Five: Mind, Body and Brain

In the spiritual quest (by all accounts) there is just one destination for us all. The different paths on offer all promise the same outcome: 'Ah, they're all gates into the one field - but ours is the right one!' is the way a Roman Catholic friend of my Irish Protestant grandmother put it. In the final chapter we'll try to assemble some clues to that field, but for now our sights are set firmly on temporal goals.

Earlier on I mentioned three themes in personal development, namely individuality, awareness and choice. I'm not going to make a detailed theory - there are plenty already in existence - but the simple idea here is that the primary goal is to find and rejoice in yourself as you are, and awareness (input) and choice (output) represent the means. Awareness covers such advice as: develop your intuition, trust your feelings, connect with your surroundings. Choice is about deciding what you think (or how you perceive), what you say and what you do. There are all sorts of different difficulties that individuals have with awareness and/or choice. The two sides clearly interact with each other - for instance, choices are simpler when the world seems simpler, and greater awareness can leave us utterly confused as to what to do next. As the Chinese proverb has it: 'He who deliberates fully before taking a step will spend the rest of his life on one leg'.

Models of the mind

We have seen that there are just about as many models of the temporal world as there are questions about it. With perspective relativity we can choose our way of looking at the world that surrounds us, and we can change it at any time. Since the mind is also a temporal entity, the same applies to our ways of looking within ourselves. So there's a large and growing number of models of the mind, or of the whole human being including the mind, according to the various puzzlements that people want to sort out. Psychoanalysis, Transactional Analysis, Psychodynamic Counselling, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, acupuncture, Reiki, hands-on healing, the Enneagram, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, chakra work, crystal healing, even assertiveness training, positive thinking and the martial arts all have an ontology and theoretical framework behind them. The 'talking therapies' tend to draw from the framework put together by Freud, who was perhaps the last of the great system-building thinkers (albeit nutty as a fruit cake, if Jung's testimony is anything to go by). Many of the others draw their framework from teaching which is older than Christianity. If a model is very ancient, it can be said to have stood the test of time, but it would be a mistake to suggest that it's any closer to 'The Truth' than the modern ones. They were all put together by people.

Each model has its followers, as seekers make their choices and stay with them a while. Each has its relative merits, in just the same kind of way that physics and chaos theory have their relative merits - they can each see the whole world in their own perspective space but they might not see one another's subject matter clearly if at all. Someone in a similar space at this particular time appears as a kindred spirit. Someone else might be completely at cross-purposes and miss the point altogether. Thus our friendships change as our outlooks develop.

An unashamedly synthetic model

To illustrate a number of the points made so far, here is a model of human communication that I've made up. Whether it is enlightening or not isn't the point; what matters is what happens when the model takes over from the metaphor.

The metaphor is this: each of us is surrounded by a sphere of windows, pictured as a geodesic dome. Each of the windows represents a particular perspective space. We look out at the world through these windows, generally one at a time, but they're all there all the time. Any particular window at any particular time is either transparent, opaque, or somewhere in between. The somewhere in between is visualised as a more or less silvered mirror.

Now, when you encounter someone else, your windows connect with the corresponding windows on the other person's sphere (given a few topological distortions). For any particular perspective space, if both windows are transparent you'll get on a treat, at least on that subject. If either of the windows is opaque, then in that space you're not communicating at all (though you might be sharing other spaces). In between the extremes, you're more or less reflecting your own ideas about what the other person means.

It should be clear already that to ask whether the metaphor is true or not is absurd. We are obviously not surrounded by a geodesic dome of windows. Nevertheless, there are immediately some things we can say about personal development using this model.

For instance, most of us would agree that the process of growing up will bring increasing transparency in more and more windows. Some will remain dark all one's life; some will clear more easily or quickly than others. Some we may decide, consciously or unconsciously, to keep dark for the time being. Others we might be desperate to open, but (as in our predicament) remain frustratingly opaque. We talk about blind spots and natural talent, and about facets of personality. Narcissism could be described as a tendency to keep certain windows fully silvered, so all you see is yourself. Denial is keeping the window dark. Projection is looking at a mirror when you think you're looking through it. Hypocrisy might be looking at a mirror while pretending you're looking through it. And so on.

The model provides a way of talking about all kinds of interpersonal interaction. This offers a temptation to extend and adjust it, and ask some questions about how it works. For instance: is there a fundamental difference between an open window and one that is closed but transparent? Similarly, what is the distinction between a window that is opaque (shuttered, perhaps) and one that opens to total darkness? Is the open window Love? If so, is it temporal love or Divine Love? Maybe there are concentric spheres, one inside the next inside the next, all needing to be opened. Or maybe there are just two concentric spheres, which could be labelled conscious and unconscious, or in another space, temporal and spiritual. Or whatever.

