Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind

by Guy Claxton

  Johannes Tauler, a Dominican monk and disciple of Meister Eckhart who lived and taught in the German Rhineland in the midfourteenth century, was one of the first of the apophatics to adopt an explicitly psychological interpretation of his religious experience. His practical instruction on the contemplative life, delivered mostly in his sermons at the convents and monasteries which he visited, offers very clear advice to the nuns and monks on how to pursue their devotions inwardly. For him it was self-evident that human beings yearned for inwardness; for ‘personal renewal through a submersion in the divine ground from which all creatures have arisen’.12 And this divine ground was none other than the Kingdom of God.

  This Kingdom is seated properly in the innermost recesses of the spirit. When the powers of the senses and the powers of the reason are gathered up into the very centre of the man’s being – the unseen depths of his spirit, wherein lies the image of God – and thus he flings himself into the divine abyss . . . where [everything] is so still, full of mystery and empty. There is nothing there but the pure Godhead. Nothing alien, no creature, no image; no form ever penetrated there.

  Tauler’s method for approaching this Kingdom relied on the deliberate, methodical cultivation of passivity, a way of turning oneself over to forces and impulses that did not originate from the sphere of the conscious self, which he, following Eckhart, and anticipating Heidegger, referred to as Gelassenheit, ‘letting be’. Of the pragmatic benefits of this attitude Tauler was in no doubt: ‘In this way nature and reason become purified, the head strengthened, and the individual more peaceful, more kind and more restful.’

  Tauler’s psychological interpretation of the Church’s symbolism must also have seemed, to his more conventional contemporaries, to border on the blasphemous. In his view of the Trinity, for instance, no longer is God the Father a transcendent figure. He becomes the Godhead, the innermost source, the unconscious mystery. The Son represents the perpetual birth of ‘something’ out of this divine ‘nothing’, the amazing coming into being of conscious experience and physical acts, continually gushing forth from the impenetrable fountainhead. And the Spirit is the transformation of being, the wisdom, the ‘peace of God which passeth all understanding’, which is available to all those who are willing, as Eckhart put it, to ‘naught themselves’, to put their faith in the inner God who ‘moves in a mysterious way’.

  There is a surprising coming together of the direct insight of these sages (and one could quote from dozens more in similar vein) with the new science of the intelligent – even wise – unconscious. Perhaps it would encourage people to see that their own capacity for wisdom is amenable to cultivation if this confluence of understanding were to be more widely known. As Lancelot Law Whyte, one of the first to trace the history of the unconscious back into pre-Freudian times, concludes:

  Today faith, if it bears any relation to the natural world, implies faith in the unconscious. If there is a God, he must speak there; if there is a healing power, it must operate there . . . The conscious mind will enjoy no peace until it can rejoice in a fuller understanding of its own unconscious sources.13

  Of all the major world religions, though, it is Buddhism that most clearly and consistently identifies the source of wisdom with the undermind. Indeed, Buddhism goes so far as to say that wisdom resides in the recognition that all the activities and contents of consciousness are merely manifestations of unconscious processes. Even our most rational and well-considered trains of thought are not created by the conscious ‘I’, but are merely displayed in consciousness, like images and text on a computer screen. The screen has no intelligence of its own; it merely portrays the results of a certain kind of activity within the unobservable world of the microchips. The Buddhist project, we might say, is to bring about a shift in our identity’s ‘centre of gravity’ from consciousness to the mysterious undermind. Through the meticulous form of attention that is cultivated by mindful meditation, we become more fully aware of the passing details of experience, and the wayward, ephemeral and suspect nature of the conscious mind begins to become more evident. One has to be able to adopt a more sceptical attitude towards consciousness itself, reconceptualising it as a drama, a passing show, rather than as a reliable star to steer by. In the words of a contemporary Tibetan dzogchen master:

  Whatever momentarily arises in the body-mind . . .

  has little reality.

  Why identify and become attached to it,

  passing judgement on it, and ourselves?

  Far better to simply

  let the entire game happen on its own,

  springing up and falling back like waves.14

  The relocation of the centre of both identity and intelligence to the undermind is expressed, within Buddhism, most clearly in the Zen tradition. The contemporary Japanese teacher Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, who founded and for many years directed the Zen Centre in San Francisco, used to say: ‘In Japan we have the phrase shoshin, which means “beginner’s mind”. The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner’s mind . . . If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.’15 Another contemporary Zen teacher, the Korean Seung Sahn Sunim, who has also made his home in the United States, instructs his students thus:

  I ask you: What are you? You don’t know; there is only ‘I don’t know’. Always keep this don’t-know mind. When this don’t-know mind becomes clear, then you will understand. So if you keep don’t-know mind when you are driving, this is driving Zen. If you keep it when you are talking, this is talking Zen. If you keep it when you are watching television, this is television Zen. You must keep don’t-know mind always and everywhere. This is the true practice of Zen.16

  But, as in Christianity, the discovery of the value of the hidden layers of the mind is not a modern achievement. As long ago as the seventh century, Chinese teacher Hui-Neng, the Sixth Patriarch of Zen, presumed author of the influential Platform Sutra, was encouraging his followers to take note of the activities of the undermind.17 A bluff, down-to-earth fellow, by all accounts, he devoted much of his energy to trying to combat the prevalent idea that spiritual realisation involved cutting off your thoughts, and that if you meditated earnestly and frequently enough, ‘enlightenment’ would be your inevitable reward. Spiritual practice, for Hui-Neng, was not about calming or emptying the mind; it was about noticing, in any and every moment, in whatever you were up to, the dynamic relationship between conscious and unconscious.

