| ZEN PHYSICS (what is this?) The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation David Darling 
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Like the waters of a river
That in the swift flow of the stream
A great rock divides,
Though our ways seem to have parted
I know that in the end we shall meet.
– Twelfth-century Japanese verse
One simple change in our worldview would have the most profound and dramatic effect on our lives. And it is this: to see, as Eastern philosophies have long seen, that the brain does not give rise to consciousness.
The brain is an organ of thought and memory, and has evolved as such for a variety of reasons. It pays for an animal to be able to remember what has happened to it so that it has a better chance of repeating its successes and avoiding its failures. It pays to know how to respond most appropriately to fellow members of your species or clan, especially if you have to fit in with a social structure in which complex interrelationships play a central role. It pays to be able to speculate about the future, analyze situations, and work out novel strategies. It pays – if you are to stay alive and prosper in a niche as incredibly intricate as that of Homo sapiens – to have inside your skull a two-hundred-billion-unit neural net of unprecedented power for processing and storing information. You have to be able to think and remember extraordinarily well. But the point so often overlooked is that there is absolutely no reason why you should have to be conscious.
Consciousness, in survival terms, is an irrelevancy. It is perfectly possible to conceive of a world inhabited by all sorts of life-forms, from the simplest bacteria to the most spectacularly cerebral of creatures, in which there never stirred a single conscious feeling or experience. In fact, such a world could be imagined that was outwardly indistinguishable from our own. It might appear to be full of diversity, sophisticated behavior, intelligence, and even wit and charm, and yet involve no subjective experience, no inner feeling of being, whatsoever.
Many attempts have been made by evolutionary biologists to explain why consciousness should have come about and what possible advantage it might have bestowed on its owners. For example, it has been suggested that being conscious allows us to understand how other members of our social group feel so that we can better interact and communicate with them. Consciousness, it is sometimes said, helps us to see the world from each other’s point of view. But the circularity of this argument is readily apparent. It might indeed be a survival advantage to appreciate how the other fellow feels if conscious feelings and experiences are already a fact of the world, but this offers no explanation of why consciousness should have come about in the first place. Exasperated by their failure to discern an obvious purpose for consciousness, some researchers have dismissed it as peripheral and almost accidental – an inconsequential spinoff of the brain’s other activities.
The same problem that evolutionary biologists invent for themselves in trying to find a credible survival function for consciousness, neurologists face in their attempts to explain how consciousness stems from the workings of the brain. Consciousness-explainers are currently going to all sorts of lengths to weave a viable theory – studying the development of neurons, tracing the precise pathways and stages of visual processing, drawing inspiration from artificial intelligence research, and, in the case of Roger Penrose and his followers, proposing that quantum effects inside the microtubules of cells will somehow do the trick. How long this tilting at windmills will go on before the necessary basic paradigm shift renders it all unnecessary is anyone’s guess. But old habits die hard. And, meanwhile, the present crop of brain researchers continue to be encouraged in their ultimately futile quest by the numerous successes they are achieving along the way in understanding the true workings of the brain.
