Chapter
Eighteen
Waking up
and outer, even if we know we have invented them. There are reasons why
all these ways of thinking come about, why there are so many commonalities
across individuals and societies, and also why there are some individual and
cultural variations. Illusions should not just be dismissed as stupid mistakes.
They are ways of seeing the world as other than it is – and that world includes
your own experience. There are always reasons for these other ways of seeing.
Maybe we have the illusions we have because they are a handy simplification
of reality. Maybe we have them because they help us feel a sense of control in
an uncontrollable universe. But if we really want to answer the question of how
and why we have conscious experience (or think we do), we need to question
those reasons.
If the conclusion we draw from the evidence we have considered in this book is
that what needs solving is not the hard problem but the problem of why we feel
there is a hard problem, then the questions to be asked change, too. Instead of
banging our heads against the brick wall that separates the activity of the ner-
vous system from the experience itself, we can turn to a new set of questions.
How do our embodied cognitive capacities give rise to the illusion of
consciousness?
Is the illusion of consciousness evolutionarily adaptive (or was it once upon a time
but no longer)?
How do we learn to let go of the illusion?
And what happens when we do?
Whatever questions we are asking, we should always remember to preserve a
healthy scepticism about our own experiences – even ones that feel like pro-
found awakenings. In his book Waking, Dreaming, Being (2014), Evan Thompson
talks about waking and dreaming and the Indian myth of the receding frame. He
reminds us that we can confirm that we’re dreaming by waking up – either by
waking from a dream or by becoming lucid within a dream. But we can never con-
firm that we’re awake because there’s always a chance that we might really wake
up. ‘The reason is that for any experience we choose – specifically, any experience
we take to be a waking one – it seems conceivable that we could wake up from
that experience’ (2014, p. 194). It is a valuable – and an interesting – practice to ask
yourself now and then: do I think I am awake now, or do I think I have just woken
up, and if so why, and might I be mistaken?
If we turn our attention to this new set of questions, and strip away as many
assumptions as we can about our own wakefulness, will the problem of con-
sciousness be solved? We do not know. Zen is said to require ‘great doubt’, great
determination, and the more perplexity the better. The same might be said of a
science of consciousness. We hope that you, like us, are now more perplexed than
when you began – but with a little glimpse, too, of what might lie beyond.
‘We need to say ‘I don’t
know’ often [so] we do
not fall entirely under
the enchanted spell of
our own standpoint’(Saunders, 2014, p. 187)‘motivation for
Zen training lies in
perplexity’(Crook, 1990, p. 171)