All things are one.
—Heraclitus
Nature tools along, not knowing that it’s unified.
—Allan Sandage
We conceive of the universe as a unified entity—a cosmos, as the Greeks put it, meaning a single, harmonious system—and we talk, at times, of feeling “at one with the universe.” I wonder why. We are not all that unified—as I’ve been saying, the apparent unity of mind conceals the multifarious workings of many different brain programs—and the universe is made of a whole lot more parts than is the brain. The word universe comes from the Latin for “all things turned into one,” and, as we science writers never tire of reminding our readers, all things is a lot of things. There are, for instance, something like a million billion billion planets in the universe. That’s a pretty big number: If all the science writers in the world were put to work shoveling sand, day and night without a break—I intend this merely as a thought experiment—we couldn’t shovel a million billion billion grains of sand in a lifetime. And each planet contains plenty of things. We don’t yet know much about other planets, but the one we live on has trillions of snowflakes and sea shells, sunflowers and maple seeds, fishes and beetles and birds, and thirty thousand yeast cells in each gram of fertile soil, and twenty-seven hundred species of mosquitoes, and one hundred million mites and millipedes and worms in each acre of farmland…. You get the picture.
What makes us think that all these things add up to one thing? Why do we speak of a “universe,” and envision ourselves as part of it?
It’s not as if the evidence were sufficient to have persuaded us that all is one. True, astronomers and astrophysicists have in recent years arrived at a few reasons for thinking of the universe as an integrated whole—for one thing, the fact that the universe expands suggests that all the matter and energy that today is deployed across ten billion trillion trillion cubic light years of space was originally packed into a hot little spark smaller than an atom—but these scientific findings cannot account for the intensity of the human conviction of cosmic unity, for while the evidence is recent, the conviction is old. Seers and sages, philosophers and poets have been proclaiming as much for thousands of years, and upon their belief rest, among many other things, the foundations of the great monotheistic religions. The search for extraterrestrial life may itself be regarded as an expression of faith in cosmic unity, insofar as it presumes that even so exotic a phenomenon as human intelligence may find its semblance elsewhere.
Evidently we are disposed, in the depths of our hearts and the high carrels of our philosophies, to think of the universe as all of a piece. But why? To explore this question we will need to have a look at ancient mysticism and modern neurophysiology.
The doctrine of cosmic unity was originally enunciated—and has always been most forcefully declared—by mystics, which is to say by people who value what I will call the “mystical experience.” This experience goes by many names: It is called “enlightenment” by the Buddhists and “transcendence” by religious ecstatics, while the romantic poets spoke of an “oceanic” sensation. I will define it, rather legalistically I’m afraid, as a direct and overwhelming apprehension of what reasonable, reflective people may take to be a divine spirit or principle.* The mystical experience is an ancient and widespread phenomenon, accepted both by those who have experienced it and by a sizable segment of the wider community as profoundly important, though its origin remains a mystery. (The word “mystic” means “mysterious.”)
Some have worked to attain the mystical experience; others have had it thrust upon them. Pandit Gopi Krishna meditated regularly for seventeen years, sitting cross-legged in a tiny room in the northern Indian city of Jammu, before attaining transport on Christmas morning, 1937: “Suddenly, with a roar like that of a waterfall, I felt a stream of liquid light entering my brain through the spinal cord,” he recalled. “… I experienced a rocking sensation and then felt myself slipping out of my body, entirely enveloped in a halo of light.” Moses, in contrast, was taken by surprise when God spoke to him from the burning bush: “Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?” he protested, reasonably enough, though God was not about to take no for an answer. The poet William Wordsworth was similarly unprepared; only eighteen years old at the time, he was walking home at dawn, after a dance, watching the sky brighten over the English Lake District near Windermere, when he was seized by a deep sense of his connectedness with nature at large, a sensation he described in these lines:
I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thought; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and the mind of man—
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
But if mystical ecstasy has come to different individuals in different ways, they have described its qualities in surprisingly similar terms. This, indeed, is the most striking thing about the mystical experience—that witnesses from disparate cultures and backgrounds should have recounted it so consistently. As the American philosopher William James wrote, “The everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition [is] hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neo-Platonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make the critic stop and think.”