Viewed superficially, the explaining of consciousness as a derivative of the physical workings of the brain has a ring of plausibility about it. After all, the history of science is replete with examples of large conceptual gaps being bridged by new developments and sudden flashes of insight. Life and nonlife, for instance, once considered fundamentally irreconcilable, were eventually seen to have a common basis thanks to the advent of molecular biology. In physics, magnetism and electricity were unified by Maxwell’s field equations; mass and energy, and space and time, were linked through Einstein’s monumental work. But the divide between neural events and consciousness, brain and mind, is of a different order entirely. As Konrad Lorenz described in Behind the Mirror:
The “hiatus” between soul and body ... is indeed unbridgeable... I do not believe that this is a limitation imposed just by the present state of our knowledge, or that even a utopian advance of this knowledge would bring us closer to a solution... It is not a matter of a horizontal split between subjective experience and physiological events, nor a matter of dividing the higher from the lower, the more complex from the more elementary, but a kind of vertical dividing line through our whole nature.There is an interesting parallel – and it may be more than a parallel – between the attempts of neurologists to explain how consciousness is produced by the brain and the efforts of cosmologists to show how the material universe was created or why it should even exist at all. At first sight, these programs seem poles apart. But in both cases, there is a persistent failure on the part of the investigators to recognize one simple truth beyond the complexity and ingenuity of their theories. And this simple truth is that what they are trying to do is not just difficult but fundamentally, categorically impossible. Even if physicists eventually discover their Holy Grail – the long sought after Theory of Everything – it will not be possible to deduce from this why there should be an actual, material universe instead of the potential, abstract universe described by mathematical equations. Why should there be actuality instead of mere potentiality? Why should the equations have come to life? Why should there be both a script and a play? There is no way – and there never will be a way – to breathe fire into the formalism, to understand the existence of reality from theory alone. And, in exactly the same way, it will never be possible, even in principle, to explain why physical activity in a brain – however intricate, however well-integrated – should give rise to the subjective experience of consciousness. If, in the next ten thousand years, we discover how the brain is organized and functions on every level from the individual cell to the entire central nervous system, we shall not be a scintilla closer to comprehending why a person should feel and be aware and experience a whole fantastic inner world instead of being just a complex, unconscious automaton. To try to explain consciousness in terms of the mechanisms of thought, the activities of neurons, is to miss the whole point about consciousness. As Milan Kundera wrote in his novel Immortality: “I think, therefore I am, is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.”
For the past several hundred years, Western humanity has embraced the view that to be real is to be material. Matter’s what matters. And mind? Never mind. Science has upheld this position for so long now that it has become an axiom of our culture. We take it as given that matter exists “out there” whether or not there is a mind present to experience it. And we take it as given that the cosmos has always had an objective aspect and that only later, as conditions allowed, did the raw, nonconscious building blocks of the universe come together in such a way as to allow the emergence of subjective experience. This makes it easy and natural for us to believe that if only data is handled by a system (like a brain) in a sufficiently and suitably complex way, consciousness will arise, like steam over a hot stew. So deeply embedded is this notion in our collective psyche that to challenge it may seem outrageous, contemptuous, and just plain wrong. Yet the moment we stand back, shake off our conditioning, and look at the issue anew, we can begin to appreciate that the scientific tenet that matter – the entire objective world – is primary is an arbitrary and totally unsubstantiated claim. There is no prima facie reason at all to go along with the assertion that mind is an emergent property of matter – that, at some point, mind came into being when matter, in the form of brains, acquired some critical level of complexity. On the contrary, it is the material world which is very evidently conditional, for it is just one among many objects of our experience, and an object, moreover, that is not strictly given but known only through interpretation.
In time, no doubt, we shall come to understand the brain very well in computational or mechanistic terms. And there is no compelling reason to suppose that we shouldn’t eventually be able to duplicate or even exceed all of its capabilities using artificial neural networks. But we shall never, in a billion years, be able to explain how the brain gives rise to consciousness. Because consciousness is not a product of the brain, nor did it come about at some point during the development of life. The time is ripe for us to reexamine the metaphysical foundations of our worldview.
Out of the heart of quantum mechanics, that most basic branch of science, has come the realization that consciousness can never be divorced from matter, that every aspect of the universe – and indeed the universe as a whole – has both an objective and a subjective nature. “Things” have no reality independent of their location in experience; they require the intimate involvement of mind to be given substance. And so, quantum physics insists, consciousness has to be seen in a radically new light, not as some quirky, local by-product of matter but as the very groundswell of creation. Only our stubborn, out-moded attachment to Newtonian reductionism and Cartesian dualism – an attachment that, not surprisingly, remains strongest among many scientists, despite recent developments – is blocking the acceptance of this fundamental truth.
