"Lectures on Mysticism" from The Varieties of Religious Experience -- by William James

We are pleased to excerpt William James’ lectures on mysticism from his book THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE. The original lectures are a delight to read. We can capture but a fraction of their spirit here, however we hope this post will compel you to read the original. James (1842-1910) was well-known as a philosopher, psychologist, and physiologist. He was an astute observer of experience, as well as an incisive thinker. He is often thought of as the father of modern psychology. Certain passages below resonate intriguingly with Thomas Metzinger’s “Out-of-body experiences as the origin of the concept of a “Soul’” excerpted previously.  

William James

One may say truly, I think, that personal religious experience has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness. ... How do we part off mystical states from other states? ... [I] propose to you four marks which, when an experience has them, may justify us in calling it mystical... .

1 Ineffability. ...The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression… . [I]ts quality must be directly experienced… . [M]ystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists.

2. Noetic quality. -- Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. ... [A]s a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.

3. Transiency. -- Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. ...Often, when faded, their quality can but imperfectly be reproduced in memory; but when they recur it is recognized; and from one recurrence to another it is susceptible of continuous development in what is felt as inner richness and importance.

4. Passivity. -- Although the oncoming of mystical states may be facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing the attention, or going through certain bodily performances, or in other ways…; yet when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.  … Some memory of their content always remains, and a profound sense of their importance. They modify the inner life of the subject between the times of their recurrence.

Our next step should be to gain acquaintance with some typical examples. … [P]henomena are best understood when placed within their series, studied in their germ and in their over-ripe decay... .

The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one. ... Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them. ... We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.

A more pronounced step forward on the mystical ladder is found in an extremely frequent phenomenon, that sudden feeling, namely, which sometimes sweeps over us, of having "been here before,"

As Tennyson writes:

Moreover, something is or seems
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams --
"Of something felt, like something here;
Of something done, I know not where;
Such as no language may declare.

A much more extreme state of mystical consciousness is described by J. A. Symonds; and probably more persons than we suspect could give parallels to it from their own experience.

It consisted in a gradual but swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time, sensation, and the multitudinous factors of experience which seem to qualify what we are pleased to call our Self. In proportion as these conditions of ordinary consciousness were subtracted, the sense of an underlying or essential consciousness acquired intensity. At last nothing remained but a pure, absolute, abstract Self. The universe became without form and void of content. But Self persisted, formidable in its vivid keenness, feeling the most poignant doubt about reality, ready, as it seemed, to find existence break as breaks a bubble round about it.

The next step into mystical states carries us into a realm that public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as pathological, though private practice and certain lyric strains of poetry seem still to bear witness to its ideality. I refer to the consciousness produced by intoxicants and anaesthetic, especially by alcohol. The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole....

Certain aspects of nature seem to have a peculiar power of awakening…mystical moods. Most of the striking cases which I have collected have occurred out of doors. ... I take this from Starbuck's manuscript collection:

[T]he consciousness of God's nearness came to me sometimes. I say God, to describe what is indescribable. ... I felt myself one with the grass, the trees, birds, insects, everything in Nature. I exulted in the mere fact of existence, of being a part of it all -- the drizzling rain, the shadows of the clouds, the tree-trunks, and so on. 

Here is a similar record from the memoirs of that interesting German idealist, Malwida von Meysenbug:

I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me, liberating and reconciling; and now again, as once before in distant days in the Alps of Dauphine, I was impelled to kneel down, this time before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the Infinite. I felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and knew now what prayer really is: to return from the solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is, to kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one imperishable. 

[F]rom the Autobiography of J. Trev[a]or.

For nearly an hour I walked along the road to the 'Cat and Fiddle,' and then returned. On the way back, suddenly, without warning, I felt that I was in Heaven -- an inward state of peace and joy and assurance indescribably intense, accompanied with a sense of being bathed in a warm glow of light, as though the external condition had brought about the internal effect -- a feeling of having passed beyond the body, though the scene around me stood out more clearly and as if nearer to me than before, by reason of the illumination in the midst of which I seemed to be placed. 

The writer adds...

The spiritual life...justifies itself to those who live it; but what can we say to those who do not understand? ... This, at least, we can say, that it is a life whose experiences are proved real to their possessor, because they remain with him when brought closest into contact with the objective realities of life. Dreams cannot stand this test. 

We have now seen enough of this cosmic or mystic consciousness, as it comes sporadically. We must next pass to its methodical cultivation as an element of the religious life. Hindus, Buddhists, Mohammedans, and Christians all have cultivated it methodically.

In India, training in mystical insight has been known from time immemorial under the name of yoga. Yoga means the experimental union of the individual with the divine. It is based on persevering exercise; and the diet, posture, breathing, intellectual concentration, and moral discipline vary slightly in the different systems which teach it.

[Quoting] from VIVEKANANDA, Raja Yoga, London, 1896.

All the different steps in yoga are intended to bring us scientifically to the superconscious state or Samadhi. ... Just as unconscious work is beneath consciousness, so there is another work which is above consciousness, and which, also, is not accompanied with the feeling of egoism. ... There is no feeling of I, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness, objectless, bodiless. 

The Buddhists used the word "samâdhi" as well as the Hindus; but "dhyâna" is their special word for higher states of contemplation. There seem to be four stages recognized in dhyâna. The first stage comes through concentration of the mind upon one point. It excludes desire, but not discernment or judgment: it is still intellectual. In the second stage the intellectual functions drop off, and the satisfied sense of unity remains. In the third stage the satisfaction departs, and indifference begins, along with memory a self-consciousness.  [Refer to the text for the fourth stage!]

In the Christian church there have always been mystics. ... The basis of the system is "orison" or meditation, the methodical elevation of the soul towards God. ...The first thing to be aimed at in orison is the mind's detachment from outer sensations, for these interfere with its concentration upon ideal things.

[Saint Teresa writes]

In the orison of union the soul is fully awake as regards God, but wholly asleep as regards things of this world and in respect of herself. During the short time the union lasts, she is as it were deprived of every feeling.... God establishes himself in the interior of this soul in such a way, that when she returns to herself, it is wholly impossible for her to doubt that she has been in God, and God in her. ...The deliciousness of some of these states seems to be beyond anything known in ordinary consciousness. I confess that it is all a mystery in which I am lost. 

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by Bernini, Basilica of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome

Do mystical states establish the truth of those theological affections in which the saintly life has its root? ... In spite of their repudiation of articulate self-description, mystical states in general assert a pretty distinct theoretic drift. ... We pass into mystical states from out of ordinary consciousness as from a less into a more, as from a smallness into a vastness, and at the same time as from an unrest to a rest. We feel them as reconciling, unifying states. They appeal to the yes-function more than to the no-function in us. In them the unlimited absorbs the limit. ...  In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think... .

Our own more "rational" beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in nature to that which mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have assured us of certain states of fact; but mystical experiences are as direct perceptions of fact for those who have them as any sensations ever were for us. The records show that even though the five senses be in abeyance in them, they are absolutely sensational in their epistemological quality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression -- that is, they are face to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist.

But more remains to be told, for religious mysticism is only one half of mysticism. The other half has no accumulated traditions except those which the text-books on insanity supply. Open any one of these and you will find abundant cases in which "mystical ideas" are cited as characteristic symptoms of enfeebled or deluded states of mind. In delusional insanity, paranoia, as they sometimes call it, we may have a diabolical mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down. ... It is evident that from the point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great subliminal or transmarginal region of which science is beginning to admit the existence, but of which so little is really known. ... Its value must be ascertained by empirical methods, so long as we are not mystics ourselves.

Did Meditating Make Us Human? -- by Matt J. Rossano

Matt Rossano’s article provides an interesting contrast to our previous two posts extracting Thomas Metzinger’s article on out of body experiences. Altered states here are seen as a prelude to the evolutionary development via Baldwinian selection of working memory and eventually the ability to symbolize, which characterizes modern humans. Rossano is a professor of Psychology at University of Southeastern Louisiana University. He is a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post (Link). His recent book is SUPERNATURAL SELECTION : HOW RELIGION EVOLVED, and a list of his recent publications can be found here. The original article contains more extensive citations.

