means to express it. “By the end of that morning, my consciousness shifted into a perception that I was at
one
with the universe. Since that time, I have come to understand how it is that we are capable of having a ‘mystical' or ‘metaphysical' experience—relative to our brain anatomy.”
¹²
Obviously, her language is very careful here: “a perception,” “relative to our brain anatomy,” and those scare quotes around “mystical” and “metaphysical” are guarded and ambiguous.
But
then there is that italicized word: “I was at
one
with the universe.” Like her double-sided brain, Jill Bolte Taylor is alternating between two different worlds of meaning, two different possibilities, and
exactly
like a good fantastic author, an author of the impossible, she cannot decide which is the real.

Or can she? The human being now appeared to her as “an electrical being; an apparition of energy smoldering around an organic lump.”
¹³
She entered the space of the fantastic, that is, she felt “bizarre, as if my conscious mind was suspended somewhere between my normal reality and some esoteric space.”
¹⁴
She was “comforted by an expanding sense of grace.” She was in “a void of higher cognition.” She “soared into an all-knowingness.”
¹⁵
More stunning still, she now knew the brain-body as a kind of UFO window, “a portal through which the energy of who I am can be beamed into a three-dimensional external space.” The body now revealed itself for what it is, “a marvelous temporary home.” She marveled at how she could have spent so many years unaware of this, never really understanding “that I was just visiting there.”
¹⁶
Like an alien.

We are not who we think we are, she concluded:

I shuddered at the awareness that I was no longer a normal human being. How on earth would I exist as a member of the human race with this heightened perception that we are each a part of it all, and that the life force energy within each of us contains the power of the universe? How could I fit in with our society when I walk the earth with no fear?
¹⁷

Evolutionary biology now took on a whole new light too: “At the level of our DNA, we are related to the birds, reptiles, amphibians, other mammals, and even the plant life. From a purely biological perspective, we human beings are our own species-specific mutation of earth's genetic possibility.”
¹⁸
In short, Taylor realized that we are all transhuman: “
What a bizarre living being I am. Life! I am life! I am a sea of water bound inside this membranous pouch . . . I am cellular life, no—I am molecular life with manual dexterity and a cognitive mind
!”
¹⁹

Being in one's “right mind” also took on new meaning. To our right mind, Taylor explains, “the moment of
now
is timeless and abundant.” Time, history, and the clock are no more. Our right mind, moreover, is “free to think intuitively outside the box.” It is “spontaneous, carefree, and imaginative.” It is also the source of some of our deepest ethical sensibilities and political dreams. One might even say that it is the ultimate source of democracy itself: “The present moment is a time when everything and
everyone
are connected together as one. As a result, our right mind perceives each of us as equal members of the human family.”
²⁰

Not so the left mind. It is analytic and thinks in units of linear time. It divides, dissects, analyzes, and insists on “details, details, and more details about those details.”
²¹
It also goes on and on (and on) about “the insignificant affairs of society.”
²²
It chatters to us constantly in order to shore up the social ego with all its ethnic, racial, national, cultural, and religious convictions. None of this, however, is really real. Thus, in one of Taylor's most striking passages, she marvels at how she finally realized that, “I really had been a figment of my own imagination!”
²³
In short, the ego was revealed for what it is—a social construction. And consciousness was revealed for what it is—a presence of mythological proportions that is filtered through the brain and body, but is in fact neither.
²⁴
In Taylor's own words, “I was simply a being of light radiating life into the world.”
²⁵

Finally, consider the recent work of Mario Beauregard, the neurobiologist of religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences (RSME) at the University of Montreal who recently published
The Spiritual Brain
with journalist Denyse O'Leary. Summarizing his own research with contemplative Carmelite nuns in the context of the vast literatures on the philosophy of mind, neuroplasticity and OCD, the placebo effect, near-death experiences, and psi research, Beauregard exposes and criticizes what Karl Popper called the “promissory materialism” of contemporary science as fundamentally incapable of explaining the most basic facts of consciousness. Promissory materialism is the notion that, even though there are gaps in our knowledge now, eventually materialistic science promises to explain everything, including human intention, imagination, and that mystery of all mysteries—consciousness itself.

Not so, no way, Beauregard argues. Science may indeed eventually throw some light on the nature of consciousness, but only if it is willing to abandon its unquestioned, uncritical commitment to the metaphysics of monistic materialism. The limits of scientific materialism here are captured in the joke about the man searching for his car keys. Another man comes up and asks where he thinks he lost them.

“In the basement,” he answers.

“So why are you looking out here in the driveway?” he asks in confusion.

“Oh, because the light is much better here.”

This, Beauregard suggests, is more or less how materialism functions as an unquestioned dogma in contemporary science. Its dogmatic methods preclude even looking at data that suggest that its monistic materialism is deeply flawed, that there might really be something worth looking for
in
the dark. Thus anything that cannot be explained within its Flatland philosophy—like paranormal phenomena, or the notion that evolution might display intelligent dimensions—is relegated to the tired tropes of “irrationalism,” “anecdote,” or “pseudoscience.” Often, moreover, individual scientists who are brave enough to question the metaphysics of materialism or, worse yet, offer real scientific data that seem to violate its absolute principles, are ruthlessly denied, shamed, or otherwise humiliated in the profession. They are “damned,” Fort would say.

But scientific rationalism is not at all the same thing as scientific materialism, and there are very good, perfectly rational reasons to advance a nonmaterialist science that posits the Mind as distinct from the brain, that understands brain as a kind of supersensitive receptor or reducing valve that the Mind uses to interact with the material world. In other words, the filter thesis.

What Beauregard finally proposes is really quite stunning, or better, really quite impossible (since it is all in perfect sync with the paranormal phenomena that we have been examining all along here). He begins by quoting Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Charles Sherrington on the futility of looking for Mind in the brain: “If it is for mind that we are searching the brain, then we are supposing the brain to be much more than a telephone-exchange. We are supposing it to be a telephone-exchange along with subscribers as well.” Beauregard then offers his own “psychoneural translation hypothesis,” or PTH for short. The PTH “posits that the mind (the psychological world, the first-person perspective) and the brain (which is part of the so-called ‘material' world, the third-person perspective) represent two epistemologically different domains that can interact because they are complementary aspects of the same transcendent reality.”
²⁶

The ways in which the neuroscientist turns to hermeneutical and semiotic terms is quite remarkable here. Not only is this a “
translation
hypothesis,” but Beauregard argues that trying to look at neurons to understand consciousness is like trying “to determine the meaning of messages in an unknown language (thoughts) merely by examining its writing system (neurons),” and this, I would add, while denying, in principle, that there is an unknown speaker to detect and decode at all. Basically, materialist neuroscience operates exactly like religious fundamentalism here: it denies the gap between meaning and text, between right-brain consciousness and left-brain culture, between intention or conscious cause and neural correlation. Now there is
only
the text,
only
the rational methods of the left-brain,
only
the neurons. Such a materialist view of the human being also, as Beauregard reminds us, completely denies the very possibility of
human
freedom, human responsibility, and moral agency. There is, after all, nobody in there, at all. The political implications of all of this border on the appalling.