| SOUL SEARCH (what is this?) A Scientist Explores the Afterlife David Darling 
|
People normally cut reality into compartments, and so are unable to see the interdependence of all phenomena. To see one in all and all in one is to break through the great barrier which narrows one's perception of reality...
– Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen master
It is no secret that human mental experience is sharply divided. There is the familiar experience of facts, objects, events, memories and self – our analytical mode – which seems to take place against a backdrop of time. And there is that other, transcendent feeling of pure awareness in which time dissolves and the perceived and the perceiver merge into an undivided whole.
In the West, we have come increasingly to revere and rely upon the rational, timebound aspects of thought. But many human groups, not so preoccupied with “progress,” display a quite different outlook on life that is less materialistic, less hurried. One particular Indian culture uses the “time to boil rice” (about thirteen minutes) as its smallest unit of time measurement – it has no need of anything more precise. The natives of the Trobriand Islands, off New Guinea, and the Hopi Indians of northeast Arizona, seem not to have any linear sense of time at all. Theirs is a continuous mode of simultaneity and present-centeredness. Instead of seeing events as a causal stream arranged in order, one after the other, the Trobrianders and the Hopis tend to regard events as forming a patterned whole, with all action drawn into a single stroke. This is mirrored in the Hopi’s language, in which the verbs are strangely lacking in any usual forms of tense. An event that happened a long time ago is regarded as “far away”; distances in space, in other words, are equated with distances in time.
The two different modes of human awareness – what might be called “tight-beam” and “wide-beam” – have a physiological parallel in the two different halves of the brain. Interest in the differences between the brain hemispheres was intense at the turn of the century, but then seemed to fade. It surged again strongly, however, in the 1960s and 1970s following a remarkable series of experiments by Roger Sperry and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology.
The subject of these experiments were people who had undergone a radical form of surgery in an effort to relieve very severe epilepsy. This procedure involved completely cutting through the corpus callosum, which is the main connecting body between the two brain hemispheres. As a cure for acute epilepsy it was a surprising success. But the patient was effectively left with two brains – and two very different brains at that.
Tests on these “split-brain” patients showed that the majority of human analytical thinking takes place in the left cerebral hemisphere. Included in this category are our advanced language skills and our ability to break the world down into separate objects and events. The left brain dominates our decisions, supplies our will and motivation and effectively makes us who we are. In contrast, the right hemisphere is an expert in spatial reasoning and seeing the world all at once, as an interconnected system. If we were to characterize society in these terms, we might say that the developed West has a mainly left-brain type of consciousness, while other, more nature-centered cultures make fuller use of right-brain modes of thought.
Individual human beings, of course, rely on both sides of their brain. Even the most committed of rationalists use their right hemisphere for controlling the left side of their body as well as for many other tasks involving memory and sensory processing. But this caveat does not take away from the fact that there is a definite functional division between the two brain halves.
In everyday situations, the left hemisphere tends to dominate. Because it has most of the key language centers, it can communicate eloquently and so serves as the brain’s spokesperson. It processes things one after another, from which it follows it must be the source of our familiar notion of clock time. Most significant, it is the home of our insecure, time-harried self. The subjective experience of the left hemisphere is literally “us.” It is the habitat of our ego awareness.
This brings about an intriguing, not to say potentially explosive, situation inside our head. The left side of the brain is anxious not to lose permanent control, not to relinquish the carefully nurtured feeling of self that it gives rise to. Because it also creates the illusion of linear, sequential time and can foresee its own end, it fashions myths and grasps at any evidence, however flimsy, to try to convince itself that immortality is possible. But science now speaks loudly against the survival of self after death. So the left brain finds itself in a quandry.
Meanwhile, it glances across at its shadowy, silent partner and views its unfocussed workings with almost paranoid suspicion. The right side of the brain tends to be less judgmental about the stream of data it receives from the senses. It is more inclined to take the world as it comes, without breaking down or interpreting what it sees. This leads it to support states of consciousness very different from our normal, focused awareness. If the left side of the brain is a scientist and pragmatist, the right side is very much a mystic.
