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Body, Mind and Soul—Do They Exist?

Whenever Sri Ramana was asked any questions relating to God, atman, and the meaning of life, his usual response used to be: ‘Who is asking the question? Who or what is this “I”? What is mind? Enquire into it; find out . . .’

How does one find out? There is no asking ‘how’, JK would say, yet do inquire, be aware, and see ‘what is’. On the other hand, UG would assert that the whole business of self-inquiry is a joke. But in the first place, why do we ask these questions? Who am I? What is man? Is there a God? Is the soul different from the body? What is the meaning of all this?

But are these really our questions? Or are we repeating questions already asked by others in the past, sometimes rephrasing them this way or that? Are we asking these questions because our traditions and gurus have told us that they are very important and that it is possible to find answers? Or is it, to use UG’s language, because the old answers are really no answers, that the questions have remained and continue to be asked. Could it be that there are actually no questions but only unsatisfying and unconvincing answers, and these answers are our problem. Is the problem that we hope that one day we should be able to find satisfactory and final answers to all our questions?

Obviously, of all the creatures living on this planet, only the self-conscious human being asks questions. The questioning is backed by a sort of a priori belief that it is possible to know, to understand and share or communicate that understanding to others. Otherwise, all our inquiries, all our searching, all our sciences should come to a grinding halt.

However, there has arisen time and again a strong suspicion about this whole business of the search. For, to ask what something is or to ask, say, what the body or the mind or a human being is, is to seek out its essence. Does such a thing as essence exist? This is indeed a metaphysical question and metaphysical answers are no real answers at all. ‘Man does not exist’, declared Foucault. Actually, what he meant was that the body–mind composite, the empirico-transcendental duo is nothing more than a metaphysical construct. Nietzsche too questioned the very basis of this search for, according to him, it is rooted in the value not only of absolutes but also of opposites, by playing off one against the other.100

There is nothing outside the text, announced Derrida, meaning that there is only the text and the language in which it is expressed. The implication is that we have first to examine the text, how it works, examine the language and see if it offers any meaning, stable or otherwise, and whether the text achieves anything at all!

So then, for many postmodernists it is not the question, but language itself that is problematic. The self, or even the body, is not something given, but the significant effect of language. The self is not outside of language, and is always in relation to the ‘other’. In fact, it is in and through language and in comparison with others that man constructs himself as a subject, and establishes the concept of self or ego.101

It all seems to be a terribly futile epistemological exercise. As G.B. Madison would say: ‘So long as we remain bound to epistemology, which is to say, to metaphysics, searching for ultimate basis or “models”, sources, grounds, or origins, ultimate causal, essentialist, fundamentalist explanations, we are perhaps condemned to go round in endless circles, like a dog chasing its tail in vain.’102

But the chase is on. The dog seems to be getting nearer its own tail, particularly in the non-metaphysical domain. A considerable number of psychologists, neuro-physiologists, geneticists and socio-biologists do not bother too much about whether ‘mind’ exists at all. They simply grant it a vague epiphenomenal status and get down to talking about behavioural patterns and neural activity. And we see a certain interpenetration of disciplines: The psychologists reduce their science to biology, the biologists to chemistry and physics, and physicists to the enigmatic man who happens to be the observer who seems to create or construct a phenomenon rather than discover it. This epistemological circle, avers Madison, has not led us anywhere closer to a unified theory or non-reductionist understanding of the human person.

However, there are tough molecular biologists and geneticists who believe that they have nearly solved the body–mind problem within their discipline. It is interesting to take a quick look at least at two of their important theories.

The Selfish Gene

Richard Dawkins’s celebrated yet controversial book, The Selfish Gene, narrates a fascinating story of the evolution of man on earth from the genetic point of view. It is the story of the journey of the ruthless gene, starting its passage from the ‘primordial soup’ through Darwinian ‘natural selection’, through ‘mutation’ and ‘adaptation’ to ‘Homo sapiens’, the human body, which is but a fantastic machine used by the gene for its perpetuation.

According to Dawkins, it is erroneous to assume some grand design or purpose to evolution, or that it is for ‘the good of the species’. No—it is for the good of the individual or the gene. The argument that culture is more important than genes to the understanding of human nature is at best only wishful thinking. ‘Much as we wish to believe otherwise,’ writes Dawkins, ‘universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.’

Anything that has evolved through natural selection is selfish, Homo sapiens included. ‘Selfish’ in the sense that genes act only for themselves, their only interest being their own replication. Come what may, they copy themselves and ‘want’ to be passed on to the next generation. ‘Selfish’ or ‘want’ ought not to be understood as some grand purpose, aim or intention (which are all only mental constructions) but only as ‘chemical instructions’ that can be copied. In this relentless journey of the gene, altruism too is but another technique of the gene, another facet that is played out to ensure its continuity. ‘To put it in a slightly more respectable way, a group, such as a species or a population within a species, whose individual members are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the group, may be less likely to become extinct than a rival group whose individual members place their own selfish interests first.’ Altruism is selfishness in disguise and ‘often altruism within a group goes with selfishness between groups’.103

These genes or replicators are basically the same kind of molecules in all living organisms—from bacteria to elephants. The human body, which has evolved over millions of years, is the handiwork of the very same gene, created for its safe perpetuation. ‘We are all survival machines,’ declares Dawkins, ‘for the same kind of replicators—molecules called DNA—but since there are many different ways of making a living in the world, the replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in water . . .DNA works in mysterious ways.’

