The destination of a path depends on the kind of questions that propel one along it. An existential question is presented not only in words but by the wordless astonishment at being alive. Its resolution too is rooted in this dumb surprise. Gotama’s existential awakening is already prefigured in the scream of a newborn baby, the anguish of ageing, the humiliation of disease, the decay of a corpse. For only when these things become questions for him can his quest for awakening begin to unfold. His path both originated and culminated in an awareness of the “great matter of birth and death.”
Astonishment is a gift. No amount of effort can peel off the stubborn veneer of banality that renders the world flat, routine, and opaque. The mystery that there is anything at all glimmers in the margins of awareness but rarely strikes home in all its intensity. “Because it is so very close, you cannot get this truth out of your eyes,” said the twelfth-century Chinese Zen monk Ta-hui. “But if you try to receive it by stirring your mind, you have already missed it by eighteen thousand miles.” In spite of Mara’s desperate attempts to replace astonishment with a consoling opinion or belief, you only remain true to your quest by allowing the riddle of the world to disclose itself.
12
The Riddle of the World
THE WORDS ON THIS PAGE and the eyes that flit across them originated around fifteen billion years ago when the universe was just an extremely tiny, hot, and energetic drop of space-time. There was no time before and no space outside this drop: all space, all time, and all things were generated from it. As it expanded, it created every quark and lepton, atom and molecule that constitute the estimated hundred billion galaxies in the universe, hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, trillion cells in each human body, and ten trillion synapses in each human brain.
This planet on which our every breath and meal depends coalesced from stardust and interstellar gas into a stable sphere of matter four and a half billion years ago. Within another half-billion years, simple forms of bacterial life had emerged in the oceans. No one yet knows how the first sequences of self-replicating molecules that eventually would generate trilobites, hummingbirds, and chimpanzees arose. Yet alternative theories of creation provide not answers to this puzzle but other questions disguised as answers. To invoke God, mind, or meteor-borne bacteria to explain the origins of life on earth leaves one with equally imponderable questions about God, mind, and meteor-borne bacteria.
A terrestial vertebrate like Huai-jang was only able to walk from Mount Sung to Mount Ts’ao-ch’i because four hundred million years earlier a small group of fish evolved a skeletal structure that would evolve into the kind of spine and limbs that could support the weight of a creature moving on dry land. Driven by adaptive pressures, this evolutionary pathway was selected for reasons peculiar to the subaquatic survival of these fish. Had they been wiped out by a natural calamity or driven to extinction by another fish better suited to that aquatic environment, that pathway would have been cut off and terrestial beings may never have evolved.
When the first mammals appeared on earth, they had to eke out a precarious existence in the crevices and gaps of a world dominated by dinosaurs. Only the sudden mass extinction of these reptiles sixty-five million years ago as the result of an asteroid five miles wide smashing into the Yucatán peninsula allowed the opportunity for mammals and birds to flourish in the vacated ecological niches. Had the asteroid been deflected from its earthbound trajectory by a collision with another chunk of cosmic debris, the evolution of animals whose females suckle their young may never have led to the “improbable and fragile entity” called Homo sapiens.
Human beings anatomically identical with ourselves first appeared in Africa about a hundred thousand years ago. For the next ninety millennia these large-brained, tool-making, language-speaking, itinerant creatures subsisted entirely by gathering roots, berries, and plants, scavenging animal remains, and hunting game. Around ten thousand years ago, they learned how to domesticate plants and animals, making possible settled agrarian communities. It took another five thousand years to discover how to extract and use metals. Shortly thereafter, states began to emerge, then writing, cities, and the beginning of history.
The record of the past is inscribed in the background radiation from space, the Doppler shift in light, geological strata of rocks, radioactive decay of carbon, fossils and bones, sequences of genetic code. This scripture of life tells a story in which humans have just appeared as tentative characters in a drama of staggering duration and complexity. Our cherished humanity, which feels to us so necessary, turns out to be contingent upon a bewildering array of unforeseen conditions and chance events. Despite our rapid and pervasive domination of the earth, our violent impact on the biosphere may cause us to disappear from the narrative as abruptly as we entered it.
The universe is indifferent to the fate of sentient beings who arise and pass away upon the surface of this planet. Millions of species of plants and animals have already become extinct and would have been forgotten had we not unearthed their fossilized remains. Just because life has evolved in such a way to produce beings like us does not mean that we were a foregone conclusion from the outset. According to evolutionary biology, there is no discernible purpose guiding this sublime exfoliation of creatures toward a preordained goal. But once a life-form has emerged through evolution, both its origins and the conditions needed for its survival are intelligible in terms of ordered sequences of causes and effects.
To believe one’s existence to be either preordained by the will of God or an inevitable consequence of actions in a former life is consoling because it confirms the deep intuition of one’s being necessary rather than contingent. Such views are attractive because of their seeming ability to account for everything that happens to us. It is comforting to be assured that things are the way they are because of remote and mysterious causes that have an intimate bearing on the exigencies of one’s particular life. Yet since there is nothing that cannot be explained as the workings of God or the results of karma, these “explanations” explain nothing. Incapable of being either falsified or verified, they have as much explanatory power as a theory that claims life on earth to be under the telepathic control of invisible beings from Alpha Centauri.