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The thesis of this article is that this commonplace activity, which I will call campfire rituals of focused attention, created an important selective pressure in the evolution of the modern human mind. Ritualized gatherings before an open fire — repeated night after night, generation after generation for thousands of years — contributed significantly, though not necessarily exclusively, to the evolution of the enhanced working memory capacity required for symbolic thinking.

The scenario is grounded in the following five propositions.

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1. Convincing evidence of symbolism in the form of ceremonial tools, artwork and grave goods appears late in the archaeological record (largely after 50,000 bp) and post-dates the emergence of anatomically modern humans.

Late emergence of symbolism

In this article, ‘symbolism’ is Peirce’s definition, arbitrary referents based on cultural convention. Peircian symbolism is what appears to have arrived late in the archaeological record and it is this that required enhanced working memory. Genetic and fossil evidence points to the emergence of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) somewhere between 200,000 and 150,000 years bp in Africa . Some have argued that the relatively sudden appearance of sophisticated tools, burial with grave goods, and image-making in the European Upper Palaeolithic signifies a ‘revolution’ in human thought and behaviour . Peircian symbolism most likely did not occur until the Upper Palaeolithic, when grave goods, sophisticated tools, image making and what appear to be purely ceremonial artifacts arrive on the archaeological scene. For the purposes of the current model, what is pivotal is that the evidence for this‘higher-level’ symbolism emerges late and post-dates the arrival of anatomically modern humans.

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2. Recent work combining cognitive science and archaeology has built a compelling case for explaining the late emergence of symbolism as the result of a fortuitous genetic mutation (or combination of mutations) that enhanced human working memory capacity.

Fortuitous Mutation (s)

The ultimate mechanism [responsible for symbolism] must come down to a fortuitous genetic mutation that reorganized brain structure and function, thus giving Homo sapiens a cognitive advantage over other archaic hominin forms . While Klein typically talks in terms of a single genetic mutation (terminology, which for simplicity’s sake, I will retain), this change could have involved a series of mutations that affected the interaction of genes and, or, their manner of expression. Coolidge & Wynn (2001...) have elaborated on Klein’s proposal, arguing that the most likely target of this mutation would have been an enhancement of working memory capacity. In this context, working memory capacity refers to the ability to hold information in mind, especially information about behavioural procedures and intended goals, in spite of interfering stimuli or response competition .

Enhanced working memory capacity, however functionally envisioned, is a prerequisite to the emergence of symbolism. Our ancestors had an enhanced capacity to recall, consciously retain and manipulate information. This enhanced working memory capacity was essential to crossing the threshold to purely arbitrary or convention-based symbolism . To understand this level of purely arbitrary reference, one must be able to hold in mind both what the signifying image is perceptually and what it means conceptually, while at the same time understanding that these two are not the same.

The exact time of emergence is less important than when this change became widespread, which, I would argue, was not until around 50,000 bp, immediately prior to the emergence of symbolism.

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3.Evolutionary developmental biology indicates that genetic adaptation can sometimes follow somatic adaptation (the Baldwin effect). Put another way, environmental conditions that require bodily adaptation (such as high-altitude conditions which require the production of more red blood cells) simultaneously create selection pressure for genetic mutations that more permanently establish the adaptive phenotypic state.

The Baldwin effect updated

Environmentally induced somatic modifications (resulting from either learning or physiological adaptation) ... become heritable changes. According to this principle, acquired traits do not directly affect genes but these traits could create or importantly contribute to selective conditions that would, in time, genetically establish them in the population.... In other words, an initially environmentally induced trait eventually became encoded and transmitted genetically. .

This could provide a model for how hominins acquired increasingly complex cognitive skills. These skills may first have appeared as novel acquired traits induced by atypical environmental demands. Then, as those demands persisted, a Baldwinian process could have led to the traits becoming genetically heritable and stabilized. Over the course of hominin evolution, the atypical environmental demands were increasingly products of hominins themselves.

Wright (2004) has recently reviewed a range of studies providing support for the process of ‘stress-directed mutagensis’, where feedback mechanisms within the organism allow environmental stressors to target specific genes that must mutate in order to surmount the stress. Though a great deal is still to be learned about how mutations arise, it is becoming increasingly clear that dismissing them as simply random is too simple.

Modifications are more likely to arise in those systems that are under selection pressure — where the adaptive range of a physiological system is under stress. Any mutation or genetic reassortment that resets the range of a physiological system to a more adaptive level would then be positively selected by environmental conditions. Thus, a population of humans relocated to higher altitudes is biased toward the expression of any mutation that permanently resets their baseline levels of red blood cell production.

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4. Neuroscience studies indicate that meditation produces short-term and long-term effects on both the structure and function of those areas of the brain closely associated with working memory and focused attention such as the dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex.

Meditation and the brain

Recent brain-imaging and EEG studies have shown that areas in the frontal lobe of the brain associated with working memory and focused attention, especially the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate, are activated during meditation . [For example,] Newberg et al. (2001) found increased activation in the dorsolateral and orbital prefrontal cortices, anterior cingulate cortex, and the sensorimotor cortices of the brains of eight meditating subjects. [Moreover,] Carter et al. (2005) found that Tibetan monks experienced at one-point meditation (a type that involves focused attention on a single object) were able to exert conscious control over a typically automatic phenomenon of attention, binocular rivalry.

This accumulating body of research indicates that meditation produces long-term changes in those areas of the brain involved in attention and working memory. These areas are critical for the enhancement of working memory capacity. This enhancement may have given Homo sapiens a competitive edge over other hominins and produced the emergence of symbolism about 50,000 bp. However, it can rightly be pointed out that it seems quite unlikely that our ancestors of 100,000 years ago or more were engaging in one-point or compassionate meditation. While true, numerous other studies have shown that far more mundane memory and attention tasks also activate the same brain areas.

Numerous other studies with similarly simple cognitive demands have indicated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to be an important high-level filter of attention, sustaining cognitive energy on relevant information while suppressing the processing of and responding to irrelevant signals.

Campfire rituals practiced by our hominin ancestors need not have been as disciplined as those of Tibetan monks to have activated the brain regions important for attention and memory. However, they were probably more intensive than the tests used in typical neuroscience studies. Those most susceptible to the rituals’ physical and psychological healing effects reaped the greatest survival and reproductive advantage — a Baldwinian process. Finally, there is evidence to suggest that these conditions were unique to Homo sapiens and not a regular part of the social worlds of Neanderthals and other archaic hominins.

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5. Hypnotizability, or the ability to achieve a ritually-induced, health-enhancing, suggestibility-prone conscious state, is individually variable and heritable; and would have been fitness-enhancing in our ancestral past.

Shamanistic healing rituals

Strictly speaking, shamanism is a practice confined to cultures of the higher latitudes of Eurasia where the term originated. More broadly, however, the shaman is anyone who uses consciousness-altering ritual as a means of connecting with the spiritual world for the purpose of individual or community healing.

There is considerable evidence that shamanism (broadly defined) is humanity’s oldest form of religion. It is found in nearly all traditional societies. An increasing number of scholars agree that some of the Upper Palaeolithic cave art and artifacts reflect shamanistic rituals and, or, experiences . If so, they also suggest that shamanism pre-dates the Upper Palaeolithic, since the depiction reflects an already present system.

McClenon (1997; 2002) has marshalled considerable evidence indicating that those of our ancestors who were most susceptible to the beneficial physical and psychological effects of shamanistic rituals had a selective advantage over others in surviving illness or injury, overcoming debilitating emotional states and enduring the rigours of childbirth. Ritual healing is often highly effective for a range of maladies where psychological factors are involved, such as chronic pain, burns, bleeding, headaches, skin disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, and the discomforts and complications of childbirth .

Furthermore, only minimal verbal expression is required (if any at all) to add to the persuasive impact of the ritual (‘relax’, ‘heal’ etc.). Indeed, part of the power of spiritual healing is that it is something beyond words and logic. What is required for spiritual healing appears to be well within the behavioural and cognitive repertoire of our hominin ancestors: a belief in a healing spiritual power accessible through conscious-ness-altering ritual.

