Contents

Chapter 1: Spirituality

• The Search for Happiness
• Religion, East and West
• Mindfulness
• The Truth of Suffering
• Enlightenment

Chapter 2: The Mystery of Consciousness

• The Mind Divided
• Structure and Function
• Are Our Minds Already Split?
• Conscious and Unconscious Processing in the Brain
• Consciousness Is What Matters

Chapter 3: The Riddle of the Self

• What Are We Calling I?
• Consciousness Without Self
• Lost in Thought
• The Challenge of Studying the Self
• Penetrating the Illusion

Chapter 4: Meditation

• Gradual versus Sudden Realization
• Dzogchen: Taking the Goal as the Path
• Having No Head
• The Paradox of Acceptance

Chapter 5: Gurus, Death, Drugs, and Other Puzzles

• Mind on the Brink of Death
• The Spiritual Uses of Pharmacology

Conclusion

Chapter 1: Spirituality

Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved. If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life—you won’t enjoy any of it.

Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.

Our world is dangerously driven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit. One purpose of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and empirical support.

• Spirituality must be distinguished from religion— because people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences. While these states of mind are usually interpreted through the lens of one or another religious doctrine, we know that this is a mistake.
• Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can experience—self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light—constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another.

Nothing in this book needs to be accepted on faith. He is talking about the nature of experience itself—all his assertions can be tested in the laboratory of your own life. 

Authors who attempt to build a bridge between science and spirituality tend to make one of two mistakes:

• Scientists generally start with an impoverished view of spiritual experience, assuming that it must be a grandiose way of describing ordinary states of mind (parental love, artistic inspiration, awe of beauty). One finds Einstein’s amazement at the intelligibility of Natures laws described as though it were a kind of mystical insight.
• New Age thinkers go to the other extreme: They idealize altered states of consciousness and draw specious connections between subjective experience and the spookier theories at the frontiers of physics. Here we are told that the Buddha and other contemplatives anticipated modern cosmology or quantum mechanics and that by transcending the sense of self, a person can realize his identity with the One Mind that gave birth to the cosmos.

In the end, we are left to choose between pseudo-spirituality and pseudo-science.

Our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world.

• Experiences of “self-transcendence” are generally thought about in religious terms, there is nothing, in principle, irrational about them. From both a scientific and a philosophical point of view, they represent a clearer understanding of the way things are. Deepening that understanding, and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the self, is what is meant by “spirituality” in the context of this book.

The Search for Happiness

The terms spiritual and mystical are often used to support religious beliefs or to make generalized and unsubstantiated claims about the universe and reality. Unfortunately, these terms are the most fitting for those who have experiences that are hard to explain any other way. The use of those words brings annoyance and discomfort to those who assume the user to be mentally unhinged or self-deceptive. There is a midway point though.

Meditation, yoga, and prayer have been utilized by many to achieve an altered state of perception. Helping them to realize that happiness is elusive when chased. Often driving them to wonder whether there is anything beyond the repetition of pleasure or the avoidance of pain.

• Occasionally, the prospect of eternal bliss is aligned with the religion at hand and considered the pathway towards it. Possibly due to the mindfulness practices and priming that are associated with that religion.

A lot of people consider being isolated the ultimate form of torture, whereas some claim to find extraordinary depths of psychological wellbeing while in isolation.

Leaving aside the metaphysics, mythology, and sectarian dogma, what contemplatives throughout history have discovered is that there is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves; there is an alternative to simply identifying with the next thought that pops into consciousness. And glimpsing this alternative dispels the conventional illusion of the self.

Our struggle to navigate the space of possible pains and pleasures produces most of human culture. Medical science attempts to prolong our health and to reduce the suffering associated with illness, aging, and death. All forms of media cater to our thirst for information and entertainment. Political and economic institutions are expected to seek peaceful collaboration with one another—and the police or the military is summoned when they fail. Beyond ensuring our survival, civilization is a vast machine invented by the human mind to regulate its states. We are ever in the process of creating and repairing a world that our minds want to be in.

A true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only briefly, and that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self. 

The phenomenon of self-transcendence is generally sought and interpreted in a religious context, and it is precisely the sort of experience that tends to increase a person’s faith.

Religion, East and West

We are often encouraged to believe that all religions are the same: All teach the same ethical principles; all urge their followers to contemplate the same divine reality; all are equally wise, compassionate, and true within their sphere— or equally divisive and false, depending on one’s view.

No serious adherents of any faith can believe these things, because most religions make claims about reality that are mutually incompatible. Exceptions to this rule exist, but they provide little relief from what is essentially a zero-sum contest.

• Hindus are committed to specific metaphysical ideas—the law of karma and rebirth, a multiplicity of gods—that almost every other major religion decries.
• Devout Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that theirs is the one true and complete revelation—because that is what their holy books say of themselves. Only secularists and New Age dabblers can mistake the modern tactic of “interfaith dialogue” for an underlying unity of all religions.
• The Abrahamic religions are incorrigibly dualistic and faith-based: In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the human soul is conceived as genuinely separate from the divine reality of God. The appropriate attitude for a creature that finds itself in this circumstance is some combination of terror, shame, and awe. In the best case, notions of God’s love and grace provide some relief—but the central message of these faiths is that each of us is separate from, and in relationship to, a divine authority who will punish anyone who harbors the slightest doubt about His supremacy.
• The Eastern tradition, at its highest teachings, found within the various schools of Buddhism and the nominally Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedanta, explicitly transcend dualism. By their lights, consciousness itself is identical to the very reality that one might otherwise mistake for God. While these teachings make metaphysical claims that any serious student of science should find incredible, they center on a range of experiences that the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam rule out-of-bounds.

Like Huxley, anyone determined to find a happy synthesis among spiritual traditions will notice that the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260-ca. 1327) often sounded very much like a Buddhist: “The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.” Had Eckhart lived a little longer, it seems certain that he would have been dragged into the street and burned alive for these expansive ideas. That is a telling difference between Christianity and Buddhism.

One can practice most techniques of Buddhist meditation or the method of self-inquiry of Advaita and experience the advertised changes in one’s consciousness without ever believing their stories. To get started as a Christian, however, one must first accept a dozen implausible things about the life of Jesus and the origins of the Bible—and the same can be said, minus a few unimportant details, about Judaism and Islam. If one should happen to discover that the sense of being an individual soul is an illusion, one will be guilty of blasphemy everywhere west of the Indus.

