Tag Archives: Susan Blackmore

Blogging (an aside)

Not for the first time I’ve been reflecting on blogging as a medium, helped in this instance by a commenter on my post yesterday.

“A blog (a truncation of “weblog”) is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts)” (Wikipedia) A blog post, as I use the term, is a special kind of short-form essay, usually on a particular subject.

Blog posts have their limitations. Mine tend to be 700 words or so on average; anything over about 2000 seems to me to be unwieldy, and clunky in the way many long poems can tend to be. At their best they can be, as I suggested in my recent post ‘Road songs‘, a sort of literary form all their own. I wrote there,

At one point, and I honestly can’t remember when, it occurred to me that all these bits of (mainly) prose were something like my own road songs, much more than considered accounts of anything. Consequently, they’re not autobiographical as such; they don’t tell a connected story, but are more in the nature of snatches of music heard in passing.

Sometimes I’m guilty of biting off more than I can chew. In yesterday’s post ‘Atheism and contemplation‘ I attempted to introduce, by way of a few quotes from one of my favourite writers, Susan Blackmore, Daniel Dennett’s ‘multiple drafts’ model of consciousness. Now, I attempted to squeeze into a medium-length blog post something that takes Dennett – one of the great philosophers of our time – more than 450 pages (and two appendices) to set out (Consciousness Explained), using a few paragraphs lifted from the work of a psychologist, academic and memeticist. I am none of these things…

I am a contemplative, though, albeit an amateur, or freelance, one – being neither a monastic nor under any other sort of vows – and Dennett’s philosophy of mind is something that has spoken deeply to me. It put into words, and into careful argued thought, impressions that my own practice had already brought home. Reading Blackmore’s condensation of Dennett (Zen and the Art of Consciousness pp. 34ff.) was one of those, “Oh yes, of course!” moments for me – and it is this illumination I tried, rather than the theory itself, to squeeze into my post.

Does blogging work for these profound questions? Can it ever? I don’t know. I’m sure Daniel Dennett wouldn’t have written 450-odd pages (and two appendices) if he’d thought that 750 words would do. But to convey the immediacy of experience? Yes, I think it may – and that’s why, despite the perils and obvious difficulties, I do still go on blogging after all these years.

Atheism and contemplation

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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.

Road songs

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Since my teens I’ve loved the idea of the road song – music that you play to accompany driving, that somehow measures out the miles in bars and choruses, but is not (probably) about the travelling in itself.

I’ve been blogging on one platform or another since 2005; for four or five years before that I kept a website where I regularly published something like this kind of episodic writing. At one point, and I honestly can’t remember when, it occurred to me that all these bits of (mainly) prose were something like my own road songs, much more than considered accounts of anything. Consequently, they’re not autobiographical as such; they don’t tell a connected story, but are more in the nature of snatches of music heard in passing.

Lately I’ve been trying harder to be honest about some of the tentative conclusions I come across along the way, but I know that knowing is not as easy as that. AC Grayling:

One can believe a true proposition and have a justification for doing so, but the justification can be the wrong one for holding that belief. For example: suppose you believe that Fred is in the next room because you heard Fred’s favourite tune being strummed on Fred’s peculiar-sounding guitar. Fred is indeed in the next room, so your belief is true; but he has taught a friend to strum his favourite tune on his peculiar guitar, and it is the friend strumming. Your justification for holding this true belief is therefore not the right justification in the circumstances. So if you claim to know that Fred is in the next room on the basis of the evidence you employ to justify that claim, you cannot be said to know that Fred is there; you only or merely believe that he is. And very often, indeed, our beliefs are merely beliefs because the justification for them is insufficient to make that belief amount to knowledge.

