A couple of friends were talking the other day about some esoteric brain experiences they had heard about and would like to have; two different experiences actually: one about experiencing “nothingness,” and the other about being able to function “in the void” without the feeling of your self being involved. Both implied that there was something supernormal or otherworldly about these experiences, maybe even something supernatural.
My own brain wasn’t agile enough to come up with a brief and insightful comment, and besides, no one asked for any. The nice thing about having a blog, though, is that I can offer my opinion without being asked, and my brain can take it’s own plodding time to come up with one, therefore…
Don’t believe everything your brain tells you. Brains don’t automatically know how they work, and as a result, they sometimes misinterpret their own workings. By studying how other people’s brains’ abilities have been altered by stroke or injury, our brains can learn things about themselves that they couldn’t learn by introspection, and can correct some of their faulty interpretations.
The first bit of information every brain needs in order to evaluate its experiences doesn’t involve brain damage, however, but an understanding of a built-in limitation of the organ: its limited capacity for attention. There is a wonderfully relevant article in the current issue of Scientific American Mind, called “Mind over Magic?”. It goes into detail about how magicians have, for centuries, exploited the limits of attention to perform their feats, and about the neurophysiology involved. Not only is attention inherently limited, but when it’s directed toward one thing, the brain actively suppresses firing in neurons that are stimulated by that thing’s surroundings to bring it into sharper focus.
The object of attention is determined by the interplay of external and internal stimuli, and in order to experience the “nothingness” my friend was interested in, we have to become convinced that that experience is more important than anything else, internal or external, that might tempt our attention. Our personal history—some sort of study or contact with a teacher—has to lead us toward that conviction and give us the willingness to practice, and has to provide us with an idea of what “nothingness” might be like. The brain’s ability to focus attention on one thing and suppress everything else allows it to create that and any number of other amazing experiences.
When we understand how the brain works, then the skill of experiencing nothingness can be seen as no more unusual than learning the skill of playing the violin: it takes devoted practice, but it is not beyond the brain’s natural capabilities. It doesn’t constitute contact with anything beyond normal reality; no otherworldliness required.
The experience of functioning without the sense of self being involved can be seen as a variant of the same skill of focusing attention that allows the experience of nothingness. The sense of being a person, a self, is located in particular parts of the brain—malfunctioning brains have taught us a lot here—and when attention is focused tightly enough in other areas, there isn’t enough attention left to monitor one’s selfhood, resulting in what Meister Eckhart called the total “poverty” of the self. Again, unusual, but not unnatural, brain function.
There are many motivations for wanting to develop the focused attention that meditation practice makes possible. When I first encountered the idea, I thought it was about getting high. Later, I thought it was about finding a higher truth; something unavailable in ordinary experience. Both those motivations are based on the idea that ordinary reality is unsatisfactory, which is true, I think, in a sense.
Most of us grow up with conventional ideas about what it is to be human, and for many of us, those ideas are uninspiring, to say the least: get an education so you can get a good job so you can raise a family, etc. Join the rat-race.
It turns out that the problem is not with reality, but with the limited values and options that most of us learn; with the limited idea of human possibilities. Learning what we are—how our brain works and how we acquire values—opens us up to consider a broader range of possibilities, to explore the values of eras and geographies other than those we grew up in.
In my own explorations, I came to the conclusion that nothingness was not particularly interesting; it’s like dying without actually being dead.
Turning off self-consciousness has been more rewarding. Learning to do things like wash the dishes without my brain running its habitual self-maintenance routine is a nice break, but being involved in social life means I have to keep my “story” current, although not as obsessively as once was the case.
As for getting high, I had an experience on LSD a few times that I’ve learned to reproduce, and it can be fun on occasion. It involves closing my eyes and focusing on visual sensations without any attempt to manipulate them, so that I can watch my visual system’s random activity. It’s like abstract three-dimensional movies, and it’s the primary reason I got interested in doing 3D animations. My 3D efforts in the world outside my head have not yet approached the variety and fecundity of my brain’s unfettered activity, but I’m getting closer, and I’m having a lot of fun in the process.
I’m all in favor of developing the ability to focus attention; it can open us up to the brain’s many wonderful capabilities. But we need to understand that even though we can experience something in our head that seems very real, it doesn’t necessarily reflect outside reality. There are millions of way to imagine the universe, but unless they generate testable hypotheses, they’re only good for entertainment.
All our experiences are natural, no matter how exotic. That they seem supernatural is the result of not understanding our built-in capabilities. If there were such a thing as the supernatural, we human beings wouldn’t have access to it.