More than likely, it was the immediate positive psychological (ecstatic emotions/social bonding) and physical (placebo benefits, ‘miracles’) effects of these rituals that provided the motivation for enactment. What is critical is that these rituals required focused attention which activated those areas of the brain associated with attention and working memory.

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What made humans different?

These rituals may have been one of the few activities that consistently differentiated Homo sapiens from other contemporary hominins.

When Homo sapiens moved into Europe around 40,000 bp, it was for good. Neither Neanderthals nor cold conditions stopped them from laying claim to the entire continent. Whatever it was that changed them did not similarly affect Neanderthals. So what was the difference?

The evidence suggests that a capacity for symbolism was present in some nascent or measured form in Neanderthals and, under certain environmental conditions (such as close contact with Cro-Magnons), this capacity flowered; but apparently those conditions were not a regular aspect of the Neanderthal world prior to the Upper Palaeolithic. This again emphasizes the fact that something was different about the Homo sapiens world, something generally not present in that of other hominins.

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Why Neanderthals did not meditate

If the critical difference between Homo sapiens and other hominins was campfire rituals of focused attention, then why did Neanderthals not engage in this activity? Were they and other archaic hominins not just as likely to have been singing, chanting and encountering healing spirits around their campfires? Odd as it may seem, the answer to this seems to be no. Evidence suggests that Neanderthals had neither the time nor the energy to engage in such activities. They lived hard lives— harder, apparently, than Cro-Magnons’.

They did not invest as much as Cro-Magnons in home bases and the activities associated with them, including (and especially) communal ones involving a central fire.

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Notes

Intensified or altered states are characterized by increasingly non-rational processing and internally-directed focus ranging from fantasy to hypnagogic imagery to sensory hallucinations.

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Out-of-Body Experiences as the Origin of the Concept of a "Soul" Part Two - Thomas Metzinger

This is Part 2 of a two-part post extracting Metzinger’s article. Part 1 characterizes out of body experiences and explores their relationship to the experience of self. In the passages in this post, Meztinger places out of body experiences in a historical context, considers their scientific explanation, and examines their relationship to dualism. Like Pim Van Lommel’s article on near-death experiences we extracted below, Metzinger's article considers an unusual phenomenon within a scientific framework that is rigorous but at the same time open.

What is the “proto-concept of mind”? In many cultures we simultaneously find prescientific theories about a “breath of life”, e.g., the Hebrew ruach, the Arabic ruh, the Latin spiritus, the Greek pneuma or the Indian prana and the five koshas, respectively, etc. (for historical details and further references see Verbeke 1974, Schrott 1974). Typically this is a spatially extended entity, keeping the body alive and leaving it during phases of unconsciousness and after death. It has a material aspect, though more subtle than that of the physical body. (58)

The Western history of the concept of mind can be read as a history of a continuous differentiation of a traditionalistic, mythical, sensory proto-theory of mind which gradually led to a more and more abstract principle. Finally, culminating in Hegel, mind is conceived as devoid of all spatial and temporal properties. (57)

… In non-scientific contexts, we all know what we mean by a “soul”: Our soul is the innermost and essential part of ourselves; it is the prime candidate for the “true self”; it is the phenomenal locus of identity; it bears a deep relation to the emotional layers of our self-model, to the emotional core of our personality. For many of us it is something of which we secretly hope that it may survive physical death, because it is not identical to our body. (58)

...There is a well-known class of phenomenal states in which the experiencing person undergoes the untranscendable and highly realistic conscious experience of leaving his or her physical body, usually in the form of an ethereal double, and moving outside of it. (59)

These states correspond to a class (or at least a strong cluster) of intimately related phenomenal models of reality characterized by a visual representation of one’s own body from a perceptually impossible, externalized third-person perspective (e.g., lying on a bed or the road below oneself) plus a second representation of one’s own body, typically (but not in all cases) freely hovering above or floating in space. This second body-model is the locus of the phenomenal self. It forms the “true” focus of one’s phenomenal experience and also functions as an integrated representation of all kinesthetic qualia and all non-visual forms of proprioception. Such experiences are called out-of-body-experiences or OBEs…(59)

It is not at all inconceivable that there are physically or emotionally stressful situations, in which an information-processing system is forced to introduce a “representational division of labor” by distributing different representational functions into two or more distinct self-models (in what was previously called “multiple personality disorder”, see Metzinger 2003a, section 7.2.4). The OBE may be an instance of transient functional modularization, of a purposeful separation of levels of representational content in the PSM. (69)

For instance, if cut off from somatosensory input, or if flooded with stressful signals and information threatening the overall integrity of the self-model as such, it may be advantageous to integrate the ongoing conscious representation of higher cognitive functions like attention, conceptual thought and volitional selection processes into a separate model of the self. This may allow for a high degree of integrated processing, that is, for “mental clarity,” by functionally encapsulating and thereby modularizing different functions like proprioception or attention and cognition in order to preserve at least some of these functions in a life-threatening situation. Almost all necessary system-related information is still globally available, and higher-order processes like attention and cognition can still operate on it as it is presented in an integrated manner. (69)

Blackmore, … explicitly operating under the information-processing approach and analyzing the representational needs and resources of persons undergoing OBEs,… arrives at a theory describing OBEs as episodic models of reality, constructed by brains cut off from sensory input during stressful situations and having to fall back to internal sources of information. For instance, she draws attention to the remarkable fact that visual cognitive maps reconstructed from memory are organized from a bird’s eye perspective in the majority of subjects. She also points out an important phenomenological feature of intended bodily motion in the OBE-state: frequently, the way in which OBE subjects move around in the currently active model of reality is not smooth, as in walking or flying, but occurs in discrete jumps from one salient point in the cognitive map to the next. Blackmore’s observation emphasizes that, whatever else OBEs are, they certainly are internally simulated behavioral spaces. This phenomenological observation indicates that frequently these behavioral spaces, typically simulated by a brain under great stress, are spatially underdetermined – i.e., they are coarse-grained internal simulations of landmarks and salient spots in certain perceptual scenes that were seen and acted upon at an earlier stage in life. (72)

However, taking a more careful look at abstract, non-spatial aspects of the phenomenal self in these states, one discovers how it is not completely empty. An attentional and cognitive subject engaging in selective processing is modeled, and actually in existence: OBE subjects generally have good control over their attentional and their thought processes as such, even if almost all the contents of these processes may be hallucinatory. (73)

Let me point to a logical possibility, which is rarely noticed: OBEs may, at the same time, be both confabulatory states or complex hallucinations and information-bearing states correctly representing certain aspects of the environment. (78)

… OBEs show that self-models are not necessarily subject-models: You can represent something as your own body, without representing it as an agent with which you are identical, and you can do so under a perceptual model of the subject-object-relation. OBEs are like a “perceptualized” variant of reflexive self-consciousness. OBEs constitute a strong argument for the thesis that, while an accompanying bodily self-model may be fully “confabulated” by subpersonal mechanisms fighting for global coherence, the phenomenal locus of the self is always where the locus of cognitive and attentional agency is (see section 3.1). Interestingly, this is not true of bodily agency (recall the example of the marathon runner above). It is easy to conceive of systems that are not cognitive, but only attentional agents (for instance, animals) and nevertheless have OBEs. Therefore, the experience of attentional agency may be the core of phenomenal selfhood and perspectivalness and the origin of all consciously experienced intentionality. (77)

… It is as if, in situations where the self-model can no longer be anchored in internal somatosensory input or a low-level egocentric frame of reference (see Metzinger 2003a, section 5.4), higher cognitive functions like attentional processing or categorical thought simply take over in centering the global model of reality. In this way some persons undergoing an OBE truly are disembodied, thinking selves in a neurophenomenologically reduced version of the original Cartesian sense. However, it is not subjectively available to them that all this is just a model of reality generated by their central nervous system. (77)

…Even if a reductive explanation of all types of OBEs as deviant configurations of the human PSM should be achieved in the future, and even if the hypothesis about the history of the concept of a soul presented here is correct, it still remains logically possible that souls do exist. We would then not need the concept of a soul any more for the purposes of science or philosophy, because it would not play an explanatory role in any rational, data-driven theory any more. We would also have a deeper understanding of its genesis in human culture. But from a strictly logical point of view it remains possible that one day we discover a sense in which it is not an empty concept at all. (76)