The aspiring yogi is traditionally encouraged to lengthen his tongue—even going so far as to cut the frenulum (the membrane that anchors the tongue to the floor of the mouth) and stretch the soft palate. This enables him to insert his tongue into his nasopharynx, thereby blocking the flow of air through the nostrils. The yogi can then imbibe subtle liquors believed to emanate directly from his brain. These substances—imagined, by recourse to further subtleties, to be connected to the retention of semen—are said to confer not only spiritual wisdom but immortality. This technique of drinking mucus is known as khechari mudra, and it is thought to be one of the crowning achievements of yoga.

The teachings of Buddhism, and of Eastern spirituality generally, focus on the primacy of the mind. There are dangers in this way of viewing the world. Focusing on training the mind to the exclusion of all else can lead to political quietism and hive-like conformity. The fact that your mind is all you have and that it is possible to be at peace even in difficult circumstances can become an argument for ignoring obvious societal problems.

The instructions in this book are intended for readers who are adults’ (more or less) and free from any psychological or medical conditions that could be exacerbated by meditation or other techniques of sustained introspection. If paying attention to your breath, to bodily sensations, to the flow of thoughts, or to the nature of consciousness itself seems likely to cause you clinically significant anguish, please check with a psychologist or a psychiatrist before engaging in the practices described.

Mindfulness

For beginners, he recommends vipassana (Pali for “insight”), which comes from the oldest tradition of Buddhism, the Theravada. One of the advantages of vipassana is that it can be taught in an entirely secular way.

• The quality of mind cultivated in vipassana is almost always referred to as “mindfulness.” It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness.

The four foundations of mindfulness are the body (breathing, changes in posture, activities), feelings (the senses of pleasantness, unpleasantness, and neutrality), the mind (in particular, its moods and attitudes), and the objects of mind (which include the five senses but also other mental states, such as volition, tranquility, rapture, equanimity, and even mindfulness itself).

There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that it expresses a specific kind of a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or body—thoughts, sensations, moods—without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant.

Most people who believe they are meditating are merely thinking with their eyes closed. By practicing mindfulness, however, one can awaken from the dream of discursive thought and begin to see each arising image, idea, or bit of language vanish without a trace. What remains is consciousness itself, with its attendant sights, sounds, sensations, and thoughts appearing and changing in every moment.

We crave lasting happiness in the midst of change: Our bodies age, cherished objects break, pleasures fade, relationships fail. Our attachment to the good things in life and our aversion to the bad amount to a denial of these realities, and this inevitably leads to feelings of dissatisfaction. Mindfulness is a technique for achieving equanimity amid the flux, allowing us to simply be aware of the quality of experience in each moment, whether pleasant or unpleasant.

As every meditator soon discovers, distraction is the normal condition of our minds. The goal is to come out of the trance of discursive thinking and to stop reflexively grasping at the pleasant and recoiling from the unpleasant, so that we can enjoy a mind undisturbed by worry, merely open like the sky, and effortlessly aware of the flow of experience in the present.

How to Meditate

1. Sit comfortably, with your spine erect, either in a chair or cross-legged on a cushion.
2. Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and feel the points of contact between your body and the chair or the floor. Notice the sensations associated with sitting—feelings of pressure, warmth, tingling, vibration, etc.
3. Gradually become aware of the process of breathing. Pay attention to wherever you feel the breath most distinctly—either at your nostrils or in the rising and falling of your abdomen.
4. Allow your attention to rest in the mere sensation of breathing. (You don’t have to control your breath. Just let it come and go naturally.)
5. Every time your mind wanders in thought, gently return it to the breath.
6. As you focus on the process of breathing, you will also perceive sounds, bodily sensations, or emotions. Simply observe these phenomena as they appear in consciousness and then return to the breath.
7. The moment you notice that you have been lost in thought, observe the present thought itself as an object of consciousness. Then return your attention to the breath—or to any sounds or sensations arising in the next moment.
8. Continue in this way until you can merely witness all objects of consciousness—sights, sounds, sensations, emotions, even thoughts themselves—as they arise, change, and pass away.

The Truth of Suffering

Even while safe, most of us feel a wide range of painful emotions on a daily basis. When you wake up in the morning, are you filled with joy? How do you feel at work or when looking in the mirror? How satisfied are you with what you’ve accomplished in life? How much of your time with your family is spent surrendered to love and gratitude, and how much is spent just struggling to be happy in one another s company? 

Most people seem to believe that we have only two ways to think about death: We can fear it and do our best to ignore it, or we can deny that it is real. The first strategy leads to a life of conventional worldliness and distraction—we merely strive for pleasure and success and do our best to keep the reality of death out of view. The second strategy is the province of religion, which assures us that death is but a doorway to another world and that the most important opportunities in life occur after the lifetime of the body. But there is another path, and it seems the only one compatible with intellectual honesty.

Enlightenment

It is quite possible to lose one’s sense of being a separate self and to experience a kind of boundless, open awareness—to feel, in other words, at one with the cosmos. This says a lot about the possibilities of human consciousness, but it says nothing about the universe at large. And it sheds no light at all on the relationship between mind and matter.

The fact that it is possible to love one’s neighbor as oneself should be a great finding for the field of psychology, but it lends absolutely no credence to the claim that Jesus was the son of God, or even that God exists. Nor does it suggest that the “energy” of love somehow pervades the cosmos.

The traditional goal of meditation is to arrive at a state of wellbeing that is imperturbable—or if perturbed, easily regained.

The near goal is to have an increasingly healthy mind—that is, to be moving one’s mind in the right direction.

It is difficult to raise a happy family, to keep yourself and those you love healthy, to acquire wealth and find creative and fulfilling ways to enjoy it, to form deep friendships, to contribute to society in ways that are emotionally rewarding, to perfect a wide variety of artistic, athletic, and intellectual skills—and to keep the machinery of happiness running day after day. There is nothing wrong with being fulfilled in all these ways—except for the fact that, if you pay close attention, you will see that there is still something wrong with it. These forms of happiness aren’t good enough. Our feelings of fulfillment do not last. 

The moment we admit the possibility of attaining contemplative insights— and of training one’s mind for that purpose—we must acknowledge that people naturally fall at different points on a continuum between ignorance and wisdom. Part of this range will be considered “normal,” but normal isn’t necessarily a happy place to be.