It is genes that are immortal, not some dreamed-up spirit or soul which we imagine and identify ourselves with. There is no such thing as God or spirit either! There are only genes that leap ‘from body to body down the generations, manipulating body after body in its own way and for its own ends . . .’ We are merely their survival machines and ‘when we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.’

What then is ‘mind’ in this scheme of things? Is it just another technique, another ‘machine’ used by the gene for its own survival? Towards the end of his book, Dawkins proposes a theory of what he calls meme, apparently to solve the niggling body–mind problem: If the ‘body’ is the survival machine of the gene, the ‘mind’—that is, memory—is the survival machine of the meme, proclaims Dawkins. Unlike genes, memes are not physically located, yet, he asserts: ‘Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.’

If the gene emerged out of the ‘primordial soup’, human culture is a product of the ‘new soup’—memes. But how and when did memes emerge? Dawkins says: ‘The old gene-selected evolution, by making brains, provided the “soup” in which the first memes arose. Once the self-copying memes had arisen, their own much faster kind of evolution took off. And they seem to have taken over the genes and started a new, independent kind of evolution of their own.’104

There are different kinds of memes—what Dawkins calls ‘meme complexes’—such as fashions in dress and diet, ceremonies and customs, art and architecture, engineering and technology, music, ideas and concepts—all of which ‘evolve in historical time in a way that looks like highly speeded up genetic evolution, but has really nothing to do with genetic evolution’. In other words, these new replicators, like selfish genes, perpetuate themselves simply because it is advantageous to them. They plant themselves on or parasitize the brain, ‘turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell’. According to Dawkins, God exists ‘if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human cultures’.

The Meme Machine

Surprisingly, it is not Dawkins’s theory of the selfish gene (which many people find reductionist and reactionary), but his novel concept of the meme that has caught the imagination of a considerable number of psychologists, biologists and cultural theorists, although they may not all use the term to mean the same thing. For instance, Ken Wilber finds the theory quite problematic105

though he too uses the term ‘green meme’ to mean pluralistic relativism embedded in egalitarian, anti-hierarchical values.

Susan Blackmore, a psychologist who is interested in near-death experiences, the effects of meditation, the paranormal and evolutionary psychology, has applied the idea of the meme to develop a theory of memetics in her book, The Meme Machine. Since her theory has some bearing on what UG has been saying about the nature of thought, it is worthwhile to consider some of her central ideas.

Blackmore believes that memetic theory not only solves what is called the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ and body–mind dualism more effectively than other theories, but can also open up a whole new way of seeing and being in the world.

We copy each other all the time and with great ease. We imitate and learn through imitation, and that imitation is what distinguishes us from animals and makes us special. When we imitate an idea, an instruction, a behaviour, even a gesture, something is passed on again and again and from generation to generation, which takes on a life of its own. It becomes independent and autonomous, for instance, Karl Popper’s idea of World 3 (the world of ideas, language and stories, works of art and technology, mathematics and science). This is the meme: the second replicator (after the gene). Memes are stored in human brains or in books and computers and passed on endlessly. Memes spread for their own benefit, without regard to whether they are useful, neutral or harmful. As examples, the idea of God, or revolution, or a particular invention, spread irrespective of whether they are useful or not. Some memes are useful and creative, some harmful and even dangerous. But memes don’t care, they just ‘want’ to spread and perpetuate themselves. ‘There is no master plan, no end point, and no designer.’ What we call new creative or original ideas are only ‘variation and combination of old ideas’. Memes have uncanny ways of perpetuating themselves. But not all thoughts are memes; not our immediate perceptions and emotions, which are ours alone and which we may not pass on. However, once we express them or speak about them to others, be it our feelings or our ideas, they are passed on.

Memes have nothing to do with genes. If ‘genes are instructions encoded in molecules of DNA—memes are instructions embedded in human brains, or artefacts such as books, pictures, bridges or steam engines’.106

Acknowledging Dennett’s idea of ‘competition between memes to get into our brain’ to make us the kinds of creatures we are, Blackmore believes that our minds and selves are created by the interplay of the memes. For that matter, human consciousness itself is a product of memes.

There are only memes, only thoughts. Thinking involves energy. Much of our thinking is sheer frustration or self-pity, which we could do without, to the huge advantage of the body. Yet thinking goes on, draining the energies of the body. It happens because the memes, replicators or thoughts are trying to get themselves copied, and in this process, language plays a crucial role in helping memes copy themselves and ensure their perpetuation.

Blackmore says that for at least 2.5 million years, memes have co-evolved with genes. Now, for the last century or so, they are ‘off the leash’ and have become independent of genes. For instance, sex is no longer indulged in for reproduction alone, for sex has been taken over by memes. Similarly, the self or the I is the doing of the meme called the ‘selfplex’, which, strangely, does not exist. It is an illusion, says Blackmore, in the sense that there is no self separate from the brain, no continuous, persistent and autonomous self. It does not exist, though ‘we construct many of our miseries out of the idea of a persistent self’. Blackmore quotes the Buddha: ‘. . . actions do exist, and also their consequences, but the person that acts does not’.