Human consciousness is not – well, mine isn’t, anyway – so coherent a thing, or so independent of the objects of its perceptions, as to allow me to say, “This is what I think,” and have done with it. Susan Blackmore, in her luminous and heartwarming book Zen and the Art of Consciousness, writes:

At any time in a human brain there are multiple parallel processes going on, conjuring up perceptions, thoughts, opinions, sensations and volitions. None of these is either in or out of consciousness for there is no such place. Most of the time there is no observer: if consciousness is involved at all it is an attribution made later, on the basis of remembering events and assuming that someone must have been experiencing them in the past, when in fact no one was…

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. Does it completely disappear in those who transcend it?

To be still, not interfering – not even to ask Blackmore’s questions – allows something odd to happen, it seems to me. The “multiple parallel processes” appear to settle out, like sediment in a disturbed pond. Some sort of clarity supervenes: the layers of the mind rearrange themselves, perhaps, to continue with the metaphor, and the sense of a sequence, or progress, of events is replaced with something else, that is like the patterning of sunlight on the wavelets across the pond. Jiddu Krishnamurti:

When there is no illusion the “what is” is most sacred. Now let’s look at what actually is. At a given moment the “what is” may be fear, or utter despair, or a fleeting joy. These things are constantly changing. And also there is the observer who says, “These things all change around me, but I remain permanent”. Is that a fact, is that what really is? Is he not also changing, adding to and taking away from himself, modifying, adjusting himself, becoming or not becoming? So both the observer and the observed are constantly changing. What is is change. That is a fact. That is what is.

All that happens is that the stillness allows what is to appear, that’s all. The road disappears; the road songs go on changing, and yet somewhere there is something steady. Wieland Samolak:

When I was a teenager I used to sit on an empty field listening for hours to the sounds of distant cars, railroads, helicopters, and other motorized objects. These sounds, which are very rough and noisy when they are near, attracted me from the distance because they had merged and diffused into a continuum when they reached my ears. By this experience it came to my mind that it is more satisfying for me to listen to continuous changes within one sound than to the combinations of discrete sonic events usually found in music.

Just noticing what is – whatever appears in the field of consciousness, without having to label it or evaluate it, without having to either focus one’s attention on it or wrench one’s attention away from it – is perhaps the freshest, most peaceful thing one can do. There is no technique to adhere to, no doctrine to conform to: what is, is, and there’s nothing that needs to be done about it.

Am I conscious now?

Ain’t superstitious

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In the old Willie Dixon song, he claims not to be, but believes the signs anyway: “Well, I ain’t superstitious, but a black cat crossed my trail…”

Stevie Wonder has a different take: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer – superstition ain’t the way…”

Sam Harris writes, “Math is magical, but math approached like magic is just superstition—and numerology is where the intellect goes to die.” The same thing, perhaps, applies to metaphysics.

Metaphysics can be a slippery word these days. “Metaphysics is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, logic, and ethics. It includes questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.” (Wikipedia) But Harris (ibid.) lists it along with mythology and sectarian dogma.

While it is true that probably all religions are filled with mythology and sectarian dogma, they do not all approach metaphysics like magic – and it seems to me, from experience, that metaphysics, at some level, is inseparable from the contemplative life.

[W]hen we look closely, we can’t find reliable external evidence of consciousness, nor can we conclusively point to any specific function it serves. These are both deeply counterintuitive outcomes, and this is where the mystery of consciousness starts bumping up against other mysteries of the universe.

If we can’t point to anything that distinguishes which collections of atoms in the universe are conscious from those that aren’t, where can we possibly hope to draw the line? Perhaps a more interesting question is why we should draw a line at all. When we view our own experience of consciousness as being “along for the ride,” we suddenly find it easier to imagine that other systems are accompanied by consciousness as well. It’s at this point that we must consider the possibility that all matter is imbued with consciousness in some sense—a view referred to as panpsychism. If the various behaviors of animals can be accompanied by consciousness, why not the reaction of plants to light—or the spin of electrons, for that matter? Perhaps consciousness is embedded in matter itself, as a fundamental property of the universe. It sounds crazy, but … it’s worth posing the question.
Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

Sam Harris again,

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.
Sam Harris, Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality without Religion

Things that seem very strange at first glimpse (like Willie Dixon’s black cat) may turn out on closer examination to make an uncommon degree of sense. Annaka Harris (op cit.) quotes a personal communication from Rebecca Goldstein to the effect that, “[c]onsciousness is an intrinsic property of matter; indeed, it’s the only intrinsic property of matter that we know, for we know it directly, by ourselves being material conscious things. All of the other properties of matter have been discovered by way of mathematical physics, and this mathematical method of getting at the properties of matter means that only relational properties of matter are known, not intrinsic properties.”