• No one hesitates to admit the role of talent and training in the context of physical and intellectual pursuits; I have never met another person who denied that some of us are stronger, more athletic, or more learned than others. But many people find it difficult to acknowledge that a continuum of moral and spiritual wisdom exists or that there might be better and worse ways to traverse it.

In one sense, the Buddhist concept of enlightenment really is just the epitome of “stress reduction.” According to the Buddhist teachings, human beings have a distorted view of reality that leads them to suffer unnecessarily. We grasp at transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic self that doesn’t exist. This is stressful—and spiritual life is a process of gradually unraveling our confusion and bringing this stress to an end. According to the Buddhist view, by seeing things as they are, we cease to suffer in the usual ways, and our minds can open to states of well-being that are intrinsic to the nature of consciousness.

Given our social requirements, we know that the deepest and most durable forms of well-being must be compatible with an ethical concern for other people otherwise, violent conflict becomes inevitable. We also know that there are certain forms of happiness that are not available to a person even if, like Genghis Khan, he finds himself on the winning side of every siege. Some pleasures are intrinsically ethical— feelings like love, gratitude, devotion, and compassion. To inhabit these states of mind is, by definition, to be brought into alignment with others.

Chapter 2: The Mystery of Consciousness

Nagel’s thoughts on consciousness: whatever else consciousness may or may not entail in physical terms, the difference between it and unconsciousness is a matter of subjective experience. Either the lights are on, or they are not.

The question of how consciousness relates to the physical world remains unresolved. There are reasons to believe that it emerges on the basis of information processing in, complex systems like a human brain, because when we look at the universe, we find it filled with simpler structures, like stars, and processes, like nuclear fusion, that offer no outward signs of consciousness. But our intuitions here may not amount to much. After all, how would the sun appear if it were conscious? Perhaps exactly as it does now.

The birth of consciousness must be the result of organization: Arranging atoms in certain ways appears to bring about an experience of being that very collection of atoms. 

To say that consciousness may only seem to exist, from the inside, is to admit its existence in full—for if things seem any way at all, that is consciousness. Even if I happen to be a brain in a vat at this moment—and all my memories are false, and all my perceptions are of a world that does not exist—the fact that I am having an experience is indisputable. Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.

Authors struggling to link spirituality to science generally pin their hopes on misunderstandings of the “Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics,” which they take as proof that consciousness plays a central role in determining the character of the physical world. If nothing is real until it is observed, consciousness cannot arise from electrochemical events in the brains of animals like ourselves; rather, it must be part of the very fabric of reality. But this simply isn’t the position of mainstream physics. It is true that, according to Copenhagen, quantum mechanical systems do not behave classically until they are observed, and before that they may seem to exist in many different states simultaneously. But what counts as “observation” under the original Copenhagen view was never clearly defined.

We know, of course, that human minds are the product of human brains. There is simply no question that your ability to decode and understand this sentence depends upon neurophysiological events taking place inside your head at this moment. But most of this mental work occurs entirely in the dark, and it is a mystery why any part of the process should be attended by consciousness.

To simply assert that consciousness arose at some point in the evolution of life, and that it results from a specific arrangement of neurons firing in concert within an individual brain, doesn’t give us any inkling of how it could emerge from unconscious processes, even in principle. However, this is not to say that some other thesis about consciousness must be true. This situation has been characterized as an “explanatory gap” and as the “hard problem of consciousness.”

Any attempt to understand consciousness in terms of brain activity merely correlates a person’s ability to report an experience with specific states of his brain. While such correlations can amount to fascinating neuroscience, they bring us no closer to explaining the emergence of consciousness itself.

If you shut your eyes at this moment, the contents of your consciousness change quite drastically, but your consciousness (arguably) does not.

The Mind Divided

We can now say that any conception of our place in the universe that denies we evolved from more primitive life forms is pure delusion. Neuroscience has also produced results that are equally hostile to the traditional idea of souls—and, therefore, to any approach to spirituality that presupposes their existence (such as the split-brain phenomenon). The right and left hemispheres can potentially hold different beliefs but is not observed externally unless the corpus callosum is severed. The hemispheres display functional specialization and independence when cut. Containing separate memories, learning processes, behavioral intentions, and possibly conscious experience.

When something is seen in the left visual field it is projected to the right hemisphere and vice versa. The same pattern holds for sensation and fine motor control. The left hemisphere is usually in charge of speech, so if you showed the right hemisphere a word (in a split-brain patient) in the left visual field, it would not be able to verbally tell you what it saw. However, if you told the person to select what they saw with their left hand, they would be correct. If asked why they picked the corresponding item to the word they said they couldn’t see, they would make up a story to explain their choice. The inability to connect the two hemispheres presents a situation where the person essentially has two different states of being that can’t communicate to each other.

It is assumed that the right hemisphere is conscious in its own right but can’t communicate it.

Structure and Function

In humans, the left hemisphere generally makes a unique contribution to language and to the performance of complex movements. Consequently, damage on this side tends to be accompanied by aphasia (impairment of spoken or written language) and apraxia (impairment of coordinated movement).

People usually show a right-ear (left-hemisphere) advantage for words, digits, nonsense syllables, Morse code, difficult rhythms, and the ordering of temporal information, whereas they show a left-ear (right-hemisphere) advantage for melodies, musical chords, environmental sounds, and tones of voice.

The right hand (sensation from which projects almost entirely to the left hemisphere) is better able to discriminate the order of stimuli, while the left hand is more sensitive to their spatial characteristics.

The right hemisphere is dominant for many higher cognitive abilities, both in normal brains and in those that have been surgically divided. It tends to have an advantage when reading faces, intuiting geometrical principles and spatial relationships, perceiving wholes from a collection of parts, and judging musical chords. The right hemisphere is also better at displaying emotion (with the left side of the face) and at detecting emotions in others.

• Interestingly, this obliges us to view one another’s least expressive side of the face (the right) with our most emotionally astute hemisphere (the right), and vice versa.
• Psychopaths generally do not show this right-hemisphere advantage for the perception of emotion; perhaps this is one reason why they are bad at detecting emotional distress in others.

If you had a callosotomy, you would lose the ability to describe your emotional life, you may become quite unintentionally impolite, but you would still retain your perceived sense of self. It’s uncertain if you would have a dominant side though.

Are Our Minds Already Split?

It is quite possible that the view with which we consciously read is preferentially left hemisphere dominant, with the right hemisphere being silent during this role. Although, it is probably working at consolidating information at a different level of subjective consciousness. The reality is, we probably have different locuses of perceived consciousness but the held beliefs, depending on the context, make it feel as one.