The self is a vast ‘memeplex’, the most insidious and pervasive of all memes. Blackmore calls it the ‘selfplex’, put together by self-protecting memeplexes, by the process of memetic evolution. It is this selfplex that ‘gives rise to ordinary human consciousness based on the false idea that there is someone inside who is in charge . . .’ but actually it is an illusion, ‘a memetic construct: a fluid and ever changing group of memes installed in a complicated meme machine’.

Therefore, Blackmore suggests that to live honestly one must be free of this illusion, this false sense of self, and allow decisions to be made by themselves. ‘From the memetic point of view the selfplex is not there to make decisions, or for the sake of your happiness, or to make your life easier, it is there for the propagation of the memes that make it up.’ In other words, ‘by its very nature the selfplex brings about self-recrimination, self-doubt, greed, anger, and all sorts of destructive emotions’.

Blackmore ends her thesis on a brilliant, ‘spiritual’ note, going beyond her guru Richard Dawkins’s idea of rebellion ‘against the tyranny of the selfish replicators’. She writes, ‘Compassion and empathy come naturally. It is easy to see what another person needs, or how to act in a given situation, if there is no concern about a mythical self to get in the way. Perhaps the greater part of true morality is simply stopping all the harm that we normally do, rather than taking on any great and noble deeds; that is, the harm that comes from having a false sense of self . . . We can live as human beings, body, brain, and memes, living out our lives as a complex interplay of replicators and environment, in the knowledge that that is all there is. Then we are no longer victims of the selfish selfplex. In this sense we can be truly free—not because we can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators but because we know that there is no one to rebel.’107

Alternative Theories

Alternative theories based on the ideas of transpersonal and integral psychology, hyperspace, ‘deep structure’, quantum mechanics, psychokinesis, the implicate order and so on basically work on the idea of the interconnectedness of life and the universe. Their thesis is that we cannot hope to understand the mystery of the body, the enigma of the mind, and our belief in God or the Spirit, in isolation, but only within this intriguing ebb and flow of reality, of the inextricable, interconnectedness of all things.

These theorists, striving to develop a unified or integral theory of life, reject what they consider to be materialist, linear, reductionist theories of body–mind put forward by biologists such as Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins. The dogma that genes determine behaviour, which has become the conceptual basis of genetic engineering and which is vigorously supported by the biotechnology industry, is viewed with suspicion by writers like Fritjof Capra, the well-known author of The Tao of Physics. Capra thinks that the claim made by geneticists that they have found the ‘blueprint’, the ‘language of life’, is premature and misleading. But then, within the family of molecular biologists too, there are a few who are critical of the view of genes as causal agents of human behaviour and of all biological phenomena. For instance, the molecular biologist Richard Strohman, who is quoted with approval by Capra in support of his criticism, thinks that the basic fallacy of genetic determinism lies in a confusion of levels: ‘the illegitimate extension of a genetic paradigm from a relatively simple level of genetic coding and decoding to a complex level of cellular behaviour represents an epistemological error of the first order’.108

The human body is not a mere survival machine for genes, nor is it just a collection of genes. Genes by themselves do not simply act. They have to be activated. For that matter, William Gelbart and Evelyn Fox Keller, both geneticists, find the term ‘gene’ to be of limited value; it cannot be ‘the core explanatory concept of biological structure and function’, and might be a hindrance to the understanding of the genome.

Capra says that ‘many of the leading researchers in molecular genetics now realize the need to go beyond genes and adopt a wider epigenetic perspective’ to explain biological structure and function. There is ‘the growing realization that the biological processes involving genes—the fidelity of DNA replication, the rate of mutations, the transcription of coding sequences, the selection of protein functions and pattern of gene expression—are all regulated by the cellular network in which the genome is embedded’.109

In some ways, the ‘epigenetic network’ seems analogous to the ‘morphic field’, the term Rupert Sheldrake, a cell biologist and plant physiologist, employs for an understanding of human consciousness and the process of evolution. Explaining his hypothesis of morphic resonance and morphic fields, Sheldrake thinks that ‘genes are grossly overrated and that a lot of inheritance depends on the memory which is carried within these organizing fields of organisms. This memory is a kind of cumulative memory, a kind of habit memory, which is built up through a pool of species experience, depending on a process I call morphic resonance.’110

In effect, Sheldrake proposes ‘a field theory of the mind’ in order to arrive at a more integral understanding of the nature of the mind, which in many ways ties up with other attempts and theories to overcome the traditional frameworks of biology, psychology and epistemology that have largely been shaped by the seventeenth-century Cartesian division between mind and matter that has ‘haunted Western science and philosophy for more than 300 years’.