This again leads to a number of issues of a more general philosophical interest. For anyone who actually had that type of experience it is almost impossible not to become an ontological dualist afterwards. In all their realism, cognitive clarity and general coherence, these phenomenal experiences almost inevitably lead the experiencing subject to conclude that conscious experience can, as a matter of fact, take place independently of the brain and the body: what is phenomenally possible in such a clear and vivid manner must also be metaphysically possible or actually the case. Although many OBE reports are certainly colored by the interpretational schemes offered by the metaphysical ideologies available to experiencing subjects in their time and culture, the experiences as such must be taken seriously. Although their conceptual and ontological interpretations are often seriously misguided, the truthfulness of centuries of reports about ecstatic states, soul-travel and second bodies as such can hardly be doubted. (78)

In conclusion, first-person reports about OBEs are available in abundance not only from all times, but also from many different cultures. There is a culturally invariant core to the phenomenon which obviously forms a coherent cluster of properties. The experience of a soul-like entity, an ethereal or astral body leaving the physical body during sleep, after accidents and in death can be called a “phenomenological archetype” of mankind. (79)

The functional core of this kind of phenomenal state is formed by a culturally invariant neuropsychological potential common to all human beings. Under certain conditions, the brains of all human beings, through specific properties of their functional and representational architecture, which have yet to be empirically investigated, allow for this set of phenomenal models of reality. (79)

Phenomenal states such as OBEs, which indicate a commonality in the neurofunctional architecture underlying the process of conscious human self-modeling, are the historical root of the proto-concept of mind. The proto-concept of mind eventually developed into Cartesian dualism and idealistic theories of consciousness. In short, the particular phenomenal content of OBEs led human beings to believe in a soul.(Let us simply call this the “soul-hypothesis.”…Given the epistemic resources of early mankind, it was a highly rational belief to assume the possibility of disembodied existence. And it was the PSM of homo sapiens which made this step possible.) (79)

The history of the concept of mind is a history of increasing differentiation and abstractness. Initially there was a theory of something concrete, an ethereal and spatially extended double, a breath of life. Eventually we find something entirely unworldly, an abstract, ideal principle. It is remarkable how the best theories of mind available today again turn it into a concrete process, fully endowed with temporal and spatial properties. However, in the light of contemporary cognitive neuroscience it is even more remarkable how, at the beginning of human theorizing about mind and consciousness, we find a very similar basic motive across very different cultural contexts: the idea of a “subtle body” which is independent of the physical body and the true carrier of higher mental functions like attention and cognition (Mead 1919). (80-81)

Taken as an ontological metaphor, the phenomenology of OBEs inevitably leads to dualism, and to the concrete idea of an invisible, weightless, but spatially extended second body. This, then, may actually be the folk-phenomenological ancestor of the soul, and of the philosophical proto-concept of mind: The soul is the OBE-PSM. (81)

Centuries of phenomenological reports describing it as a subtle body pointed in the right direction, and now we begin to see how it actually is a purely informational structure modeling bodily self-experience in cases of absent or disintegrated somatosensory/vestibular input. (81)

Out-of-Body Experiences as the Origin of the Concept of a "Soul" Part One - Thomas Metzinger

Philosopher Thomas Metzinger argues that out of body experiences are “the proto-concept of mind;…they are what led human beings to believe in a soul.” We have extracted his essay, originally published in the journal Mind and Matter in 2005, into two consecutive posts. This the first characterizes out of body experiences and explores their implications with respect to the experience of self. We have rearranged some of the material to fit our two post format. The numbers in parenthesis correspond to the page numbers in article. Metzinger is the head of the Theoretical Philosophy Group at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz Germany. His most recent book is The Ego Tunnel. (Reprinted with permission)

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The bus to the train station had already been late. And now you have even queued up in a line at the wrong ticket counter! Nevertheless you manage to reach your train just in time, finding an empty compartment and, completely exhausted, drop into the seat. In a slightly unfocused and detached state of mind you are now observing the passengers sitting in the train on the other side of the platform. Suddenly you feel how your own train starts to move, very slowly at first, but accompanied by a continuous acceleration, which you can feel in your own body. Two or three seconds later, with the same degree of suddenness, your bodily sensation disappears and you become aware that it actually is the other train, which has now started to slowly leave the train station (see also Metzinger 1993, p. 185f). (65)

Such an experience is a very rudimentary form of an OBE, a hallucinated bodily self. The center of your global model of reality was briefly filled by a kinesthetic and proprioceptive hallucination, a non-veridical model of the weight and acceleration of your body, erroneously activated by your brain. The dominating visual model of your environment, largely formed by the input offered through the “picture frame“ of the train window, was underdetermined. In the special input configuration driving your visual system it allowed for two coherent interpretations: either it is the other train, or it is the train in which you are sitting, which has just started to move. The visual model of reality allowed for two equally consistent interpretations. At the same time there was a state of general physical and emotional arousal, accompanied by an unconscious state of expectancy about what is very likely going to happen next, and very soon. (61-62)

The information-processing system, which you are, selected one of the two possible interpretations in accordance with constraints imposed by a preexisting internal context and, as a system that always tries to maximize overall coherence, “decided” to simultaneously activate a suitable self-model, one that can be integrated into the new phenomenal model of the world without causing any major problems. Unfortunately, the chosen model of the world was wrong… A possibility was depicted as a reality. (61-62)

They frequently occur during extreme sports, for instance in high-altitude climbers or marathon runners (Alvarado 2000, p. 184):

A Scottish woman wrote that, when she was 32 years old, she had an OBE while training for a marathon. “After running approximately 12–13 miles . . . I started to feel as if I wasn’t looking through my eyes but from somewhere else. . . . I felt as if something was leaving my body, and although I was still running along looking at the scenery, I was looking at myself running as well. My ‘soul’ or whatever, was floating somewhere above my body high enough up to see the tops of the trees and the small hills.” (65)

They also frequently occur during sleep.

The process of detachment started at the fingertips, in a way that could be clearly felt, almost with a perceptible sound, a kind of crackling. It was precisely the movement which I actually intended to carryout with my physical hands. With this movement, I detached from my body and floated out of it with the head leading. I gained an upright position, as if I was now almost weightless. Nevertheless I had a body consisting of real limbs. You have certainly seen how elegantly a jellyfish moves through the water. I could now move around with the same ease. I lay down horizontally in the air and floated across the bed, like a swimmer, who has pushed himself from the edge of a swimming pool. A delightful feeling of liberation arose within me. But soon I was seized by the ancient fear common to all living creatures, the fear of losing my physical body. It sufficed to drive me back into my body.(64)

A 29-year-old woman has had absence seizures since the age of 12 years. The seizures occur five times a week without warning. They consist of a blank stare and brief interruption of ongoing behavior, sometimes with blinking. She had an autoscopic experience at age 19 years during the only generalized tonoclonic seizure she has ever had. While working in a department store she suddenly fell, and she said, “... the next thing I knew I was floating just below the ceiling. I could see myself lying there. I wasn’t scared; it was too interesting. I saw myself jerking and overheard my boss telling someone to ‘punch the timecard out’ and that she was going with me to the hospital. Next thing, I was in space and could see Earth. I felt a hand on my left shoulder, and when I went to turn around, I couldn’t. Then I looked down and I had no legs; I just saw stars. I stayed there for a while until some inner voice told me to go back to the body. I didn’t want to go because it was gorgeous up there, it was warm – not like heat, but security. Next thing, I woke up in the emergency room.” No abnormalities were found on the neurological examination. Skull CT scan was normal. The EEG demonstrated generalized bursts of 3/s spike-and-wave discharges. (66)

The prevalence of OBEs ranges from 10% in the general population to 25% in students, with extremely high incidences in particular subpopulations like, to take just one example, 42% in schizophrenics (Blackmore 1986; for an overview and further references see Alvarado 1986, 2000, p. 18p, and Irwin 1985, p. 174p). However, it would be false to assume that OBEs typically occur in people suffering from severe psychiatric disorders or neurological deficits. Quite the contrary, most OBE-reports come from ordinary people in everyday life situations. (64)