Now, I have been a professional journalist for half my life, and an amateur scientist for longer than that, and I would be among the last to argue against taking a skeptical, critical attitude toward sensational reports of extraordinary and purely personal experiences, of which none is more extraordinary and personal than the mystical experience. Nevertheless, I feel that these accounts ought to be taken seriously. The estimable character of many of the individuals who have reported experiencing enlightenment, plus the remarkable uniformity with which they have described the experience, leaves scant grounds for dismissing their testimony as involving deceit, self-deception, or fraud. On the contrary, it seems to me that once we better understand the human nervous system, mystics may come to be viewed as pioneers in its exploration, whose accounts will prove to have illuminated previously uncharted inner landscapes.
Spiritual like physical exploration can be dangerous. Consider what happened to Pandit Gopi Krishna, whom I mentioned earlier as having attained enlightenment in 1937. Krishna was an amateur meditator who sought enlightenment pretty much on his own, without consulting the experts. Along the way he apparently did something wrong, with the result that his initial ecstasy was soon transformed into a living nightmare. He writes that he lost his appetite and his will to live, and felt that a terrible fire was consuming him from within; this torment persisted for fully twelve years, leaving him at the brink of suicide. Consulting works of Eastern philosophy much as a physically sick man might consult medical dictionaries, Krishna finally hit upon the hypothesis that he had inadvertently summoned up the force of enlightenment through the hot solar channel of the spine (pingala), with the result that he felt himself constantly roasted in spiritual flame. Concentrating to the fullest, he attempted to redirect this energy through the cool lunar channel (ida), which the tantric diagrams depict as being located on the left side of the spine. It worked: “There was a sound like a nerve thread snapping and instantaneously a silvery streak passed zigzag through the spinal cord … filling my head with a blissful luster in place of the flame that had been tormenting me.” Thereafter, Krishna reports, he felt fine, and went on to live the life of enlightened peace that had been his original goal.
We may if we wish dismiss all this as crazy, but even from that inhospitable perspective we must weigh the indisputable fact that the experiences of crazy people have taught doctors at least as much about the workings of the brain as have the testaments of the sane. Alternately, we might regard Krishna’s testimony as a clearheaded account of a powerful nervous system dynamic witnessed from within.
This, however, is not the place to survey everything that the mystics can teach science about the brain. Instead, I want to draw attention to three qualities of the mystical experience that seem particularly relevant to understanding the neurological underpinnings of the conviction that all is one. All three have been widely reported, in quite similar terms, by philosophers, fakirs, poets, and pilgrims in many different times and places. They are, first, a sense of deep conviction; second, a sense of ineffability; and third, a feeling of unity with the universe.
As to conviction: The mystical experience conveys a sense that something of great importance has been learned (or taught, as mystics who view the experience in theological terms might prefer to say). Global and all-embracing in its scope, the insight is accompanied by what the Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki called “authoritativeness”—the certainty that it is valid, reliable, and to be believed in. To someone who has achieved such a state, ordinary explanations seem trivial and superfluous: As the twentieth-century Zen scholar Reginald Blyth remarked, “Any enlightenment which requires to be authenticated, certified, recognized, congratulated, is (as yet) a false, or at least an incomplete one.”
So powerfully does the importance of mystical transport impress itself on the men and women who have experienced it that by comparison the world of the senses may come to seem insubstantial as a shadow play. Mohammed, whose illumination occurred, after extensive prayer and meditation, in A.D. 610, when he was forty years old, wrote that “the life of this world is but a play and a sport.” Thomas Aquinas became enlightened on the morning of December 6, 1273, while saying mass in Naples, and ended his sermon at once, declaring, “I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw, and I now await the end of my life.” Lao Tzu warned that the data of the senses only obscure what really matters: “The five colors blind the eye; the five tones deafen the ear; the five flavors dull the taste.” In a similar vein, William Blake wrote that
This life’s five windows of the soul
Distort the heavens from pole to pole
And teach us to believe a lie
When we see with, not through, the eye.