These alternative theories also question the recent research by neuroscientists on the function of different areas of the brain to explain religious and mystical experiences in terms of neural network, neurotransmitters and brain chemistry. For instance, neuroscientists have put forward the idea that normal functioning of the right frontal lobe, specifically the parietal lobe, helps orient a person in three-dimensional space, and controls much of our sense of self, and the decreased activity of the parietal lobe could cause the blurring between the self and the rest of the world and give rise to a transcendental feeling of being one with God or with the world.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, an eminent researcher and author of the widely acclaimed book, Phantoms in the Brain, believes that questions on the Self, free will and consciousness can now be approached and explained empirically. He says ‘even though it is common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life—all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards as his own intimate private self— is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else . . . Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West—but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.’111

The alternative theorists, of course, are suspicious of this over-enthusiasm of neuroscientists like Ramachandran and reject their ‘findings’ on the ground that the neuroscientists haven’t been able to repeat their experiments to produce identical results as incontrovertible proof, simply because you cannot really reduce human experiences or human consciousness to purely neural mechanisms. These scientists succeed only in explaining away the complex relationship between the nature of the human brain and consciousness.

So, Capra suggests: ‘Mind is not a thing but a process of cognition, which is identified with the process of life. The brain is a specific structure through which this process operates. The relationship between mind and brain, therefore, is one between process and structure. Moreover, the brain is not the only structure through which the process of cognition operates. The entire structure of the organism participates in the process of cognition, whether or not the organism has a brain and a higher nervous system.’ For that matter, ‘At all levels of life, beginning with the simplest cell, mind and matter, process and structure are inseparably connected.’112

Rupert Sheldrake comes close to UG’s opinion when he suggests that ‘the brain is like a tuning system, and that we tune into our own memories by a process of morphic resonance, which I believe is a general process that happens throughout the whole of nature’.

Extending this idea as it were, Saul-Paul Sirag, a theoretical physicist, suggests that ‘in some cosmic sense there really is only one consciousness, and that is really the whole thing—in other words, that hyperspace itself is consciousness acting on itself, and space-time is just a kind of studio space for it to act out various things in’. Karl Pribram, a professor of neuropsychology, who explores the similarities between current findings in neuropsychology and in quantum physics, thinks that our ideas of mind–brain, for that matter our whole understanding of life, are still caught up in terms of classical mechanics, with cause and effect relationships. In actuality, he says, we can never find out what and where the cause of a particular act or event is. ‘The whole system does it. There isn’t a start and a midst and so on, because time and space are enfolded, and therefore there is no causality.’ Every act is ‘very much a quantum type, holographic, implicate order kind of idea’. In view of this, there is no such thing as self or mind as such; rather, there are only ‘mental processes, mental activities. But there isn’t a thing called the mind’.113

UG’s Response: The Mind is a Myth

Although the various theories discussed above, on the one hand, seem to contradict and cancel each other out, on the other hand they appear to support, extend and explicate each other in quite complex ways. Some of these theories come close to what UG has been saying for more than three decades now. However, our purpose is not so much to note the parallels, but see where and how UG deepens our understanding of the body–mind relationship and the interconnectedness of life and the universe. This is not just an idea or an insight with him, but the way he moves and lives in the world, he asserts. It is amazing how very spontaneously, without batting an eyelid, and with absolute clarity he answers questions that have troubled philosophers and religious thinkers over the centuries. In this context, one may be tempted to compare and contrast UG’s utterances with the Enlightenment traditions and teachings of the sages of the world, although this would not necessarily enhance our understanding of things. In fact, it could even mislead us into thinking that what UG has been saying is as old as the hills, so we should tread carefully here. For, in actual fact, there is something new, utterly new in what UG is saying, the implication of which is tremendous and critical for a world that seems to have more or less decided what is right for humanity. Unless we break out of our old, established mode of thinking, our situation will continue to be like that of a dog chasing its own tail in vain.

Outwardly, there is nothing new in the language UG uses. He does not coin any new words as philosophers and scientists do, he uses simple, commonplace terms, free of metaphysical overtones and spiritual content, but what comes through is revolutionary, to say the least.

What is there is only the body, asserts UG. There is no mind. But for centuries we have been made to believe that there is an entity—the ‘I’, the self, the psyche, the mind. There is no such thing. It’s only an illusion.

In the light of what UG says, we need to understand the term ‘mind’ at two levels.

Mind in the sense of intelligence is life itself and is everywhere. It is present in the seed of a plant as much as in a mosquito. It is there in matter, in every particle of the universe, in every cell of the body. This mind or consciousness as intelligence, as awareness, says UG, ‘functioning in me, in you, in the garden slug and earthworm outside, is the same. In me it has no frontiers; in you there are frontiers—you are enclosed in that.’

When Arthur M. Young says that photons can think, or that so-called matter has properties of mind, or when Saul-Paul Sirag suggests that ‘hyperspace itself is consciousness acting on itself’, they are, in point of fact, saying that mind is immanent in matter at all levels of life. The Mundaka Upanishad too seems to suggest the same thing poetically: ‘As the web comes out of the spider and is withdrawn . . . so springs the universe from the eternal Brahman . . . Brahman . . . brought forth out of himself the material cause of the universe; from this came the primal energy, and from the primal energy mind, from mind the subtle elements, from the subtle elements the many worlds . . .’

