Читать книгу Noises from the Darkroom: The Science and Mystery of the Mind - Guy Claxton - Страница 11

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.