Consciousness

• seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
  people drop all the illusions, nonduality is revealed, and ‘there is no longer any
  vestige of a distinction between self and experience’ (Claxton, 1986b, p. 319). In
  Buddhism, this is likened to polishing a mirror. When the mirror is completely
  spotless, there is no distinction between the world and its reflection, and the
  mirror disappears.
  Have these people really seen nonduality, directly, in their own experience? If they
  have, could we all see it? Might the psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists,
  and all other thinkers working on the problem of consciousness see nonduality
  directly for themselves? If so, it seems possible that they might bring together two
  apparently totally different sets of disciplines: the disciplines of science and the
  disciplines of self-transformation. They might then understand exactly what had
  happened in their own brains and the rest of their bodies when all the illusions
  fell away and the distinctions between the first, the second, and the third person
  were gone. This way the direct experience of nonduality might be integrated into
  a study of consciousness which at the moment knows intellectually that dualism
  must be false, but has not yet worked out what this really means, or how to take
  the next step.
  The prospects for a profound integration of this kind seem real, when we consider
  all the parallels between what we have learned in this book and what the practice
  of nonduality teaches us. We have explored the possibility that visual experience
  and perhaps consciousness as a whole may be subject to a ‘grand illusion’. We
  have surveyed findings which challenge the intuition that action or attention
  happens because ‘I’ make a decision to act or attend. We have contemplated the
  idea that it is impossible to find a function for consciousness beyond the interac-
  tions of everything else in our bodies and environments. We have asked whether
  it is impossible to pin down hard boundaries between ordinary and altered states,
  or between what is real and what is imagined, or between animals and machines
  that are or aren’t conscious. We have gathered a vast amount of evidence from
  different corners of consciousness studies, much of which turns out to support
  the basic spiritual notions of impermanence of self and continuity of self with the
  rest of the universe.

So it may be that the deepest mystical insights are not only monist and non-para-

normal, but are perfectly compatible with the world described by physics (Hunt,

2006). Perhaps the experience of unity or oneness that is so common in mystical

and psychedelic experiences is a valid insight into an ultimately unified and inte-

grated universe in which everything affects everything else. This might be sum-

marised as ‘the universe is one, the separate self is an illusion, immortality is not in

the future but now, and there is nothing to be done’.

If these insights are valid, what needs overthrowing is not monist science but

the vestiges of dualist thinking that still lurk within it. This idea gives no comfort

to those who hope for personal survival of death, but it is compatible with our

scientific understanding of the universe.

We have also begun to learn why this is often not how it feels: why we fall for

free will, pictures in the head, and singular streams of consciousness, even if

they are fictions; why we like the clean lines between conscious and uncon-

scious, voluntary and involuntary, human and machine, self and other, inner

WHAT IS IT LIKE BEING

MINDFUL?

‘experiencing is

impossible without an

experiencer’

(Strawson, 2011, p. 254)

‘This is just the universe

................ ing’

(write in your own name)