Conscious and Unconscious Processing in the Brain

We now know that at least two systems in the brain—often referred to as “dual processes”— govern human cognition, emotion, and behavior. One is evolutionary older, unconscious, and automatic; the other evolved more recently and is both conscious and deliberative. When you find another person annoying, sexually attractive, or inadvertently funny, you are experiencing the percolations of System 1. The efforts you make to conceal these feelings are the work of System 2.

Human beings can consciously perceive very brief visual stimuli (down to about V30 of a second), but we can no longer see these images if they are immediately followed by a dissimilar pattern (a “mask”). This fact allows for words and pictures to be delivered to the mind subliminally, and these stimuli have subsequent effects on a person’s cognition and behavior. For instance, you will be faster to recognize that ocean is a word if it follows a related prime, like wave, than if it follows an unrelated one, like hammer. And emotionally charged terms are more easily recognized than neutral ones (sex can be presented more briefly than car), which further demonstrates that the meanings of words must be gleaned prior to consciousness. Subliminally promised rewards drive activity in the brains reward centers, and masked fearful faces and emotional words increase activity in the amygdala.

Your conscious memories of practicing a musical instrument, driving a car, or tying your shoelaces are neurologically distinct from your learning how to do these things and from your knowing how to do them now. People with amnesia can even learn new facts and have their ability to recognize names and generate concepts improve in response to prior exposure, without having any memory of acquiring such knowledge.

Consciousness Is What Matters

Consciousness is also what gives our lives a moral dimension. Without consciousness, we would have no cause to wonder how we should behave toward other human beings, nor could we care how we were treated in return. Granted, many moral emotions and intuitions operate unconsciously, but it is because they influence the contents of consciousness that they matter to us.

We don’t have ethical obligations toward rocks (on the assumption that they are not conscious), but we do have such obligations toward any creature that can suffer or be deprived of happiness. Of course, it can be wrong to destroy rocks if they happen to be valuable to other conscious creatures.

Chapter 3: The Riddle of the Self

Most scientists and philosophers disdain the spirituality, for it suggests a neglect of intellectual standards: Bliss, it has been noted, is not conducive to detached observation. And yet, we are all seeking fulfillment while living at the mercy of changing experience. Whatever we acquire in life gets dispersed. Our bodies age. Our relationships fall away. Even the most intense pleasures last only a few moments. And every morning, we are chased out of bed by our thoughts.

Is it enough to say that I am physically continuous with my former selves because most of the cells in my body are the same as or descended from those that made up the bodies of these younger men?

Imagining “teleporting” to Mars but realizing that your Earth body is actually being disintegrated while your Mars body is just a clone might make one conclude that physical continuity is more important than psychological continuity. There is also the issue with maintaining (the majority of) physical continuity, but having dementia. Becoming psychologically discontinuous due to the destruction of the physical neurons. However, we change every second of our lives with the turnover of cells and integration of new information, so it is merely the fear of loss that is the issue. There is no true or consistent self/identity.

Subjectively speaking, the only thing that actually exists is consciousness and its contents. And the only thing relevant to the question of personal identity is psychological continuity from one moment to the next.

What Are We Calling I?

Reality vastly exceeds our awareness of it. The feeling that I intended to do what I just did seems to be only that: a feeling of some internal signature, perhaps the result of my brains having formed a predictive model of its ensuing actions. It may not be best classified as a feeling, but surely it is something. Otherwise, how could I note the difference between voluntary and involuntary behavior? Without this impression of agency, I would feel that my actions were automatic or otherwise beyond my control.

The pronoun I is the name that most of us put to the sense that we are the thinkers of our thoughts and the experiencers of our experience. It is the sense that we have of possessing (rather than of merely being) a continuum of experience. The fact that people report losing their sense of self to one or another degree suggests that the experience of being a self can be selectively interfered with.

Each of us knows what it is like to develop new capacities, understandings, opinions, and tastes over the course of time. It is convenient to ascribe these changes to the self. That is not the self I am talking about. The self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment—the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts inside one’s head, the sense of being an owner or inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to appropriate as a kind of vehicle.

Consciousness Without Self

To determine whether certain experiences are possible and to see how these states of mind relate to the conventional sense of self, we have to be able to use our attention in the requisite ways. Primarily, that means learning to recognize thoughts as thoughts—as transient appearances in consciousness— and to no longer be distracted by them, if only for short periods of time. This may sound simple enough, but actually accomplishing it can take a lot of work. Unfortunately, it is not work that the Western intellectual tradition knows much about.

Lost in Thought

We rehearse past conversations and we anticipate the future, producing a ceaseless string of words and images that fill us with hope or fear. We tell ourselves the story of the present, as though some blind person were inside our heads who required continuous narration.

Every moment of the day offers an opportunity to be relaxed and responsive or to suffer unnecessarily.

We can address mental suffering of this kind on at least two levels. We can use thoughts themselves as an antidote, or we can stand free of thought altogether.

• The first technique requires no experience with meditation. Many people do it quite naturally; it’s called “looking on the bright side.” And if, like many people, you tend to be vaguely unhappy much of the time, it can be very helpful to manufacture a feeling of gratitude by simply contemplating all the terrible things that have not happened to you, or to think about how lucky you are compared to others.
• It can be liberating to see how thoughts pull the levers of emotion—and how negative emotions in turn set the stage for patterns of thinking that keep them active and coloring one’s mind. Seeing this process clearly can mean the difference between being angry, depressed, or fearful for a few moments and being so for days, weeks, and months on end.

Most of us let our negative emotions persist longer than is necessary. Becoming suddenly angry, we tend to stay angry—and this requires that we actively produce the feeling of anger. We do this by thinking about our reasons for being angry—recalling an insult, rehearsing what we should have said to our malefactor, and so forth, without noticing the mechanics of the process.

• Most people know what it’s like to suddenly drop their negative state of mind and begin functioning in another mode. Of course, most then helplessly grow entangled with their negative emotions again at the next opportunity.
• Become sensitive to these interruptions in the continuity of your mental states. You are depressed, say, but are suddenly moved to laughter by something you read. You are bored and impatient while sitting in traffic, but then are cheered by a phone call from a close friend. These are natural-experiments in shifting mood. Notice that suddenly paying attention to something else—something that no longer supports your current emotion—allows for a new state of mind. 
• Pay close attention to negative feelings themselves, without judgment or resistance. What is anger? Where do you feel it in your body? How is it arising in each moment? And what is it that is aware of the feeling itself? Investigating in this way, with mindfulness, you can discover that negative states of mind vanish all by themselves.