But this mind as intelligence, as primal energy, is not our problem, although it would be if we make that into a philosophy or build a religion around it. It simply points to the inseparability of life and the interconnectedness of everything, which by implication means our sense of separation is an error and an illusion.

Our actual problem is the mind in the sense of self. The Buddha did not find this self inside or outside, above or below, and UG says it is non-existent. But it is this non-existent self that has created religions, cultures, politics, technology, and the market forces that have begun to dominate the world today. It is the same self that not only produces great architecture, wonderful artefacts, and enchanting music but also invents nuclear bombs, wages wars, abuses natural resources and endangers the existence of life on earth.

How does this sense of self arise in the first place? And why? Tradition says we do not know, cannot know, it is ignorance. The evolutionary biologists say that self-consciousness probably arose to enable the survival of the hominid. In other words, self-consciousness was the emergent property of the brain, or the result of some strange mutation engineered by the body itself in its fight against the forces threatening its survival. A strange adaptation!

The myth of creation found in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad offers layered meanings and implications: In the beginning there was nothing but It, the Self (in the sense of Awareness), in the form of a person (the Body). It looked around and saw that there was nothing but itself, whereupon its first utterance was ‘It is I’; hence the birth of ‘I’. Then it was afraid, and desired a second. It split itself into two: female and male. The male and female now desired each other and embraced and from them arose all living creatures, including the human race.

Hence, it is said, the sense of aloneness, the sense of lack, fear and desire (libido or kama). To put it differently, in the words of Joseph Campbell: ‘Life and death became two, which had been one, and the sexes became two, which also had been one.’ One could say that God divided itself into two and thus began the terrific play, the maya; what tradition calls the lila of Brahman.

In other words, this primordial creature(s) was thrown out of the Garden of Eden (not in the orthodox Christian sense but in Joseph Campbell’s image), breaking the unitary consciousness. It was a grand illusion, forever accompanied by a sense of separation, alienation, lack, and suffering. As long as this illusion of separation, this ego, remains, in the words of Joseph Campbell again, ‘the commensurate illusion of a separate deity also will be there; and vice versa, as long as the idea of a separate deity is cherished, an illusion of ego, related to it in love, fear, worship, exile, or atonement, will be there. But precisely that illusion of duality is the trick of maya.’114

UG, however, refuses to use this kind of religious or mythical metaphor, or even any words that may carry philosophical or metaphysical connotations. Terms such as soul, universal mind, oversoul, atman or higher self are all only persuasive words that seduce people and put them on the wrong track—a bogus chartered flight! UG believes life has to be described in simple, physical and physiological terms: ‘it must be demystified and depsychologized’.

According to UG, somewhere along the line of evolution, the human species experienced self-consciousness, which does not exist in other species on this planet. (UG refuses to say why this happened, probably because it cannot be known; it is not within the realm of knowing, for thought cannot know its own origin.) With the help of this sense of self-consciousness, man accorded himself a superior position over and above the other species on this planet. It is this separation and sense of superiority that has been the source of man’s problems and tragedy.

Since the whole of Nature is a single unit, human beings cannot ever really separate themselves from the totality of what we call Nature. Our sense of separation from Nature is an illusion and it is in this illusion that the ‘I’ is born (the ‘I’ itself being the illusion) and tries to perpetuate itself, forever seeking permanence. In actuality, there is no permanence, no security, no permanent happiness, and no ‘I’, no separate, psychological entity. The search for permanence and the ‘I’ are the same thing. The institutionalization of this search is what all religions are about. There is only the ‘I’, as a first person singular pronoun which, UG says, he uses only to make the conversation simpler. There is no other ‘I’.

Sometimes, for purposes of convenience, and for want of a better or adequate word, UG uses the term ‘world mind’ to explain the nature of ‘I’ or the ‘self’. The world mind constitutes the totality of thoughts, feelings, experiences and hopes of humankind.

‘The world mind is that which has created you and me, for the main purpose of maintaining its status quo, its continuity. That world mind is self-perpetuating, and its only interest is to maintain its continuity, which it can do only through the creation of what we call individual minds—your mind and my mind. So without the help of that knowledge, you have no way of experiencing yourself as an entity. This so-called entity—the I, the self, the soul, the psyche—is created by that. And so we are caught up in this vicious circle, namely, of knowledge giving you the experience, and the experience in turn strengthening and fortifying that knowledge . . . This knowledge is put into us during the course of our life. When you play with a child, you tell him, “Show me your hand, show me your nose, show me your teeth, your face . . . what is your name?” this is how we build up the identity of the individual’s relationship with his body and with the world around.’

