Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [89]
I put the question to Matthieu Ricard, a scientist who has coauthored some of Davidson’s studies. Ricard is a Buddhist who has meditated for, on average, two hours and twenty minutes a day, seven days a week, for the past thirty-five years. He lives in Dharamsala with the Dalai Lama and serves as his translator. Ricard told me that the idea that brain and mind are the same—that we are a bag of molecules and our brains merely react to stimuli—makes no sense to him. Consider free will.
“If you say,‘Okay, just to prove my free will exists, I’ll do something completely against nature and biology. I’m going to sit on my chair until I collapse. I’m not going to go to the bathroom. I’m not going to eat. I’m not going to drink.’ A functional brain—except for a crazy person—would refuse to do that. So where does that free will come from? It doesn’t make any sense from the body’s perspective. The brain has no reason to say, ‘I’m going to sit there and pee in my pants and not eat anything’—it’s totally meaningless, except to prove that I am in charge.”
Listening to Matthieu Ricard, I had a naughty thought. Maybe the materialists have got it wrong. Maybe the emperor has no clothes. Maybe we do have a mind, consciousness—a soul—that works with the material brain but is independent of it.
The attempt to explain spiritual experience through neurology alone reminds me of a joke I heard recently from a Buddhist monk. A person loses his car keys. It’s dark outside, and he’s looking right under a streetlamp. Another person comes over and asks, “What are you doing?” And the man replies, “Well, I lost my keys.” And the other fellow says,“Did you lose them here?” And the man says,“No, I lost them way over yonder, but this is where the light is.”
Brain activity, chemical reactions, the functions of the various lobes of the brain—this is where the light is for modern-day scientists. Peering at brain scans and EEGs is something they are really good at. And so they keep on doing it, even though there is a possibility that at least part of the explanation lies somewhere else, just beyond their circle of light.
Since scientists have not presented an airtight case that matter is the sum total of reality, I decided to venture beyond the circle of light, beyond the boundaries of safe, mainstream science. This leads directly to the ground zero of scientific debate: the nature of consciousness. Can a person perceive when her brain is not functioning? When the radio receiver is broken, or out of batteries, can it pick up a signal? What happens to consciousness when the physical brain is stilled by death?
CHAPTER 9
Out of My Body or out of My Mind?
THE DILEMMA FOR CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCHERS IS THIS: How do you tease apart the mind from the brain? For most of us, the brain and the mind cannot be distinguished: if the brain stops, so does the person’s consciousness and perception of reality. Little surprise, then, that most scientists believe the physical brain and nonphysical consciousness are two sides of the same coin.
But a healthy number of people say that assumption is flat wrong. No doubt you have met a few of them, perhaps unwittingly: people whose consciousness kept ticking after their brains shuddered to a halt. These people have approached the border of death and lived to tell the tale, and their stories suggest that mind is more than matter.
By his own account, Michael Sabom was an unlikely candidate to launch a methodical investigation into the murky world of consciousness.