Consciousness is not new, isolated, and relatively unimportant; it is ubiquitous and essential. It is a permanent, inherent property of the universe, a fact that becomes most immediately obvious to us when we escape temporarily from our normal, egocentric state of mind during mystical or transcendental interludes. At such times, “we” vanish altogether and in our place is simply consciousness. As soon as the analytical activity of the brain is suppressed or circumvented, pure consciousness – the background consciousness of the universe – floods in. The barrier is removed, the partition between subject and object dissolved. And of all the occasions when this happens none is more profound or revealing than at the point of death when, with the brain almost totally disabled, a condition of the most indescribably profound and expansive awareness takes hold.
Without the brain, it is true, there cannot be selves. And our preoccupation with the self is perhaps the main reason for our longstanding confusion. In the West, we have tended to equate having thoughts and memories and, above all, selves, with being conscious. But this is a serious mistake. As long as the self is in residence we can never truly be conscious, for while “we” exist we are trapped in a kind of fantasy – Einstein’s “optical delusion” – in which memories and conditioning cause us to put a private and false interpretation on the world. Only when thought and self come to an end, when symbolizing, analyzing, boundary-defining, and ego-building cease, can genuine, unfettered consciousness begin.
It is one of our greatest misconceptions to suppose that somehow the brain produces consciousness by integrating all of the perceptions and information that come in from the outside world. But the world is already integrated. It is already as perfect, whole, and well conceived, throughout all of space and time, as it will ever be. What the brain really does is to sample extremely narrow aspects of reality through the senses and then subject these to further drastic and highly selective reinterpretation.
To grasp the truth about the universe we need to adopt a new, broader perspective. We have to see that reality is an unbroken unity, and that within this unity are aspects of the whole that think of themselves as being separate. Despite how it may seem, there is no paradox or inconsistency here: the development of living organisms has necessarily involved the development of selves – the feeling (albeit, in most cases, only at a very primitive level) of being those organisms. And all of this has taken place within the undivided totality of what is real. It seems unusual and puzzling. But nothing is contradictory in the “feeling of being apart” existing within an overall system that actually has no parts. This, at it happens, is the situation in which we find ourselves.
Human beings have reached what may well be a pivotal stage in their evolution. They have been created by the universe, in the universe, as an integral part of the universe. They have passed through a difficult period when their strong day-to-day experience of selfhood and their cultural conditioning have made them feel detached from the reality in which they are permanently embedded. And now they are beginning to see beyond the self again to the truth of their condition. They are beginning, on a planet-wide, intercultural scale, to appreciate that, as Freud put it:
Our present I-feeling is ... only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive – indeed, all-embracing – feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the I and the world about it.We are coming back, experientially, into the universe again – slowly, nonuniformly, slightly uncomprehendingly, and, in some cases, begrudgingly. The signs of emergence of a new, as-yet-uncertain cosmic perspective are evident in a number of seemingly diverse areas: in the esoteric philosophy of quantum physics, in the study of NDEs and other altered and transcendent conscious states, in the work of poets like Whitman and Eliot, in the ecology movement, in various aspects of youth culture and counterculture, and in the growing appreciation of the timeless truths of the world’s major religions.
It is likely to be a testing time for us, not least because we are beginning to discover that the universe is entirely natural. The only reality that exists, it is becoming clear, is right in front of us; nothing is hidden, nothing is beyond our ken. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Other world! There is no other world! Here or nowhere is the whole fact.”
Perhaps it is one of the definitive signs of a sentient species reaching maturity when it finally manages to let go of the security blanket of the supernatural. This we are gradually starting to do. We have peered inside ourselves, into the depths of the human brain, in search of a soul and have found ... nothing. We don’t have souls. There is no deeper, further fact to being a person than being a thinking brain – a small, temporary whirlpool of memories and thoughts in the larger river of life. And science and religion, despite superficial appearances, actually agree on this point: science quite clearly, but religion, too, quietly and insistently. No major religion, from Christianity to Buddhism, professes in its core a belief in the existence of personal souls. On the contrary, the aim of all sincere religion is, and always has been, to go beyond the self and its putative spiritual counterpart – both of which are seen as illusory – to the boundless consciousness of reality. The core message of the world’s great religio-philosophical systems, Eastern and Western, is to forget about yourself, lose yourself, and so, in the process, make contact with the much more important truth of the timeless awareness of the universe.
