Intellect and The Parable of The Poisoned Arrow

What do I know? This. Something sees a dissected brain on a laboratory table and what sees is not an object like the thing cut open on the table. Can I explain beyond that? No.

Sure, I can talk about brain neurons and the optical cortex, and that does provide an objective correlative to explain the processes involved in seeing. But it does not explain the seeing itself.

I found the study of consciousness through brain science quite helpful in providing objective explanations about mind.  There is, for example, neuro-plasticity, which provides evidence that intention (roughly, the "will" part of free will) can help the brain change itself. (See Paul Bach-y-Rita, who taught his father to walk after a stroke). But that was as far as it went.

In The Parable of The Poisoned Arrow (more later), Buddha was in effect talking about intellect but not the kind brain scientists used to discover neuro-plasticity. So this article is about what he meant and what he did not mean.

As I already knew would happen, none of my readings in neuroscience and the philosophy of consciousness got me any closer to seeing as seeing.  Buddha meant that I start with experience. Not my everyday experience, although I could use it, but instead what reveals itself in deep meditation.

A sensation arises in a leg attended by a sensation of the leg itself. The sensation comes with the leg as something "there." The edges of this body are sensations of a location. But all arises in the empty space of consciousness. The space can have faint, wispy boundaries but they too are sensations. Sensations arising and falling away, to be followed by new ones arising and passing.

Thoughts and feelings also arise and disappear. That is obvious without meditation. After developing meditation skill, one can come to realize we are in the flow of emptiness, as Shinzen Young characterizes it. Emptiness not in a bad sense but in a liberating one.

Meditative experience says this. Thoughts, feelings, sensations as well as their locations are all evanescent arisings and passings away, without inherent reality in something devoid of them, something we call emptiness.

That doesn't mean through practice, or realization, we can regularly go through our days as arisings and passings in empty space. In order to survive as organisms we aren't wired that way.

But when mental activity comes almost to a stop, the nature of the activity itself becomes clear. Nothing hangs around. Not this moment, not that noise, not that flicker of light, not that thought, not anything.

Can I say more than that? No. That's what happens. I can't go any further. Even this "I" is only a sensation, something seen, not the seer. Look for it and only an idea, a thought, a feeling can be found, not that which sees them.

Does that mean people can be divested of a sense of self? Obviously not. Evolution hard-wires it into us for survival. What can disappear has been variously called the autobiographical self, the personality self, as well as other terms. These are not adequate, for personal history doesn't disappear.  It becomes unimportant.  Personality doesn't disappear.  There is much less turf to defend. As for mental chatter, that gives way to a calmer mind. I am confident that one day brain science will identify the brain modules wired (or de-wired as a result of deep realization.) A module already identified is the default mode network (DMN). Science has also found that sustained meditation develops the left temporal lobe.

Science seeks monistic explanations. It only makes sense to science that the world can be described through an over-arching principle rather than two. Since Descartes posited his cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, philosophy and brain science have both acknowledged his then-radical empiricism while rejecting the dualism it implies of "a little man inside" (homunculus).  In its monistic search science finds congeniality with Buddhism's nonduality, although nonduality means something different. (Not two, not even one, as either is conceptual, the seen, not the seeing.)

Although seeing--the unknown source of witnessing the world--will remain a mystery, I find nothing mystical, metaphysical in the sudden or gradual realization of one's "true nature." It's just seeing what is.  Just clearly seeing how everything arises and passes away.  It is empirical and scientific.  It can be verified by anybody with enough training, concentration, and dedication. Buddha said with sufficient meditative training and resolve it can be reached in a relatively short time. (Various accounts indicate six months to ten years.) Seeing clearly does not elevate one to a glorious, elevated state.  It is just that. Seeing what was always there. Buddha was not pretentious about it.  He said he did not know if the world is infinite or finite. He said he only offered a way out of typical human unhappiness. (Ignore the Buddhist dogma and doctrine added through the centuries.)

Okay. Enough of that. I don't want to go off on another of those endless nondual "sermons" so often found on the web. You're either familiar with them or you're not. If you are, you don't want to read another. If you're not, you can find them elsewhere. While true that we must let go of mind and its preconceptions to become fully immersed in nondual practice, that does not mean intellect must be abandoned.

In that regard, serious thinkers offer discussions about consciousness.  As one way to explain our subjectivity David Chalmers posits consciousness as basic and gives a way to think about it. Chalmers is a philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is currently Director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University and professor of Philosophy and Neural Science, and a Director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness (along with Ned Block) at New York University. Chalmers disagrees with Daniel Dennett who argues that consciousness is an illusion.  Dennett says our brains are physical things that deceive us into thinking we have something separate from them. (So, I ask, "Are we zombies, then, Daniel?")

Chalmers argues that consciousness may be basic in one of two ways. First, panpsychism, the view that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness. He offers panpsychism as an explanation of our subjectivity. Consciousness is all-pervasive. This is a world-view in other cultures, which see no separation between us and nature.

In the second he refers to space, time, and energy as primitives. Primitive, in that they are accepted by science as fundamental to the universe. Consciousness, he says, also can be regarded as a primitive.  He hopes that someday its fundamental laws will be discovered as they have been for the other three--space, time, and energy..

Chalmers might say Dennett's argument offers a simplistic solution, although he would say it more politely. Dennett does away with the problem.  Dennett's early book, Consciousness Explained, could instead be termed Consciousness Explained Away. With his many "intuition pumps" Dennett is evasive. With skilled slight of hand he switches from one pump to the other to insist on consciousness as illusion.

Instead, David Chalmers' famous phrase counters Dennett. His phrase is "the hard problem" of consciousness, by which he says the problem is to explain what it feels like to be you, to be me. Until that problem is solved, says Chalmers, our subjectivity, our consciousness, remains a mystery.

I find the thinking of Chalmers and Dennett interesting because I am philosophically inclined and have no doubt both philosophy and science enrich life. (Some meditators turn off the intellect though it is part of our lives.)

You can read about them elsewhere.  They are used here partly as an invitation to read more on the philosophy of consciousness and to point out the difficulty in merely thinking about it.  To wind down, I come back to my opening remarks about sensations, feelings, and empty space. They are what happens and that is what Buddha taught.

Were he alive, Buddha would also probably find Chalmers and Dennett interesting but, like Chalmers, he too is famous for what he said. In the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta (from Majjhima Nikaya 63), Malunkyaputta, a monk, asked Buddha if the cosmos is eternal. Buddha told Malunkyaputta he was like a man wounded by a poisoned arrow who would not have it pulled out until he knew the name of the archer, the tribe, and the kind of feathers in the arrow. Buddha said he taught suffering and the end to suffering through understanding gained from insight, understanding free of delusion.  It is not gained through rational speculation or theories. Humankind is wounded and the cure is not intellectualizing on its cause but instead looking deeply within.

I like this quote by Reginald Ray: "Buddhism, in its most subtle and sophisticated expression, is not a tradition that seeks to provide answers to life's questions or to dispense 'wisdom' to allay our fundamental angst.  Rather, it challenges us to look beyond any and all answers that we may have found along the way, to meet ourselves in a naked, direct, and fearless fashion." (Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body)

Using Buddha on the poisoned arrow, I said the cure is not intellectualizing.  I did not say intellect should be abandoned in other spheres of life, and Buddha would also not have said that.

But as for seeking intellectual answers to consciousness, I will leave you with this. There is a light on inside each of us and nobody knows how it got there. The light so far won't answer philosopher's or scientist's questions about itself--I doubt it ever will--but once you get to know it you don't need answers from them.