The emerging understanding of reality disclosed by the natural sciences evokes in me feelings of awe incomparably greater than anything religious or mystical writings of any tradition can inspire. Far from being just dumb, inert stuff, matter is wondrously, abundantly, profusely alive. The more we understand it, the less there appears any need for a divine spark or immaterial consciousness to animate it. To accept the wisdom of life’s scripture is to accept that we have sprung from the same stuff as carrots and ducks. The fingers that tap these words on a computer keyboard evolved from the fins of a long-forgotten fish, refined their skills through picking lice from fellow monkeys’ fur and chipping arrowheads from shards of flint. No matter how perfectly adapted they appear to be for present needs, half a billion years from now they may seem as alien to our remote descendants as are the fishes’ fins to us.
Whatever emerges contingently upon a matrix of unstable conditions in turn becomes an unstable condition upon which something else can contingently emerge. We inhabit a universe of relentless motion and flux in which everything from an idle thought to a solar system comes into being then hastens to its end. In the past second, the Milky Way has traveled one hundred and twenty miles closer to the center of its local galaxy cluster, the earth twenty miles in its orbit around the sun, while the brain has generated millions of firing patterns across its neural pathways. In five billion years, the sun is expected to explode, engulfing the earth as it expands beyond the orbit of Jupiter, at which point any sentient life remaining on the planet will become extinct.
While Darwin regarded evolutionary change as proceeding with majestic slowness, meticulous observations of finches on islands in the Galápagos have demonstrated how the birds’ beaks are continually being modified in the st
ruggle to adapt to contending environmental forces. The beaks “look solid,” concludes the science writer Jonathan Weiner,
but they are as fluid as ripples on a stream. . . . The closer you look at life, the more rapid and intense the rate of evolutionary change. . . . the farther your remove, the more the living world seems fixed and stable, hardly moving at all.
A similar illusion of solidity and stability is achieved by keeping the awareness of one’s own life at a safe existential distance from its contingency and flux. Mara is the part of us that recoils from life’s tumult and seeks solace in such illusions, whereas Buddha stands for that capacity to behold, embrace, and transform the turbulent stuff that ceaselessly pours forth.
Each of us is no more necessary or durable in the scheme of things than a shooting star, a piece of cosmic debris burning up as it enters the earth’s atmosphere. However much we avert our gaze from the imminence of our demise, we cannot escape the end that Mara holds in store for us. For our death is not an event that will just happen one day: it is etched into the fabric of what we are now. The consciousness of our singularity achieves its bittersweet focus in the intimation of how precarious this life is. As the personification of death, Mara defines us by standing unavoidably in our way. We only feel about ourselves the way we do because we know one day we will vanish.
13
On Being Conscious
EVER SINCE I CAN REMEMBER, this same consciousness has perused colorful shapes with these eyes, listened to melodies and laments through these ears, handled objects and caressed bodies with these fingers. This same self has been worrying about itself and those close to it, replaying the past, projecting the future, suffering fears, nurturing desires, all in a fractured monologue uttered silently in the same head. Thoughts, images, memories, and feelings may come and go, but the presence of consciousness itself seems irreducible, constant, necessary, and essential—anything but contingent.
Without consciousness, I would lose that most intimate sense of being who I feel I am. Consciousness enfolds my singularity: the peculiar texture of my inner self that I reach for but never touch, the tape-loops of thought and feeling that never will be shared, the snatches of my mother’s voice still calling to the child I was, clips of the past (a door handle, a driveway, a line of ants) that defines me in an indefinable way, the silent mantras of my hopes, secrets, conceits, wounds. And simultaneously, consciousness reveals the public world in which this irreducibly private self feels at home: the blueness of the summer sky, the taste of cumin, Frank Sinatra’s voice, the scent of honeysuckle, the rasp of a cat’s tongue.
“The fire is at its last click,” wrote John Keats late one winter’s night in 1819.
I am sitting with my back to it with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated from the carpet . . . These are trifles—but . . . Could I see the same thing done of any great Man long since dead it would be a great delight: as to know what position Shakespeare sat when he began “To be or not to be.”
Imagine a snapshot of Gotama sitting beneath the bodhi tree, or video footage of Huai-jang walking down the dusty path to Mount Ts’ao-ch’i. The textual record replaces the unrepeatable singularity of these moments with stylized descriptions written down years after the event. Yet we look to these texts not to resolve abstract questions about the nature of existence but specific questions posed by this astonished being-here-now.
A single faded photograph of Buddha would communicate something no amount of exquisite statues and scroll paintings can ever convey. Although the first photograph would not be made until several years after Keats’ death, the poet had an intimation of the effect photography would have. For “the Photograph,” writes Roland Barthes, “is . . . the sovereign Contingency . . . the This.” Whereas painting and sculpture seek to represent what is essential and abiding in their subjects, a photograph is a trace of what is fleeting and unrepeatable. “To designate reality,” Barthes continues,
Buddhism says sunya, the empty; but better still: tathata, the fact of being this, of being thus, of being so. Tat in Sanskrit means that, which makes one think of the gesture of a small child who designates something with its finger and says: Ta! Da! Ta!