At present it is not clear whether the concept of an OBE possesses one clearly delineated set of necessary and sufficient conditions. The concept of an OBE may in the future turn out to be a cluster concept constituted by a whole range of diverging (possibly overlapping) subsets of phenomenological constraints, each forming a set of sufficient, but not necessary, conditions. On the other hand the OBE clearly is something like a phenomenological prototype. There is a core to the phenomenon, as can be seen from the simple fact that many readers will have already heard about in one way or another. (59)

One can offer a representationalist analysis of OBEs by introducing the concept of a “phenomenal self-model” (PSM; for more on the concept of a PSM, see Metzinger 2003a). APSM is an integrated, conscious representation of the organism as a whole, including not only its spatial features, but also those of its own psychological properties to which it has access. An important feature of the human PSM is that it is almost entirely transparent. This means that we, as the organisms activating the PSM in their own central nervous system, cannot recognize it as a model: We become naive realists with regard to its content, the transparent representational content of the PSM is simply what we experience and later refer to as “our” conscious self. (59-60)

Given this conceptual background, we can analyze OBEs a class of deviant self-models. On the level of conscious self-representation a prototypical feature of this class of deviant phenomenal self-models seems to be the coexistence of (a) a more or less vertical representation of the bodily self, from an external visual perspective, which does not function as the center of the global model of reality, and (b) a second self-model, which according to subjective experience largely integrates proprioceptive perceptions – although, interestingly, weight sensations only to a lesser degree – and which possesses special properties of shape and form that may or may not be veridical. Both models of the experiencing system are located within the same spatial frame of reference (this is why they are out-of -body-experiences). (60)

…You see your own body, and you recognize it as your own, but presently it is not the body as subject, the body as the locus of knowledge and of lived, conscious experience. (67) OBEs, phenomenologically, are not states of disembodiment. On the contrary, there always seems to be a spatially located phenomenal self, even if its embodiment is reduced to a pure spatial point of visuo-attentional agency. (68) In general it seems safe to say that prototypical OBEs are fully transparent states. The model of reality generated during the experience is not experienced as a model, although in experienced subjects and practitioners this fact may well be cognitively available during the episode. It is precisely the transparency of OBEs, which has led generations of experiencers and theoreticians in many cultures and for many centuries in the past to naive-realistic interpretations of this deviant form of phenomenal self-modeling. However, many OBE subjects also report a “dreamlike quality, as if being awake in a dream”. (68)

The physical body viewed from an external perspective is very rarely distorted or changed in shape and size. However, the subject component of the intentionality-relation modeled in these states may vary greatly (note how just the opposite principle holds for ordinary waking states). Some OBE subjects see or feel themselves in a weightless replica of their original body, others experience themselves as being in no body at all or in a kind of indeterminate form, such as a ball of light or an energy pattern (Alvarado 1997, p. 18; Green 1968) or even as “pure consciousness” (Alvarado 2000, p. 186). (70)

This may indicate that spatial content is not strictly necessary in realizing the function fulfilled by the second self-model for the system as a whole. In other words, those higher functions such as attention, cognition and agency, which are integrated by the “dissociated” self, now are only weakly embodied functions. In order to be carried out they do not need the integration into a spatially characterized, explicit body image. Arguably, attentional and cognitive agency can functionally be decoupled from the process of autonomic self-regulation and the spatial self-representation necessary for generating motor behavior. Conceptually, this is an important insight about the human mind. As it is plausible to assume that also non-cognitive creatures like animals could undergo the type of fully disembodied OBEs described above, we may conclude that attentional agency actually is one of the essential core properties underlying the conscious experience of selfhood. Spatial self-representation and cognitive self-reference are not necessary for selfhood. (70)

Medical Evidence for Near Death Experiences: A Reply to Shermer - by Pim van Lommel

Dr. Pim van Lommel, one of the presenters at the Conference on Neuroscience, Consciousness, and Spirituality that was the subject of our last post, is a clinician who studies near death experiences. He and his colleagues published a landmark study in The Lancet in 2001 entitled “Near-death experiences in survivors of cardiac arrest; a prospective study in the Netherlands.” Michael Shermer, in his article "The Demon-Haunted Brain" in Scientific American, wrote that the Lancet study ‘delivered a blow’ to the view that consciousness and the brain are separable. The following post is an abridged version of Dr. van Lommel’s response to Shermer. Dr. van Lommel’s book, ENDLESS CONSCIOUSNESS will be published in English in 2010. (The references refer to the original article. Reprinted with permission of the author.)

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We performed our prospective study in 344 survivors of cardiac arrest to study the frequency, the cause and the content of near-death experience (NDE). A near-death experience is the reported memory of all impressions during a special state of consciousness, including specific elements such as out-of-body experience, pleasant feelings, and seeing a tunnel, a light, deceased relatives, or a life review. In our study 282 patients (82%) did not have any memory of the period of unconsciousness, 62 patients (18%) however reported a NDE with all the “classical” elements. Between the two groups there was no difference in the duration of cardiac arrest or unconsciousness, intubation, medication, fear of death before cardiac arrest, gender, religion, education or foreknowledge about NDE. More frequent NDE was reported at age younger than 60 years, more than one cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) during hospital stay, and previous NDE. Patients with memory defects after lengthy and complicated CPR reported less frequent NDE.

There are several theories that should explain the cause and content of NDE. The physiologic explanation: the NDE is experienced as a result of anoxia in the brain, possibly also caused by release of endomorphines, or NMDA receptor blockade.

In our study all patients had a cardiac arrest, they were clinically dead, unconscious, caused by insufficient blood supply to the brain because of inadequate blood circulation, breathing, or both. If in this situation CPR is not started within 5-10 minutes, irreparable damage is done to the brain and the patient will die. According to this theory, all patients in our study should have had an NDE, they all were clinical dead due to anoxia of the brain caused by inadequate blood circulation to the brain, but only 18% reported NDE.

The psychological explanation: NDE is caused by fear of death. But in our study only a very small percentage of patients said they had been afraid the seconds preceding the cardiac arrest, it happened too suddenly to realize what occurred to them. However, 18 % of the patients reported NDE. And also the given medication made no difference.

We know that patients with cardiac arrest are unconscious within seconds, but how do we know that the electro-encephalogram (EEG) is flat-lined in those patients, and how can we study this?

Complete cessation of cerebral circulation is found in cardiac arrest due to ventricular fibrillation (VF) during threshold testing at implantation of internal defibrillators. This complete cerebral ischaemic model can be used to study the result of anoxia of the brain.

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In cardiac arrest global anoxia of the brain occurs within seconds. Timely and adequate CPR reverses this functional loss of the brain because definitive damage of the brain cells, resulting in cell death, has been prevented. Long lasting anoxia, caused by cessation of blood flow to the brain for more than 5-10 minutes, results in irreversable damage and extensive cell death in the brain. This is called brain death, and most patients will ultimately die.

In acute myocardial infarction the duration of cardiac arrest (VF) on the CCU is usually 60-120 seconds, on the cardiac ward 2-5 minutes, and in out-of-hospital arrest it usually exceeds 5-10 minutes. Only during threshold testing of internal defibrillators or during electro physiologic stimulation studies will the duration of cardiac arrest hardly exceed 30-60 seconds.

From these studies we know that in our prospective study of patients that have been clinically dead (VF on the ECG) no electric activity of the cortex of the brain (flat EEG) must have been possible, but also the abolition of brain stem activity like the loss of the corneareflex, fixed dilated pupils and the loss of the gag reflex is a clinical finding in those patients. However, patients with an NDE can report a clear consciousness, in which cognitive functioning, emotion, sense of identity, and memory from early childhood was possible, as well as perception from a position out and above their “dead” body. Because of the sometimes reported and verifiable out-of -body experiences, like the case of the dentures reported in our study, we know that the NDE must happen during the period of unconsciousness, and not in the first or last second of this period.

