culture lives within an invisible myth; and a central part of that myth, the most invisible of all, concerns human nature. Our culture has developed a particularly disastrous mind-myth, and while that myth remains unconscious and unexamined, we will continue to wreck the nest and hurt each other.
One of the symptoms of the mind’s disease is that it will go to great lengths to examine every conceivable option except the right one. It will think endless new thoughts, but has extreme difficulty in scrutinizing that-which-thinks. The fundamental strategic problem of our time, therefore, is how to get individual minds, in sufficient quantities and with sufficient speed, to embark enthusiastically on the requisite process of demythologization-brain-washing, in the sense of laundering away our misconceptions, you might say. If cognitive science can demonstrate to rational minds how and why they have expurgated their own mystery, and what it has cost them to do so; if it can open our ears to the noises from the darkroom and make us wonder about them, then it will have proved itself valuable as well as merely interesting.
The science on which we have to draw is biological and psychological. Twenty years ago, the dialogue between science and religion was revitalized by the appearance of Fritjof Capra’s classic The Tao of Physics, and since then there have been many attempts to account for the basic mysteries of human spirit and consciousness in terms of the fascinating concepts of cosmological and particle physics. But these accounts, it has turned out, while they offer intriguing metaphors and allegories, are not real explanations at all. Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’, however powerful in the world of the atomic nucleus, tells us nothing of interest about the emergent properties of brains and minds – just as the study of liver disease in principle cannot explain the Nuremberg rallies.1 Spirituality is a phenomenon of whole human beings embedded in their biological and social worlds, and it is therefore from the shores of brain science, evolutionary biology, and transpersonal psychology that we have to build out towards the far bank of mystery.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge some of the major bridge-builders in this area, whose masterly construction work has enabled me to reach out as far as I have. Not all of them will approve of the uses to which I have put their work, but without them it would not have been possible. There are the founders of systems theory, such as Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and Gregory Bateson with his famous search for ‘the pattern which connects’. There are those who have forged links between religion (a word whose root meaning is itself ‘to bind back together’) – especially the Eastern traditions of Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism – and forms of Western psychology: most notably Alan Watts and his ‘dharma heir’ Ken Wilber. More recently there are the pioneers of ‘ecopsychology’ such as Warwick Fox and Theodore Roszak. And then there are psychologists such as Nicholas Humphrey and Robert Ornstein, whose informed speculations about the evolution of mind and consciousness have contributed much to the development of my own thought. The fact that I have come to the conclusion that the origins of the unconscious are much more important than those of consciousness in no way detracts from my debts to them. Finally there are the cognitive scientists, whose bold ideas about the nature of brain, mind and self have contributed perhaps most of all to the story that I want to tell. I am thinking especially of philosopher Daniel Dennett, and neuroscientists Gerald Edelman and Michael Gazzaniga. To all of these, and many others, my thanks for their building materials.
On a more personal note, I am most grateful to Jenny Edwards and Liz Puttick, my editor, both of whom read drafts of the book and made suggestions for improvement, the wisdom of which I could not deny. Thanks to Stephen Batchelor for sharing on many occasions his profound understanding of Buddhism. Though Buddhism as such hardly appears in this book, its insights permeate Parts II, III and IV.
Finally, a note on style. Because the web of ideas in this book is spun within a context of practical concern, I have endeavoured to write in an evocative, sometimes even jaunty, manner that will, I hope, engage both the general reader and the experts in the various fields on which I touch. Where this has meant throwing my more natural scholarly caution to the winds, I have done so. One of my draft-readers wrote to me: ‘I can’t remember ever having read another science book that made me laugh aloud!’ I admit that comment pleased me almost as much as any learned approbation. In keeping with this attempt to treat weighty matters with a light touch, the referencing is minimal and illustrative rather than comprehensive – though if you wrote to me I could give you chapter and verse and in the interests of good story-telling I have written as if I were propounding the absolute truth, rather than constructing a flexible, equivocal span of ideas.
Guy Claxton
Dartington, October 1993
The mind is far too narrow to contain itself. But where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside and not in itself? How can it be, then, that the mind cannot grasp itself? A great marvel rises in me; astonishment seizes me. Men go forth to marvel at the height of mountains and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbit of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves.
St Augustine
Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.
Ambrose Bierce
Pooh got up and began to look for himself.
A.A. Milne
The Overestimation of Consciousness
When people talk about something being ‘second nature’, they are referring to what seems natural, obvious, or habitual – common sense. It is the business of both scientific and religious enquiry (in their very different ways) to keep showing us how far this second nature misrepresents and oversimplifies ‘first nature’: the reality of Nature and – more importantly in this book – Human Nature. We take our view of ourselves for granted. Yet what is second nature to us about ourselves is at least as suspect as our flawed intuitions about the natural world outside.
The two most vital ingredients of human nature, to which our ‘second nature’ does not do justice, are its mystery and its history. Instead of a core apprehension of the mystery we truly are, we have unwittingly constructed a bogus sense of self, full of hubris, that is closely identified with consciousness: so closely that we are no longer sensitive to the underlying, inaccessible layers and motions of mind, brain and body that form the moment-to-moment swell from which the breakers of consciousness emerge. It is as if we imagined that the drama of our lives were being played out on a brightly lit stage, oblivious to the wings, the dressing-rooms, the technicians, and all the invisible paraphernalia without which there could be no play.
We do not need to go back-stage, to know every detail of what goes on behind the scenes, in order to enjoy the production. But if we do not know, at some level, that there is a ‘behind-the-scenes’, then we confuse playing and reality. We become busy and anxious, forced to duck down in our seat when the villain pulls a gun, and to clamber on to the stage to rescue the heroine. When the mystery of the mind is unappreciated, people become compulsively drawn into the drama, as campaigners, insurers, money-makers and busybodies. When the dark surround is acknowledged, and the attempt to control everything is put in perspective, play is possible. God – or ‘enlightenment’, or the Tao – is essentially a sense of mystery; a mystery that is impenetrable, but entirely understandable. When Nietzsche wrote ‘God is dead’, he was declaring that humankind had lost its sense of mystery.
By identifying ourselves with a mobile pinprick of self-awareness,