Consciousness

enlightenment is not a meme, even though the idea

of it is. Yet, paradoxically, one person can do things,

or point to things, to help others become enlight-

ened, and in this way enlightenment can be passed

on. This is known in Zen as ‘transmission outside the

scriptures’. This is the point of the koan story about

Hui Neng and the monk (Concept 18.1). Perhaps

the closest we can get to saying anything positive

about enlightenment is that it is losing, not gaining –

dropping, or seeing through, the illusions.

All this sounds gloriously paradoxical. It could be

glorious nonsense. Or it could be that Zen confronts

the same paradoxical problems that the science of

consciousness confronts. We have met these many

times already. For example, there seems to be both

a private inner world and a public outer world. From this duality arise the hard

problem and the explanatory gap. We feel strongly that we, and we alone, know

what our inner world is like. Yet as soon as we try to describe it, we find we are

providing third-person data, and the special inner world is gone.

We have met illusions too, in perception, and in theories about self and free will.

Are these the same illusions that enlightenment sees through? If so, then we

might hope to learn something from traditions that have been struggling with

the paradoxes and penetrating the illusions for two and a half millennia. If not,

then this foray into Buddhism and spirituality will have been a waste of time.

So we return now to our central question. What does all this have to do with a

science of consciousness? We saw that both Buddhism and science claim to have

succeeded, can claim that we have “unperceived” them or
whatever, but that’s just self-fooling’ (2007, p. 303). But
is it? As metzinger reminds us, ‘self-deception may feel
like insight’ (2009, p. 220).

this debate has often been confined to arguments over
personal experience or theological doctrine, amounting
to just another playground scrap: ‘I’ve experienced it,
so there!’, ‘oh no you haven’t’, ‘oh yes I have’. Yet the
possibility or impossibility of pure consciousness may be
an example of where the creative self-reflexive methods
discussed in Chapter 17 could help.

FIGURE 18.4 • Yogins at playtime.