Myths, Meditations, Metaphors and Mansions

Once we take a break from the distractions of daily life ("Samsara"), we are left with the ultimate question ...

What (if anything) am I?

Religions, great and small, hand us a pre-packaged answer to this question. The answers are all transparent fictions, but we hold on to them desperately, in part precisely because they are so flimsy, but for many other reasons -- most notably the lack of plausible alternatives.

Perhaps the most popular packaged answer involves a metaphor. We are asked to imagine that we are really a kind of "soul" or "atma" just "wearing" our physical bodies. The soul is detachable and can wander off once the body dies, perhaps to haunt the living or perhaps to move on to a realm supposedly more "real" than what ordinary un-enlightened folks think of as the real world. Once it peels off it's fleshy coat, we imagine the ghostly version of ourselves to be very much like the original - having hands and feet - even clothes.

The metaphor works because that's the way it feels - like we are driving our bodies around in the world from a comfortable seat behind our eyes. The rest of the story, involving heaven and hell, ghosts and/or the happy hunting ground follows naturally once this basic metaphor is accepted.

The metaphor melds nicely with another -- the idea that the world is ruled by spirits that have (like us) such a disembodied "self" and act in the world with plans and intentions, especially with intentions toward human beings and acting as gate keepers and rulers of both the "real" world and the even more real world where our own spirits will eventually reside. The entire corpus of related ideas like this is called a "myth" or world view. We generally regard other people's world view as mythical and our own as rational - of course, they do the same when they consider our world view.

All of this is obvious nonsense. Belief in such a world can only be sustained with diligent application of the tool kit of reality-denial techniques, including ...

• Confirmation bias --  finding "evidence" everywhere but turning blind eye to massive conflicting evidence 
• Heavy social penalties for "unbelievers" -- ranging from shunning to banning to even horrible death
• Active extermination of people with conflicting metaphors - ironically just as silly as those we hold ourselves -- to avoid coming to the realization that our crazy ideas are not really very different from all the other (conflicting) crazy ideas

Any one who actually cares about such issues has also run into the biggest factor sustaining widespread flight from reality -- plain old laziness. Most people don't give a shit about such issues and are happy to leave the serious thinking to others. They take it for granted that somebody has the answers and are happy to swallow them whole so they can get on with the daily business of life. There is very strong social pressure on ordinary folks not to question authority and it's just a lot easier to give in.

In this piece, I'm not so much concerned with why people believe in such nonsense or the content of these belief systems. I want to point out what kind of beliefs they are. My central point here is that all of this is built on metaphor -- seeing the world as if we and the world are constructed in a certain way. Our minds being what they are, we can only proceed to new understanding by using the stepping stones of what we already experience and believe, however unsteady and unreliable those stones may be and however risky the leap from one stone to another may be.  We have seen this problem in quantum mechanics - on a small scale, the world is not at all like anything we experience at our scale. We still scramble unsuccessfully for metaphors that would allow us to visualize what is going on at the smallest scale. Should we not expect a similar problem when we try to understand the most complex phenomenon - the human mind?

An analogy (why not!)

Once everyone believed that fire was a  substance - phlogiston. What else could it be? Wasn't the world made up of substances? Of course we now see fire as a process. A process is a fundamentally different kind of animal than a substance. 

Do we make the same kind of mistake when imagining what the "soul" might be? Is it a thing (perhaps with impossibly exotic properties, like phogiston) or is it a process?

Just as it was with pholgiston, once you change your metaphor think of the mind as a process, doors open for whole new ways of seeing everything. In the case of phogiston, these "new ways" are what we now refer to as "Chemistry".

But the "process" model of the mind is still a metaphor. We are left with a lot of questions -- What does the process act upon? What are its inputs and outputs? Can we say simply that the feeling I have of being "me" - consciousness -- is just what it feels like to be a process of this kind?

Zen raises a similar challenge. According to Zen, you do not have thoughts, feelings, sensations etc. You are those thoughts, feelings and sensations. This is very close to the process metaphor, but it's still a subtle metaphor. After all, in Zen meditation, we are taught to watch such thoughts and feelings come and go. So who is doing the watching? Personally, I get a glimpse of a "hall of mirrors" analogy, where the thought of a thought is like mental feedback - or recursion (in Computer Science terms). I don't feel an urgent need to smoke out the "watcher". The metaphor is complete and useful as it stands. But still a metaphor.

I like a somewhat more generalized idea -- the concept of a form. Forms are often very "thingy" and tangible - like a chair. However other forms, like waterfalls and thunder storms, are obviously processes that persist for a fair bit of time but have an existence that doesn't depend on the specific matter and energy tied up in them at any one time. The forms associated with life seem to be a special case -- behaving in such a way as to preserve their own form for a time while propagating similar forms in the long run. 

With this slightly broader metaphor, we can speak of forms like "me", "my family" or "the human race" or "life on Earth" -- all self-sustaining processes that owe their existence to the moment-by-moment flow of material and energy.

Where I part ways with the Zen philosopher (who really doesn't want to be taken seriously anyway) is that the contents of consciousness at any one moment (thoughts, feelings ...) aren't the whole story.  It actually matters what is caught up in the process at anyone moment and the process as a whole follows persistent patterns that have a life of their own (think of the shape of a water fall). I seem to have common ground with the Zen philosopher in holding that :

• The process (form) is arbitrarily defined and not objectively "real" -- you can draw the boundary and say what is and is not part of the process any way you like - ultimately there is only one huge process -- reality itself
• All processes are transitory and will ultimately be destroyed -- including whatever process I chose to define as "me"

But we must never forget that we are still in the realm of metaphor. It may be more productive to think of myself as a "process" than a "thing" but there are many other "stepping stone" ideas that may lead us closer to the truth. For example, physicists tell us that there is really nothing in the universe except quantum fields (no actual "things" at all). By putting too much emphasis on the process idea, we may be making the old phlogistin mistake. Whatever our model of consciousness and the mind may be, it's clear that it's a very different animal from everything else we have found in the universe. We should always be open to exploring the mind itself. Indeed, there may come a day when we understand it very well and find other things "out there" that are like the mind!