But while the content of the mystical experience is taken to be transcendentally important, it is also said to be ineffable. Alfred Lord Tennyson, who made his reputation from the written word, nevertheless described the experience as “utterly beyond words.” “It can neither be spoken nor written about,” said Plato. “The vision baffles telling,” said the third-century Neoplatonist Plotinus. “It is impossible to describe the experience accurately,” Krishna wrote. “The Tao [or path, or way] that can be spoken of is not the eternal Way,” wrote Lao Tzu. “The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”
Understandably, mystics have been reluctant to write or talk much about their insight, both because its content defies logic and language and because it reveals words to be sham and vainglory. Lao Tzu is said to have dictated the five thousand words of The Book of Tao only at the behest of the city gatekeeper, who prevailed on him to leave behind something of his wisdom before retiring to live in the mountains. Plotinus maintained that “but for the continual solicitations of [his editor and biographer] Porphyry I should not have left a line to survive me.”
The ineffability of the mystical experience leaves the mystics in a bind: To remain silent seems miserly, while to teach (or preach) is to act out a contradiction. Their dilemma has done damage to their reputations, producing on one side the stereotypical speechless hermit who may be faking (“It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt”), and on the other the laughable spectacle of the seer who says he has experienced something that cannot be described, and then goes on to try to describe it. Reginald Blyth’s assertion on this point—”The more we say, the more we write, the more we wish we hadn’t. I myself don’t know anybody who really understands a single sentence of all I have written”—appears in a six-volume work, an irony not lost on Blyth himself.
Nevertheless the mystics generally have stuck to their guns, even at considerable personal risk. Jesus of Nazareth wrote nothing, spoke principally in the elusive language of paradox and parable, and when asked by Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?” held his tongue and paid for his silence with his life. In a lighter vein, the ineffability of the mystical was pointed up in an effervescent if sexist anecdote related by the Irish satirist John Toland:
The old Lord SHAFTESBURY … conferring one day with Major WILDMAN about the many sects of Religion in the world … came to this conclusion at last: that notwithstanding those infinite divisions caus’d by the interest of the priests and the ignorance of the people, ALL WISE MEN ARE OF THE SAME RELIGION; whereupon a Lady in the room, who seem’d to mind her needle more than their discourse, demanded with some concern what that Religion was? To whom the Lord SHAFTESBURY strait reply’d, MADAM, WISE MEN NEVER TELL.
The central content of the mystical experience, difficult though it may be to express properly, consists in a revelation of cosmic unity. So important is this conviction to enlightenment that Plotinus defined illumination as “absolute knowledge founded on the identity of the mind knowing with the object known.” One senses that everything—mind and matter, God and Man, one’s self and all other individuals—are part of a unified whole. “In mystic states we become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness,” wrote the American philosopher William James. “Everything is made of one hidden stuff,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.
All diversity flows from this essential unity. “The One begets all things,” writes Plotinus, echoing Lao Tzu, who proclaimed that “The Tao begot one; One begot two; Two begot three; and three begot the ten thousand things.” And so it is, the mystics say, that each object, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant, contains the seed of everything else. Thus Julian of Norwich, a recluse who became enlightened during an illness on May 13, 1373, writes, “He showed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.” The thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen, considered perhaps the greatest original thinker in Japanese history, wrote that:
In a grain of dust are all the scrolls of the sutras in the universe; in a grain of dust are all the infinite Buddhas. Body and mind are together with a blade of grass and a tree. Because all Dharmas [things] are unborn, the One mind also is unborn. Because all things are in their true form, so also is a grain of dust in its true form. Therefore the One Mind is all things; all things are the One Mind, are the complete body.
