Can Studies in Mysticism Inform the Contemporary Debate on Consciousness?

Mike King
April 1995
Core Unit

Introduction

There has been a considerable dialogue between science on the one hand and religion and mysticism on the other hand in recent history, culminating perhaps in the pervasive physics-supports-mysticism New Age view promoted by books like the Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu-Li Masters. Ken Wilber is a seemingly lone dissenter to this view, presenting in Cosmic Questions convincing evidence that the bulk of physicists responsible for the 'new physics' took the view that while their physics did not invalidate mysticism, neither did it support it: their mystical views were independent of their physics. David Bohm is clearly a counter-example to Wilber's argument, but the argument is still worth making.

If we take Wilber's view that mystics don't need 'validation' from modern physics but concede at least that there is a fruitful line of dialogue here, what about the contribution of mystics to science? While it may be that a mystic, also trained as a scientist, may do better science, the more interesting question lies in the nature of the mystic's expertise: the inner world. Studies in consciousness is a growing academic field with contributions from both the sciences and the humanities. Perhaps studies in mysticism can offer the insights of the mystics of three thousand years or more into the questions emerging from studies in consciousness.
The Contemporary Debate on Consciousness

A number of popular science books on consciousness in recent years has shown an increasing acceptance that consciousness has become not just an acceptable field of study, but fashionable. Behind the lurch from poor relative to hyped-up topic of the moment is a serious consensus within and across a range of academic disciplines that a better understanding of consciousness is needed for genuine progress, not just in the Western world-view as a whole, but in specific areas that could lead to new scientific understanding, and new technologies, such as in Artificial Intelligence.

The launch of the international Journal of Consciousness Studies (JCS) indicates the respect that the subject now commands, and its first two issues and editorials are setting the tone for the debates, both within and across disciplines.

The editors of the JCS include Robert Forman, known in studies in mysticism for his work on Eckhart, and for The Problem of Pure Consciousness. The editors' introduction to the first issue of JCS explicitly states that contributions from religious studies are important to the debate, and in particular that a phenomenological approach must be included:

The inclusion of this phenomenological approach is essential, we believe, because consciousness studies in one field – perhaps the one academic field – where the experiential aspect cannot be ignored.

The first issue of JCS contains a paper by Forman, focusing on the role of language in mystical experience; a paper demonstrating that the paranormal poses a theoretical problem for conscious machines; and a paper dealing with a Buddhist perspective on causality. Otherwise the papers are largely scientific papers with different degrees of sympathy to anything that could be called a mystical approach to consciousness. In the second issue there is one article explicitly dealing with mysticism; a paper discussing Francis Crick's work from a religious studies perspective; and a discussion between Oliver Sacks and Anthony Freeman, the recently sacked Church of England vicar.

While the debates in studies in consciousness are largely within physics, computing, biology, neurology, psychology and philosophy, it seems that proponents of almost any viewpoint have to define their stand with respect to the religious or mystical, even if only to mount an attack on it. It seems that such attacks are rarely going to be of the deadly variety that a Richard Dawkins mounts (enjoyable as they are), and that studies in mysticism is going to have a genuine part to play in the debate.

Issues in the Contemporary Debate on Consciousness

It is only possible to give here a brief summary of the positions of the key players and the key debates in the subject, but the positions can be usefully categorised as materialist, dualist and idealist.

Francis Crick, famous for his part in the discovery of DNA, probably represents the materialist or reductionist view of consciousness, summed up in his 'astonishing hypothesis' that we are nothing more than a pack of neurons, and that all consciousness is merely neuronal activity. He seeks to find the neural correlates of perceptions (he works mainly with the sense of sight), thus tackling the qualia problem (i.e. explaining the 'redness' of red), and eventually to find the neural correlate of consciousness. Daniel Dennett, a philosopher, is a more moderate materialist who rejects the Cartesian duality of mind and brain, and wishes to replace the concept of a Cartesian theatre (where all sensory input are ultimately unified into a holistic perception) with the Multiple Drafts Model. This only accepts that perceptions are conscious when 'noted down' in memory, and proposes a continual editorial process as a model for consciousness. Some of the researchers that can be placed in the materialist camp are best characterised by the term 'epiphenomenalist' in that they see consciousness as an epiphenomenon or emergent phenomenon (though these are in themselves distinguishable positions).

