The Healing Power of Mindfulness

NOTHING PERSONAL, BUT, EXCUSE ME… ARE WE WHO WE THINK WE ARE?

As biology students, it was hammered into us (this is one of a number of metaphors that are not uncommon within higher education) that life obeys the laws of physics and chemistry and that biological phenomena are merely an extension of those same natural laws; that while life is complex, and the molecules of life far more elaborate than the simpler atomic and molecular structures of inanimate nature and in more dynamic relationship to one another, there is no reason to suspect that there is some extra special animating or “vital” force that is “causing” the whole system to be alive; nothing special, that is, beyond the mix of fairly sensitive conditions that permit the components and structures of living systems to act in concert somehow to allow the properties of the whole to emerge as, say, a living, growing, dividing cell. By extension, the same principle would apply throughout the web of increasingly complex life forms branching out into the plant and animal kingdoms including, in our mammalian lineage, the emergence of increasingly complex nervous systems, and, in time, the advent of ourselves.

Said another way, this view affirms that while we do not fully understand what we call “life” even at the level of one single cell, even at the level of a very “simple,” single-cell organism such as a bacterium, there is no inherent reason that this could not be done, and indeed, an entirely synthetic bacterium was created in 2010. Earlier, in a similar breakthrough, researchers synthesized the polio virus from scratch out of simple chemicals and information about the virus’s genetic sequence obtained off the Internet. Once made, it was shown to be infectious and able to replicate and make more virus in a living cell, thereby demonstrating that no “extra” vital force was necessary. Of course, ethical issues associated with such work are huge.

This perspective, that there is no “extra” nonmaterial animating element to living systems, stands in biology as a revered bulwark against what used to be called vitalism, the belief that some special energy other than natural processes explainable through physics, chemistry, biology, natural selection, and a huge amount of time, is required to give life its unique properties. And that would include sentience. Vitalism was seen as mystical, irrational, anti-scientific, and just plain wrong. And in the historical record, of course, it was and is just plain wrong. But that doesn’t mean that a reductionist and purely materialist perspective is necessarily right. There are multiple ways of exploring and understanding the mystery of life through scientific inquiry, ways that take into account and respect higher orders of phenomena, and their emergent properties.

From the biological perspective, there is nothing but impersonal mechanism at the very base of living systems, including us. It sees the emergence of life itself as an extension of a larger emergence, the evolution of the entire universe and all the ordered structures and processes that unfold within it. At some point, perhaps around three billion years ago, when the conditions were right on the young planet Earth—which had formed out of the interstellar dust cloud surrounding the nascent star we call our sun, that dust itself being the result of the colossal disintegration via gravitational collapse of earlier stars in which the very atoms, the atomic elements, except for hydrogen, that constitute our bodies and everything else on this planet were forged—biomolecules couldn’t help but be synthesized by naturally occurring inorganic processes in warm pools and oceans over millions and millions of years, perhaps catalyzed by lightning, by clays, and other inanimate microenvironments that could contribute in various ways to such processes. Given enough time, these various ingredients found ways to interact according to the laws of chemistry to give rise to rudimentary polymer chains of nucleotides (the stuff of DNA and RNA) and amino acids that had particular properties.

By their very nature, polynucleotide chains have the capacity to store huge amounts of information in the sequence of their four constituent bases, to self-replicate with high precision to conserve that information, and to change slightly under various conditions and thus produce variants, known as mutations that may, rarely, have a selective advantage in competing for natural resources. This information in the polynucleotide chains is translated into the linear sequence of amino acids that constitute poly-amino acid chains that, when they fold up, are known as proteins, the workhorses of the cell that perform all its thousands of chemical reactions, in which case they are called enzymes, and that provide a myriad of key structural building blocks out of which cells are made, in which case they are known as structural proteins.

How it all came about to give rise to an organized cell in the first place, even an exceedingly primitive one, is not understood. But from the perspective of biology, in principle it can and will be understood, and all that will be necessary to understand it will be deeper insight into complex systems of such molecules that themselves have no vital force other than the capacity, under the right conditions and in concert with many other such molecules, for the unpredictable emergence of novel phenomena, including, importantly, the stabilizing, storing, and retrieval of information and the modulation of its flow. In this sense, life is a natural extension of the evolution of the universe, once stars and planets are created that allow the conditions necessary for chemistry-based living systems to emerge. And consciousness, which emerges within living systems following those same laws of physics and chemistry when the conditions are friendly to it and there is enough time and selective pressure for that level of complexity to develop, is also therefore seen as a natural, if highly improbable, emergence from a biological evolutionary process that is empty of a driving force, empty of teleology, not at all mystical.