So, knowledge is all that there is, says UG. The ‘me’, the ‘self’ is nothing but the totality of this inherited knowledge that is passed from generation to generation. Susan Blackmore would be delighted to know that what UG says about knowledge and thoughts, reflects her ideas: Memes and memeplex are passed on through imitation, education, and knowledge systems, for ensuring their own continuity. But she would note that according to UG, thoughts are passed on not only through education and books; thoughts are everywhere, and we have no way of finding out the seat of thought or human consciousness. Sometimes, he uses the phrases ‘thought sphere’ or ‘world mind’ to explain the all-pervasive nature of thought. But how this knowledge, these thoughts, this memory is passed on is a mystery. The genetic code is only a part of it; it is much more than the genetic code. He says:

There is no such thing as your mind and my mind. Mind is everywhere, sort of like the air we breathe. There is a thought sphere. It is not ours and not mine. It is always there. Your brain acts like an antenna, picking and choosing what signals it wants to use. That is all. You use the signals for purposes of communication. First of all, we have to communicate with ourselves. We begin as children naming everything over and over again. Communicating with others is a little more complex and comes next. The problem, or the pathology if you will, arises when you constantly communicate with yourself, irrespective of any outside demand for thought. You are all the time communicating with yourself: “I am happy . . . . I am not happy . . . . What is the meaning of life? . . .” and so on. If that incessant communication within yourself is not there, you are not there as you now know and experience yourself. When that inner monologue is no longer there, the need to communicate with others is absent. So you communicate with others only to maintain that communication you are having with yourself, your inner monologue. This kind of communication is possible only when you rely and draw upon the vast totality of thoughts passed on by man from generation to generation. Man has, through the process of evolution, learned to draw from this storehouse quicker, subtler, and more refined thoughts than the rest of the animals. They have powerful instincts. Through thinking, man has enabled himself to survive more efficiently than the other species. This ability of thought to adapt is the curse of man.

And it seems to be the curse of man never to know the origin of thought. It is too vast, it has the tremendous momentum gathered over thousands of years of evolutionary history, and within it also survive what UG calls the ‘plant consciousness’ and the ‘animal consciousness’. Whatever insights we might claim to have are arbitrary, the invention of thought itself, for they are a result of thought observing thought, thought thinking about itself. It is not in the nature of thought to know either its own origin or the origin of things. In fact, there is no such thing as the origin of things, the origin of consciousness, or the origin of the universe, asserts UG— a position that some scientists seem to have come round to accept today, though reluctantly. In the study of matter, molecules, atoms, particles and quarks, the scientists finally say that there is really nothing there. Indeed it is an exercise in futility, avers UG; we shall never be able to discover the fundamental particle or the building blocks of the universe, because ‘the fundamental particle does not exist’.

In a conversation with Jeffrey Mishlove, Capra admits that ‘quantum physics has brought a dissolution of the notion of hard and solid objects, and also of the notion that there are fundamental building blocks of matter’. The search, however, goes on, although scientists have more or less come to a tacit understanding that in effect, all our laws of physics, all our observations and findings are generated by our minds. The physicist Evan Harris Walker expresses this position most tellingly when he says that essentially what makes a quantum reaction finally get to some determinate end point is a human consciousness observing it.115

Thus, we see that in effect, thought manufactures all our ideas and world-views, for in this lies its illusory existence and continuity. But this thought, the ‘I’, separated from nature, from the totality of life, also knows that it cannot exist forever, that it has to come to an end. Hence, the ‘I’ also entails the fear of extinction. And this fear, which is ‘me’, the ‘I’, creates an artificial immortality by way of

Strange and contradictory as it may sound, thought by itself can do no damage. However, when the ‘I’, the ‘self’, uses thought to achieve what it cannot achieve the problems begin. In UG’s words: ‘The thoughts themselves cannot do any harm. It is when you attempt to use, censor, and control those thoughts to get something that your problems begin. You have no recourse but to use thought to get what you want in this world. But when you seek to get what does not exist—God, bliss, love, etc., through thought, you only succeed in pitting one thought against another, creating misery for yourself and the world.’

The nature of thought or the self is to think always in pairs, in terms of opposites—love and hate, birth and death, good and evil, God and Satan, spirituality and materialism—and always to privilege one over the other. But such a separation cannot be made, for love and hate, good and evil, are born of each other, or rather from the same source; in short, the pairs are made of basically the same self-protective movement of thought.

There is no such thing as spirituality, asserts UG. It is yet another movement of thought or the ‘self’, that creates this artificial division, hoping to overcome the problem that thought has created for itself in the first place. We could perhaps see through this terrible dualism in yet another way. ‘Thought is matter,’ says UG. So when the ‘I’ uses thought to achieve either material or spiritual goals, it is basically the same movement of thought, (that is, matter) to free itself from what may be called self-created anxiety, sorrow, conflict, hate, envy, and the fear of coming to an end. Society may have placed spiritual goals on a higher level than material goals, but actually all values, even the so-called spiritual values, are all materialistic.

The Brain is Only a Reactor

The brain has nothing to do with thought. Thoughts are not manufactured by the brain. Concepts such as synapsis, micro-circuits, Broca’s area, and so on do not explain the origin, nature and function of thought. As UG says, thought is everywhere. It is there as traces of the past, as memory in every cell of the body, including the brain. And it is there in the ‘thought sphere’ or ‘world mind’. It is the ‘I’ that uses thought, and the body, strictly speaking, is not involved in its play. Yet, the body carries, in every cell, the traces of not only human memory, but also of plant and animal consciousness.