  O friends, if there are among you some who are still in the stage of learners, let them turn their illumination upon the source of consciousness whenever thoughts are awakened in their minds . . . The [conscious] mind has nothing to do with thinking, because its fundamental source is empty. . . It is called ‘ultimate enlightenment’ when one has awakened to the source of the mind.

  Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki explains very clearly what this awareness of the interface between conscious and unconscious means, in terms of the key Buddhist concept of prajna, usually translated as ‘wisdom’.

  Prajna points in two directions, to the Unconscious, and to a world of consciousness which is now unfolded . . . When we are so deeply involved in the outgoing direction of consciousness and discrimination as to forget the other direction of Prajna, [wisdom] is hidden, and the pure undefiled surface of the Unconscious is now dimmed .. . Ordinarily the apperceiving mind is occupied too much with the outgoing attention, and forgets that at its back there is the unfathomable abyss of the Unconscious. When its attention is directed outwardly, it clings to the idea of an ego-substance. It is when it turns its attention within that it realises the Unconscious.

  The undermind for Hui-Neng, like the Godhead for Tauler, is the ‘nothing’ that constantly brings forth the ‘somethings’ of the mind. The miracle, as D. T. Suzuki puts it, is that ‘It is in the nature of Suchness [the Unconscious] to become conscious of itself . . . In the self-nature of Suchness the
re arises consciousness . . . Psychologically we can call [Suchness] the Unconscious, in the sense that all our conscious thoughts and feelings grow out of it.’ And: ‘To see self-nature means to wake up in the Unconscious.’

  When Ma-tsu and other Zen leaders declare that ‘this mind is the Buddha himself’, it does not mean that there is a kind of soul lying hidden in the depths of consciousness; but that a state of consciousness . . . which accompanies every conscious and unconscious act of mind is what constitutes Buddhahood.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Undermind Society: Putting the Tortoise to Work

  The great spectre that recurrently haunted many of the most sensitive men of the last two hundred years is that there may eventually come a time when all the richness and amplitude of Creation will simply pass through the eyes of a man into his head and there be turned by the brain into some sort of formula or equation.

  Nathan Scott

  In the ballroom of the Washington Hilton, 1,500 top educators from around the world sit rapt while Doug Ross describes the future. Ross, then Assistant Secretary of Labor for Employment and Training in the Clinton administration, is delivering the closing address to the 1994 international conference ‘A Global Conversation about Learning’. He is talking about the practical steps that the multi-billion-dollar agency he oversees is taking to bring about the ‘learning society’. Plans already exist, he tells the audience, to create a system of tax incentives to encourage people to become lifelong learners: to invest in developing their own ‘cognitive capital’ throughout their working lives. Taking out a loan for learning should be as easy, and as attractive financially, as taking out a mortgage. New ‘school to work’ programmes are being designed to break down the traditional divide between academic and vocational study, and to bring sophisticated theory to life in the workplace.

  Ross makes no bones about the fact that the new ‘poor’, the new marginals in society, will be those who cannot or will not learn. Learning and earning are already inextricably entwined, and becoming more so by the day. The work of the future will be overwhelmingly mind work. Manual and blue-collar workers, Ross claims, will constitute just 10 per cent of the workforce by early in the next century. Economic and vocational forces are placing unprecedented pressure on individuals throughout society continually to learn new knowledge and skills – and to develop their ability to learn: their confidence and their resourcefulness as learners, and their skill at managing their own learning lives.

  The concern with learning is not just American: it is worldwide. In Britain a massive ‘Campaign for Learning’, supported by the government and big business, and coordinated by the Royal Society of Arts, was launched in 1996 to encourage people to, in the words of its chairman Sir Christopher Ball, ‘care about their learning in the same way that we are all gradually learning to care about the environment or about our own personal health’. The aim of the campaign is ‘to help create a learning society in the UK in which every individual participates in learning, both formal and informal, throughout their lives. This means boosting people’s desire to learn, highlighting existing ways of learning and proposing new ones’. The campaign arose as a response to a large-scale survey which revealed that, while more than 80 per cent of the population believed that learning was important for them, less than a third had plans to do anything about it. For only £2.50 you can receive from campaign headquarters a pack of material that will enable you to create your own Personal Learning Action Plan, and many other initiatives are in the pipeline.