So we have to conclude that NDE in our study was experienced during a transient functional loss of all functions of the cortex and of the brainstem. It is important to mention that there is a well documented report of a patient with constant registration of the EEG during cerebral surgery for an gigantic cerebral aneurysm at the base of the brain, operated with a body temperature between 10 and 15 degrees, she was put on the heart-lung machine, with VF, with all blood drained from her head, with a flat line EEG, with clicking devices in both ears, with eyes taped shut, and this patient experienced an NDE with an out-of-body experience, and all details she perceived and heard could later be verified. (8)

Credit: NASA, ESA, T. Megeath (University of Toledo) and M. Robberto (STScI)
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/nebula/pr2006001q/

There is also a theory that consciousness can be experienced independently from the normal body-linked waking consciousness. The current concept in medical science states that consciousness is the product of the brain. This concept, however, has never been scientifically proven. Research on NDE pushes us at the limits of our medical concepts of the range of human consciousness and the relationship between consciousness and memories with the brain.

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Interrupting the electrical fields of local neuronal networks in parts of the cortex also disturbs the normal function of the brain, because by localized electrical stimulation of the temporal and parietal lobe during surgery for epilepsy the neurosurgeon and Nobel prize winner W. Penfield could sometimes induce flashes of recollection of the past (never a complete life review), experiences of light, sound or music, and rarely a kind of out-of-body experience. These experiences did not produce any transformation.(15-16) After many years of research he finally reached the conclusion that it is not possible to localize memories inside the brain. Olaf Blanke also recently described in Nature a patient with induced OBE by inhibition of cortical activity caused by more intense external electrical stimulation of the gyrus angularis in a patient with epilepsy (17).

The effect of the external magnetic or electrical stimulation is dependent of the amount of energy given. There may be no clinical effect or sometimes stimulation is seen when only a small amount of energy is given, for instance during stimulation of the motoric cortex. But during “stimulation” with higher energy inhibition of local cortical functions occurs by extinction of the electrical and magnetic fields resulting in inhibition of local neuronal networks (personal communication Blanke). Also in the patient described by Blanke in Nature stimulation with higher electric energy was given, resulting in inhibition of the function of the local neuronal networks in the gyrus angularis.

And when for instance the occipital visual cortex is stimulated by TMS, this results not in a better sight, but instead it causes temporary blindness by inhibition of this part of the cortex. We have to conclude that localized artificial stimulation with real photons (electrical or magnetic energy) disturb and also inhibit the constant changing electrical and magnetic fields of our neuronal networks, and so influence and inhibit the normal function of our brain.

In trying to understand this concept of mutual interaction between the “invisible and not measurable” consciousness, with its enormous amount of information, and our visible, material body it seems wise to compare it with modern worldwide communication.

There is a continuous exchange of objective information by means of electromagnetic fields (real photons) for radio, TV, mobile telephone, or laptop computer. We are unaware of the innumerable amounts of electromagnetic fields that constantly, day and night, exist around us and through us as well as through structures like walls and buildings. We only become aware of these electromagnetic informational fields the moment we use our mobile telephone or by switching on our radio, TV or laptop. What we receive is not inside the instrument, nor in the components, but thanks to the receiver the information from the electromagnetic fields becomes observable to our senses and hence perception occurs in our consciousness. The voice we hear in our telephone is not inside the telephone. The concert we hear in our radio is transmitted to our radio. The images and music we hear and see on TV is transmitted to our TV set. The internet is not located inside our laptop. We can receive at about the same time what is transmitted with the speed of light from a distance of some hundreds or thousands of miles. And if we switch off the TV set, the reception disappears, but the transmission continues. The information transmitted remains present within the electromagnetic fields. The connection has been interrupted, but it has not vanished and can still be received elsewhere by using another TV set. Again, we do not realize us the thousands of telephone calls, the hundreds of radio and TV transmissions, as well as the internet, coded as electromagnetic fields, that exist around us and through us.

Could our brain be compared with the TV set that electromagnetic waves (photons) receives and transforms into image and sound, as well as with the TV camera that image and sound transforms into electromagnetic waves (photons)? This electromagnetic radiation holds the essence of all information, but is only conceivable to our senses by suited instruments like camera and TV set.

The informational fields of our consciousness and of our memories, both evaluating by our experiences and by the informational imput from our sense organs during our lifetime, are present around us as electrical and/or magnetic fields [possible virtual photons? (18)], and these fields only become available to our waking consciousness through our functioning brain and other cells of our body.

So we need a functioning brain to receive our consciousness into our waking consciousness. And as soon as the function of brain has been lost, like in clinical death or in brain death, with iso-electricity on the EEG, memories and consciousness do still exist, but the reception ability is lost. People can experience their consciousness outside their body, with the possibility of perception out and above their body, with identity, and with heightened awareness, attention, well-structured thought processes, memories and emotions. And they also can experience their consciousness in a dimension where past, present and future exist at the same moment, without time and space, and can be experienced as soon as attention has been directed to it (life review and preview), and even sometimes they come in contact with the “fields of consciousness” of deceased relatives. And later they can experience their conscious return into their body.

Michael Shermer states that, in reality, all experience is mediated and produced by the brain, and that so-called paranormal phenomena like out-of body experiences are nothing more than neuronal events. The study of patients with NDE, however, clearly shows us that consciousness with memories, cognition, with emotion, self-identity, and perception out and above a life-less body is experienced during a period of a non-functioning brain (transient pancerebral anoxia).

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A Watershed Event: Neuroscience, Consciousness, and Spirituality - by Robert K. Forman

Conference, July 2-4, 2008, Freiburg, Germany

This article by Robert K. Forman, of The Forge Institute, summarizes a recent and important conference on neuroscience, consciousness, and spirituality. Its purpose was "to explore methodologies of inner experience, and explore consciousness, not only from the neuroscientific point of view but from all points of view, including the transpersonal and the nondogmatic." Many presenters addressed questions that resonate with those raised by the excerpt from His Holiness the Dalai Lama's book in our prior post. For example--- in the context of quantum physics---the previous post asks if the 'apparatus' or what it detects is more real! In the future, we hope to post about some of the work described in the summary of the conference. The article was originally published by the JOURNAL OF CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES, 15, No. 8, 2008, pp. 110–15. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Frieburg (Germany) was far away from my home near New York City, and I was dreading going. I had heard by way of the grapevine that there would be a number of materialistic reductionists there; as the token religionist, I wasn’t looking forward to being bludgeoned or even worse, ignored. But there we were, happily ensconced in our pleasantly courtyarded Freiburg hotel, 30 of us, mostly men, mostly scientists, and mostly non-reductionists. And all open minded about the connections between spirituality, neurophysiology and consciousness.

I was to speak last to this ‘Meeting of Experts’. I was glad, for my planned remarks were aimed primarily at the ‘materialists’ who were not there; I would have been preaching to the choir. So going last encouraged me to listen well throughout and speak to what I was hearing. And I was glad because what I was hearing was as profound, as new, and as inspiring as it was coherent. I was indeed inspired enough to offer an summary of the surprising, exciting consensus I heard over the two days.

We humanists don’t often offer hypotheses, certainly not to august bodies of scientists. But I felt emboldened. After all, the purpose of the conference was to address the questions, ‘Can a modern day neuroscientific, functionalist or emergentist model of consciousness accommodate spiritual experiences? … What would a model of consciousness have to look like that is both true to our modern scientific knowledge and phenomena reported by spiritual traditions?’ As Harold Walach, our kindly and well organized chairman, put it, we were there to explore methodologies of inner experience, and explore consciousness, not only from the neuroscientific point of view but from all points of view, including the transpersonal and the nondogmatic. Or as youthful Antoine Lutz put it, we were there to ‘take subjectivity seriously.’ So that made me, someone who studies spiritual experiences, in as good a position to hypothesize as the next fellow.

So, being welcomed and being last, I offered the following as the emerging consensus I was hearing in the group. Since it was quite well received, I offer it here as a summary of what went on. We make no claims about universality. All positions about consciousness were not represented in the room. We were all folks who are interested in and open minded about spirituality; and God knows not everyone is. So I offer it here more modestly, as an hypothesis perhaps. Or, as clear eyed Jonathan Schooler put it, as a ‘bold thesis for us to consider’.

