Today’s spiritual discourse would benefit from a dose of logic and reason from time to time. I’m not suggesting an “Integral” injection of Ken Wilbur-esque pondering, but old-fashioned critical thinking.
Take this experiment, for example: Lay your arm on a table, and now verbally tell it to move. Likely, it remains still, awaiting its true master. Now, mentally picture it moving. Perhaps a twitch results, but nothing more. In spiritual circles, this sort of experiment is a oft-encountered first step in the deconstruction of the belief in self. Cleary, it is declared, such a basic event as moving our arm or getting out of a chair happens of its own volition. We do not control our movements. We don’t cause our hair to grow, or our food to digest. We do not control our motions. They just happen and we later claim governance. Such is the first pull in a logical thread which leads to an supposedly inevitable conclusion that we (our self) is an illusion.
Maybe…. I recall when, as a new graduate student, I was directed past the frosted panes of a laboratory door and pointed towards a hulking, decrepit-looking piece of equipment called a gas chromatograph. “It doesn’t work,” was the grim pronouncement, “See what you can do.” Shortly thereafter, soldering iron in hand, there was a minor electrical explosion as I tried to remove an unanticipated live wire. Serendipitously, the prior weeks had seen me busily convincing myself of the “spiritually correct” obviousness of not being a body. My conviction was reset as I was, literally, shocked into seeing that I was definitely a body! In fact, in the afterglow of my newly electrified consciousness, I realized I might be nothing but a body.
In short, it’s one thing to lay your arm on a table and marvel how you can’t control it, and quite another to burn that arm and realize how intimately connected to it you really are.
Consider the possibility of a person controlling a machine with their mind. Better yet, what if they could control a robotic arm and move that arm by thinking about moving their own arm? As you may know, this is reality and not science fiction. Take a look at this video, “Paralyzed woman uses thoughts to sip coffee”:
This is conscious control of a motion. The woman imagines moving her arm to pick up the cup, and the robotic arm responds. In our daily life, such motions are simply habitual and, like overlooking the latest memo posted in the break room, we simply look past, are blind to, the thoughts causing such motion. Like moving from thinking of each letter as I type, to simply typing words, to simply typing as I think, the brain is remarkably efficient at finding shortcuts. While we are conscious at moments, much of our day is controlled (thankfully) without the need for conscious thought. Rather than making us less of an individual self, this could be seen as a maximization of our individuality. My valuable consciousness is free to focus on the truly unique experiences in life and offshore (or “inshore”) the mundane tasks.
Potentially undermining this view, though, is the work of Benjamin Libet and others, who since the 1980s, have shown in a number of experiments that a reaction potential in the brain corresponding to muscle action precedes the conscious decision to move. In other words, before I am aware of deciding to move my arm, my nerves prepare the arm to move. What consciousness appears to do, at least in these limited laboratory settings, is become aware of already made decisions and claim to be the decision maker. Taken to an extreme hypothesis, these experiments question if there is any conscious control of our actions. Science to date is far from answering such a question.
It would be interesting to devise a Libet-style experiment with a paralyzed subject moving a robotic arm. Would the subject have the same pre-conscious readiness potential before they were conscious of imagining moving the robotic arm? In other words, is even our imagination preceded by an unconscious spark? If it was, what would that really mean to you? On a day-to-day basis? It make us pause, which is good, but our self concept is remarkably resilient to these scientific assaults.
Likewise, it is resilient in the face of philosophical assaults. Take the mystical pronouncement that “The world is an illusion.” How many times have you heard that? Yet, at a gut level, has that concept changed who you feel (not think) you are? You may have decided that you are the awareness in which all thoughts, feelings, objects, and motions occur, yet wherein lies the awareness with which you are aware? If it is all-encompassing, then how are you aware of it?
As Douglas Harding was so fond of saying, “Look for yourself.” Combine that with Richard Rose’s “Back away from untruth,” and you have a map whose compass is your developed intuition. By all means, keep abreast of scientific inquiry. I do not criticize honest scientific inquiry, but I do criticize much of what currently passes for spiritual inquiry. The contemporary avalanche of “awakened” teachers, demonstrate a distinct trend toward facile reasoning. Questioning is subsumed by believing. Critical thinking is labeled a barrier to “true seeing,” and a giggle or smug smile dismisses honest questioners.