The dualists in some way or other are forced to accept Descartes view of a 'ghost in a machine', or some kind of distinction between brain and mind. Roger Penrose, is not happy with the term dualist, arguing that scientific advances since Descartes, particularly quantum theory, make the term less useful than in an era of Newtonian mechanics. Penrose believes that quantum-mechanical effects in the brain allow for the entry of important aspects of consciousness that cannot be explained by the 'classical' science of Crick and Dennett, these being indeterminacy (allowing for free will) and coherence (allowing for the holistic nature of consciousness). Penrose suggests that the transfer of quantum mechanical phenomena into the classical region of the brain is a result of physics that we do not yet understand, and proposes that structures called microtubules are the location for these effects. Note that he term dualist is used here in a specific way and is not directly related to its use in mysticism. The basic problem that dualists face is this: how to explain that a non-material entity such as mind can influence the brain as matter.

The idealist position is that there is only mind and no matter. It is included here for completeness, but finds few adherents in the scientific community. It may be that some scientists have a perception that this is the position of the mystics, i.e. that mystics deny the material as vigorously as the materialists deny the spiritual. This is probably a category mistake: the idealist position (as stated here) is more likely to be a poetic or pedagogical device in mysticism than a valid proposition in an academic sense. However, for a rounded debate in consciousness studies, the idealist position needs expansion and clarification.

The following is a brief list of some of the issues arising in studies in consciousness:

• the binding problem / Cartesian theatre / awareness
• free will / causality problems
• the ghost in the machine problem / Cartesian cut
• other-minds problem / zombies
• qualia
• 1st person vs. 3rd person methodologies (introspectionism vs. behaviourism)
• relationship between thought and consciousness
• links with quantum theory
• implications of the paranormal
• problems surrounding artificial consciousness.

Mysticism and Consciousness

There is a reasonable consensus that one can divide the world's mystical literature into two broad camps: love-mysticism and awareness mysticism. There may be a large number of texts that appear to move effortlessly from one of these poles to the other, but this does not detract from the contention that a group of scholars in the subject could fairly easily dispose of the texts into two large heaps corresponding with these poles, along with a smaller heap containing the genuine hybrids and don't-knows. The point of saying this is that scholars looking for material that deals with consciousness would sensibly start with the large pile labelled 'awareness-mysticism'. This includes many Buddhist and Zen Buddhist texts, Patanjali, Ramana Maharshi, The Cloud of Unknowing, Krishnamurti and Douglas Harding, to choose just a tiny selection. This is not to say that these authors do not deal with love, or that so-called love mystics have nothing to tell us about consciousness: it is just a starting point.

Few scholars in mysticism have concerned themselves directly with the issues of consciousness as formulating at the present time outside of religious studies. In some ways many of the issues in studies in mysticism are related to consciousness, but to ask the same question a different way can reveal hidden threads and congruences in a body of material, in this case the mystical texts.

Contributions from Mysticism

As we have seen, the contemporary debate on consciousness involves a range of issues and methodological assumptions, which can broadly be categorised as materialist, dualist, and idealist. It is unlikely that studies in mysticism can make a contribution in the first category, but likely that they can in the second two. There are perhaps three main types of contribution:

1.	A body of knowledge about consciousness.
2.	Empirical techniques for introspective experimentation in consciousness.
3.	A range of additional problems in studies in consciousness.

Knowledge

In the editorial in the first issue of JCS the editors' list the disciplines that contribute to studies in consciousness and go on to add:

The latter [phenomenological category] is best exemplified by the transpersonal and contemplative traditions, who have focused not so much on knowledge 'about' consciousness, but on transformative techniques that claim to reveal its true nature in a more experiential way.

This acceptance that knowledge 'about' something is not the be-all and end-all of academic endeavour is highly encouraging. In the second issue of JCS G. William Barnard from the Religious Studies Department at the Southern Methodist University takes the transformative idea further. He argues that academies must accept scholar-mystics in their midst, rather than see them as a threat to academic cosiness.