"Absolution of the Wind", © E. Corbato, 2009 www.ecorbato.com

1. Consciousness is fundamental element of reality, like an additional dimension.

_ Jonathan Schooler, Harold Walach and many folks in private conversations suggested that consciousness may exist in itself.

_ It is outside of time, pre-linguistic, yet somehow witness to time. Pim van Lommel, the belle of the ball, studies Near Death Experiences. He described his meticulous research which found that near death experiences (NDEs) are experienced as outside of time. Ernst Pöppel suggested that consciousness forms impressions that build towards language within a 3 second window; I offered that mystical experiences are experienced as outside of time.

_ As a fundamental element of reality, consciousness is non local or spread out. It is experienced by mystics as just that, non local or spread out. NDEs are experienced as interdeterminately beyond our human body; one experiences oneself as rising beyond the body. Brian Lancaster, in a fetching discussion of the connections between neurophysiology and Kabbalah, suggested that we can move from the personal to the divine indexing system.

_ The field of consciousness is parallel in some way to the quantum vacuum field. The theory of consciousness we were developing as an independent field out of time may connects with the quantum field in some way. Perhaps the connection is on the level of ions flowing in and out of the membranes in the brain, suggested Henry Stapp in a demanding talk on the role of physics in Quantum Collapse. There was no agreement in the room on how consciousness may connect with or parallel the quantum vacuum field.

_ Jonathan Schooler, in what was probably the most creative offering of the conference, showed a video of consciousness as like wave moving through time, and suggested that mystical experiences are like ‘riding a tidal wave of consciousness.’ From what I know of mystical experiences, however, consciousness is experienced by such people as more like a field than a wave. Both Schooler and myself suggest that consciousness is whole and undivided; that for which there is movement.

2. Consciousness is mediated by the brain, not excreted by it.

_ Throughout the conference we heard phrases suggesting that consciousness is a ‘transducer’ or like a ‘radio receiver’ or a ‘relay station’.

_ Pim suggested that the brain is a ‘conveyor not producer’. Jeffrey Schwartz, with his typically vivacious energy, exhorted ‘It ain’t in the brain, it ain’t in the brain!’

_ Matthais Braeunig, a youthful member of our hosting team, said ‘consciousness takes place with the help of the brain, but is not within it. Brains’, he added, ‘are transducing consciousness’.

_ Hartmann Romer was ill; in his presentation, his alter ego suggested that there is a ‘non local correlation between consciousness and the brain’.

_ Mario Beauregard suggested that there is no one sub organ like the thalamus that is active in the spiritual process, but rather there is a complex multi dimensional process. That’s why, suggested Antoine Lutz, that in meditation we see greater coherence across large brain areas, and high ‘amplitude gamma synchronicity’. This implies that the whole brain may be involved in some way in the transducing process.

3. Consciousness is independent of brain processes. (This stems from principle 1 & 2)

_ ‘As the field of consciousness is experienced through consciousness- transducing brains,’ said Matthais Braeunig. ‘Consciousness appears to exist independently of the brain, though it remains unobservable unless transduced by brains.’

_ Most so called anomalous experiences, often ignored or ridiculed by the scientific community, point to the possibility that consciousness is independent of the brain. Distant viewing and predictive (future) viewing, were mentioned.

_ Pim’s research on Near Death Experiences, which are sometimes veridical, clearly suggests that people can have experiences even when there is effectively no brain activity.

_ Thomas Metzinger described his creative studies on Out of Body Experiences (OBEs); they suggest that human beings can have experiences beyond the body.

_ Mystical experiences sometimes carry the sense of being non local or spread out beyond the body. There is brain activity during them, as Mario Beauregard effectively described, but this sense may reinforce the claim that awareness is not limited to our bodies. As Walach suggested, mystics can be aware of themselves and of the infinite, even simultaneously, which reinforces the hypothesis that consciousness is not limited to brain or egoic processes.

4. Our ability to connect with that which is larger may be a normal state of human beings.

_ In one of the most stimulating talks of the gathering, Matt Rossano took us back to the earliest days of hominid life, when Shamans brought people to health by having them focus their attention around the fire. In effect, he said, our ability to connect with that which is larger may have been one of the distinguishing capacities of human beings, as on of the original capacities that gave early human beings an advantage over other species.

_ Over time this ability to focus on that which is beyond led to our ability to hyper-focus.

_ In this hyper focus, we lost sense of the whole as we developed more and more automatized and culturally trained cognitive patterns. Thus enculturation may have overwhelmed our early ability to open to what is larger.

_ Thus as Arthur Deikman points out elsewhere, meditation may serve as a de automatization process, making it a way to recover that which is more fundamentally ours. Metzinger said effectively the same thing when saying that the ‘first step is to let go of all worldviews,’ helping us recover our lost sense of a connection to something larger. Or, as Kabbalah says, according to Brian Lancaster, we should ‘untie the knots from the self, step out of the structure we’ve created.’

Astonishingly enough, I found myself thinking, even surrounded by those hard headed scientists, in religious terms. Brahman, the non dual, panentheistic principle that is one core notion of Hinduism, is said to exist independently of the cosmos and of the person. Like our theory of consciousness, it is its own kind of stuff, a kind of dimension all its own. But, like consciousness, it forms itself into form, and comes to be ‘formed Brahman,’ much as consciousness comes to be formed as an individual. Thus formless Brahman, like the consciousness in this hypothesis, exists simultaneously and hidden within its formed aspect. The ‘formless within form.’ Finally our consciousness, which Hinduism calls Atman, can come to experience its true nature as Brahman; much as one might experience the independent domain of consciousness in certain anomalous experiences.

As I said, our emerging hypothesis was well received. We knew, and spoke of, the many, many questions that it opens up. Some that we named were:

- How might the body transduce consciousness?

- Can consciousness exist verifiably outside of brain/person? If so in what sense?

- Might there be any way to measure consciousness outside the brain? We jokingly asked if there might be a ‘consciousness o- meter?’

- Where does the domain of consciousness come from?

There are countless more.

Yet the feeling in the final go round was, I felt, one of sincere satisfaction. We had found a community, many said, always a gratifying sense. We had heard a cascade of excellent talks. One said ‘I did not have a single moment of boredom.’ But even more important, several mentioned that we seemed to be part of a larger movement that may lead to a paradigm shift, one which may lead to a new and fascinating approach to science and our larger worldview. We were encountering the possibility of a science that might take seriously the full range of experiences and in a non-dualistic way.

Jeffrey Schwartz captured the moment’s seriousness and importance that I think we all felt. ‘The implications here are enormous; they are political as well as scientific. And they are important. So as Franklin said when the founding fathers signed the declaration of independence on this day 232 years ago, “Gentlemen, we must all hang together or we will surely hang separately.”’

Whether or not that group turns out to be that important, the gathering was for many of us the first in which a group articulated a fascinating, bold and possibly true new approach that could tie together East and West, spirituality and science, brain and inner experience and could begin to account for anomalous experiences. I was honoured to be part of it.

Emptiness, Relativity, and Quantum Physics - by His Holiness the Dalai Lama

His Holiness the Dalai Lama provides a somewhat different perspective on the relationship of Buddhism and science than Dr. Donald Lopez, whose book was the subject of our last post. This excerpt is from the chapter "Emptiness, Relativity, and Quantum Physics" (page 64-69) from His Holiness’ book, THE UNIVERSE IN A SINGLE ATOM: THE CONVERGENCE OF SCIENCE AND SPIRITUALITY. The Buddhist concept of dependent origination posits that all entities are “empty”---or lack independent existence at the deepest level---yet our usual, practical understanding of reality also has its place. He suggests that the “two truths” view developed by ancient Buddhist philosophers can serve as a possible model for the duality suggested by contemporary physics. Quantum mechanics points to a “profound interconnectedness at the heart of physics,” nonetheless objects have individual existence at the macroscopic level. The excerpt is reprinted with permission of the office of His Holiness.

