Noises from the Darkroom: The Science and Mystery of the Mind

ONE Science and Mystery

The mind is far too narrow to contain itself. But where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside and not in itself? How can it be, then, that the mind cannot grasp itself? A great marvel rises in me; astonishment seizes me. Men go forth to marvel at the height of mountains and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbit of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves.

St Augustine

Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

Ambrose Bierce

Pooh got up and began to look for himself.

A.A. Milne

The Overestimation of Consciousness

When people talk about something being ‘second nature’, they are referring to what seems natural, obvious, or habitual – common sense. It is the business of both scientific and religious enquiry (in their very different ways) to keep showing us how far this second nature misrepresents and oversimplifies ‘first nature’: the reality of Nature and – more importantly in this book – Human Nature. We take our view of ourselves for granted. Yet what is second nature to us about ourselves is at least as suspect as our flawed intuitions about the natural world outside.

The two most vital ingredients of human nature, to which our ‘second nature’ does not do justice, are its mystery and its history. Instead of a core apprehension of the mystery we truly are, we have unwittingly constructed a bogus sense of self, full of hubris, that is closely identified with consciousness: so closely that we are no longer sensitive to the underlying, inaccessible layers and motions of mind, brain and body that form the moment-to-moment swell from which the breakers of consciousness emerge. It is as if we imagined that the drama of our lives were being played out on a brightly lit stage, oblivious to the wings, the dressing-rooms, the technicians, and all the invisible paraphernalia without which there could be no play.

We do not need to go back-stage, to know every detail of what goes on behind the scenes, in order to enjoy the production. But if we do not know, at some level, that there is a ‘behind-the-scenes’, then we confuse playing and reality. We become busy and anxious, forced to duck down in our seat when the villain pulls a gun, and to clamber on to the stage to rescue the heroine. When the mystery of the mind is unappreciated, people become compulsively drawn into the drama, as campaigners, insurers, money-makers and busybodies. When the dark surround is acknowledged, and the attempt to control everything is put in perspective, play is possible. God – or ‘enlightenment’, or the Tao – is essentially a sense of mystery; a mystery that is impenetrable, but entirely understandable. When Nietzsche wrote ‘God is dead’, he was declaring that humankind had lost its sense of mystery.

By identifying ourselves with a mobile pinprick of self-awareness, we overestimate the importance and the trustworthiness of the conscious mind, and we become out of touch with the invisible layers of brain and body on which it rests. This is unfortunate because while the modern conscious self is solitary, a candle in the night, the earlier evolutionary strata that continue to comprise the bulk of our being are ecological, connected, ‘at home’. The surface of our skin and the end of our driveway are not the limits of our personal terrain; they form our connection, our joints, the points at which each ‘member’ of the human race is connected to the wider body of nature and society. If we do not ‘re-member’ ourselves, we must continually strive to forge links of love (or, in desperation, domination) that are caricatures of what, in the mystery, is already, still, in place.

In the last three centuries, we have completed a complicated process of evolution, each individual step of which has helped us to survive, but which eventually has led us to lose our understanding of mystery, and with it our sense of wholeness, belonging and reverence. Consciousness has become the adopted seat of our identity. People nowadays do not just think a lot; they think that who they are is someone who is doing a lot of thinking. Cogito, ergo sum. We think that, if we do not notice something, it has no effect on us. We think that our deepest interests are served by pursuing those things that we are aware of wanting. We think that, if only we could figure things out carefully enough, most of life’s difficulties could be smoothed out. We take our perceptions for granted, and think that what we think matters frightfully.

We have been taught by Descartes and his heirs to be ignorant of those aspects of human life that are not easily available to conscious inspection. We inhabit a world made up of consciousness, and what cannot enter into that world is None of My Business. How the blood gets round the body, by what alchemy a cauliflower is transmuted into human flesh and bone: these may be miracles – they can intrigue me, as a Black Hole or a Desert Orchid may intrigue me – but I feel a bystander, not a participant. I do not, except rarely (on occasions such as this), even become aware of not being aware of the millions of processes that sustain me and comprise me. We do not even bother to think of such things as unconscious.

And when we do think of ‘the unconscious’ we have been taught by Freud to associate it with the murky bits of the mind; those aspects of emotion and personality from which we shy away in fright or revulsion. The unconscious is ‘The Little Shop of Horrors’; it is ‘Where the Wild Things Are’. It is the cellar in which we put everything about ourselves that we have (or had) good reason to forget. It is selfish, infantile and embarrassing. It wants to shout ‘I’M BORED’, ‘LET’S FUCK’ or ‘DON’T HURT ME’. If ‘I’, the conscious censor, were to let it, it might even erupt with hate or lust or sheer energy that would make me, the conscious me, think I was mad.

Creatures of Belief

Because we are creatures of belief, what we believe – without knowing that we believe it – about our minds determines the reality we inhabit. It determines what we allow ourselves to see. It determines the goals we must pursue. It determines the laws we pass and the motorways we build and the forests we fell and the restaurants we frequent. Even the countryside, throughout vast areas of the world, is a monument to mind: a representation not only of what generations have believed in and lived for, but of the view they have had of themselves – of their emotions, memories, thoughts and identities. Our ‘folk psychology’, woven out of landscape, language and a million subliminal events, forms the invisible filter through which we have to look as we look inward.