Because it controls language and reason, the left brain tends to assume charge most of the time. Yet despite this, it seems as if we have a powerful, innate drive to experience the radically different states of awareness involving the right side of the brain.
Young children regularly use consciousness-altering techniques on themselves and each other when they think no adults are watching. They whirl around until vertigo and collapse set in. They hyperventilate and then have another child squeeze their chest to produce unconsciousness. They choke each other around the neck to cause fainting. Such practices are found everywhere in the world and are present at such early ages – as young as two or three years old – that social conditioning cannot be a factor.
As children grow older, they learn that similar experiences can be brought about chemically, for instance by sniffing the fumes of volatile solvents found around the house. By their teenage years, large numbers of young people seek chemically induced changes of consciousness through a wide variety of illicit and medically disapproved drugs. Virtually every culture throughout history has done the same. A rare exception are the Inuit, or Eskimo, who had to wait for outsiders to bring them alcohol since they couldn’t grow anything of their own.
In North America, the Athabaskan Indians of the Canadian Northwest chew birch gum to get a high. According to John Bryant of the University of Alaska, this may explain the purpose of the world’s oldest-known lumps of chewing gum, found in 1993 in southern Sweden. Three wads of nine-thousand-year-old chewed birch resin turned up on the floor of a hut used by hunter-gatherers on the island of Orust. Dental experts concluded that the imprints on one piece came from a fully grown person whose teeth had not yet been worn down by the stresses of the Stone Age–almost certainly a teenager. Although the gum could have been used medicinally, Bryant suspects the chewer was probably using it as the Neolithic equivalent of a joint.
The psychologist and philosopher William James was struck by the ineffable nature of a drug-induced experience. Following a session in which he breathed in a mixture of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and ether, he wrote: “Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. The truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense.”
Nevertheless, he continued, “I know of more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation.”
Dominated as it is by left-brain thinking, our society is uneasy about people going off into trances and hallucinatory intoxication. The left brain feels threatened by mystical experiences because these involve at least a temporary loss and possibly a permanent alteration of self. A person who uses drugs may “come back” changed – in effect, be a stranger to us. We fear that influence on others, especially our children. So, we have laws against possession of drugs in the first place to discourage people from getting high.
Alcohol and nicotine, of course, are the prime exceptions. We still need our legal, right-brain fix. The paradox is that, whereas we deem almost every other mind-altering substance to be morally corrupting, alcohol is so socially acceptable that we frequently toast each other’s health with it, spend vast sums on its advertising and consume it copiously in public. James praised its positive effects: “Drunkenness expands, units and says yes... It makes [a person] for the moment one with the truth.”
More potent pychoactives, such as LSD, have even been seen as doorways to a new phase of human evolution. Long before the flower children of the sixties bloomed in California, medieval peasants in Europe had felt the strange effects of “acid” from eating stale rye bread. In 1943, a Swiss chemist isolated the chemical responsible – lysergic acid – after a bout of hallucination while carrying out research on a fungus found in rye plants. Popular use of the drug soon followed. Aldous Huxley experimented with both LSD and mescaline, and in The Doors of Perception extolled that consciousness-expanding drugs could be used as a shortcut to mystical experience. According to Huxley, mankind was laboring under the burden of the brain – a “reducing valve” that stemmed the flow of experience. Drugs, he claimed, could relax that valve. True to his belief, Huxley took LSD on his deathbed, shortly after completing his utopian novel Island – the book that inspired Timothy Leary to set up his “transcendental communities.”
As millions can now testify, hallucinogens undoubtedly have a major effect on our perception of the world and our self. But when does an acid trip become an altered state, and when does an altered state become a mystical experience? Drugs can have the unfortunate effect of permanently addling the brain as well as enlightening. If they have any lasting value at all, it may be in pointing the sincere seeker of truth in the right direction.
For many, that “right” direction is meditation. As one practitioner commented after taking several acid trips with the help of a doctor friend, “We mystics are used to much stronger stuff than that.”
