Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (50 page)

Beauregard's nonmaterialist neuroscience works very differently. It does not deny, of course, all the material processes of the body and the brain or of the physical world in general (although he constantly reminds us that quantum physics has definitively demonstrated that there is no such thing as “matter,” and that quantum probability collapses before an observer, hence the hopelessly outdated notion of an objective “materialism”). But it does not make the mistake of reducing mind to these material processes without remainder. Rather, it begins with mind, intention, and human freedom, and then shows how this consciousness communicates its messages through our shared neurobiology, that is, through the body and brain.

This “informational transduction mechanism,” as he puts it, is described as “a paramount achievement of evolution that allows mental processes to causally influence the functioning and plasticity of the brain. It is somewhat like writing our spoken words down in a symbol system that can be read by others at a distance.” In essence, a kind of microtelekinesis within the brain itself.

Beauregard's invocation of biological evolution here is not tangential. It is in fact part of a much larger evolutionary mysticism in which he understands his neuroscience and the history of human culture in general:

A teleologically oriented (i.e., purposeful rather than random) biological evolution has enabled humans to consciously and voluntarily shape the functioning of our brains. As a result of this powerful capacity, we are not biological robots totally governed by “selfish” genes and neurons. One outcome is that we can intentionally create new social and cultural environments. Through us, evolution becomes conscious, that is, it is driven not simply by drives for survival and reproduction but more by complex sets of insights, goals, desires, and beliefs.
²⁷

This, of course, comes very close to what I have identified above as the dialectic of consciousness and culture. Here, though, the influence of consciousness is extended back into the biological realm as well. In this model, at least, consciousness was implicated in biological evolution before it came into its own, became conscious of itself, and took up the task of cultural evolution.

Finally, after almost three hundred pages of robust criticism of monistic materialism and a discussion of the scientific evidence for his own thesis about how the brain mediates but does not produce religious, spiritual,
and
mystical experiences, Beauregard insists again that
psyche
and
physis
, or mind and matter, “represent complementary aspects of the same underlying principle,” that neither can be reduced to the other. Here finally we seem to have an answer to the rather sensationalistic question touted on the back cover: “Did God create the brain, or does the brain create God?” The answer? Both.

Beauregard is perfectly aware that his thesis about the brain mediating transcendent religious experiences has been advanced before by William James, Henri Bergson, and Aldous Huxley. Indeed, he cites these very authors on the idea that “the brain can be compared with a television receiver that translates electromagnetic waves (which exist apart from the TV receiver) into picture and sound.” But he goes much further than a simple acknowledgment of intellectual debt. He reveals his own direct knowledge, even gnosis, of the psychoneural translation hypothesis, that is, he describes his own mystical experiences, which he classifies under what Richard Maurice Bucke called “Cosmic Consciousness.” These, he explains, occurred in 1987 within a serious bout of chronic fatigue syndrome (the theme of trauma-as-trigger again):

The experience began with a sensation of heat and tingling in the spine and the chest areas. Suddenly, I merged with the infinitely loving Cosmic Intelligence (or Ultimate Reality) and became united with everything in the cosmos. This unitary state of being, which transcends the subject/object duality, was timeless and accompanied by intense bliss and ecstasy. In this state, I experienced the basic interconnectedness of all things in the cosmos, the infinite ocean of life. I also realized that everything arises from and is part of this Cosmic Intelligence.
²⁸

The nonmaterialist neuroscience that flows from
both
the third-person perspective of professional science
and
the first-person perspective of mystical experiences suggests for Beauregard that “the death of the brain does not mean the annihilation of the person.” If the brain, after all, is a receiver or a reducing valve and not the producer of consciousness, then the destruction of the filter or reducing valve hardly implies the end of consciousness. The TV can go on the blitz, even be demolished, but the television program, like the Truth in
The X-Files
, continues to be “out there.” It is completely unaffected by what happens to this or that television set.

