Don't-Know Mind

The question “Who were you before you were born?” is a fundamental koan in zen teaching. Zen masters often ask questions like, “What does your original face look like?” or “Where have you come from?” Of course, one of the purposes of such questions is to jog the initiate out of cursory answers like, ”I’m a professor”, “a mother”, or simply a flesh-and blood automoton of electrochemical stimuli and responses.” etc. Because beyond the thoughts and emotional responses and fleshy parts, there is that unknowable essence known as pure consciousness, sky blue mind, The eye beyond the “I” found outside the realm of questions and answers. The silent witness transcendent of conditioning and assumptions. What the masters call “don’t-know mind.”

Zen Master Seung Sahn said our purpose in this existence is to understand “don’t-know mind.” We don’t do it by reading a bunch of books which are limited to the opinions and dogmas of others but by dwelling in “the primary point” “before thinking”. “Keeping a don’t-know mind 100% you and everything are already one.” he said.

Easier said than done, of course. Even in my deepest meditations my babbling brook of constant thought actually subsides into a pool of stillness only for a moment or two. And yet, to borrow a metaphor from Majarishi Mahesh Yogi, it only takes a moment of dipping the cloth into the dye to change the cloth indelibly. Then you hang the cloth in the warm sun of the everyday world where it fades somewhat. Then dip it in the dying vat again before exposing it again to the heat of the light of day. Repeating this process over and over, the color deepens and becomes fast.

Satsang (sitting meditation) is not the only path toward don’t-know mind, It also helps to contemplate what we aren’t— a process that Krishnamurti calls “negation.” One thing becomes clear. We aren’t our thoughts. And once we come to this realization, we are forced to eliminate all forms of conception from our definition of self or anything else really. Soon one realizes that, since any definition can only be a product of thought, any attempt to capsulize consciousness into a concept is futile. All concepts, words, symbols, and ideas about observers and the observed are but maps, not the territory— as alien to the true nature of the thing they describe as a four color atlas is to the vast stretches of complex terrain it vaguely refers to.

Seung Sang points out that when a dog barks Koreans say he makes the sound, “Mung! Mung! Mung!” Japanese people say it says, “Wong! Wong!” Polish say it’s “How! How! How!” and Americans say it’s “Woof! Woof!”…”But this dog never gives his sound a name; he only barks. Human beings make this word and sound an idea, and become attached to it. Then they cannot see the world as it is.”

So if you ask me to describe my original face, my answer is, “How! How! How!”

Astonishing Hypothesis or Just Astonishing Hype?

In a recent article in Time magazine entitled “The Mysteries of Consciousness” Stephen Pinker, a psychology Professor at Harvard, attempted to explain why most neuroscientists believe consciousness is merely a quirky byproduct of brain function— what he snarkily termed “a terrifying prospect” for “ many nonscientists” because “it strangle[s] the hope that we might survive the death of our body.”

He tried to prove his point by listing various ways in which electrical probes, drugs and oxygen deprivation can produce different thoughts and perceptions in a subject, all indicating, in his mind (and apparently the minds of many of his colleagues), that “Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.”

All he had really proven, however, is that he and many other academics confuse the content of consciousness with consciousness itself. The “‘astonishing hypothesis’— the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the brain” has been old news to meditators for thousands of years.

Indeed one of the purposes of meditating is to calm the “activity in the brain” so that the sediment of thoughts and emotions can settle and separate itself from the medium it obscures and is suspended within, the translucent liquidity of consciousness. Allow this to happen and it becomes crystal clear that pure consciousness is not the activity of the brain. In fact it is best detected when such activity has diminished considerably. Stir up the sediment with electrical probes and you’ll only confuse the issue.

Pinker attempts to refute the inference of out of body experiences that might suggests that essential consciousness is independent of brain activity by briefly mentioning a recent Swiss experiment in which neuroscientists created the illusion of out of body experience “by stimulating the part of the brain in which vision and bodily sensations converge.” He dispatches the subject with a few dismissive sentences but, again, what did he really prove?

Just because you can reproduce many of the sensations of flight with a flight simulator doesn’t demolish someone’s assertion that they’ve actually flown at one time or another. And what about the fact that certain out-of-body experiencers have gathered information from places at the same moment their body was in another place? The fact that Pinker would try to palm off such wispy arguments as “oxygen starvation” as the final word on OBE causes one to wonder how much hubris plays a part in his viewpoint.

And what about the inferences of past life experiences— accounts of people who have inexplicably intimate knowledge of events and situations they could not have known about without having been someone long departed from that time and place. Do such phenomenon infer consciousness transcending brain function? Pinker doesn’t touch on such inconvenient considerations but he would probably say that such anecdotal evidence does not conform to the rigors of scientific method.

In reality the rigors of scientific method have not been properly applied to past life or out of body experience or the phenomenon of the clear light of death (see previous blog entry) or a host of other possible pathways toward a better understanding of the issue of consciousness because such inquiry is politically incorrect in the extreme to the conventional scientific community.

Is there consciousness (as opposed to brain activity) outside of physical phenomena? How do you find out if you only use instruments that measure physical phenomenon? The lack of effort by most of the scientists that claim to be interested in the subject to develop a methodology that might actually address the challenges of such an inquiry brings to mind a famous Sufi teaching story: A policeman comes upon a man searching for his key late at night under a street lamp. The officer asks where the man lost the key and the man points to a dark corner a considerable distance away. The officer asks, “If you lost it over there, why are you looking over here?” The man replies, “Because the light’s better.”

If the man was an academic required to publish something authoritative on the subject on a regular basis, I wouldn’t be surprised if he soon threw up his hands and wrote a treatise claiming that he’d proven the key a figment of our imaginations all along.