What appears to be most singular about me turns out to be what is most contingent. This identity as a conscious “I,” which feels so densely and intractably given, derives its sense of being this rather than that, me rather than you, from the myriad influences, choices, accidents, attributes, and circumstances from which it springs. Each significant step I take in life differentiates me that much more from others. Since each step could have been one that circumstances might have prevented or one I chose not to take, each difference that defines me need not have happened.
That this tentative singularity experiences itself is a mystery. To know what it means to “know oneself” is perplexing. I am intimately conscious of being conscious, but struggle to find an adequate way to express it. I tend to describe a thing I experience by comparing it to something else I experience. Cumin is compared to fennel, Frank Sinatra to Dean Martin, cats’ tongues to sandpaper. But I know no other immediate experience to which this immediate experience can be compared. This consciousness that wonders what it is, is the only one to which I have access.
Contemporary neuroscience offers a wealth of evidence to show how consciousness is profoundly connected with the functioning of the brain. A piece of brain “the size of a grain of sand,” writes neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran,
would contain one hundred thousand neurons, two million axons and one billion synapses, all “talking to” each other. . . . it’s been calculated that the number of possible brain states . . . exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.
This extraordinarily complex and rapidly firing organ receives constant inputs from the senses, which it converts into a simulation of a world being experienced by a conscious self. Although we feel as though we are peering out of our bodies at the summer sky while caressing a cat, the entire show is a representation generated in the brain. My being conscious of the episode is as much a configuration of neural signals as are the sky and the cat. The picture of a world out there divided from a subject in here, mysteriously connected to each other in the formless ether of “mind,” is illusory.
While damage to parts of the brain can radically and predictably alter the nature of consciousness, observation of brain states cannot tell us why or how a particular configuration of neurons is experienced as the last click of a dying fire on a cold winter evening. Nor can it explain how vast arrays of constantly shifting visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, tactile, and mental sensations are miraculously unified into the seamless experience of having lunch with an aunt in a bistro in Buenos Aires. Although neuroscience presents a strong case for consciousness being contingent on the brain, it fails to illuminate how the brain generates that crucial and poignant sense of being a self-aware creature in a highly specific, value-laden world.
Buddhism describes consciousness of the summer sky as springing from the impact between a patch of blue color and the unimpaired eyes of an awake organism. As integral parts of the nervous system, the sense organs here take the place of the brain (which is never mentioned in Buddhist studies of mind). Consciousness is not seen as the emergent property of one dominant organ but of an entire system of interconnected processes: external objects, bodily senses, feelings, concepts, language, memories, history. It is not reducible to any one or all of these conditions, nor can it occur without them. Consciousness is the consequence of the interaction between the kind of creature we are and the kind of environment we inhabit.
Human consciousness is ceaselessly affected by a world of which it is aware. To be conscious is always to be conscious of something. Whether we are awake or dreaming, consciousness is triggered by images, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, and ideas that constantly bombard us. Even when we turn attention inward to examine consciousness itself, the ex
amining consciousness immediately feels detached from and impacted by the consciousness under examination. For the examining consciousness to be aware of itself is impossible. Just as a finger cannot touch itself and a sword cannot cut itself, so the mind cannot (in this strict sense) know itself.
The world that appears to consciousness comes already colored by tones and shades of emotion. The experience is subjectively registered somewhere along a spectrum whose extremes are ecstasy and agony. Even if an experience is so neutral that we feel indifferent toward it, that indifference is nonetheless a feeling. It can prompt us to act just as efficiently as do feelings of pleasure or pain. When we are bored, we seek stimulation, just as when we pull a muscle we take care not to aggravate the discomfort.
This world of which we are conscious not only feels a certain way, it makes sense to us. It is intelligible. It comes as though preloaded with meanings. You catch a glimpse of a person racing past in a car, and you know without doubt who it is. You read the title of a book, and its meaning jumps out from the letters and words themselves. You do not see dark squiggles on a pale ground that you have to make an effort to interpret. On entering a room for the first time, you are not bewildered by an array of meaningless shapes and colors. You immediately see windows opening up onto landscapes, furniture placed on carpets, paintings arranged on walls.
The world that is given in consciousness is more than a set of sensations and impressions that we receive, feel, and organize. It is an arena of possibilities to be realized through verbal and physical acts. To be conscious is to be on the threshold of responding or reacting to what is unfolding around you. Whether we carefully respond after months of deliberation, or instinctively react without thinking, in both cases we realize what until then was merely a possibility. Even if we decide to do nothing, as a choice that has consequences, that decision is nonetheless an act. We cannot not act. We cannot not pay attention to the pressures and opportunities with which the world confronts us, even if it is to ignore them.
Living with the Devil Page 7