To emphasize the point again, the brain is not the ‘creator’ of the ‘self’ or of thought, it is only a ‘reactor’. ‘It is, rather, that the brain is like an antenna,’ insists UG, ‘picking up thoughts on a common wavelength, a common thought sphere.’

What UG is saying is that the brain has a minimal function in the protection and survival of the body. Rather, it is only the coordinator of bodily functions. It is not the creator of the coordinator, the ‘I’, which in fact uses the brain. Left to itself, the brain is only concerned with the safety and survival of the body. It is only a reactor, or as Sheldrake would say, it is ‘like a tuning system’. The brain does not generate thoughts, it only picks up thoughts.

Now, in UG’s words again:

Thoughts are not really spontaneous. They are not self-generated. They always come from outside. Another important thing for us to realize and understand is that the brain is not a creator. It is singularly incapable of creating anything. But we have taken for granted that it is something extraordinary, creating all kinds of things that we are so proud of. It is just a reactor and a container. It plays a very minor role in this living organism.

The brain is only a computer. Through trial and error you create something. But there are no thoughts there. There is no thinker there. Where are the thoughts? Have you ever tried to find out? What there is is only about thought but not thought. You cannot separate yourself from a thought and look at it. What you have there is only a thought about that thought, but you do not see the thought itself. You are using those thoughts to achieve certain results, to attain certain things, to become something, to be somebody other than what you actually are. I always give the example of a word-finder. You want to know the meaning of a word and press a button. The word-finder says, ‘Searching.’ It is thinking about it. If there is any information put in there, it comes out with it. That is exactly the way you are thinking. You ask questions and if there are any answers there, they come out. If the answers are not there, the brain says ‘Sorry.’ The brain is no different from a computer.

Is There a Soul?

Etymologically speaking, it is said that atman in Sanskrit, psyche in Greek, anima and spiritus in Latin mean ‘breath’, as do pneuma in Greek and ruah in Hebrew. If spirit or soul means ‘breath’, perhaps there isn’t much to say about it except that prana or ‘breath’ is the defining characteristic of all life forms. Linked to it, one might suggest, is the ancient idea of ‘spirit’ believed in by ‘primitive’ or tribal people the world over for thousands of years. They believed that a mysterious spirit (or spirits) animates the whole world, not only life forms but also the whole of Nature.

However, the notions of spirit or soul as found in the belief systems of the major religions and even mystical reports are complex, complicated and different from each other. The Hindu notion of atman or Self is not the same as the Christian or Islamic soul. The one common defining characteristic of these different narratives of the soul is that it is conceived of as an independent or separate entity, and that in its complex relationship with God, mind and body, the soul is always privileged over the body. The soul is pure and transcendental; the body is impure, mundane, subject to decay and death. The body is something to be rejected, abandoned, and transcended in order to realize and experience the soul. Despite the hermeneutical attempts to overcome the dualism of body–soul or soul–God, it has to be conceded that this dualism between the body and the soul is the bedrock on which all religions are built and continues to be the core of all their discourses. It is the same with what goes under the name of spirituality, too. After all, what is spirituality? Isn’t it understood as something concerned not with the material or the mundane, but with the sacred, the holy, with Soul, God or things divine? Isn’t spirituality seen as an engagement with the soul or spirit as opposed to matter, body, and external reality? This dichotomy or dualism between spirit and matter, body and soul, spirituality and materialism is the warp and woof of all religions and all spiritual traditions.

If one were to consign the notion of the soul to the dustbin, religions would collapse like a pack of cards, and gurus would have to find some other job to earn their living. In UG’s words, ‘We have been fed on this kind of bunk for centuries, and if this diet were to be changed, we would all die of starvation.’

In many ways, this is analogous to our belief in ‘love’, without which most of our artists, novelists and poets would not survive, and the gargantuan structures of the film and music industry would soon be a heap of ash.

Just as hate is seen as the enemy of love, the body is seen as the enemy of the soul. The major religions might differ in their interpretations of the soul, but they all pit the soul against the poor body! However, some people may argue that of all religions, Hinduism—or rather, India’s different religious groups and spiritual traditions—have developed a more rigorous and sophisticated discourse on atman which is radically different from the other notions of the soul. It isn’t. The notion of atman, however sophisticated and complex, is not free of this awful dichotomy.

‘While our bodily organization undergoes changes, while our thoughts gather like clouds in the sky and disperse again,’ writes S.Radhakrishnan, ‘the self is never lost. It is present in all, yet distinct from all.’ The nature of atman or soul is ‘not affected by ordinary happenings. It is the source of the sense of identity through numerous transformations. It remains itself though it sees all things. It is the one thing that remains constant and unchanged in the incessant and multiform activity of the universe, in the slow changes of the organism, in the flux of sensations, in the dissipation of ideas, the fading of memories.’116 These words more or less summarize the position of Vedanta, which is considered to be the highest philosophy of atman or Self.

In short, the body, the mind, and the world are arbitrary restrictions imposed on atman, which in itself is pure, unaffected, unchanged, immutable and eternal, a trinity of transcendental reality (sat), awareness (cit), and bliss (ananda).