William Blake said exactly the same thing when he began his poem “Auguries of Innocence” with the now familiar lines:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
Despite mysticism’s disparagement of logic and language, the mystical experience has enjoyed the esteem of many eminently rational thinkers. The physicist and philosopher Niels Bohr—who when knighted in 1947 chose the yin-yang symbol for his coat of arms—often spoke in Zen riddles, as when he remarked that “there are things that are so serious you can only joke about them.” His younger colleague Werner Heisenberg could fashion koans worthy of an early Taoist: “Why is the one reflected in the many,” Heisenberg asks in his memoirs. “What is the reflector and what the reflected, why did not the one remain alone?” Einstein was of the opinion that “the most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”
The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal had a mystical experience himself, on what he called his “Night of Fire.” He quickly made notes on it, inscribed on a small piece of parchment that he carried for the remaining eight years of his life, sewn into his doublet, where a servant discovered it a few days after his death in 1662. At the top of the parchment Pascal had drawn a gleaming cross. Beneath it he wrote:
In the year of the Lord 1654
Monday November 23
From about half-past ten in the evening until half past twelve.
FIRE
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob
Not of the philosophers nor of the scholars.
Certainty. Joy. Certainty, feeling, joy, peace …
THE SUBLIMITY OF THE HUMAN SOUL
Just Father, the world has not known thee
but I have known thee.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I do not separate myself from thee ….
Soon thereafter Pascal gave up his studies of physics and mathematics and devoted himself to religion, his enlightenment having convinced him that logic is a dead end. Religion is not contrary to reason, he maintained, but no rational argument, only the “grandeur of the human soul,” can prove the existence of God.
The affinity for the mystical displayed by many scientists may seem less curious when we reflect that science arose in part from mystical insights. Pythagoras of Samos, whose proclamation that “all is number” places him at the headwaters of mathematical science, was as mystical as they come: He practiced meditation, kept his doctrines secret, is said to have spoken not a word for five years, and he based his mathematics—a superstitious numerology, really—on the conviction that the number One (known among the Pythagoreans as “truth,” “being,” and “the ship” around whose keel the universe revolved) was the source of all things. Johannes Kepler, discoverer of the phenomenological laws of planetary motion, based his theories on the Pythagorean doctrine of celestial harmony. Copernicus cited in support of his heliocentric hypothesis the sun-worshipping paeans of the alchemist Hermes Trismegistus, “the thrice-great Hermes,” who might be regarded as a perfectly spiritual being in that he never even existed. Isaac Newton, who believed that “a vital agent diffused through everything in the earth is one and the same,” spent less time working on his theory of universal gravitation than in poring over Christian dogma and speculating on the floor-plan of the Temple of Jerusalem, which he took to be a map of the universe. And this list could be extended considerably; though scientific theories are rational, the inspired steps that lead to them often are not.
Science in its seedling stages may be said to have been fertilized by three mystical doctrines. The first was promulgated in the sixth century B.C. by Thales of Miletus, who proposed that the universe is not a chaotic collection of many things but a cosmos made of a single substance. (Like Lao Tzu, he thought water was the supreme material.) The second doctrine, put forth by the Pythagoreans and elaborated upon by Plato, was that mathematics is a key to apprehending the cosmic order; here the One was sometimes interpreted literally, as being represented by the number one. The third was monotheism, the belief that all the affairs of heaven and earth are ruled by a single divine being. The thrust of these three quite nonrational beliefs was to assert that events occur not capriciously but in accord with the dictates of a single natural law or principle; that the workings of this law may be discerned by examining nature and doing mathematics; and that a law identified on Earth may also pertain to the wider universe.
In part because they were armed with these convictions, the founders of scientific cosmology—Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton—were emboldened to employ theories adduced here on Earth to interpret the behavior of stars and planets. Modern science may be said to have begun when Renaissance scholars abandoned Aristotle’s doctrine that the universe was divided into two entirely different realms, one heavenly and the other mundane, and commenced instead to entertain the contrary belief that our world and the stars all function according to the same physical laws. Thus was set in motion an intellectual odyssey that continues today, when experiments conducted in particle accelerators underground are used to plumb the secrets of the stars, and when scientists seek a “unified theory” that would reveal natural laws to be but facets of a single, universal law or principle.