However it would be wrong to assume that knowledge about consciousness can only reside in the living beings of those somehow transformed in their quest for its better understanding, and the same is true in mysticism. There is a body of knowledge in mysticism, and at the very least it should prevent the making of category mistakes. For example Eleanor Rosch presents a discussion of the four types of causality in Madhyamika Buddhism (a thing may arise out of itself, out of something other, out of both, or out of nothing) in relation to the ideas of modern cognitive psychology. While discussions of causality are undoubtedly part of a philosophical debate in the East, it is also true to say that these four types of causality are also metaphors for states of consciousness in the mystic: e.g. to see that all things arise from nothing is a poetical way of expressing a state of samadhi. Rosch's analysis of causality would be more complete with an acknowledgement that a category shift would transform the meaning of the original statements.

Techniques

Barnard's proposal that active mystics become part of the academy, and that studies in consciousness needs an introspective as well as a behaviourist approach opens up the profoundly difficult question of a first-person methodology. William James's Radical Empiricism is an attempt to broaden scientific empiricism to experience, while Husserl's Phenomenology, requiring us to 'bracket out' concepts relating to our pure experience of phenomena, also tries to extend empiricism. However, the behaviourist schools of psychology in their various forms won the argument over 'subjectivity', demonstrating that advances in knowledge best came from the 'black box' approach, where the subjective experience of the individual was discounted. Dennett devotes a whole chapter to the problem of first- vs. third-person perspectives and even proposes a new methodology called heterophenomenology as some kind of hybrid, with little evidence however of any successes to date.

One reason for the possible failure of various types of introspective or phenomenological approach may be that the subject (and object!) of such empirical investigation is not necessarily trained. In third-person science one expects a rigorous training lasting many years before the scientist can make any substantial contribution to knowledge, so why not in a first-person science? In most religious and mystical traditions training is expected to be at least as lengthy and as arduous as in science, with perhaps a similar 'hit-rate' (many mystics deny a causal link between training and liberation, but plenty of well-trained scientists also fail to make substantial contributions to science).

If this principle is accepted then we are faced with the problems of the confessional aspect of any mystical training, which brings in pre-packaged assumptions from that tradition about the nature of reality. If we wish to borrow a training in introspection from any mystical tradition, for the purposes of investigating consciousness, then we must be aware of all the assumptions that come with it.

Problems

As well as offering a body of knowledge and a range of introspective techniques, mysticism also offers studies in consciousness an additional range of problems to tackle. These mainly lie under the heading of the problem of pure consciousness, though pure consciousness can be variously defined, leading to a range of questions to tackle, rather than a single one. An additional but unrelated problem lies with the doctrines of reincarnation and anatman (no-self). One could view the Eastern understanding of reincarnation as a way of stating that consciousness accrues to organisms; this is a radically different view to that of epiphenomenalism, and assumes a Cartesian duality. The doctrine of anatman, on the other hand, denies that anything as central or profound as consciousness is reincarnated, merely a set of tendencies (which include, for some, memories of past lives, and for all, the karmic predispositions). A complete theory of consciousness needs to address these issues.

We will now examine some authorities in mysticism to give some illustrative flesh to the notion that studies in mysticism can contribute to studies in consciousness.
Forman

Robert Forman is a distinguished academic in religious studies, and, as part of the JCS philosophy of promoting a first-person approach, we are told in the first issue that he practices a form of new-Advaitan meditation daily. The book The Problem of Pure Consciousness, of which he was the editor, presents something he terms the Pure Consciousness Event (PCE). In his introduction he states that this is a state of consciousness devoid of content, and that articles in part 1 of the book demonstrate its existence, while papers in part 2 show that the contextualist approach to mystical experience (which argues that all experience is mediated through language and concept) cannot explain it, and is therefore incomplete. The contextualist approach, arising from modern thinking on the role of language, denies the validity of the concept of pure consciousness, and fits well with Dennett's Multiple Drafts Model of consciousness.

