Living as a River

There’s a nice article by Mo Costandi on the plasticity of the sense we have of being embodied selves. The article covers some of the same research that I discuss in Living as a River:

Who – or what – do you think you are? You probably think that your memories and personality are an important part of what you call your “self,” and you’d be right. But the core of your sense of self is something that you probably take completely for granted – your body.

Philosophers have always known about awareness of the body of the body is critical to the sense of self. In his 1739 book, A Treatise on Human Nature, for example, David Hume wrote, “When I enter into myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, or heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.”

Hume clearly understood the importance of the body for the sense of self, as did various other philosophers who came later, and neuroscientists are now beginning to catch up with them. In the past 10 years, they have made big advances towards understanding the neurological basis of bodily awareness, revealing the mechanisms by which the brain makes – and can break – our sense of self-identity. Leaders in this area of research described their work today in a symposium held at the BNA Festival of Neuroscience…

Continue reading the original article…

Smithsonian.com has an article called “The Ten Most Disturbing Scientific Discoveries,” the sixth of which is very pertinent to the exploration of consciousness that you’ll find in Living as a River.

6. Your mind is not your own.

Freud might have been wrong in the details, but one of his main ideas—that a lot of our behaviors and beliefs and emotions are driven by factors we are unaware of—turns out to be correct. If you’re in a happy, optimistic, ambitious mood, check the weather. Sunny days make people happier and more helpful. In a taste test, you’re likely to have a strong preference for the first sample you taste—even if all of the samples are identical. The more often you see a person or an object, the more you’ll like it. Mating decisions are based partly on smell. Our cognitive failings are legion: we take a few anecdotes and make incorrect generalizations, we misinterpret information to support our preconceptions, and we’re easily distracted or swayed by irrelevant details. And what we think of as memories are merely stories we tell ourselves anew each time we recall an event. That’s true even for flashbulb memories, the ones that feel as though they’ve been burned into the brain:

Like millions of people, [neuroscientist Karim] Nader has vivid and emotional memories of the September 11, 2001, attacks and their aftermath. But as an expert on memory, and, in particular, on the malleability of memory, he knows better than to fully trust his recollections… As clear and detailed as these memories feel, psychologists find they are surprisingly inaccurate.

Riccardo Manzotti of the University of Milan has an interesting comic(!) purporting to explain the “hard problem” of philosophy, which is how experience can arise from matter.

It’s very much along the lines of Alva Noë’s excellent book, “Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness.”

The takehome message is “We and the world are really one process.” This is also what I understand the Buddha’s teaching to have been, as embodied in the 18 dhātus and in teachings such as the Kalaka Sutta:

“Thus, monks, the Tathagata, when seeing what is to be seen, doesn’t construe an [object as] seen. He doesn’t construe an unseen. He doesn’t construe an [object] to-be-seen. He doesn’t construe a seer.
“When hearing…
“When sensing…
“When cognizing what is to be cognized, he doesn’t construe an [object as] cognized. He doesn’t construe an uncognized. He doesn’t construe an [object] to-be-cognized. He doesn’t construe a cognizer.

The Buddha’s teaching, although this isn’t always immediately obvious, is one of non-duality. This is, of course, something I go into in Living as a River.

One of the most interesting things that happens in my meditation practice is when I observe experiences arising and realize that I’m not making them happen. I come to the realization that I do not “own” these experiences. In fact, even the sense of ownership of my experiences that normally dominates my mind comes to be seen as another unowned experience. Normally the conscious mind assumes ownership of experiences, but in fact it’s a kind of plagiarist, claiming experiences when it has nothing to do with their creation.

Probably this is gobbledegook to most people — I’d recommend just watching your experience and recognizing that your experiences “just happen.” This is a practical way of coming to recognize the truth of the BUddhist teaching of anatta, or not-self.

An article I recently read gives evidence to back up this radical notion that all our experiences are unowned.

Francesco Riganello at the Santa Anna Institute in Crotone, Italy, and colleagues played four pieces of classical music to 16 healthy volunteers while measuring their heartbeats. The team then repeated the experiment with nine people who were in a vegetative state. In addition, they asked the healthy volunteers to describe the emotions they had felt while listening.

The pieces, each 3 minutes long and by different composers, were chosen because they have different tempos and rhythms – factors previously shown to elicit positive and negative emotions.

Riganello found that the music affected the heart rates of both groups in the same way. Pieces rated as “positive” by healthy volunteers, such as the minuet from Boccherini’s string quintet in E, slowed heart rate, while “negative” pieces like Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony increased heart rate.

Ordinarily we’d listen to music, and the conscious mind makes the assumption that it is listening to the music, and that it is enjoying the music. But in fact the listening is still taking place even if there is no possibility of conscious thought or attention, as in the case of people in a persistent vegetative state. The enjoying may be going on as well, to the extent that the body and parts of the brain are still engaged in the activity of producing physiological responses to the music.

That last statement I made in fact is rather challenging! Can we have enjoyment when there is no one there to do the enjoying. Well, why not? Normally we’d say there could not be the activity of “listening and responding to music” unless there was someone there. And yet clearly “listening and responding to music” does take place in the absence of consciousness.

This challenge should lead us to question our notion of a unitary self, and our notion that the conscious mind is central to the existence of our selves. The practice I suggested above — where we observe experiences arising and realize that we’re not making them happen — is a way to make this more experiential, and to help free us from delusions we have about the nature of the self.