Enlightenment:
Is Science Ready to Take it Seriously?
By— Jeff Warren November 2012 - Issue 3
I’m not
given to making grand predictions, but in this case I can’t resist: the very
real spiritual transformation at the heart of mysticism is about to explode
into the secular mainstream, and the consequences may just revolutionize our
scientific understanding of the mind.
Yowzer!
No doubt the reader’s New Age flapdoodle-detector is now shrieking. Bear with
me. Let’s first get the tricky business of defining enlightenment out of the
way.
For
expediency’s sake, I’ll define enlightenment as a complex and multi-faceted
process by which the mind comes to know – and over time rest more securely in –
its own ground. As this happens, our habitual sense of being a separate and
bounded self begins to fade. Ultimately, the person for whom this happens no
longer feels themselves to be an autonomous entity looking out at an external
world; rather, they feel themselves, more and more, to be an intimate part of
that world’s humid expression, an unfolding natural process no different than
anything else in nature. As a result, practitioners report a liberating sense
of freedom, ease, spontaneity. The volume of self-referential thought often
decreases, although, since enlightenment happens along a deepening continuum,
they are still routinely trapped in old habits of dualistic thinking.
Despite
the fact that this transformation has been painstakingly described in virtually
every contemplative tradition – from Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism through to
the mystical branches of the Western Abrahamic religions – and is the central
drama in the lives of thousands of lucid and intelligent human beings, here in
the West there is zero mention of the phenomenon in any of our bastions of
intellectual respectability. You’ll never read about spiritual enlightenment in
a Malcolm Gladwell book, or the pages of The New York Review of Books. This is
true even in most Western Buddhist books, where enlightenment may be mentioned
as a general principle or orientation, but almost never as a tangible
transformation that happens to real 21st-century human beings.
The
reason for this probably has to do with accessibility. The first American
Buddhist teachers, most of them operating out of the Insight Meditation Society
(Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield and others), acted as
skillfully as possible to bring the benefits of meditation to a large secular
audience. Given how skittish Western intellectuals are around religious themes,
the last thing you’d want to do here is start raving on about mystical oneness.
There is also a lively debate in the spiritual world about the advisability of
even mentioning different states and stages. On the upside it can help orient
practitioners within often strange and difficult experiences; on the downside
it can burden them with unrealistic expectations of “progress” that end up
getting in the way. Compounding this, there are whole schools of contemplative
thinking who argue that all of us are already enlightened; we have no where to
go and nothing to do.
The
majority of old-guard U.S. Buddhist teachers erred on the side of caution; as a
consequence most of their books are filled with sensible soft-dharma insights
gently shaped to fit our general Western model of psychotherapy. There are
exceptions, and those exceptions, I’d like to argue, are about to become the new
rule.
There is
a new spirit of openness, for instance, in both the culture of spirituality and
the culture of science. One spiritual
Trojan horse is yoga. Another is the increasingly popular practice of
“mindfulness.” Both of these are powerful spiritual technologies. Most people
approach them for practical fitness or stress-reduction reasons, and this is
all they ever deliver on. But, for a small percentage, something else happens.
They find themselves – deliciously, inexorably, sometimes alarmingly – moving
along a course of spiritual development they never expected.
I teach
mindfulness meditation, so I have a particular interest here. Mindfulness is
the practice of bringing clarity and concentration and equanimity to our
moment-by-moment experience. Doctors chirp happily about its secular benefits
even as the terrifying specter of loving mystical connectedness pours from the
belly of the horse. You can thank Jon Kabat-Zinn for this. His pioneering
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction model is everywhere – over 120 medical
centers in the US alone offer mindfulness programs, and there has been a
commensurate scientific interest in the subject – official NIH-funded studies
on mindfulness have gone from two in the year 2000 to 128 in 2010. Mindfulness
in small doses is an immensely helpful way to address stress and anxiety and
pain and all kinds of other conditions. Mindfulness in large doses is called
vipassana; it rewires the brain and extirpates the sense of a separate self.
Come for the raisin, stay for the perspective-shuddering cosmic U-turn. What
starts subtle can grow, and, as the brilliant Buddhist teacher Shinzen Young
says, “subtle is significant.”
In the
multidisciplinary world of consciousness studies, the buzzword is nonduality, a
translation of Advaita (literally “not two”), an ancient branch of Hindu
philosophy. I’ve presented at two ‘Toward a Science of Consciousness’ meetings,
a terrific annual assembly of the biggest names in neuroscience and philosophy
of mind, among them Antonio Damasio, David Chalmers, Wolf Singer, Susan
Greenfield, Stuart Hameroff and others. For the past few years nonduality has
been a popular subject of discussion. There is even a dedicated ‘Science and
Nonduality’ conference - now in its fourth year – that features some of the
same speakers, many of them offering straight-to-the-bone “Direct Path”
instruction in books and DVDs and weekend workshops.
The
Internet is the great culprit in all of this. Where once you had to climb a
mountain in Tibet to get answers to spiritual questions, you can now find them
on Wikipedia, or an easily-arranged Skype call. Enlightenment is the Internet
subject par excellence – vague, contradictory, fiercely blogged about by
ill-credentialed authorities. It’s no small irony that the very medium that is
hopelessly fragmenting human attention is simultaneously offering up some of
the necessary tools to heal us – that is, if you can separate the wheat from
the chaff.
Within
American Buddhism, the heart of this new transparency calls itself “Pragmatic
Dharma.” The influential Buddhist Geeks podcast and conference is at the center
of it. For the past few years, in popular interviews with dozens of scientists
and teachers, they talk openly about different aspects of the awakening
process, including frank testimonials of their own enlightenment experiences.
This is a culture of learning and experimenting and exploring together. The
Geeks believe – as do I – that the reticence and secrecy around spiritual
transformation is no longer helpful or productive.
How do
we know that all of these self-described enlightened practitioners and teachers
aren’t bullshitting us? We don’t. And we won’t until we find some identifying
neural signature in the brain, if such a signature even exists. I know several
neuroscientists working on this question right now.
In my
own case, I have stopped quibbling. People I’ve known for years tell me about
their enlightenment experiences and I believe them. I believe them because my
curiosity about what may be happening in the mind is greater than my allegiance
to an outdated and uninformed scientific consensus. Western psychology is still
outgrowing a reactive skepticism towards the subjective anecdote that it
inherited from behaviorism. Fortunately, this is changing. These days, there is
a growing appreciation among investigators that if you want to understand
consciousness – as opposed to just brain activity – you have to start taking
first-person reports seriously. This will soon include reports of
enlightenment.
Science
changes. That’s what it’s supposed to do. How it stands to change from
enlightenment is something I’ll address in my next column.