To sum up, the mystical doctrine of cosmic unity has been endorsed by august thinkers in many different cultures, throughout much of recorded history, despite the absence of any significant evidence (until quite recently) to support it. This suggests to me that the doctrine has more to do with the internal architecture of the brain than with the phenomena of the outer universe. Indeed, I would argue that the doctrine of cosmic unity arises from the very mechanism that makes a unified mind out of the disparate parts of the human brain.
If so, what neurological processes generate the mystical experience, and how might they have produced the conviction that we are at one with a unified cosmos?
I propose that enlightenment occurs when introspection succeeds in breaking through the level of language, to confront the mental module—call it the “integration” program—that is responsible for presenting the multipartite functions of the brain to the conscious mind as a unified whole. We saw in the previous chapter that there appears to be such a program, since we experience mind as singular though the brain is multifarious. What happens, in my view, is that the seer (“he who sees,” related to he who cuts, or breaks through) gains direct access to this program—to the module charged with maintaining the conviction that he is one person, of one mind, in charge of his affairs in an ordered universe.
This breakthrough instantly produces the three impressions that we have seen characterize enlightenment. Enlightenment is persuasive because the mystic has exposed himself to a program whose role is persuasion. It produces a conviction of cosmic unity because the very purpose of the integration program is to make him feel that the many are one. And it leaves him convinced that words are superfluous and untrustworthy, because he has penetrated beneath the level of the “interpreter” program discussed in the previous chapter. Now that he can see through the interpreter’s trick of using words to fabricate plausible but illegitimate explanations for unbidden actions—can peer behind the facade of its Potemkin Village, if you will—he is unlikely to be fooled by words again.
Because enlightenment means penetrating past words and reasoning to reach the realm of the program that unifies human thought, one must abandon language and logic to get there: “Satori,” as Suzuki writes, “may be defined as an intuitive looking into the nature of things in contradistinction to the analytical of logical understanding of it.” The enlightened individual does not regard language and logic as necessarily deceptive, but distrusts these faculties because he has seen how readily they can blind us to the truth.
Does that mean that enlightenment represents ultimate, bedrock truth? I doubt it. The brain is complex, and I have no reason to assume that the mystical experience puts one in touch with its foundations. To the extent, however, that the brain can properly be regarded as having a hierarchy of levels, the mystics may have succeeded in peeling off one or two layers of the onion. Deeper penetrations are by implication possible, and indeed many mystical systems speak of there being further levels of enlightenment. The implications of going deeper could, however, be troubling. If one could break through the integration program altogether, the result might be direct exposure to the cacophonous voices of many inharmonious programs, speaking in a wild diversity of codes for which we have as yet no translation—and that hazardous voyage might well rob any but the most adept explorer of his sense of a coherent self and a coherent universe. Here lies the territory of divine madness, from whose shores many a lost soul howls at the moon.
Still, the siren song from that dark continent urges that something beautiful and true—if ununified—lies on the other side; perhaps some can venture there and come back sane. When we plumb the depths of the brain we need to maintain the same courage and faith in the beauty and integrity of nature that sustains us when we contemplate the dance of the electrons or the winds of the interstellar nebulae from which we were born.
We can draw hope, after all, from the tentative but cheering prospect that the universe really does seem to be a cosmos. Our mystical sense of unity did not, after all, spring from a vacuum; the human brain evolved in a real world, full of break-your-bones stones and breakable tree branches, and we could not have made our way this far in so harsh a world were our perceptions and our world view wholly illusory. Newton’s equations do enable us to send a spaceship to Neptune, and Einstein’s equations do chart the gently curving contours of intergalactic space.
Why this should be possible—why we should be able to find rational laws operating in nature at large, and make some sense of it all—remains a mystery; Einstein called it the greatest mystery of all. But it is a mystery for the mystics, too; and the ultimate truth, if there is such a thing, is still to be conjugated in the future tense. Science and mysticism have not followed converging paths to the mountaintop: Their paths may have converged, but the mountain looms above, and its peak (if there is one) is still shrouded in clouds.
*I am of course speaking of the real thing, not the shallow-draft ecstasies of such hearers of uplifting voices and seers of self-promoting visions as are to be found among the ranks of fortune-tellers, television evangelists, and other such spiritualistic proselytes and profiteers.