Radhakrishnan himself being a Vedantin, a non-dualist, his interpretation does come close to the various discussions on the nature of atman to Sankara’s notion of body as impure, limiting, and imperfect, to his distinction between what he called, the empirical, individual self and the Supreme Self: unconditioned, transcendent, absolute, pure and immutable, essentially the same as Brahman, the source and ground of all creation and existence. This again is the notion of atman as found in the Bhagavad Gita, which declares atman, not the body, as immutable, immortal, which ‘weapons cut not, fire burns not, water wets not, wind dries not’; which casts off worn-out bodies and takes on new ones in its cycles of births and deaths, until it finds release and becomes one with the Supreme.

Say what you will, in these texts, the opposition between the atman and the body is unmistakably evident. Modern gurus and alternative theorists, who are trying to develop an integral and unified theory of spirituality, might argue that atman or Spirit or the Universal Self is not necessarily opposed to the body; that it is a problem of semantics, and the limitation of the vocabulary of the period when these texts were composed. This is sheer word-play that does not really help the situation. The modern theorists succeed only in dodging the real issue, which is the irreconcilable dualism between body and soul, spirit and matter, that runs through all spiritual discourses. The usage of terms such as pure, transcendental, unchanging, unconditioned, and eternal, simultaneously betrays the fear of the self coming to an end and the search for some symbolic security, permanence or immortality. The more important question for us here is: Why talk of soul or atman as immortal, when, in the first place, there is no death for the body?

The Buddha, of course, did not find the atman. As regards JK, he found the whole thing problematic. He asked why, instead of saying the atman is immortal, ‘Thou art That’, ‘You are That Brahman,’ you cannot say ‘I am the river,’ ‘I am the poor man,’ ‘I am that tree,’ ‘I am all that.’ How can a narrow, conditioned mind observe or even speculate on the unconditioned? How can one start with a conclusion that one is Brahman? Isn’t that the end of the search?

UG is categorical and direct in his response and asserts that there is nothing to our search there. He demolishes the questions and the many answers given by declaring: There is no self, no I, no atman, no God.

What is there inside you is nothing but fear, states UG. ‘Death’ is fear, the fear of something coming to an end. The ‘I’ knows that this body is going to drop dead as others do, it is a frightening situation and it does not want to come to an end. So it creates the belief that there must be something beyond, it projects an afterlife, immortality of soul, God and so on. The problem, therefore, is not whether there is a soul, whether there is a centre, whether there is a God or not; it is fear, operating as belief, that is passed on from generation to generation. It is this knowledge, says UG, that makes us think that there must be something beyond and even experience it. But there is nothing to it. In other words, ideas of the soul and life after death are born out of the demand for permanence. That is the foundation of man’s religious thinking. All religious thinking is born out of that demand for permanence.

But thought is a tricky customer. It cannot exist without grounding itself in some belief. It will appear to abandon a belief only to create a new one in its place. It will even employ the so-called negative approach to arrive at some positive idea. Atheism, agnosticism, pragmatism, nihilism, and what have you, are only the various tricks of thought to anchor itself to some belief in order to seek its perpetuation. And so, UG warns: ‘You will replace one belief with another. You are nothing but belief, and when it dies, you are dead. What I am trying to tell you is this: don’t try to be free from selfishness, greed, anger, envy, desire, and fear. You will only create its opposites, which are, unfortunately, fictitious. If desire dies, you die. The black van comes and carts you away, that’s it! Even if you should somehow miraculously survive such a shock, it will be of no use to you, or to others.’

And then, according to UG, all our beliefs in the ‘thoughtless state’, ‘state of awareness’, ‘choiceless awareness’ are nothing but bogus chartered flights. There is no such thing as self-awareness, for the self and awareness cannot coexist. If one has to give a simple analogy, awareness is something like a mirror, images are reflected upon it, but the image is not the mirror. Awareness is only a medium through which images pass in and pass out. There is nothing more that can be said about it, we cannot call it a soul or build a philosophy or religion around it. Any such attempt will be an attempt to anchor ourselves in something which it is not. In other words, it is only our search for power and security, useful only to spiritual gurus. In UG’s words:

You cannot be aware; you and awareness cannot coexist. If you could be in a state of awareness for one second by the clock, once in your life, the continuity would be snapped, the illusion of the experiencing structure, the ‘you’, would collapse, and everything would fall into the natural rhythm. In this state you do not know what you are looking at—that is awareness. If you recognize what you are looking at, you are there, again experiencing the old, what you know. It is not something that can be captured, contained and given expression to through your experiencing structure. It is outside the field of experience. So it cannot be shared with anyone.

Putting it differently, he says:

I am not particularly fond of the word ‘awareness’. It is misused. It is a rubbed coin, and everybody uses it to justify some of his actions, instead of admitting that he did something wrong. Sometimes you say, ‘I was not aware of what was going on there.’ But awareness is an integral part of the activity of this human organism. This activity is not only specifically in the human organism but in all forms of life— the pig and the dog. The cat just looks at you, and is in a state of choiceless awareness. To turn that awareness into an instrument which you can use to bring about a change is to falsify that. Awareness is an integral part of the activity of the living organism.