If this sounds more than a little mystical and starry-eyed, then I make no apologies. The universe is one and to see it is as such is the goal of mysticism, as well as of science. And our eyes are indeed starry, being composed of atoms whose nuclei were manufactured inside the intensely hot cores of giant stars that exploded in the remote past. Waxing lyrical about our relationship with the cosmos is entirely appropriate at a time when science, religion, and mysticism are finally converging on a unified worldview, by contrast with which our old anthropocentric perspectives are going to seem extraordinarily parochial. We are nothing less than the universe in dialogue with itself and our words do sometimes need to rise above the prosaic, the practical, and the scientifically correct to catch a hint of the drama of our situation. This is why music and poetry so often touch us more deeply than the anodyne pronouncements of reductionist science, why so often we choose to rely upon intuition and unspoken feelings above intellect. We know inside what the truth is, without being told. Even a hardened pragmatist like J. B. S. Haldane felt moved to write that
If death will probably be the end of me as a finite individual mind, that does not mean that it will be the end of me altogether. It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter...It may seem as if I have reached two very different and incompatible conclusions in this book. Earlier, I reasoned that after death the feeling of being a self continues. I argued that this can be thought of as a form of reincarnation: the death of one brain followed by the birth of another being functionally and experientially equivalent to a person in life forgetting who they are and subsequently remembering they are someone else. How can this conclusion be squared with the idea that at death we effectively rejoin the unbroken sea of consciousness that lies outside us? Surely, when we die, there can be only one outcome.
But as regards my own very finite and imperfect mind, I can see, by studying the effects on it of drugs, alcohol, disease, and so on, that its limitations are largely at least due to my body.
Without that body it may perish altogether, but it seems to me quite as probable that it will lose its limitations and be merged into an infinite mind or something analogous to a mind which I have reason to suspect probably exists behind nature. How this might be accomplished I have no idea.
But I notice that when I think logically and scientifically or act morally my thoughts and actions become those of any intelligent or moral being in the same position; in fact, I am already identifying my mind with an absolute or unconditioned mind.
Only in so far as I do this can I see any probability of my survival, and the more I do so the less I am interested in my private affairs and the less desire do I feel for personal immortality. The belief in my own eternity seems to me indeed a piece of unwarranted self-glorification, and the desire for it gives concession to selfishness.
In so far as I set my heart on things that will not perish with me, I automatically remove the sting from my death.
But, in fact, there is no incompatibility. We simply need to appreciate that we are dealing with two complementary aspects of the universe. And I use the word “complementary” here advisedly to highlight a comparison with the wave-particle complementarity of modern physics and the subject-object complementarity of Eastern philosophies. The cosmos exists en bloc and yet within it individual selves have evolved. The one does not preclude the other; in fact, the two appear to be in some kind of extraordinary, intimate symbiosis, the significance of which will doubtless become clearer as our species further matures.
New selves emerge as new brains emerge, because what a brain does is to act as a funnel, a filter, a limiter of consciousness, and therefore a shaper of self – a separator of subject and object. The brain effectively pinches off a little bubble of introverted awareness and stores and manipulates information relevant exclusively to the survival needs of the individual so created. Using its archived memories, the brain builds and subtends the myth of personality and self, its onboard programming working ceaselessly to substantiate and immortalize this phantasmic inner being. And such a fine job does it do that the projected self not only feels itself to be tangible, but it fails to appreciate, or even suspect, that it is never the same from one moment to the next.
Selves come and go, as brains come and go. And at the subjective, human level what this amounts to is a continuous state of “being you.” “You” don’t have to worry about dying, because the moment you stop being associated with a particular brain and a particular narrative, the feeling of being you reemerges in a new guise. It has happened before and it will happen again. And it is not a case of you becoming someone else in the traditional sense of transmigrating souls. We have to see that “being you” is just a general phenomenon. There is no actual, objective link that determines who you will become. You will not become anyone. There is just a continuously experienced condition of you-ness.