While it is hard to overestimate the importance of The Problem of Pure Consciousness, its arguments are open to attack on several grounds. Firstly, the essays in Part 1 are probably too disparate in their approach to convince the sceptic of the existence of PCE, and secondly, there is too little illustrative material regarding it. To characterise the PCE as one devoid of content is problematic because of its rarity, even in the lives of the mystics. The PCE is close to a fit of abstraction or trance, or to the state of catatonic schizophrenia, requiring the complete suspension of the operation of the sensory apparatus. We do have descriptions of Socrates and Ramakrishna in such states (we even have a photograph of Ramakrishna requiring the support of his devotees because of his ecstasy), but Forman gives us little clue as to how, for example, sounds are shut off from this particular state of consciousness. We know that by staring at something long enough the picture breaks up and we can lose the sensory data of sight, but sounds are not so amenable, and Socrates' fits of abstraction must have been accompanied by at least some birdsong. This is not to argue against the PCE, but to propose a more general case of pure consciousness: where sensory percepts are normal, but where thought ceases. This is a more widely encountered state in mysticism, and poses a more generalisable set of problems in the study of consciousness.

Krishnamurti

As an advocate of pure consciousness based on the absence of thought rather than percept, Krishnamurti serves as an excellent case study. There is not space here to give his credentials as one of the 20th century's greatest mystics, other than to say that he was trained for 20 years to be a Buddha, experienced enlightenment under similar circumstances to the Buddha, and taught like the Buddha up to his death at an advanced age. His teachings can be summed up in the phrase 'choiceless awareness'. While his advocacy of silence of the mind is strongly reminiscent of Zen Buddhist 'no-mind' teachings, he refused to allow any comparisons with his teachings, and in particular denied the value of the spiritual teacher or guru. This paradoxical position becomes even more puzzling in an extraordinary conversation with the physicist David Bohm, where he persuades Bohm that the important part of their communication is at the unconscious level.

Bohm: To reach the unconscious you have to have an action which doesn't directly appeal to the conscious.

Krishnamurti: Yes. That is affection, that is love. When you talk to my waking consciousness, it is hard, clever, subtle, brittle. And you penetrate that, penetrate it with your look, with your affection, with all the feeling you have. That operates, nothing else.

Krishnamurti, despite the apparent role-inversion of guru and disciple, gives the game away: he is admitting that it is the charismatic power of the teacher (comprising looks, affection, feeling, love) which enables a transformation in the disciple.

Krishnamurti leaves little in the form of a body of knowledge, or of technique (other than choiceless awareness), but leaves us with a new version of the no-mind problem. He claimed once to have walked for a whole hour without a single thought. Knowing that he was fond of dogs, and that his dog may have been with him at the time, one can then pose (the Krishnamurti's dog) problem: what was the difference between his state of consciousness and the dog's?

Douglas Harding

Douglas Harding is another great mystic of the 20th century, still alive and teaching. Unlike Krishnamurti, Douglas is fond of relating his teachings to those of other mystics, although his teachings are on the surface of it far more unconventional than Krishnamurti's. Douglas teaches a version of no-mind that he calls 'headlessness'. The origins of this lie in his own experience in the Himalayas at the age of 33, following a prolonged period of self-enquiry along lines similar to Ramana Maharshi's suggested meditation on the question: what am I?

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough, and what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in – absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not a head.

This is probably a description of the more common type of pure conscious experience, as opposed to the PCE, and is probably also a description of a spontaneous and complete 'bracketing out' (of memory and imagination) that Husserl was vainly groping for. What is unusual in Harding's case is his latching on to the no-head observation as central to the experience, and as a central pedagogical device. Since this experience some fifty years ago, Harding has evolved a toolkit of first-person experiments to demonstrate headlessness, all of which at first sight seem absurd, but may in fact be highly useful as a starting point for a methodology for a first-person scientific investigation of consciousness.

Conclusions

From the discussion so far it would seem reasonable to assume not only that studies in mysticism can contribute to studies in consciousness, but that the reverse may also be true. Studies in mysticism can contribute a body of knowledge, a body of introspective techniques (and a comparative study of them), and pose a range of problems for studies in consciousness (or formulate existing problems in new ways). In turn, studies in consciousness may reformulate existing problems in studies in mysticism, directing studies of the mystical texts with a different emphasis. Lastly, if studies in consciousness makes genuine progress in promoting and legitimising first-person scientific investigation in consciousness, then why not in mysticism?

References