If consciousness, at least chemistry-based consciousness, is built in as potentially possible or even inevitable in an evolving universe given the correct initial conditions and enough time, one might say, as we have noted already, that consciousness in living organisms is a way for the universe to know itself, to see itself, even to understand itself. We could say that in this local neighborhood of the vastness of it all, that gift has fallen to us, to Homo sapiens sapiens, apparently more so than to any other species on this infinitesimally small speck we inhabit in the unimaginable vastness of the expanding universe, where our kind of matter, that makes up our bodies and the planets and even all the stars, seems to account for only a tiny percentage of the substance and energy of the universe.^* In this view, our capacity for consciousness has fallen to us not because of any particular moral virtue but purely by accident, by the vagaries of evolutionary selection pressures on tree-dwelling primate species, some of which evolved to stand erect as they moved onto the savannah and freed up the use of their arms and hands and gave their brains a greater range of challenges to deal with. These, of course, were our direct ancestors.

How we understand our inherited sentience and what we do with it individually and collectively as a species is clearly the defining issue of our time. The impersonal nature of the biological view of living systems is worth emphasizing, because it says very clearly that there is no intrinsically mystical dimension to the unfolding of life. It says that consciousness does not direct the process but emerges out of the process, even though the potential for its emergence was latent all the time. Nevertheless, once consciousness emerges and is refined, it can have a profound influence on all aspects of life, through the choices that we make about how to live and where to place our energies, and how to appreciate our impact in and on the world we inhabit. Sentience could only emerge given the right causes and conditions, which are not guaranteed to happen. Of course, if they hadn’t, there wouldn’t have been any of us around to comment on its absence in any event.

If we ourselves are the product of impersonal causes and conditions following on the laws of physics and chemistry, however complex, and if there is no “vital force” behind it all, then we can see why the anti-vitalism of science, especially biology, would lead to the declaring that there is no such thing as a soul, a vital center within a sentient being that is following laws other than the laws of physics and chemistry. In the seventeenth century, Descartes declared the seat of the soul to be in the pineal gland deep in the brain. Modern neurobiologists would say that the pineal gland may do many things but it does not generate a soul because there is no reason to postulate an enduring entity or energy that is immaterial and that inhabits or interfaces with the organism in some way and guides its trajectory through life. That doesn’t mean that life and sentience are not hugely mysterious to us, or for that matter, sacred, just as the universe itself is hugely mysterious. Nor does it mean that we can’t speak of the soul, meaning what moves deeply in the psyche and in the heart, nor of the source of uplift and transfiguration we call spirit. It also does not imply that one’s personal feelings and personal well-being are not important, or that there is no basis for ethical or moral action, or for that matter, a sense of the numinous. In fact, we could say that it is our nature and calling as sentient beings to regard our situation with awe and wonder, and to wonder deeply about the potential for exploring and refining our sentience and placing it in the service of the well-being of others, and of what is most beautiful and indeed most sacred in this living world—so sacred that we would guard ourselves much more effectively than we have so far from causing it—the world that is—to be disregarded or perhaps even destroyed by our own precocity.

Buddhists hold a similar view of the fundamentally impersonal nature of phenomena. As we encountered in the Heart Sutra (see Book 1, Meditation Is Not What You Think, “Emptiness”), the Buddha taught, based on his own personal investigations and experience, that the entire world that can be experienced—what he termed the five skandas (heaps): forms, feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness—is empty of any enduring self-existing characteristic; that try as one might, one will not be able to locate a permanent, unchanging self-ness inside or underneath any phenomenon, living or inanimate, including ourselves, because everything is interconnected and each manifestation of form or process depends on a constantly changing web of causes and conditions for its individual emergence and its particular properties. He challenges us to look and see for ourselves and investigate whether or not it is so, whether or not the self is merely a fabrication, a construct, just as in some way our senses combine to construct both the world that appears to be “out there” and the sense of the person “in here” that perceives it.

Well, if it is not so, then how is it that we feel that there is a self, that we are a self, that what happens happens to a me, that what I do is initiated by me, what I feel is felt by me, that when I wake up in the morning, it is the same me waking up and recognizing myself in the mirror? Both modern biology (cognitive neuroscience) and Buddhism would say that it is something of a mis-perception that has built itself into an enduring individual and cultural habit. Nevertheless, if you go through the process of systematically searching for it, they hold that you will not find a permanent, independent, enduring self, whether you look for it in “your” body, including its cells, specialized glands, nervous system, brain, and so forth, in “your” emotions, “your” beliefs, “your” thoughts, “your” relationships, or anyplace else. And the reason you will not be able to locate anywhere a permanent, isolated, self-existing self that is “you” is that it is a mirage, a holographic emergence, a phantom, a product of the habit-bound, emotionally turbulent, thinking mind. It is being constructed and deconstructed continually, moment by moment. It is continually subject to change, and therefore not permanent or enduring or real, in the sense of identifiable and isolatable. It is more virtual than solid, akin at least metaphorically to virtual elementary particles that appear to emerge out of nothing for a brief moment in the quantum foam of empty space and then dissolve back into the nothing. Or what we call the self could also be described as a “strange attractor” in the world of chaos theory, a dynamical pattern that is continually changing but is always self-similar. You are who you were yesterday, more or less, but not exactly.