Thinking is essential for belief formation, planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other capacities that make us human. Thinking is the basis of every social relationship and cultural institution we have. It is also the foundation of science. But our habitual identification with thought—that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as appearances in consciousness— is a primary source of human suffering. It also gives rise to the illusion that a separate self is living inside one’s head.

Beginning meditators often think that they are able to concentrate on a single object, such as the breath, for minutes at a time, only to report after days or weeks of intensive practice that their attention is now carried away by thought every few seconds. This is actually progress. It takes a certain degree of concentration to even notice how distracted you are. Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought.

From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It’s a mode of not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment. It is essentially a form of psychosis. Thoughts themselves are not a problem, but being identified with thought is. Taking oneself to be the thinker of one’s thoughts—that is, not recognizing the present thought to be a transitory appearance in consciousness— is a delusion that produces nearly every species of human conflict and unhappiness. It doesn’t matter if your mind is wandering over current problems in set theory or cancer research; if you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are.

The eighth-century Buddhist adept Vimalamitra described three stages of mastery in meditation and how thinking appears in each.

• The first is like meeting a person you already know; you simply recognize each thought as it arises in consciousness, without confusion.
• The second is like a snake tied in a knot; each thought, whatever its content, simply unravels on its own.
• In the third, thoughts become like thieves entering an empty house; even the possibility of being distracted has disappeared.

One must be able to pay attention closely enough to glimpse what consciousness is like between thoughts—that is, prior to the arising of the next one. Consciousness does not feel like a self. Once one realizes this, the status of thoughts themselves, as transient expressions of consciousness, can be understood.

The Challenge of Studying the Self

The temporal-parietal junction—a region known to be involved in sensory integration and body representation—seems to be responsible for the out of body effect. Whether or not a person’s consciousness can really be displaced is irrelevant; the point is that it can seem to be, and this fact draws yet another boundary between the self and the rest of our personhood. It is possible to experience oneself as (apparently) outside a body.

Consider the sense of body ownership. It must be produced, at least in part, by the integration of different streams of sensory information: We feel the position of our limbs in space; we see them at the appropriate locations in our visual field; and our experience of touching objects generally coincides with the sight of them coming into contact with our skin. An analogous synchrony occurs whenever we execute a volitional movement. No doubt our sense of body ownership is essential for our survival and for relating to others. Any loss or distortion of this sense can be profoundly disorienting. But disorienting to whom?

Self-recognition depends on context. There are neurological patients who cannot recognize themselves in a mirror (a condition called the “mirror-sign delusion”) but can pick themselves out in photographs, and these subjects show no evidence of having lost anything like a self or knowledge thereof. So, what is the relationship between self-recognition and the feeling we call “I”? The fact that the word self is generally used while making reference to these phenomena does not suggest that any deep relationship exists between them.

One of the most important things we do with our minds is attribute mental states to other people, a faculty that has been variously described as “theory of mind,” “mentalizing,” “mindsight,” “mind reading,” and the “intentional stance.” The ability to recognize and interpret the mental activity of others is essential for normal cognitive and social development, and deficits in this area contribute to a variety of mental disorders, including autism.

Being looked at just feels different from not being looked at—and the difference can be described as a magnification of the feeling that we call “I.” It seems undeniable that self-consciousness and this more fundamental form of TOM are closely related. 

We can view the actions of others, along with their facial expressions, make eye contact with them, without the slightest risk of being observed ourselves. Movies and television magically transform the primordial context of face-to-face encounters, in which human beings have always been subjected to harrowing social lessons, allowing us, for the first time, to devote ourselves wholly to the act of observing other people. Possibly a factor contributing to the growing cases of autism.

As is now widely known, people suffering from autism tend to lack insight into the mental lives of others. Conversely, a longitudinal study of compassion meditation, which produced a significant increase in subjects’ empathy over the course of eight weeks, found increased activity in one of the regions believed to contain mirror neurons.

Penetrating the Illusion

There is no region of the brain that can be the seat of a soul. Everything that makes us human—our emotional lives, capacity for language, the impulses that give rise to complex behavior, and our ability to restrain other impulses that we consider uncivilized— is spread across the entirety of the cortex and many subcortical brain regions as well.

How can we know that the conventional sense of self is an illusion? When we look closely, it vanishes. This is compelling in the same way that the disappearance of any illusion is: You thought something was there, but upon closer inspection, you see that it isn’t. What doesn’t survive scrutiny cannot be real.

Chapter 4: Meditation

The wandering mind has been correlated with activity in the brain’s midline regions, especially the medial prefrontal cortex and the medial parietal cortex. These areas are often called the “default-mode” or “resting state” network because they are most active when we are waiting for something to happen. Activity in the default-mode network (DMN) decreases when subjects concentrate on tasks of the sort employed in most neuroimaging experiments.

• The DMN has also been linked with our capacity for “self-representation.” For instance, if a person believes that she is tall, the term tall should yield a greater signal in these midline regions than the term short. Similarly, the DMN is more engaged when we make such judgments of relevance about ourselves, as opposed to making them about other people. It also tends to be more active when we evaluate a scene from a first-person (rather than third-person) point of view.
• To pay attention outwardly reduces activity in the brain’s midline, while thinking about oneself increases it.
• Mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation (Pali: metta) also decrease activity in the DMN.

Meditators tend to have larger corpora collosa and hippocampi (in both hemispheres). The practice is also linked to increased gray matter thickness and cortical folding. Some of these differences are especially prominent in older practitioners, which suggests that meditation could protect against age-related thinning of the cortex.

One study found that an eight-week program of mindfulness meditation reduced the volume of the right basolateral amygdala, and these changes were correlated with a subjective decrease in stress. Another found that a full day of mindfulness practice (among trained meditators) reduced the expression of several genes that produce inflammation throughout the body, and this correlated with an improved response to social stress.

Five minutes of practice a day (for five weeks) increased left-sided baseline activity in the frontal cortex—a pattern that, as we saw in the discussion of the split brain, has been associated with positive emotions.