If matter is, as it seems, fundamental to existence, or at least to the material universe, and if it is in some way intrinsically conscious, then Paul Tillich’s conception of God as “ground of being” (being-itself rather than a supreme being among, or above, other beings – as the apostle Paul quotes from Epimenides (Acts 17:28), “[f]or in him we live and move and have our being”) seems inescapable. Only, as Tillich himself suggests, we may then have to give up using the word “God”.

There is, it seems, no way to “fall out of” being. If being itself entails consciousness, then even to say that individual consciousness ceases at death is, to say the least, problematic. And in any case, our conventional sense of an individual self is an illusion, as contemplatives throughout history have discovered. It is only a fiction of convenience, a way for the mind to locate itself, for a moment, in the body of which it is aware. (See Susan Blackmore’s wonderful book Seeing Myself for the correspondence of contemplative and neuroscientific insights here.)

It ain’t necessary to be superstitious: the belief in things we don’t understand turns out to be a mistake. There is enough wonder in what is.

Looking for a language

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All contemplative traditions seek, in one way or another, to look past the shifting pattern of thoughts and emotions which we take to to be ourselves, and to know directly that which is unthinkable, and is.

But thinking is what we always do, if only to find some way of pointing out the ineffable, of showing others the beginning of the way to this unconditioned treasure. But it is always difficult, and painfully easily misunderstood, as contemplatives have long found to their cost in their dealings with religious authorities.

I think the reason why most contemplatives are in fact allied with some religion or another may be that, not only do we ourselves find the way to our own contemplative practice within a religious tradition, but within that tradition we find a path that others have walked, a thread others have followed, and a language with which to talk, and more importantly to think, about contemplation and its purpose. In many traditions contemplative practice is seen and experienced as a form of prayer, which comes with its own questions, and its own ways to think and talk about them.

One of the difficulties with treading a secular contemplative path is that these frameworks of tradition and language fall away. This is of course a great freedom, but it is easier perhaps to see what it is a freedom from than it is to see what it may be a freedom to, because of the sheer difficulty we have in finding new words for that which is beyond words, and in looking for ways to understand what we have perceived directly.

Happily, in most cases, bereft of a traditional Buddhist, Christian, or whatever language for contemplative experience, with all its baggage of doctrine and metaphysics, some have turned to Western philosophy, or to neuroscience, for paradigms. Those who are trained in these fields, Susan Blackmore, for instance, or Sam Harris, have made contributions that I for one find useful to say the least. Others, like Stephen Batchelor, seem to work more nearly by pruning the language of an existing tradition to express a secular practice, repossessing well-tried (in Batchelor’s case Buddhist) words to chart a secular path.

I am very late to the game. My four decades, more or less, of broadly Christian contemplative practice have left me missing their rich tradition of expression, and the depth of thought and teaching that underpins that tradition in both the Eastern and Western church, and in the great body of writing that predates the Great Schism of 1054, and, come to that, in the Quaker way since the 17th century in England.

I am finding it hard, as readers of this blog may have noticed, to pick up an alternative framework in which to think and write about practice and experience. I don’t have an alternative expert language, like the philosophers and the students of consciousness, and yet there is a sense that my own stream, my own practice and its fruits, has not gone astray so much as found a deeper bed on its way to the sea. The question is, how to talk about it?

An Open Ground

Secular contemplative spirituality and practice