Through such ongoing reincarnation – if we choose to use this term – the human race evolves, the efforts and achievements of individuals being stored both extrasomatically and in the living memories of others so that in every life we each contribute, to a greater or lesser extent, to humanity’s overall progress. Viewed in this way, it is true that we appear to be far from masters of our situation. Our brains are in thrall to the automatically encoded programs in our genes, and “we” are shaped not by our own efforts but by the influence of our brains and our environments. It is a sobering realization that, in an important sense, we don’t really own or exert will over our bodies and minds: we are simply part of an endlessly unfolding process. It is sobering, and yet it is also strangely exhilarating and liberating to think that there is more to us than brief, solitary lives. Each of us, in the broader scheme of nature, is the latest representative of a lineage of individuals that stretches back to the dawn of mankind and before, and will continue, indefinitely, into the future. Moreover, if we can embrace a still wider panorama, we can begin to see that the differences between us are so slight and the similarities so great that all of us alive today are really just minor variations on the same person. The fragmentation or plurality of consciousness is only an appearance, like the hundreds of little pictures that a multifaceted crystal reflects without multiplying the object in reality. The physicist Erwin Schrödinger understood this well when he wrote:
Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she – and more so. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely she will bring you forth, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over.We have a future, then, beyond death, as new individuals – as participants in “I-mode” continuity, or what amounts to secular reincarnation. However, standing behind this is the unfragmented consciousness of the universe. And, in some ways, this is the ideal and only genuine state in which to exist. It is that to which we ultimately aspire – the timeless, all-knowing condition in which subject and object, life and death, you and I, God and man, are one.
In his novel Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke referred enigmatically to the “overmind” – a higher entity with which, he speculated, the individual minds of many advanced species, at some crucial, metamorphic point in their development, begin spontaneously to merge. And it is at least interesting to speculate that, in this particular instance, fact may be on an intercept course with fiction.
Death of the self is seen as the gateway to what Buddhism calls nirvana and Christianity refers to as heaven. Buddhism urges us to escape the Wheel of Life, the cycle of death and rebirth, by achieving enlightenment through meditation – by becoming a new Buddha. Zen goes a step further and tells us, effectively, not to even bother trying to escape; we should simply stop thinking about it, because there has never been a time when we haven’t been free. In Christianity, the same message is couched in different terms. All we need do, it says, is become like little children (whose selves are not yet well defined) in order to enter God’s kingdom.
Every deep moral and religious system around the world has intuitively grasped this truth – that we must endeavor to transcend the self. Death of the self, either through the physical death of the brain or the bypassing of its analytical mode during life, breaks down the psychological walls that contain us, leaving us free to meld again with the whole unbroken field of consciousness.
We may not think we want this to happen. The idea of being, at one moment, a small speck of humanity in the vastness of space and, at the next, becoming one with the universe may seem terrifying. But this is only because we are compelled to try to understand everything from our limited personal perspective. The plain fact is we are already one with the universe; we have never really been apart from it. And only the presence of the self prevents us from seeing this. Through techniques such as Zen, which bring a temporary halt to thought, we can directly experience the consciousness of the cosmos – have a taste, as it were, of death during life. Or a transcendent awareness may, for one reason or another, simply happen. Or, without having any dramatic experiences, we may simply, through quiet contemplation, become accustomed to the idea of who we really are. As Bertrand Russell wrote:
The best way to overcome [the fear of death] – so it seems to me – is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river – small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the water flows more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome.Death is not the end. In the truest sense, it is the essential prelude to change and new life. Death is the point where the individual and the cosmos meet, where differences are reconciled, and where physics and Zen, so long held apart in uneasy tension, merge effortlessly in a realm beyond words and thought.
If you enjoyed "Zen Physics," you might also like to read the companion volume, "Soul Search," which is also available on-line and unabridged. To begin reading "Soul Search," click here.