Mindfulness in particular fosters many components of physical and mental health:

• It improves immune function, blood pressure, and cortisol levels; it reduces anxiety, depression, neuroticism, and emotional reactivity. It also leads to greater behavioral regulation and has shown promise in the treatment of addiction and eating disorders.
• Unsurprisingly, the practice is associated with increased subjective well-being. Training in compassion meditation increases empathy, as measured by the ability to accurately judge the emotions of others, as well as positive affect in the presence of suffering.
• The practice of mindfulness has been shown to have similar pro-social effects.

No doubt many distinct mechanisms are involved— the regulation of attention and behavior, increased body awareness, inhibition of negative emotions, conceptual reframing of experience, changes in the view of ‘self,” and so forth—and each of these processes will have its own neurophysiological causes.

Gradual versus Sudden Realization

The deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self—and to seek such freedom, as though it were a future state to be attained through effort, is to reinforce the chains of one’s apparent bondage in each moment.

• The urge to attain self-transcendence or any other mystical experience is a symptom of the very disease we want to cure. There is nothing to do but give up the search.

The goal of meditation is to uncover a form of well-being that is inherent to the nature of our minds. It must, therefore, be available in the context of ordinary sights, sounds, sensations, and even thoughts. Peak experiences are fine, but real freedom must be coincident with normal waking life.

Dualistic mindfulness—paying attention to the breath, for instance—generally proceeds on the basis of an illusion: One feels that one is a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head, that can strategically pay attention to the breath or some other object of awareness because of all the good it will do. This is gradualism in action. And yet, from a nondualistic point of view, one could just as well be mindful of selflessness directly. To do this, however, one must recognize that this is how consciousness is—and such an insight can be difficult to achieve. However, it does not require the meditative attainment of cessation.

Of all the Buddhist teachings, those of Dzogchen most closely resemble the teachings of Advaita. The two traditions seek to provoke the same insight into the nonduality of consciousness, but generally speaking, only Dzogchen makes it absolutely clear that one must practice this insight to the point of stability and that one can do so without succumbing to the dualistic striving that haunts most other paths.

• What the Dzogchen teachings make clear, is that thinking about what is beyond thought is still thinking, and a glimpse of selflessness is generally only the beginning of a process that must reach fruition. Being able to stand perfectly free of the feeling of self is the start of one’s spiritual journey, not its end.

Dzogchen: Taking the Goal as the Path

The practice of Dzogchen requires that one be able to experience the intrinsic selflessness of awareness in every moment (that is, when one is not otherwise distracted by thought)—which is to say that for a Dzogchen meditator, mindfulness must be synonymous with dispelling the illusion of the self. Rather than teach a technique of meditation—such as paying close attention to one’s breathing—a Dzogchen master must precipitate an insight on the basis of which a student can thereafter practice a form of awareness (Tibetan: rigpa) that is unencumbered by subject/object dualism.

• In Dzogchen, one “takes the goal as the path,” because the freedom from self that one might otherwise seek is the very thing that one practices. The goal of Dzogchen, if one can call it such, is to grow increasingly familiar with this way of being in the world.

Imagine that perceiving the blind spot will completely transform a person’s life. Next, imagine that whole religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are predicated on the denial of the blind spot’s existence—let us say that their central doctrines assert the perfect uniformity of the visual field. Perhaps other traditions acknowledge the blind spot but in purely poetical terms; without giving any clear indication of how to recognize it. A few lineages may actually teach techniques whereby one can see the blind spot for oneself, but only gradually, after months and years of effort, and even then, one’s glimpses of it will seem more a matter of luck than anything else.

• A good teacher would give you a dot and cross on paper, get you to close one eye, and move closer until the dot in the periphery disappears. Then you can experiment with the existence on the blind spot without focusing on it intensely.

Dzogchen is not vague or paradoxical. It is not like Zen, wherein a person can spend years being uncertain whether he is meditating correctly. The practice of recognizing nondual awareness is called trekchod, which means “cutting through” in Tibetan, as in cutting a string cleanly so that both ends fall away. Once one has cut it, there is no doubt that it has been cut.

Beyond Duality:

• Think of something pleasant in your personal life— visualize the moment when you accomplished something that you are proud of or had a good laugh with a friend. Take a minute to do this. Notice how the mere thought of the past evokes a feeling in the present. But does consciousness itself feel happy? Is it truly changed or colored by what it knows?

Meditation doesn’t entail the suppression of such thoughts, but it does require that we notice thoughts as they emerge and recognize them to be transitory appearances in consciousness. In subjective terms, you are consciousness itself—you are not the next, evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind. Not seeing it arise, however, the next thought will seem to become what you are.

• Whatever their content, thoughts vanish almost the instant they appear. They are like sounds, or fleeting sensations in your body. How could this next thought define your subjectivity at all?

Having No Head

Harding describes an experience of being nothing but a necessary ingredient of the universe and at the same time nothingness. He fills the world with his consciousness and the impression of having a head seems almost laughable. His body is no longer “his” and all that matters is the present.

Look for whatever it is you are calling “I” without being distracted by even, the subtlest undercurrent of thought—and notice what happens the moment you turn consciousness upon itself. This illustrates a very common phenomenon in scientific and secular circles: We have a contemplative like Harding who, to the eye of anyone familiar with the experience of self-transcendence, has described it in a manner approaching perfect clarity; we also have a scholar like Hofstadter, a celebrated contributor to our modern understanding of the mind, who dismisses him as a child.

The Paradox of Acceptance

As you gaze at the world around you, take a moment to look for your head. Simply look at the world, or at other people, and attempt to turn your attention in the direction of where you know your head to be. For instance, if you are having a conversation with another person, see if you can let your attention travel in the direction of the other person’s gaze. He is looking at your face—and you cannot see your face.

Some people find it easier to trigger this shift in a slightly different way: As you are looking out at the world, simply imagine that you have no head. Whichever method you choose, don’t struggle with this exercise. It is not a matter of going deep within or of producing some extraordinary experience. The view of headlessness is right on the surface of consciousness and can be glimpsed the moment you attempt to turn about. Pay attention to how the world appears in the first instant, not after a protracted effort. Either you will see it immediately or you won’t see it at all. And the resulting glimpse of open awareness will last only a moment or two before thoughts intervene.

It is very difficult to imagine someone not being able to see her reflection in a window even after years of looking—but that is what happens when a person begins most forms of spiritual practice. Most techniques of meditation are, in essence, elaborate ways for looking through the window in the hope that if one only sees the world in greater detail, an image of one’s true face will eventually appear.