Skeptics will point to the lavish lifestyle of that most fashionable of meditation gurus, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. A mystic with a surprising business acumen, his slickly packaged style of transcendental meditation (TM), loosely adapted from the teachings of the ninth-century philosopher Shankara, burst on to the scene in the Sgt. Pepper era and now claims 3.5 million adherents worldwide.
To make it more appealing to Westerners, TM is dressed up as a kind of science. But the thinly veiled Hindu ceremony that precedes every initiation (to which the novice is asked to bring a piece of fruit and a flower – together with a check – reveals its true religious significance. Having offered a Vedic prayer, the TM inductor asks the subject to sit and relax with eyes closed. Then the mantra, or chant word, is given. The initiate is told that this has been carefully selected for him or her and must be kept confidential for it to remain effective. However, this is a deception. The only reason for trying to keep the mantra secret is that there are only a handful of them, which anyone can find out about and thus avoid the expense of the TM sessions, most of which are padded with pseudoscientific nonsense.
The mantra having been passed on, the initiate is now told to repeat it slowly aloud. Gradually, the inductor asks for the rate of repetition to be increased and the volume decreased, until the mantras becomes literally a panting for breath. This is intentional, but few people seem to realize that they are actually being made to hyperventilate. TM initiates frequently say their first experience was the most profound, with buzzing in their ears, a great space opening before them and a floating sensation. In fact, this is due less to any mystical influence of the mantra than it is to the physical effects of too much carbon dioxide, a known hallucinogen.
During hyperventilation – rapid, shallow breathing – the body cannot absorb as much oxygen as it needs. At the same time, the level of carbon dioxide in the blood rises. The temporal lobe of the brain is very sensitive to oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations, and when these change, various familiar subjective effects may ensue: a feeling of peace and omnipresent love, an apparent separation of mind and body, and a vision of emptiness or a tunnel accompanied by a bright light. They are the well-known themes of the drug-induced and near-death experiences.
Hyperventilation is a common and easy way to achieve an altered conscious state. The famous Sufi dancers, or whirling dervishes, spin their way to a carbon dioxide high and a sensation of the unity of all things. As the thirteenth-century Sufi philosopher-poet Rumi wrote: “I have put duality away. I have seen that the two worlds are one. One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call.”
Young people today have made the same discovery, that by dancing to exhaustion through head-banging or rave music (often assisted by hallucinogens such as Ecstasy), consciousness is altered and the self temporarily set free. Much of music, art, dance, and poetry has this as its goal, to appeal directly to the right brain and so dissolve the ego boundary created by rational thought. As Aldous Huxley remarked: “The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is ... a principal appetite of the soul.”
At the root of all mystical thought is the idea that self and the world as we normally see it is an illusion. We superimpose a false picture of reality due to a basic misunderstanding of the nature of things. Modern neurologists would be forced to agree. But mysticism goes further, emphasizing the importance of a state that transcends the rational, timebound mind. As the Upanishads, Hinduism’s most ancient texts, say: “He [Brahman, or what we might think of as cosmic consciousness] comes to the thought of those who know him beyond thought, not those who imagine he can be attained by thought. He is unknown to the learned and known to the simple.”
The same idea of achieving enlightenment by placing one’s self in a receptive, innocent state was stressed by the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff, whose quasireligious philosophy helped spawn the modern New Age culture. And, of course, Jesus too preached that “Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of Heaven.”
The ultimate goal of mysticism is to realize the unity of self and the absolute – that “Thou Art That,” as the Upanishads say. Here, surely, is more than a passing resemblance to the 4-D, interconnected world model envisaged by modern science. Remarkably, through simple contemplation, mystics have reached an understanding of the deep structure of physical reality that Western science has only recently begun to appreciate.
Eastern thinking does not see time in the same way as does the Judeo-Christian tradition – as a linear progression through a world separate from God to an afterworld heaven (or hell). In the Eastern vision, time, like self, is not real. The world as we see it is not real, nor is it slowly evolving toward some state of perfection; it is perfect every moment if only we are able to realize it. Truth exists in the timeless and universal Now, the eternity of every instant – the block universe of the space-time physicist.
