THE ANATOMY OF CONSCIOUSNESS ■ 25unlimited powers of the mind, and with more justification. But even
many of these claims do not hold up under investigation, and the ones
that do can be explained in terms of the extremely specialized training
of a normal mind. After all, mystical explanations are not necessary to
account for the performance of a great violinist, or a great athlete, even
though most of us could not even begin to approach their powers. The
yogi, similarly, is a virtuoso of the control of consciousness. Like all
virtuosi, he must spend many years learning, and he must keep con
stantly in training. Being a specialist, he cannot afford the time or the
mental energy to do anything other than fine-tune his skill at manipulat
ing inner experiences. The skills the yogi gains are at the expense of the
more mundane abilities that other people learn to develop and take for
granted. What an individual yogi can do is amazing—but so is what a
plumber can do, or a good mechanic.
Perhaps in time we shall discover hidden powers of the mind that
will allow it to make the sort of quantum leaps that now we can only
dream about. There is no reason to rule out the possibility that eventu
ally we shall be able to bend spoons with brain waves. But at this point,
when there are so many more mundane but no less urgent tasks to
accomplish, it seems a waste of time to lust for powers beyond our reach
when consciousness, with all its limitations, could be employed so much
more effectively. Although in its present state it cannot do what some
people would wish it to do, the mind has enormous untapped potential
that we desperately need to learn how to use.
Because no branch of science deals with consciousness directly,
there is no single accepted description of how it works. Many disciplines
touch on it and thus provide peripheral accounts. Neuroscience, neuro
anatomy, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, psychoanalysis, and
phenomenology are some of the most directly relevant fields to choose
from; however, trying to summarize their findings would result in an
account similar to the descriptions the blind men gave of the elephant:
each different, and each unrelated to the others. No doubt we shall
continue to learn important things about consciousness from these
disciplines, but in the meantime we are left with the task of providing
a model that is grounded in fact, yet expressed simply enough so that
anyone can make use of it.
Although it sounds like indecipherable academic jargon, the most
concise description of the approach I believe to be the clearest way to
examine the main facets of what happens in the mind, in a way that can
be useful in the actual practice of everyday life, is “a phenomenological
model of consciousness based on information theory. This representa