• But one must start somewhere. And the truth is that most people are simply too distracted by their thoughts to have the selflessness of consciousness pointed out directly. And even if they are ready to glimpse it, they are unlikely to understand its significance.

Unless a person has spent some time seeking self-transcendence dualistically, she is unlikely to recognize that the brief glimpse of selflessness is actually the answer to her search. Having then said, “So what?” in the face of the highest teachings, there is nothing for her to do but persist in her confusion.

The Paradox of Acceptance:

• It would seem that very few good things in life come from our accepting the present moment as it is. To become educated, we must be motivated to learn. To master a sport requires that we continually improve our performance and overcome our resistance to physical exertion. To be a better spouse or parent, we often must make a deliberate effort to change ourselves. Merely accepting that we are lazy, distracted, petty, easily provoked to anger, and inclined to waste our time in ways that we will later regret is not a path to happiness.
• And yet it is true that meditation requires total acceptance of what is given in the present moment. If you are injured and in pain, the path to mental peace can be traversed in a single step: Simply accept the pain as it arises, while doing whatever you need to do to help your body heal. If you are anxious before giving a speech, become willing to feel the anxiety fully, so that it becomes a meaningless pattern of energy in your mind and body.
• However, it is important to distinguish between accepting unpleasant sensations and emotions as a strategy—while covertly hoping that they will go away—and truly accepting them as transitory appearances in consciousness. Only the latter gesture opens the door to wisdom and lasting change.

Chapter 5: Gurus, Death, Drugs, and Other Puzzles

Spiritual teachers of a certain ability are often described as “gurus,” and they elicit an unusual degree of devotion from their students. If your golf instructor were to insist that you shave your head, sleep no more than four hours each night, renounce sex, and subsist on a diet of raw vegetables, you would find a new golf instructor. However, when gurus make demands of this kind, many of their students simply do as directed.

In cults and other fringe spiritual communities, we often find a collection of needy and credulous dropouts ruled by a charismatic psychotic or psychopath.

• When we consider groups like the People’s Temple under Jim Jones, the Branch Davidians under David Koresh, and Heaven’s Gate under Marshall Applewhite, it is almost impossible to understand how the spell was first cast. But each of these groups proved that intellectual isolation and abuse can lead even well-educated people to willingly destroy themselves.

For our purpose, the only differences between a cult and a religion are the numbers of adherents and the degree to which they are marginalized by the rest of society. Scientology remains a cult. Mormonism has (just barely) become a religion. Christianity has been a religion for more than a thousand years. But one searches in vain for differences in their respective doctrines that account for the difference in their status.

Teachers in any field can help or harm their students, and a person’s desire to make progress and to win the teachers approval can often be exploited—emotionally, financially, or sexually. But a guru purports to teach the very art of living, and thus his beliefs potentially encompass every question relevant to the well-being of his students. Apart from parenthood, probably no human relationship offers greater scope for benevolence or abuse than that of guru to disciple.

• Given that the entire purpose of a devotee’s relationship to a guru is to have his egocentric illusions exposed and undermined, any unwelcome intrusion into his life can potentially be justified as a teaching.
• A student’s moral intuitions and instincts for self-preservation can always be recast as symptoms of fear and attachment. Consequently, even the most extraordinarily cruel or degrading treatment at the hands of a guru can be interpreted as being for one’s own good.

The role of guru seems to attract more than its fair share of narcissists. This seems to be a natural consequence of the subject matter. One can’t fake being an expert gymnast, a rocket scientist, or even a competent cook, but one can fake being an enlightened adept. Those who succeed in doing this are often quite charismatic, because a person can’t survive long in this mode unless he can bowl people over.

One of the first things one learns in practicing meditation is that nothing is intrinsically boring—indeed, boredom is simply a lack of attention. Pay sufficient attention, and the mere experience of breathing can reward months and years of steady vigilance. Every guru knows that drudgery can be a way of testing the strength of this insight. And, needless to say, this truth about the human mind can be exploited.

It is usually easy to detect social and psychological problems in any community of spiritual seekers. This seems to be yet another liability inherent to the project of self-transcendence. Many people renounce the world because they can’t find a satisfactory place in it, and almost any spiritual teaching can be used to justify a pathological lack of ambition. For someone who has not yet succeeded at anything and who probably fears failure, a doctrine that criticizes the search for worldly success can be very appealing. And devotion to a guru—a combination of love, gratitude, awe, and obedience— can facilitate an unhealthy return to childhood. In fact, the very structure of this relationship can condemn a student to a kind of intellectual and emotional slavery.

A relationship with a guru, or indeed with any expert, tends to run along authoritarian lines. You don’t know what you need to know, and the expert presumably does. The implied hierarchy is unavoidable. Contemplative expertise exists, and a contemplative expert is someone who can help you realize certain truths about the nature of your own mind.

Believing in one’s own perfect enlightenment is rather like driving a car without brakes—not a problem if you never need to stop or slow down, but otherwise a terrible idea.

When we look into the eyes of another human being, we seem to see the light of consciousness radiating from the eyes themselves— there is a glint of joy or judgment, perhaps. But every inflection of mood or personality—even the most basic indication that the person is alive—comes not from the eyes but from the surrounding muscles of the face. If a person’s eyes look clouded by madness or fatigue, the muscles orbicularis oculi are to blame. 

• It is not an accident, therefore, that gurus often show an unusual commitment to maintaining eye contact. In the best case, this behavior emerges from a genuine comfort in the presence of other people and deep interest in their well-being. But maintaining eye contact can also become a way of “acting spiritual” and, therefore, an intrusive affectation. There are also people who maintain rigid eye lock not from an attitude of openness and interest or from any attempt to appear open and interested but as an aggressive and narcissistic show of dominance. Psychopaths tend to make exceptionally good eye contact.

Eye Contact Meditation:

1. Sit across from your partner and simply stare into each other’s eyes. (Depending on how far apart you sit, you might have to pick one eye to focus on.)
2. Continue to hold each other’s gaze, without speaking.
3. Ignore laughter and other signs of discomfort.

Of course, there can be clear indications that a teacher is not worth paying attention to. A history as a fabulist or a con artist should be considered fatal. A fetish for numbers is also an ominous sign. Math is magical, but math approached like magic is just superstition—and numerology is where the intellect goes to die. Prophecy is also a very strong indication of chicanery or madness on the part of a teacher, and of stupidity among his students.

