Thomas W. Clark

“The naturalistic hypothesis that it’s the brain that constructs the sense of self, now being explored by neuroscientists and neuro-philosophers worldwide, is entirely consistent with what meditation might reveal. Since experience seems a function (somehow – explaining consciousness is just getting underway) of what the brain and body do, the very sense of being a subject which purportedly “has” experience and “to whom” things happen is itself simply another neurally-instantiated aspect of subjectivity, albeit psychologically fundamental. What the brain constructs can perhaps be temporarily deconstructed, given the right conditions and sufficient practice. Thus the first-person meditative experience of the dropping away of ego, should it occur, is to experience what third-person science shows to be the dependent arising, and non-arising, of the phenomenal self. In this way, the scientific-physicalist and meditative-experiential perspectives, both empirical in different senses, end up with the same conclusion: the very core of self – the experienced locus of all our concern and striving – is a mutable, perishable, dependent phenomenon, just as the Buddha taught. Seeing this clearly from both perspectives might give us some psychological distance from the very self on behalf of which we’re striving, giving us a measure of equanimity and opening space for compassion centered on others. Science and Buddhist practice are thus consilient partners in the quest for liberation.”

“Notice that your everyday, not-so-dire experience and behavior, what we can think of as your mental and physical worldline, unwinds smoothly from one moment to the next. Whatever it is that you’re thinking and doing and feeling right now will of course change, but it evolves into each successive moment according to transitions that, even though they might not realize your hopes, are nonetheless causally perfect. Although you don’t always get what you want, or even what you need, what you always get is an unobstructed, unhindered unfolding of experience and behavior into the next moment. What is this? It’s nature doing what it does, effortlessly: being the many-leveled, interlocked and evolving patterns, conforming to what we call laws of nature, that constitute you. You, in your compulsory struggle to control, achieve, persist and enjoy, are exactly what fits and gets expressed in this bit of space-time. You, a person, are in fact a process that’s perfectly entailed from moment to moment by the local configuration of impersonal factors cooked up by evolution and culture, genes and memes. We can trace the you-process historically and we can see it concurrently – what the organism and its mind do in transaction with immediate surroundings. Either way, what we see is an unhindered expression of cause and effect, the patterning of natural laws as they constitute you the person, whether in agony or ecstasy, joy or regret.”

“Connection with the world is built in to every aspect of our being. […] We’re joined to the cosmos and the everyday world as described by science in countless ways: the elements composing our bodies are the products of the Big Bang and stellar evolution; most of our DNA is shared with other beings; our perceptions and sensations are all mediated by processes involving photons, electrons, ions, neurotransmitters and other entirely physical entities; and our character and behavior is fully a function of genetics and environment. We are, therefore, fully linked with our surroundings in time, space, matter/energy, and causality. In fact, no more intimate connection with the totality of what is could be imagined. So, from a naturalistic perspective, there is an empirically valid referent for the sense of cosmic consciousness encountered in spiritual experience. The feeling of unity generated by (actually, identical to) the quieting of the orientation mechanisms in the brain mirrors the objective state of our complete interconnection with the world.”