If we're not careful, we're going to imagine that we're asking real questions about human interaction, when all we're really doing is asking questions about the model. Of course, the model itself is a window, and you and I can have a lot of fun in a smoke-filled (all right, incense, not tobacco) room exploring it. But a search for Truth it is not.

Projection and boundaries

I've said that we weren't going to go into any great theoretical detail: that is well covered elsewhere. But there is one concept in psychology that is worth isolating because it appears everywhere, and it is at first sight utterly counterintuitive. It is a defence mechanism called 'projection', and perhaps we could dub it the 'railway sleeper in your eye phenomenon'. It is usually explained in such terms as this: we all have aspects of ourselves which we don't want to admit we have, so what we do is to project these aspects, these bits of ourselves, on to other people and then proceed to dislike what we see in them. This strategy is, of course, entirely unconscious - which is why it can take years, even decades, of counselling and soul-searching before we get the faintest inkling that that's what we've been doing.

We can draw some conclusions about 'person space' from the concept of projection, even without a deep and detailed familiarity with the theory. The idea of bits of ourselves immediately suggests that the self we are trying to find is not a unity but a bundle or system of components. Some of these components, such as a flair for creative improvisation for instance, we acknowledge and even take pride in. Other components, maybe a touch of hypocrisy perhaps, make us feel so bad that we need to 'explain them away'. Similarly, a haunting refrain from the old days can carry a lot of painful baggage - this is what elsewhere I've called the BROH.

Enough people assure us that the concept of projection really does work. Your enemies and friends alike have become faithful mirrors - what you see in other people is a recognition of something in yourself. There's also an important corollary: you are a faithful mirror to all your friends and enemies, too. You're not the only one doing the projecting. The boundary between us, where I end and you begin, is increasingly blurred and/or complicated.

The busy little brain has a big problem here. It is desperate to know the truth, to see things straight. Once it has hoisted in the idea of projection, which is difficult enough in all conscience, it has no way of knowing what's thine and what's mine. Any hypothesis that comes to mind is confirmed by even the most careful observation. Trusting your feelings is impossible. It's very easy to get someone to doubt their own sanity by invoking the idea of projection. On the other hand, because of projection, everyone else is in the same boat. No one out there, however wise, learned, crazy, foolish, simple-minded, confident or deeply suffering, knows what it is to be human better than you do.

Projection has brought the same sense of interconnectedness that we found in physics, chaos theory and systems thinking. Where you end and I begin is not clear at all, and the more we look the more complicated the boundaries become.

We have found (or lost) ourselves in interpersonal free-fall, where everything we thought was steady and reliable has turned out to be as ephemeral and delicate as our immediate feelings. We're getting used to the kind of space in which everything is a seamless web, where boundaries have become arbitrary points of transition between one judgement and another. This seamless interconnectedness is in our values, in our ways of looking at the material world, and now in our interpersonal lives. We put boundaries in for convenience of handling, and we adjust them according to what we want to do with them. This is not to say that boundaries are a Bad Thing just because they are arbitrary. We need them for our conscious coping. The relative truths they offer are grist for our day-to-day mill. Relative they may be, but truths they remain.

Mind and brain

When we talk about minds and how they interact, it's easy enough to think of people as disembodied consciousnesses, somehow located behind a pair of eyes, trying to cope with the day-to-day vicissitudes of their surroundings. We use the information we get from our senses and the various skills we have developed, to keep the body alive and comfortable and the mind's experience as enjoyable as possible. The traditional 'mind-body problem' in academic philosophy is still trying to get its head round the fact that somehow all this subjective experience is closely related to our brains. The traditional problem is couched in terms of: 'how can a particular brain-state give rise to a subjective experience which is of a totally different nature?'. This particular formulation, or words to that effect, has been dubbed the 'hard problem', in contrast to the 'easy' problems about brain function which are along the lines of 'what happens when I poke here with an electrode?'. The hard problem remains intractable, because it is a traditional philosophical problem that doesn't have a paradigm. It seems clear enough what we mean by the question, but anything that looks like an answer will, like the problems in theology, probably end in '-ism'. However, now that there is more and more information coming out from the 'poke-it-and-see' approach, the so-called easy problems are getting more and more exciting and the boffins in consciousness studies are getting increasingly sick of the hard problem. What we're getting instead is some real surprises about perception, memory, speech, motor co-ordination, feelings, addictions, even religious experience.