  The pressure on individuals to become learners is not just a consequence of changes in the job market, however. If employers and governments can no longer offer everyone ‘jobs for life’, many other cultural sources of stability and authority have also been weakened and undermined over the course of the twentieth century. It is already something of a cliché to talk of ‘the collapse of certainty’, whether it be in terms of the disappearance of traditional communities, the rise of geographical mobility, the explosion in information and communication technologies, the interpenetration of different ethnic cultures, the appearance of a bewildering variety of new spiritual movements and leaders to challenge the authority of the orthodox religions, or the freedom to develop personal preferences and lifestyles that may bear no relationship to those into which one was born. For many people in Western society it is now not only possible to choose, to a considerable extent, how, where and with whom they are going to live, and who they are going to be: it is incumbent upon them to do so. Whether the freedom to invent oneself is experienced as welcome or unwelcome, the onus is on individuals to learn and grow, in all kinds of ways, as never before.

  In the midst of these uncertainties and opportunities, it is, therefore, of paramount importance that people possess not just the confidence but the know-how to be able to learn well. Governments can create incentives and campaigns can exhort, but if people feel unsafe or unsupported, or are unskilled in the craft of learning itself, they may shy away from the learning opportunities that they encounter – even when such learning would clearly help them to pursue their own valued goals and interests. Learning, whether it involves mastering a new technology or recovering from a divorce, is a risky business, and a lack of either the tools or the self-assurance to pursue it results in stagnation.

  In this context, it is all the more significant that cognitive science is currently drawing our attention to the curious fact that we have forgotten how our minds work. As we have seen, the modern mind has a distorted image of itself that leads it to neglect some of its own most valuable learning capacities. We now know that the brain is built to linger as well as to rush, and that slow knowing sometimes leads to better answers. We know that knowledge makes itself known through sensations, images, feelings and inklings, as well as through clear, conscious thoughts. Experiments tell us that just interacting with complex situations without trying to figure them out can deliver a quality of understanding that defies reason and articulation. Other studies have shown that confusion may be a vital precursor to the discovery of a good idea. To be able to meet the uncertain challenges of the contemporary world, we need to heed the message of this research, and to expand our repertoire of ways of learning and knowing to reclaim the full gamut of cognitive possibilities.

  This will not be easy, for the grip of d-mode on late twentieth-century culture is strong, and reflects a trend in European psychology that has its origins right back in classical Greece. For Homer, the seat of human identity and intelligence was emotional rather than rational, and opaque rather than transparent. The undermind, psyche, was a living reality, experienced in the body, and interpreted either, as Julian Jaynes has suggested, as ‘the voice of the gods’, or as a vital ingredient of the human personality.1 But by the time of Plato the centre of gravity of a person’s being had drifted upwards into the head, and begun to become associated with reason and control. The undermind still existed as an emotional or intuitive force, but it had come to be seen as secondary and subversive, something wayward, primitive and unreliable. It was in reason that people were most truly, most nobly, themselves.2

  This ambivalent relationship with the undermind was to continue for more than a millennium. Conscious reason might be the apotheosis of the self, but the acknowledgement of its more mysterious, sometimes more inspired but less controllable shadow remained. Plotinus, the third-century neo-Platonist, commented that ‘feelings can be present without awareness of them’; and that ‘the absence of a conscious perception is no proof of the absence of mental activity’. A century later, St Augustine famously wrote: ‘I cannot totally grasp all that I am. The mind is not large enough to contain itself: but where can that part of it be which it does not contain?’ Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, noted that ‘there are processes in the soul of which we are not immediately aware’.3

  Shakespeare clearly recognised the whole variety of unconscious influences on conscious life. He touches on the inability to see the source of one’s own experienc
e, or to comprehend its true meaning, in many of the plays, most famously, perhaps, in Antonio’s lament at the beginning of The Merchant of Venice:

  In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:

  It wearies me; you say it wearies you;

  But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,

  What stuff ‘tis made of, whereof it is born,

  I am to learn;

  And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,

  That I have much ado to know myself.

  In The Comedy of Errors he notes the power of subliminal influences on perception, when he speaks of:

  .. . jugglers that deceive the eye,

  Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind.

  While in A Midsummer Night’s Dream he sketches a theory of creativity that anticipates by 300 years the insights that we encountered in Chapter 4:

  . . . as imagination bodies forth

  The form of things unknown, the poet’s pen

  Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

  A local habitation and a name.

  Prior to the sixteenth century, people’s sense of their own minds was both deeper and broader than it was later to become: deeper, in embracing with equanimity the existence of internal forces that were beyond their ken; and broader, in accepting, for the most part rather uncritically, external sources of knowledge and authority. ‘Mind’ was not such an individual possession; it was embedded in and distributed across society. Over the course of the next two hundred years, however, both of these facets of the mind were to change significantly. First, it became normal, rather than abnormal, for individuals to ‘make up their own minds’ about things. Even by the year 1600, according to Lancelot Law Whyte, ‘the person thinking for himself ceased to be a social freak inhibited by his difference from others, and began to claim the opportunity to realise himself and to guide the community’. And in the seventeenth century ‘we can recognise the germ of a new experience and a new way of living which in our own time has become a social commonplace: the existentialist complaint that there is no tradition which makes life bearable . . . From then onward every sensitive and vital young person had to make his own choice.’4 By the eighteenth century, the inclination and the ability to think for oneself was becoming firmly accepted as the goal of development, and the essential characteristic of maturity.