review of Zen and the Art of Consciousness

I am reading Zen and the Art of Consciousness by Susan Blackmore. She understands more about true enlightenment than John Yarr or Mooji put together. Some parts of the book are boring, such as when she is writing about philosophical concepts such as free will.

There is no point in discussing philosophical concepts here. I'm sure Yarr and his Adepts will say there is no point to thinking, it is experience that matters. Except that I don't believe they have experienced true enlightenment: Susan Blackmore has.

There are just a couple of things I want to mention about free will though. Susan says that science tells us that everything has a cause therefore everything is predetermined. I know that is what you learn on a philosophy course but that's not true. Science tells us that some things are random. We live in a universe where some things happen because of previous things and some things happen at random. How that affects our understanding of free will I don't know but I think it's important to point that out.

Then there are the ethical implications of not having free will. It seems that someone who is enlightened does not feel they have free will and does not feel regret for past actions. Is it good to have people who never feel regret? Does it make them more capable of actions that harm others?

If they were always accepting everything that would be one thing. However, they seem to accept that their cult leader is abusing children yet at the same time not accepting that someone they have initiated doesn't want to continue to be part of their cult - they get very upset about that.

Before I read this book I understood certain things. I understood that there are two forms of enlightenment. Both are nonduality, but nonduality can manifest in two different ways. First, you can perceive everything you see to be part of you. Second, you perceive that there is no you.

I understood that sense perceptions are important in how a self is formed. Somehow sense perceptions become woven together to create a self. Susan Blackmore shows more about how this happens. I have quoted two passages from her book below.

page 129

"The difficult part, in my experience, is the letting go, but then it always is. This practice has a very odd quality about it. Self seems to dissolve into the multiple threads so that there is no longer any central self whose attention switches to one stream or another. So there is no longer a 'string of beads', or a 'stream of consciousness', or a 'movie in the brain', but experiences and experiencers that co-emerge all over the place and not to anyone in particular. It is much more like Dennett's 'multiple drafts'."

pages 154 and 155

"Then suddenly it's possible. Perhaps all those years of practising some kind of letting go have stood me in good stead. There goes the traffic noise, thrumming along. Someone has been listening to it all the time. Let it arise, let it be for however long it stays, and let it go. Meanwhile, in parallel with that, something else has risen up. The birds are singing. The drill has started up again. There's a sense that each arises, stays for a while, and fizzles out. They're not being attended to one at a time, but go on in parallel with nothing holding them together.

It is the fizzling out that is the tricky bit. I notice that as each sound or feeling dies away, or ceases being brought into play, there is a bit of me that wants to hang onto it; that wants to keep saying, 'I experienced that. I remember it. I exist.' But the task is clear. Let all these threads do their stuff, and that includes fizzling out again. So they are let go. It is possible after all. They do just seem to arise and fall away again, but not to me.

I have a little chuckle. For years and years I have understood John's instruction to 'Let it come, let it be, let it go' in the following way. Here I am, being mindful, practicing meditation, sitting in the middle of my world, and along comes some thought or idea or perception. What I must do is let it arise - here in my consciousness - let it be for a little while and then, when its time is up, let it go out of my consciousness again. I've done it for years, and very useful it has been too.

But now it seems that it isn't like that at all. No, not at all. Rather, there are myriad things arising and staying for a while being experienced by someone and then fizzling out again. The meaning of John's meme is to let that happen. It is not that they are happening to me. They are not coming, being and going, to me. It's all just happening anyway, whether I like it or not. The task is not to prevent it, not to interfere with it, not to suppose that there even is a me who could interfere with it all. Ah."

The problem that I have with Susan's position is that if you don't believe that the Self (or the illusion of Self) has a supernatural cause then you have to believe that it is an evolved characteristic. Either it has evolved through Darwinian natural selection or it is intimately associated with an evolved characteristic. It must have a purpose. To blithely say that we can get rid of it and everything will be fine is taking a big risk.

I used to think that we don't need a Self. That was because I believed in traditional Buddhist and Hindu belief systems. This included the concept of reincarnation: enlightenment means we don't have to reincarnate. Now I no longer accept these belief systems I think people are taking a big risk in playing about with their heads.

You go on intensive meditation retreats and you don't know what you will end up with. It affects different people in different ways. It could be mental illness. You want to risk your mental health? For what? The Truth?

I know that the peak of Everest is the highest point on Earth. I don't need to go there to prove it. I certainly wouldn't want to live there. I know that my Self isn't real. I don't need to spend vast amounts of time and money on intensive meditation retreats to prove it. As for being in a state of no-Self 100% of the time, I wouldn't want it even if it was easy to achieve. I have no reason to believe that it is a superior state of being. I gave up believing that when I gave up believing in reincarnation.