As I suggested yesterday, there will be those who feel that these words don’t sit comfortably with only a conjunction between them, but that isn’t what I wanted to write about.
Contemplative practice is, though patently a spiritual activity, not necessarily a religious one. Many contemplatives, especially within the Abrahamic religions, have lost their good name, their freedom, and sometimes their lives – witness Meister Eckhart and Mansur Al-Hallaj, for instance. Even religions founded on contemplative insights, like Buddhism, all too often regarded the practice itself as best confined to those under monastic vows.
Susan Blackmore (a patron, incidentally, of Humanists UK) has this to say:
So I looked very hard into what it’s like to be me and I found no answer. The very thing that the science of consciousness is trying to explain, disintegrated on closer inspection.
When I stare into the face of arising experiences, I find that the whole idea of there being a me, a ‘what it’s like to be me now’, and a stream of experiences I am having, falls apart.
It falls apart, first, because there is no persisting me to ask about. Whenever I look for one, there seems to be a me, but these selves are fleeting and temporary. They arise along with the sensations, perceptions and thoughts that they seem to be having, and die along with them. In any self-reflective moment I can say that I am experiencing this, or that, but with every new ‘this’ there is a new ‘me’ who was looking into it. A moment later that is gone and a different self, with a different perspective, pops up. When not reflecting on self, it is impossible to say whether there is anyone experiencing anything or not.
It falls apart, second, because there is no theatre of the mind in which conscious experiences happen. Experience, when examined closely, is not the show on our personal stage that the illusion has us imagine. Sensations, perceptions and thoughts come and go, sometimes in sequences but often in parallel. They are ephemeral scraps, lasting only so long as they are held in play, not unified and organised, not happening in definite times and places, not happening in order for a continuing observer. It is impossible to say which ones are, or were, ‘in consciousness’ and which not.
This is a contemplative insight par excellence. Blackmore herself came to it, as the title of the book from which these paragraphs are borrowed, Zen and the Art of Consciousness, suggests, through years of practice.
For many of us, the beginnings of insights like Susan Blackmore’s come occasionally in rare moments of stillness, lost in nature or confronted with great art. But they are generally fleeting, and attempts to note them down all too often are found incomprehensible when we look at them later. Blackmore again:
Even more interesting will be to understand the basis of those special moments in which one asks ‘Am I conscious now?’ or ‘Who am I?’ I suspect that these entail a massive integration of processes all over the brain and a corresponding sense of richer awareness. These probably occur only rarely in most people, but contribute disproportionately to our idea of ‘what it’s like to be me’. This kind of rich self-awareness may happen more of the time, and more continuously, for those who practise mindfulness.
More difficult may be to find a practice distinct from a religious one which is yet coherent and durable. Susan Blackmore seems to have ended up with something very similar to traditional Rinzai Zen kōan practice; I have found myself with one nearly indistinguishable from Sōtō Zen shikantaza. But there are many others, from various Buddhist traditions, from Advaita Vedanta, from Christian centering prayer, that can provide us with a framework of practice that is not inextricable from its mythic or metaphysical background. What matters is keeping on.
An Open Ground 
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So my love for my children is a ‘fleeting and temporary’ momentary ‘self’? It seems to have lasted from an absolute physical reality, i.e. the very first fleeting and temporary moments we call their birth, continuing during the myriad fleeting and temporary moments filling the long post-birth period, and thence up to the impermanent fleeting moments which our inadequate human language must call ‘the present’. Blackmore confuses the issue when conflating time, qualia and consciousness. Time, awareness and experience are quales of consciousness like ‘mind’. There is only the ‘present’ (some say ‘eternal’ present) as well as the permanent unicity and immutability that is consciousness, i.e., the reality of every moment, of every quale, of every thought. I think Blackmore is just plain wrong. And she stubbornly refuses to think through coherent alternatives unlike Galen Strawson, and a host of eminent others such as David Chalmers.
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Thanks, Gerard. I can see I’ll have to address these points properly, probably in another blog post. Thank you for pointing out what’s an obvious need for clarification.
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Of course what’s more to the point, maybe, Gerard, is that you’ve shown up one of the major limitations of blogging as a medium (see my post ‘Road Songs’ the other day). Susan Blackmore, in the passages I quoted, and elsewhere, draws on the thinking of Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained. There it takes him 450+ pages (and two appendices!) to make his point – one which many, as you point out, still passionately disagree with. I’ll write more on this – especially on the limitations – as well as the advantages – of blogging in another post. All the best, and thanks again for your comment. Mike
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Thanks, Mike. I do slightly wonder, though, if the term ‘atheist’ is entirely appropriate for someone such as yourself with a deep commitment to the contemplative life. I hope you won’t mind my bringing this up.
For many of us, it describes somebody with a resolutely materialist attitude to life, proudly self-sufficient and disdainful of anyone with religious beliefs, or the need to have faith in a power beyond themselves, and convinced that science explains everything. Someone like Richard Dawkins, in short.
I’m probably being unfair to many atheists (such as yourself), but I do nevertheless think it is a rather loaded term.
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Thanks, Tom! Yes, I do agree with you – it is a loaded term. I first used it here partly just because of that. As I tried to explain in ‘Atheist spirituality’ the other day, there is in many people’s minds just that opposition between spirituality in general and the term atheist. That’s a pity, since it’s an important term. In my post ‘Why?’ (June 8th) I tried to address the question of why I hadn’t simply used the less loaded (and (liberal!) Quaker-approved) ‘nontheist’.
I’ve been on a small mission recently to rehabilitate the word ‘atheist’ in a contemplative context. How much success I’ve had my readers may end up telling me. I don’t rule out ending up with something like ‘nontheist’, even though part of me feels that might be a fudge!
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‘Nontheist’ is certainly gentler, and less confrontational, and has the added advantage that, outside Quaker circles, there may not be that many people who know what it means!
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