Читать книгу Noises from the Darkroom: The Science and Mystery of the Mind - Guy Claxton - Страница 13

Scientific knowledge will not of itself correct the underlying faults in our inner-vision, any more than reading a textbook on optics will improve your eyesight. But it may well help us to understand and accept the diagnosis, and increase our willingness to seek a more powerful cure. For this we need more than rational understanding of the problem. We need methods for cleansing the ‘doors of perception’, and for these we shall have to turn back to the advice of the mystics again. They offer a bewildering variety of practices, but all share the view that wisdom arises not from more and more understanding, only through a personal programme of ‘perceptual re-education’. Scientific demonstrations, and reasonable argument, may take us to the brink of this process, but it cannot take us any further.

All these varied ‘technologies of transformation’, if they are to have a lasting effect, rely on a single potentiality: mindfulness.² It is fortunate indeed that evolution has equipped us with a tool to effect this perceptual cleansing, for it would have been quite possible for humankind to have painted itself into a psychological corner from which there was no escape. At the end of every episode Batman used to appear to have got himself into a hopeless position…only for some trick or gadget to save him at the start of the next programme. Luckily we have up our sleeves a particular reflexive use of consciousness that can help us too to escape. In our case the traps are of our own devising, and consist of assumptions and beliefs, dissolved in the very way we see the world, which create apparent problems, and prevent us both from solving them, and from seeing that they are of our own making. Mindfulness involves cultivating the knack of making them visible, and of freeing ourselves from the power they exert to make us ‘shrink to fit’.

In this ‘cleansing of the doors of perception’, as William Blake called it, the presence and the power of the unconscious is revealed. We cease being so eccentric, so displaced from our natural centre of gravity, and can relax into the unknowable heart. This, finally, is the revelation of divine truth: not a glimpse of any conceivable God, but a close encounter of an essentially mysterious kind. So spirituality, it turns out, resides in a simple correction of the brain – or perhaps we should say the ‘world-body-brain-mind’, as it becomes increasingly clear, as the story unfolds, that we cannot legitimately separate them from each other. Neuroscience, the scientific study of the brain and the nervous system, is now able to give us a working picture of the brain that can explain how mystical experience occurs, and why it takes the forms it does.

The mystics have talked of peacefulness and belonging, of wisdom and clarity, of an indiscriminate, impersonal love, of naturalness and simplicity, of knowing, without knowing what it is one knows, of a vivid and fiery quality to perception. Yet why just these qualities should appear together has itself been a mystery. Why should the body course with energy, and vision become luminous and penetrating, at the same time as one is suffused with tranquillity, understanding and compassion? The answer is to be found in the way the brain is built to work, and in the way its processes are corrupted by a small coterie of unrecognized beliefs (principally about the mind itself). When the ‘Self System’ is sidelined or shortcircuited, the brain instantaneously reverts to a more basic modus operandi, of which what we call ‘Buddha mind’, or ‘the grace of God’, is the natural efflorescence.