For instance, looking at vision for a moment, try this: put your hands out in front of you and then open your arms as wide as you can while still being able to see your hands. If your vision is pretty normal, your hands are practically out to either side before they've gone out of view. You can see half the world at a glance. Now put out your thumb at arm's length. The field of vision covered by your thumbnail is what the eye sees in detail at any one time. This sort of thing is as mind-boggling as any weird theory of subatomic particles.

Now, what's important for our predicament is not so much what happens to other people when they have brain surgery, but more what happens to our own self-image when we get direct experience of how an alteration in brain function makes us feel. I've never had an electrode in my brain, but most of us have experienced mind-altering drugs. I've lived with an addiction to nicotine for three decades, and enjoy alcohol in company, but what really opened my eyes to the relationship between my mind and my brain was Prozac. Yes, the Prozac worked, but the real insight that liberated me was the understanding of why it worked.

The depression was set against a background of low self-esteem (it can happen to anyone), and what would happen was this: something someone said, or something I did wrong, would trigger a downward spiral of what in the trade are called 'negative thoughts' - I'll never get the hang of being a decent human being, etc., etc. This downward spiral would go on for days at a time, and in the end I was in that miserable 'I'm going to go away and eat worms' state for most of the time. I was quite inconsolable - nothing anyone could say would help. I tried everything, from psychotherapy to meditation to martial arts including Taijiquan, and they all made it worse.
When I heard about Prozac, I asked my doctor about it and the scrip was written. It took four years, but I think a deep insight does take time to sink in. The insight was that the depression was a brain thing, not a self thing. Gradually I noticed that the depressive episodes, instead of lasting days, were over in a matter of hours. I realised that the low self-esteem wasn't driving the vicious circle any more, because my self was slowly hoisting in that the depression wasn't 'its fault' - it was just the brain going down its old pathways again. With practice, I could stop the brain's old tricks just by remembering that that was all it was. A lifelong habit of depression had vanished.

So now I know that my brain has a life of its own and, by extension, the body has a mind of its own.

The wisdom of the body

The body is more closely connected to the outside world than the mind is. The mind gets a tiny fraction of our experience, nicely distilled and packaged so that we can decide what to think and do about it. The body gets the whole lot - everything that has ever happened to us has left its mark in the body somewhere and somehow. Yet we remain to a large extent divorced from our bodies. Whether this is why or because organised religion despises the body so, is an interesting question that we can leave to historians, but the fact remains that many of us have literally forgotten how to feel. Along with countless others, when someone asks me what I am feeling I'm most likely to reply with what I think. No wonder I took to meditation like a fish to a bicycle.

Learning how to feel again is a long and difficult process. As I found with my first attempt at Taijiquan, you don't shed your blockages without a big struggle. You don't change the body's old modes of being just by changing your mind about them - you do have to work on new habits. But having got rid of the depression I went back to Taijiquan (with a different teacher) and I'm now a junior instructor.

What Taijiquan does (among other things) is to gradually persuade the muscles to relax, while keeping the body aligned with the forces acting on it - mostly gravity, but also anything else that you happen to be dealing with, whether it's digging the garden or defending yourself against an attack. In a very real sense, muscular tensions reflect tensions in the mind, and what the practice does is to gradually train the brain to let go of the tensions. The slowly emerging result is a more efficient body (because it's not using up energy keeping hold of unnecessary tensions), and a more relaxed mental attitude. In the process, there also develops an increased awareness of what is going on in the body. As the old habitual tensions loosen, the wisdom of the body begins to come through to awareness. When the body gets sick, it's telling you something, perhaps that you need to take a holiday. When you really fancy a pork pie, it's because there's something in pork pies that your body needs right now. And so on.

It's very interesting to look at the Taijiquan literature, to see what the various teachers have to say about it. What is striking is that every teacher is different. They describe different experiences and offer different interpretations. This can be confusing for the readers, who try to 'get' the feelings of the flow of qi that the authors describe and end up fooling themselves.

What all of this suggests is that while outwardly our bodies have much in common, the wisdom of my body is not going to be the same as the wisdom of yours. This is hardly surprising, the varieties of nature and nurture being what they are, but what it means is that no Perfect Master can tell you what your body can tell you. In combat, he will sense where your tensions are and use that sensitivity against you. But all that any teacher can do to help your progress is to recommend changes that you can make for yourself - in Taijiquan, for instance, he might correct your posture and the way you do the movements and maybe give a few hints and tips about relaxation and co-ordination. The rest is your own practice.