But the situation is even more radical than this, for Beauregard, if I read him correctly, seems to be proposing, to stick to our metaphors, that the television program “out there” actually helped create the circuitry of the TV-brain. In his own terms, mind or consciousness represents “a
fundamental
and irreducible property of the Ground of Being,” and “mind, consciousness, and self profoundly affect the physical world,” including the evolutionary processes themselves. “It is this fundamental unity and interconnectedness that allows the human mind to causally affect physical reality and permits psi interaction between humans and with physical or biological systems.”
²⁹
The universe is finally mental as well as physical. Or, in the words of the physicist James Jeans, “the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.”

Beauregard concludes his book by writing of “a trend in human evolution toward the spiritualization of consciousness.” He suggests that a non-materialist science may even “accelerate our understanding of this process of spiritualization and significantly contribute to the emergence of a planetary type of consciousness.”
³⁰
This acceleration of the evolution of consciousness through the cultivation and promulgation of a truly adequate science of the human spirit may sound utopian to some, but it is exactly what Frederic Myers had argued over one hundred years ago now in
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
.

We have come full circle.

I do not offer any of these three thinkers as the last word on psychical and paranormal phenomena. Nor do I mean to argue that, in neuroscience, we now, at last, have all of our answers. I do not believe that, not for a second. Nor do I mean to suggest that what emerges from the brain as producer or filter is always somehow good or wise, or, for that matter, left or right. I understand that consciousness is as unitary as it is modular, that most significant brain processes display a “horizontal” or “global” patterning across both hemispheres and cannot be located simply on the “left” or “right.” Quite the contrary. I am convinced, with Myers and Freud, that the hidden mind of the unconscious is as much a Gothic basement filled with the haunting ghosts of suppressed desires, unspeakable aggressions, and gullible nonsense as it is a potential window into the supernormal and the sublime, “a rubbish-heap as well as a treasure-house,” as Myers called it with his usual verve (HP1:73).
³¹

What I do mean to suggest is that the task of critical theory has something terribly important to learn before the spectacles of Mr. Harding's lost head, Taylor's stroke of insight, and Beauregard's personal experience of Cosmic Consciousness. To take the most obvious and simple of observations, Taylor shows us definitively that the Human as Two is not just an
ancient
mystical doctrine.
It is a universal neuroanatomical fact
. In essence (really,
in essence
), we all have two brains in one skull, and they work far more similarly than differently across cultures. This does not, of course, answer the question of the ultimate origins and nature of consciousness, but it at least gives us a very solid base from which to theorize. Actually, it gives us
two
solid bases.

Which, I suppose, is the main point that I want to make here. After all, all of our contextual, materialist, and historical methods are left-brain methods. They emphasize difference and division, not sameness and equality. They only recognize the clock-time of the brain and of the calendar, not the Now of consciousness. They focus on the ego's chatter, not on the Clear Light of Mind. In Victoria Nelson's terms, they thrive on our Aristotleanism and try their best to ignore our Platonism. In more modern terms, they focus on cognition, that is, on all those cultural grids and processes of the computer-brain, not on consciousness as consciousness, on the Sun outside the Cave. They focus on class, race, and gender, even as they ignore our shared DNA and the fundamental, undeniable biological unity of the species. They thus represent, literally, only half the picture, and, with respect to the phenomenology of revelation and religious experience, probably the least important half at that.

So what are we doing here? Do we really think that we can explain what Jill Bolte Taylor refers to as a species-wide, mutating life-force beaming through the portal of the right brain with the local cultural and linguistic equipment of the left brain? Do we really think that we can get to the “alien” presence mediated through (or as) the right brain through methods like social constructivism, discourse analysis, and historical criticism?

I find such assumptions deeply problematic. Recall my earlier point that what we have in the academy are theories
about
religion that attempt to explain the encounter with the sacred in terms of something else, that we have no real theories
of
religion. Translated now into neuroscientific terms, I would say that what we have are some very fine left-brain methods, but no accepted and significantly developed right-brain methods. The field, then, is like a two-engine prop plane that is running on only one engine. It can't even get off the ground. It just goes around and around on the runway. Hence we have a really good view of the pavement, but almost no understanding of the sky and the principles of flight.