In brief, the principle of dependent origination can be understood in the following three ways. First, all conditioned things and events in the world come into being only as a result of the interaction of causes and conditions. They don't just arise from nowhere, fully formed. Second, there is mutual dependence between parts and the whole; without parts there can be no whole, without a whole it makes no sense to speak of parts. This interdependence of parts and the whole applies in both spatial and temporal terms. Third, anything that exists and has an identity does so only within the total network of everything that has a possible or potential relation to it. No phenomenon exists with an independent or intrinsic identity.

And the world is made up of a network of complex interrelations. We cannot speak of the reality of a discrete entity outside the context of its range of interrelations with its environment and other phenomena, including language, concepts, and other conventions. Thus, there are no subjects without the objects by which they are defined, there are no objects without subjects to apprehend them, there are no doers without things done. There is no chair without legs, a seat, a back, wood, nails, the floor on which it rests, the walls that define the room it's in, the people who constructed it, and the individuals who agree to call it a chair and recognize it as something to sit on. Not only is the existence of things and events utterly contingent but, according to this principle, their very identities are thoroughly dependent upon others.

In physics, the deeply interdependent nature of reality has been brought into sharp focus by the so-called EPR paradox - named after its creators, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen - which was originally formulated to challenge quantum mechanics. Say a pair of particles is created and then separates, moving away from each other in opposite directions - perhaps to greatly distant locations, for example, Dharamsala, where I live, and say, New York. One of the properties of this pair of particles is that their spin must be in opposite directions-so that one is measured as "up" and the other will be found to be "down." According to quantum mechanics, the correlation of measurements (for example, when one is up, then the other is down) must exist even though the individual attributes are not determined until the experimenters measure one of the particles, let us say in New York. At that point, the one in New York will acquire a value-let us say up-in which case the other particle must simultaneously become down. These determinations of up and down are instantaneous, even for the particle at Dharamsala, which has not itself been measured. Despite their separation, the two particles appear as an entangled entity. There seems, according to quantum mechanics, to be a startling and profound interconnectedness at the heart of physics.

Indra's Jeweled Net- Credit: Gail Atkins

Once at a public talk in Germany, I drew attention to the growing trend among serious scientists of taking the insights of the world's contemplative traditions into account. I spoke about the meeting ground between my own Buddhist tradition and modern science-especially in the Buddhist arguments for the relativity of time and for rejecting any notion of essentialism. Then I noticed von Weizsacker in the audience, and when I described my debt to him for what little understanding of quantum physics I possess, he graciously commented that if his own teacher Werner Heisenberg had been present, he would have been excited to hear of the clear, resonant parallels between Buddhist philosophy and his scientific insights.

Another significant set of issues in quantum mechanics concerns the question of measurement. I gather that, in fact, there is an entire area of research dedicated to this matter. Many scientists say that the act of measurement causes the "collapse" of either the wave or the particle function, depending upon the system of measurement used in the experiment; only upon measurement does the potential become actual. Yet we live in a world of everyday objects. So the question is, How, from the point of view of physics, do we reconcile our commonsense notions of an everyday world of objects and their properties on the one hand and the bizarre world of quantum mechanics on the other? Can these two perspectives be reconciled at all? Are we condemned to live with what is apparently a schizophrenic view of the world?

At a two-day retreat on the epistemological issues pertaining to the foundations of quantum mechanics and Buddhist Middle Way philosophy at Innsbruck, where Anton Zeilinger, Arthur Zajonc, and I met for a dialogue, Anton told me that a well-known colleague of his once remarked that most quantum physicists relate to their field in a schizophrenic manner. When they are in the laboratory and play around with things, they are realists. They talk about photons and electrons going here and there. However, the moment you switch into philosophical discussion and ask them about the foundation of quantum mechanics, most would say that nothing really exists without the apparatus defining it.

Somewhat parallel problems arose in Buddhist philosophy in relation to the disparity between our commonsense view of the world and the perspective suggested by Nagarjuna's philosophy of emptiness. Nagarjuna invoked the notion of two truths, the "conventional" and the "ultimate," relating respectively to the everyday world of experience and to things and events in their ultimate mode of being, that is, on the level of emptiness. On the conventional level, we can speak of a pluralistic world of things and events with distinct identities and causation. This is the realm where we can also expect the laws of cause and effect, and the laws of logic such as the principles of identity, contradiction, and the law of the excluded middle-to operate without violation. This world of empirical experience is not an illusion, nor is it unreal. It is real in that we experience it. A grain of barley does produce a barley sprout, which can eventually yield a barley crop. Taking a poison can cause one's death and, similarly, taking a medication can cure an illness. However, from the perspective of the ultimate truth, things and events do not possess discrete, independent realities. Their ultimate ontological status is "empty" in that nothing possesses any kind of essence or intrinsic being.

I can envision something similar to this principle of two truths applying in physics. For instance, we can say that the Newtonian model is an excellent one for the commonsense world as we know it, while Einsteinian relativity-based on radically different presuppositions-represents in addition an excellent model for a different or more inclusive domain. The Einsteinian model describes aspects of reality for which the states of relative motion are crucial but does not really affect our commonsense picture under most circumstances. Likewise, the quantum physics models of reality represent the workings of a different domain-the mostly "inferred" reality of particles, especially in the arena of the microscopic. Each of these pictures is excellent in its own right and for the purposes for which it was designed, but if we believe any of these models to be constituted by intrinsically real things, we are bound to be disappointed.

Here I find it helpful to reflect on a critical distinction drawn by Chandrakirti (seventh century C.E.) in relation to the domains of discourse that pertain to the conventional and the ultimate truths of things. Chandrakirti argues that, when formulating one's understanding of reality, one must be sensitive to the scope and parameters of the specific mode of inquiry. For example, he argues that to reject distinct identity, causation, and origination within the everyday world, as some interpreters of the philosophy of emptiness had suggested, simply because these notions are untenable from the perspective of ultimate reality, constitutes a methodological error.

On a conventional level, we see cause and effect all the time. When we're trying to find who's at fault in an accident, we are not delving into the deeper nature of reality, where an infinite chain of events would make it impossible to place blame. When we accord such characteristics as cause and effect to the empirical world, we are not working on the basis of a metaphysical analysis that probes the ultimate ontological status of things and their properties. We do so within the boundaries of everyday convention, language, and logic. In contrast, Chandrakirti argues, the metaphysical postulates of philosophical schools, such as the concept of the Creator or the eternal soul, can be negated through the analysis of their ultimate ontological status. This is because these entities are posited on the basis of an exploration into the ultimate mode of being of things.

In essence, Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti are suggesting this: when we relate to the empirical world of experience, so long as we do not invest things with independent, intrinsic existence, notions of causation, identity, and difference, and the principles of logic will continue to remain tenable. However, their validity is limited to the relative framework of conventional truth. Seeking to ground notions such as identity, existence, and causation in an objective, independent existence is transgressing the bounds of logic, language, and convention. We do not need to postulate the objective, independent existence of things, since we can accord robust, nonarbitrary reality to things and events that not only support everyday functions but also provide a firm basis for ethics and spiritual activity. The world, according to the philosophy of emptiness, is constituted by a web of dependently originating and interconnected realities, within which dependently originated causes give rise to dependently originated consequences according to dependently originating laws of causality. What we do and think in our own lives, then, becomes of extreme importance as it affects everything we're connected to.

The paradoxical nature of reality revealed in both the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness and modern physics represents a profound challenge to the limits of human knowledge. The essence of the problem is epistemological: How do we conceptualize and understand reality coherently? Not only have Buddhist philosophers of emptiness developed an entire understanding of the world based on the rejection of the deeply ingrained temptation to treat reality as if it were composed of intrinsically real objective entities but they have also striven to live these insights in their day-to-day lives. The Buddhist solution to this seeming epistemological contradiction involves understanding reality in terms of the theory of two truths. Physics needs to develop an epistemology that will help resolve the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the picture of reality in classical physics and everyday experience and that in their quantum mechanics counterpart. As for what an application of the two truths in physics might look like, I simply have no idea. At its root, the philosophical problem confronting physics in the wake of quantum mechanics is whether the very notion of reality-defined in terms of essentially real constituents of matter- is tenable. What the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness can offer is a coherent model of understanding reality that is non-essentialist. Whether this could prove useful only time will tell.