We do not see this filter because we see through it. It is the unacknowledged background against which our mental life stands out in relief. We say ‘You make me mad’, without ever pausing to inspect the theory of emotion which this dubious claim demands. We say ‘I’m sorry – I wasn’t myself’, without noticing what a curious view of personality is being implied. We say ‘I changed my mind’, without wondering who exactly it is that changed what (or what it was that changed whom). We try in our courts to decide whether a mass murderer is mad, only rarely doubting the sanity of the question itself.

The See-Through Mind

The cornerstone of contemporary folk psychology is the assumption that the mind is see-through: that when we look inward, through the window of introspection, we see what is there. We imagine the mind to be like a clock in a glass case, with all its important workings available for inspection by its one privileged owner. We think we know ourselves already, or could know ourselves if we chose, if not completely, then at least intimately and directly. This is the cardinal misconception, and its appreciation forms the starting point for the exposé with which this book is concerned.

Contrary to popular opinion, the human mind is a closed book. The room behind the eyes is forever dark. No access is possible, either by thinking or via the senses – for thoughts and experiences are the produce of this obscure factory, not glimpses of its operation. As with the manufacture of Cointreau or Tabasco, what goes on behind the scenes is a jealously guarded trade secret. All we get to do is taste the concoction; to the world of the concocter we are not privy at all. In the mind feelings are fabricated, thoughts are marshalled, perceptual pictures are painted. But of the painter and the engineer we have no idea.

Or rather, we can only have ideas. We think we are looking at ourselves through transparent windows. We think that consciousness gives us privileged access to our process and our nature: that the dark-room of the mind is light and airy, and our natural home. We think that the stories it tells about itself are true. Yet we are not looking through clear glass. We are looking at a screen on which some rather special products of the mind’s activity are back-projected. Behind the screen there is a director producing a constant stream of interwoven films, one of which – one recurring theme – concerns the work of a director making a constant stream of interwoven films. As in Frederico Fellini’s masterpiece 8 1/2, we are not seeing the director at work, but only the director’s partial and fictionalized view of a hypothetical director at work. We are invited to believe that the fictional and factual Fellinis are one and the same. But we have no right to do so, and we can never know the degree to which they really correspond—for the real Fellini remains always beyond the filmgoers’ ken.

If the images that the mind created of itself were truthful – if the pictures projected onto the blind showed what we would actually see if the blind were raised – then nothing would be lost by mistaking one for the other. If appearance matches reality, the distinction becomes unimportant, indeed loses its meaning. But if the mind dissembles, then the consequences of buying its pronouncements may be more interesting, perhaps more serious. If the mind tells you that you are 5 feet 3 inches tall, and take a 14 inch collar, when you are really 6 foot and a 16, then you are going to bang your head on a lot of lintels, and buy a lot of clothes that leave you with cold ankles and restricted breathing. Like the man suffering from a perpetual headache, the only doctor who is going to be able to help you is the one who persuades you to buy bigger shirts.

Inside the dark-room, inscrutable though it is, are collected all the data and beliefs that give life its meaning and construct its purpose. Buried there are the files that tell us how to be happy, who and what to care about, when to react and when to keep still; the programs that enable us to understand language, to record the past, to spin fantasies, and to tell the ‘real’ from the ‘imaginary’. Manifesting indirectly, in attractions and expectations, spontaneous allegiances and solitary dreams, there are the casts of mind that tell us how to recognize a human being who will take care of us, or give us sexual pleasure; how to feel when Arsenal lose the Cup (‘Ecstatic’, ‘Destroyed’, ‘What’s “arsenal”? What “cup”?’) And somewhere right at the centre of operations is the unarticulated specification of what it means to be a person: what kind of a being is a human being. From the frisson of an impulse buy, to the image of a Good Death, all is fashioned by the back-room boys and girls of the human mind.

Reasonable Doubt

There are three potential sources of information which could give us cause to doubt this picture: everyday experience, the reports of the mystics, and science. What about the many occasions on which we have suddenly ‘come to’, and realized that we have been carrying out complicated tasks requiring accurate perception, subtle action, and intelligent judgement – driving, say, or even walking along a crowded pavement – without any conscious knowledge or memory? While consciousness has been occupied with important affairs unconsciousness seems to have been coping very nicely on its own. What about the times when we have reacted instantaneously to a sudden event—a dog runs under the wheels, a fierce backhand from an opponent comes hurtling at your face – and before the conscious mind has even taken in what is happening the brakes are applied, or a winning volley is played? The excitement may be all over before consciousness comes puffing along with its self-centred commentary and its post hoc efforts to take the credit or shift the blame.

For 2,500 years at least there has been another source of evidence for the power of the unconscious: the writings of the mystics. As we shall see, they have couched their experiences in very different terms, drawing on whatever images were provided by their diverse cultures in their attempts to convey what they have seen. But time and again they describe their experience in terms of an abrupt shift in their relationship to the unconscious. Using theistic imagery, as most of them in the Western world were bound to do, they claim a direct encounter with a God who is, paradoxically, absolutely unknowable; whose being is to be found not in some remote heaven, but at a person’s innermost core, prior to any form of knowing or conceptualization. From ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ to Rilke’s ‘no matter how deeply I go into myself my God is dark’, they agree that the most profound experience of truth is to be found by diving into the silent spring, the well-head, from which all consciousness arises. If you can but let yourself be sucked into the Black Hole at the centre of your being – if you can walk boldly into the darkroom – then an enormous weight of anxious, self-centred concern will drop away, and a light and kindly wisdom will immediately emerge to take its place.