We have imposed a dualistic split upon reality. Only by direct insight, the mystic believes, can we see the truth that observer and observed are one. So just as scientists experiment, mystics meditate as a way of moving closer to the truth behind the world. Meditation comes in many forms, like different roads. But all lead to the same destination – enlightenment, freedom from the illusion of self, a merging with the whole.
The simplest classification divides meditation into two forms: concentrative and mindful. Concentrative methods involve focusing without stress on a particular object in view, an idea, or, as in the case of TM, a mantra – a special sound, regularly repeated (usually in silence). The goal is to reach a feeling of oneness with this focus of attention and exclude all else.
In open or mindful meditation, the approach is exactly the opposite: everything is allowed to flow into the subject’s experience but with no attempt to discriminate between thoughts, sights, and sounds. The sought-for result in this case is a sense of the undifferentiated flow of existence; rather than disappearing, the world seems fresh and new, as if seen for the first time.
In both concentrative and mindful meditation, stray thoughts are not repressed or resisted but simply let go. The goal, at least in the short term, is simply to quiet the mind and stem its habit of constantly trying to rationalize what it sees. Thoughts and feelings, which might otherwise become distracting, are allowed to wash over the meditator like gentle waves and fade as naturally as they come.
In time, with increasing skill, the practitioner may notice new experiences, “higher” states of consciousness. These involve feelings of floating, great joy, and an acceptance of things as they are. The most advanced states of all are said to coincide with a complete loss of self-awareness and an unchallengeable sense of objectivity.
Meditation, being a personal and subjective experience, is hard for scientists with their measuring instruments to penetrate. How can we know if what the meditator says she feels is real? And, in any case, what does “reality” mean? The whole point of meditation is to try to break down the barrier between observer and observed, to see things in the raw. Accordingly, it could be argued that the mystical “all in one” experience is far more real than the mind-constructed, outwardly projected world of science. Still, it would at least be interesting to know more about meditation from our familiar, analytical viewpoint. And to this end we might ask whether meditation is distinguished by its own characteristic modes of brain activity as, for example, are sleep and normal waking thought.
In the waking brain, the frequency of electrical activity varies quite widely. But lower frequencies–less than fourteen cycles per second – show up more when the brain is relaxed than when it is active and alert. One of the most distinctive patterns is the alpha rhythm, with a frequency between eight and thirteen cycles per second, which is normally present when a person is resting with their eyes closed. Early research with EEG’s showed that meditators produce a lot of alpha waves even with their eyes open.
Normally, the alpha rhythm is blocked and replaced by higher-frequency beta waves if there is a sudden disturbance from the outside. For most people, no amount of trying to ignore, for example, a bang or a flash of light will stop the alpha waves from disappearing. But if the person is repeatedly exposed to the same stimulus, the alpha activity eventually carries on despite the disturbance. The blocking of alpha waves, in other words, seems to be a response to events that are unexpected.
By 1957, EEG’s had become portable enough for two researchers, B. K. Bagehi and S. Wenger of the State University of Iowa, to haul their equipment up into the remote mountain caves of India. There they tested yogis who were highly skilled in a concentration form of meditation.
The yogis agreed to meditate while the scientists did everything in their power to distract them. Cymbals were clashed behind the yogis’ ears, lights flashed before their eyes, and their feet plunged into ice-cold water! Not only did the harassed sages remain outwardly calm but their alpha waves kept up a steady rhythm in spite of the onslaught. The results suggested they had managed almost complete sensory withdrawal.
In 1966, Akira Kasamatsu and Tomo Hirai of the University of Tokyo tested forty-eight Japanese Zen Buddhist priests and students who had been meditating for between one and twenty years. These Buddhists practiced zazen, a passive, mindful meditation conducted with open eyes. As they started to relax, the meditators generated rapid alpha waves. Gradually, these rose in amplitude and fell in frequency until, in some cases, they dropped to as low as six to seven cycles per second, that is, into the range known as theta waves. The most advanced meditators showed the most theta activity. Interestingly, the Zen master’s classification of his students as low, medium, or high skill corresponded very closely with the EEG results and not necessarily with the number of years of practice.