Which is not to demean or deny the analytic and linguistic capacities of the left brain. Quite the contrary, ignoring these critical capacities and their attending theoretical categories would be just as problematic, and probably even more dangerous. Biological fiction or no, we cannot stop
analyzing
the real-world, physical, and profound social effects that a category like “race” has on countless human beings, really on all of us. So too with gender, sexual orientation, and class. This is why I have spent most of my intellectual career tracing, comparing, and analyzing the comparative erotics of Hindu, Catholic, Islamic, Jewish, and New Age mystical literature with the rational and ethical tools of psychoanalysis, feminist theory, queer theory, and historical-criticism.
³²

So please do not misread me here. I am
not
proposing that we surrender the powers of reason and critical theory. I am not antireason or antiscience. I am not proposing that we shut down the engines of our left brains. We'd just go in circles again, now in circles of faith and belief, but in circles nonetheless. I am simply suggesting that, if we are ever going to understand something as doubly complex and as two-brained as the human being, we need
both
sides of ourselves. We need both engines to fly.

As another way of getting at the same point, consider science fiction, fantasy, and fantastic literature again, that is, the great genres of the “What if?” that have engaged us so in the present volume. What if we were to read Philip K. Dick's pink beams of Valis or Charles Fort's alien projection mythology symbolically, and then translate them back into the language of contemporary neuroscience and psychical research? Would we not have an extremely powerful literary expression of the nature of mental reality as an alien projection “from somewhere else,” that is, a virtual reality projected through the neurological galaxy of the brain from the Mind via something like Taylor's hemispheric model? It's probably worth mentioning here that the brain really is a galaxy of sorts. With hundreds of billions of neurons and glia, there are as many cells in the human brain as there are stars in a typical galaxy, including our own Milky Way. And this is before we even get to the possible connections between them, which number into . . . into the what? Before such a vast neurological cosmos, Dick's Valis or Fort's X looks
way
more accurate and adequate than the typical abstractions and computer-talk of “modules” and “cognitive grids,” which now appear almost obscenely simplistic and naive.

An author of the impossible like Philip K. Dick was extremely sophisticated about all of this. He did not “believe” everything that was happening to him, but neither did he conflate Mind with brain. Indeed, he had been zapped by a form of Cosmic Consciousness and was a self-confessed gnostic on precisely this point, namely, that he had been transformed, reprogrammed by the paranormal encounter. Valis had inspired a new writing practice in him, one dominated by the radical intuition that consciousness is filtered through the brain, not produced by it. Essentially, Dick had had
his
own stroke of insight (and, perhaps not accidentally, he would soon die after multiple strokes).

Similarly, Charles Fort never confused the alien Mind, or what he called X, with the human brain, for, as he put it, “the way of a brain is only the way of a belly” (LO 560). That is to say, the brain is finally a material reality, whereas Mind is something else, something alien, something really, really weird.

Materialism, Fort's “way of a belly,” is the dominant model in neuroscience now. I understand this. I also recognize, with Victoria Nelson, that the greatest taboo among serious intellectuals is “the heresy of challenging a materialist worldview.”
³³
I am issuing just such a challenge here. In doing so, I have no illusions about trying to go back to any premodern answers. I am simply pointing out that our present Dominant can only be maintained by damning, through willed or benign neglect, what Edward Kelly and his colleagues have called the “rogue” phenomena of the history of animal magnetism, psychical research, and paranormal experience.
³⁴
I am proposing the filter thesis here not to “believe” anything (including the filter thesis, which I would be happy to toss aside before something better), but because whereas the materialist models cannot even recognize the existence of the rogue data, much less explain them, the filter thesis can do both. Moreover, the filter thesis has the inestimable advantage of being capable of embracing both the findings of modern neuroscience (as applicable to the brain) and the most astonishing data of the psychical research tradition (as applicable to Mind). Mine is thus finally a reasonable,
rational
choice, not a decision to “believe” anything at all.