Buddha and the brain |
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The May 7 edition of Newsweek ran the headline 'God & the Brain'. The magazine featured a series of articles on the new 'neurotheologists', who are attempting to chart the connections between mystical experience and brain patterns, hoping to answer the 'question of consciousness'. One of the articles began thus: 'One Sunday morning in March 19 years ago, as Dr James Austin waited for a train in London, he glanced away from the tracks towards the river Thames. The neurologist - who was spending a sabbatical year in England - saw nothing out of the ordinary: the grimy Underground station, a few dingy buildings, some pale gray sky. He was thinking, a bit absent-mindedly, about a Buddhist meditation retreat he was headed toward. 'And then Austin suddenly felt a sense of enlightenment unlike anything he had ever experienced. His sense of individual existence, of separateness from the physical world around him evaporated like morning mist in a bright dawn. He saw things "as they really are", he recalls. The sense of "I, me, mine" disappeared. "Time was not present," he says. "I had a sense of eternity. My old yearnings, loathings, fear of death, insinuations of self-hood vanished. I had been graced by a comprehension of the ultimate nature of things." Sharon Begley's article went on to state that scientists are beginning to use brain imaging to pinpoint the circuits within the brain that are active when people meditate or enter periods of deep prayer. Current scientific thinking has us experiencing a sense of 'cosmic unity' when the parietal lobes quiet down, manifesting 'spiritual emotions... of joy and awe' within our middle temporal lobe, and having our intense periods of concentration, such as in meditation, linked to our frontal lobes. Notwithstanding the above, Buddha drew a clear distinction between our body and our mind. Although the two are related, he said, they are not the same thing. The mind is not the brain, and the brain is not the mind. The brain is physical, whereas the mind is formless and functions to perceive objects. In fact, Buddha explained how our deepest levels of consciousness do not depend upon the body at all. Here we can consider some words from Geshe Kelsang's book Transform Your Life - A Blissful Journey, published in August 2001. In the chapter, What is the Mind?, he writes: 'Some people think that the mind is the brain or some other part or function of the body, but this is incorrect. The brain is a physical object that can be seen with the eyes and that can be photographed or operated on in surgery. The mind, on the other hand, is not a physical object. It cannot be seen with the eyes, nor can it be photographed or repaired by surgery. The brain therefore is not the mind but simply part of the body. There is nothing within the body that can be identified as being our mind because our body and mind are different entities. For example, sometimes when our body is relaxed and immobile our mind can be very busy, darting from one object to another. This indicates that our body and mind are not the same entity. 'In Buddhist scriptures our body is compared to a guest house and our mind to a guest dwelling within it. When we die our [deepest level of] mind leaves our body and goes to the next life, just like a guest leaving a guest house and going somewhere else. If the mind is not the brain, nor any other part of the body, what is it? It is a formless continuum that functions to perceive and understand objects. Because the mind is formless, or non-physical, by nature, it is not obstructed by physical objects. Thus, it is impossible for our body to go to the moon without traveling in a spaceship, but our mind can reach the moon in an instant just by thinking about it. Knowing and perceiving objects is a function that is unique to the mind. Although we say `I know such and such', in reality it is our mind that knows. We know things only by using our mind." We all know from our own common-sense experience that mind and body are not the same. When we close our eyes and think of our mother, for example, what does that thought feel like? Consciousness of our mother (let alone non-dual experience of anything transcendent such as the illusory nature of all phenomena) does not feel like anything physical at all - it seems to exist in a different dimension altogether, the formless dimension beyond the physical, without shape, color, spatial boundaries, tactile properties. Certainly a thought of our mother does not feel like a chemical or neural impulse. Moreoever, when we refer to 'my body', we do not feel as if we are talking about 'my mind', and vice versa,which clearly indicates that we know first-hand that they are not the same. In struggling to answer the 'question of consciousness' and how the mind relates to the body, which arose when the materialist view of Descartes and his followers took hold of Western philosophy, rather than simply accepting that mind and body are different natures, scientists have tried to answer the question by reducing consciousness to the purely physical. This is trying to blind us with science, kid us out of our own direct experience, based on the false premise that mind and body cannot be different natures. There is not and never will be a magical chemical concoction or brain operation that will lead living beings to full spiritual awakening. Finding a permanent way to quiet our parietal lobes is no guarantee of 'cosmic unity'! Meditators, on the other hand, are scientists of the mind who spend their lives investigating the nature of consciousness from direct experience (something that can be done only by using mental awareness not any crude physical instruments) - and they have clearly understood that the mind is not anything physical. There may be some relationship between certain types of mental awareness and the brain, as there is between sense consciousness and our sense faculties (the eyeball, nose, etc), but the fact that two things have a relationship proves that they are two different things, not the same thing e.g. a driver affects his car, but is not the same as the car. |
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