The researchers also tried distracting the monks by playing a repeated clicking sound every fifteen seconds. In this case, unlike the Indian yogis, the Zen Buddhists did block their alpha waves. But whereas a control group of nonmeditators quickly became dulled and habituated to the sound, eventually showing no response whatsoever to it, the meditators responded to the click just as strongly each time. Each stimulus was perceived as if it were for the first time.
These findings tie in remarkably well with the subjective experiences of the two form of meditation – one excluding the sensory world, the other observing it without comment as if it were endlessly new.
More recent evidence that something unusual goes on when people meditate has come from Peter Fenwick at the Maudsley Hospital in London. In one experiment, Fenwick took electroencephalograms of half a dozen long-term Zen meditators. In each case he found that while the subjects were meditating, there was a definite increase in activity in the right hemisphere. By linking the EEG to a computer, he transformed the data for each subject into oval-shaped diagrams, one for each type of brain wave, showing where and how large was the activity. For each of the meditators, an unusually bright region showed up on the front right-hand side of the skull. “If we saw that degree of asymmetry in someone from off the street,” commented one of Fenwick’s team, “we’d be worried that something very abnormal was going on.”
Even more dramatic results came from studying a Zen master. These showed that for tasks such as categorizing objects, for which most people use their left hemisphere, the master used his right. Furthermore, the master was astonishingly resistant to the effects of classical conditioning. “This seems to lend some support,” said Fenwick, “to the claim that he lives entirely in the present, responding to everything just as it arises.”
Scientists can go only so far in confirming what meditators say. They can seek out the measurable, physical correlates of the meditating state. But to progress further, they must either accept what meditators tell them or try out the experience for themselves.
There will always be a gap between what science can measure and what human beings feel. Yet everything we know about the way the two brain hemispheres work, everything psychology has taught us about the constructed nature of the world, and everything that those who have had mystical experiences tell us, point in the same direction. There is no persistent self and no true sense in which “we” exist independently at successive moments in time. Both self and “now” are fictions conjured up along the journey of human evolution – convenient fictions as far as survival goes, but with no lasting significance.
In the light of this conclusion, our long-term prospects might seem bleaker than ever. The self we so hoped might survive death is not even allowed any substance during life. There can be no hereafter for “us,” both science and mysticism agree, for “we” never really existed in the first place.
And yet, even in the face of this harsh truth, not all hope is lost. There remains that one very curious, unexpected fact – in situations in which the self breaks down, consciousness is found to expand.
Hindus call it samadhi, Buddhists nirvana. In Buddhist teaching, self and reality are said to be like wind blowing over the surface of water. While the wind blows, the water’s surface is disturbed, the “reality” it reflects continuously broken into half-truths and confusing, distorted images. But when the wind stops, the surface of the water calms and flattens, becoming a perfect mirror of the world as it is. Hence nirvana – “beyond wind.”
In the Rinzai school of Zen, the sought-for experience is satori – a sudden, spontaneous enlightenment when self vanishes and the whole universe takes its place. Rinzai Zen uses koans to short-circuit the rational mind. Koans are terse, enigmatic texts or dialogues between master and student whose “solution” lies beyond the bounds of analytical thought. Through contemplation of a koan, the practitioner can break through the contrived nature of perceptions to the one true reality. And when this happens, consciousness without self begins.
The Zen masters and others who have reached this transcendent state are powerless to relate how it feels. Words and descriptions do not encompass it. As the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu said: “He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know.” Only by direct personal involvement can we really know what it is like to be enlightened. And most of us cannot spend the rest of our lives in meditation. We have jobs to do, children to raise, appointments to keep.
Even so, we may eventually know what it is like to lose our selves and be one with the universe. We may someday see the prison walls of our egos broken down and the blindfolds of our senses lifted. We may do this without any special effort. For the simple fact is, we shall all someday die.