Top down, bottom up

Taijiquan is just one way to get back in touch with the body; there are plenty of other activities that foster greater body awareness. Very often, people seem to find that they get sick more often at first, that they become more sensitive to pollution (for example), more likely to catch any bug that's going, rather than more robust and resistant as they had hoped. It has to be said that usually people who start to take care of their health do so because they have had a scare, and so they start at a disadvantage in the first place. Even so, the chain-smoking coffee-gulping champagne set who work all hours with boundless energy are likely to be either very lucky genetically, very powerful mentally, or storing up trouble for themselves (or all three). My body doesn't complain any more when I smoke, it's learnt that there's no point.

So the personal development path is a delicate dance between the wisdom of the body and the judgments of the mind. Both the 'bottom-up' awareness of the body's experience and the 'top-down' influence of the thinking mind are at work on the nervous system. The mind, through education and its own experience, has ideas about what is good and healthy; the body, given a chance, can tell you directly what is good for you at any particular moment.

The process is slow, and there are good reasons for that. For one thing, the mind and the body don't always agree - indeed, it's only when they don't agree that you are aware of a personal development issue. Secondly, when there is a conflict between the two, it's not always obvious which one to follow and which one needs to change. The body's wisdom, just as much as the mind's, carries old habits and has been modified by addictions. Thirdly, old habits don't change overnight: change that is too rapid is traumatic, so the whole project is best taken very gently. Doing too much too quickly can do more harm than good.

Fortunately, patience seems to be an inevitable part of the process.

Being yourself

At long last it's beginning to look as though we can all find a unique self after all. The key seems to be not to give up thinking, but to bring the body's wisdom and experience into the picture and give it an equal share in the running of things. Many contemporary writers talk about 'energy patterns' and 'bodymind'. Bodymind looks very much like what I call brain pathways, and it's a major component of the sub-conscious mind. All the skills you ever learnt are there in the sub-conscious, ready to use when needed. You needed consciousness to learn them in the first place and what a difficult task it was then (remember your first driving lesson). In my classes, some beginners have extraordinary difficulty learning the simplest moves. (The ones who pick it up easily are likely to have other problems: perhaps they're so used to using consciousness for everything that they have a lot more difficulty with the internal work of relaxing.) But after a few weeks they find, often quite suddenly, that they've got it, and it turns out to be much easier than they had thought it would be. Another skill for the brain to use has been added. Meanwhile the conscious mind is busy on the next one.

The idea of the sub-conscious, and the whole idea of the body being a 'lower level' than the consciousness we treasure, suggests that the self - the one that the personal development project is looking for - is actually closer to the earth than to heaven. Because personal development is confused with spiritual growth, we've been looking up to the rarefied heights, rather than down to the centre of our being. The still, small voice isn't something planted there by some eternal, ineffable agency. Your centre is a temporal entity, located in space and time. The place to start looking for your individual self is in the middle of your tummy, what the Chinese call the Lower Dantien, and which coincides with your centre of gravity. There is also a Middle Dantien, which can be thought of as the centre of gravity of the upper body, and the Upper Dantien, which is the centre of gravity of your head. But if we can trust the masters, we start with relaxing the tummy. The Buddha clearly enjoys his ample belly.

The deep self, then, is firmly rooted in our physical being, and it's not the ego. This unique self is the competence of our being which operates when consciousness stops interfering.

To summarise: we need consciousness to make judgments, to learn new things and to deal with the unexpected, but the body's wisdom, both in terms of skills it has learnt and its biological structures and functions, is where your uniqueness is to be found. The body is connected to the seamless web more directly than the conscious mind, with its filters and its need to make sense of everything, can ever be.

Now for the biggest surprise of all. In the process of reacquiring our feelings and directing our attention to the body's connections, many of us find - strangely - that the ego starts to become less and less important. This is not easy to explain. It goes with the more laid-back attitude to life in general, which means that there's less out there that seems threatening - the coping space or comfort zone has widened. It goes with the more down-to-earth body awareness, which helps to drive home the understanding that other people are just like us. And it goes with the greater confidence that arises from this new-found humility.

This looks for all the world like spiritual growth.

Next Section

0: Introduction
1: Is anything wrong?
2: Values and possibilities
3: Physical Worlds
4: Earthly Paradigms
5: Mind, Body and Brain (Top of this page)
6: Transcendence and Consciousness

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