If one person on earth possessed psychic powers to any significant degree, this would be among the easiest facts to authenticate in a lab.

Mind on the Brink of Death

It should trouble near death experience (NDE) enthusiasts that only 10 to 20 percent of people who approach clinical death recall having any experience at all.

But the deepest problem with drawing sweeping conclusions from the NDE is that those who have had one and subsequently talked about it did not die. Indeed, many of them appear to have been in no actual danger of dying. And those who have reported leaving their bodies during a true medical emergency—after cardiac arrest, for instance— did not suffer a complete loss of brain activity. Even in cases where the brain is alleged to have shut down, its activity must return if the subject is to survive and describe the experience. In such cases, there is generally no way to establish that the NDE occurred while the brain was offline.

What is needed to establish the mind’s independence from the brain is a case in which a person has an experience— of anything— without associated brain activity.

Some people are so desperate to interpret the NDE as proof of an afterlife that even those whom one would expect to have a strong commitment to scientific reasoning toss their better judgment out the window. The truth is that, whatever happens after death, it is possible to justify a life of spiritual practice and self-transcendence without pretending to know things we do not know.

The Spiritual Uses of Pharmacology

Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel love and avoid loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Every waking moment—and even in our dreams—we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition toward states of consciousness that we value.

Some drugs, such as psilocybin (the active compound in “magic mushrooms”) and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), pose no apparent risk of addiction and are physically well tolerated, and yet one can be sent to prison for their use—whereas drugs such as tobacco and alcohol, which have ruined countless lives, are enjoyed ad libitum in almost every society on earth. There are other points on this continuum: MDMA, or Ecstasy, has remarkable therapeutic potential, but it is also susceptible to abuse, and some evidence suggests that it can be neurotoxic.

However, for every insight of lasting value produced by drugs, there was an army of zombies with flowers in their hair shuffling toward failure and regret. Turning on, tuning in, and dropping out is wise, or even benign, only if you can then drop into a mode of life that makes ethical and material sense and doesn’t leave your children wandering in traffic.

By 1965, a thousand studies had been published, primarily on psilocybin and LSD, many of which attested to the usefulness of psychedelics in the treatment of clinical depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, alcohol addiction, and the pain and anxiety associated with terminal cancer. Within a few years, however, this entire field of research was abolished in an effort to stem the spread of these drugs among the public.

Psychedelics such as psilocybin, LSD, DMT, and mescaline all powerfully alter cognition, perception, and mood. Most seem to exert their influence through the serotonin system in the brain, primarily by binding to 5-HT2A receptors (though several have affinity for other receptors as well), leading to increased activity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Although the PFC in turn modulates subcortical dopamine production—and certain of these compounds, such as LSD, bind directly to dopamine receptors—the effect of psychedelics appears to take place largely outside dopamine pathways, which could explain why these drugs are not habit-forming.

If the brain were nothing more than a receiver of conscious states, it should be impossible to diminish a person’s experience of the cosmos by damaging her brain. She might seem unconscious from the outside—like a broken radio—but, subjectively speaking, the music would play on.

Medications that reduce anxiety generally work by increasing the effect of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA, thereby diminishing neuronal activity in various parts of the brain. But the fact that dampening arousal in this way can make people feel better does not suggest that they would feel better still if they were drugged into a coma.

We should be slow to draw conclusions about the nature of the cosmos on the basis of inner experiences—no matter how profound they may seem.

All psychoactive drugs modulate the existing neurochemistry of the brain—either by mimicking specific neurotransmitters or by causing the neurotransmitters themselves to be more or less active. Everything that one can experience on a drug is, at some level, an expression of the brain’s potential.

Meditation can open the mind to a similar range of conscious states, but far less haphazardly. If LSD is like being strapped to a rocket, learning to meditate is like gently raising a sail. Yes, it is possible, even with guidance, to wind up someplace terrifying, and some people probably shouldn’t spend long periods in intensive practice. But the general effect of meditation training is of settling ever more fully into one’s own skin and suffering less there.

When such claims and their methods of verification admit of experiment and/or mathematical description, we tend to say that our concerns are “scientific”; when they relate to matters more abstract, or to the consistency of our thinking itself, we often say that we are being “philosophical”; when we merely want to know how people behaved in the past, we dub our interests “historical” or “journalistic”; and when a person’s commitment to evidence and logic grows dangerously thin or simply snaps under the burden of fear, wishful thinking, tribalism, or ecstasy, we recognize that he is being “religious.”

The real distinction we should care about—the observation of which is the sine qua non of the scientific attitude—is between demanding good reasons for what one believes and being satisfied with bad ones. Spirituality requires the same commitment to intellectual honesty.

Consciousness is the basis of both the examined and the unexamined life. It is all that can be seen and that which does the seeing. No matter how far you have traveled from the place of your birth, and however much you now understand about the world, you have been exploring consciousness and its changes. Why not do so directly?

Conclusion

What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose on earth? These are some of the great, false questions of religion. We need not answer them, for they are badly posed, but we can live our answers all the same. At a minimum, we can create the conditions for human flourishing in this life—the only life of which any of us can be certain.

Spirituality remains the great hole in secularism, humanism, rationalism, atheism, and all the other defensive postures that reasonable men and women strike in the presence of unreasonable faith. People on both sides of this divide imagine that visionary experience has no place within the context of science—apart from the corridors of a mental hospital. Until we can talk about spirituality in rational terms—acknowledging the validity of self-transcendence—our world will remain shattered by dogmatism.

At its best, religion is a set of stories that recount the ethical and contemplative insights of our wisest ancestors. But these stories come to us bundled with ancient confusion and perennial lies. And they invariably harden into doctrines that defy revision, generation after generation. The great pressure of accumulating knowledge—in science, medicine, history—has begun to scour our culture of many of these ideas.

The conventional self is a transitory appearance among transitory appearances, and it vanishes when looked for. We need not await any data from the lab to say that self-transcendence is possible. And we need not become masters of meditation to realize its benefits. It is within our capacity to recognize the nature of thoughts, to awaken from the dream of being merely ourselves and, in this way, to become better able to contribute to the well-being of others.

We are always and everywhere in the presence of reality. The human mind is the most complex and subtle expression of reality we have thus far encountered. This should grant profundity to the humble project of noticing what it is like to be you in the present. However numerous your faults, something in you at this moment is pristine—and only you can recognize it. Open your eyes and see.