Blogging (an aside)

Not for the first time I’ve been reflecting on blogging as a medium, helped in this instance by a commenter on my post yesterday.

“A blog (a truncation of “weblog”) is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts)” (Wikipedia) A blog post, as I use the term, is a special kind of short-form essay, usually on a particular subject.

Blog posts have their limitations. Mine tend to be 700 words or so on average; anything over about 2000 seems to me to be unwieldy, and clunky in the way many long poems can tend to be. At their best they can be, as I suggested in my recent post ‘Road songs‘, a sort of literary form all their own. I wrote there,

At one point, and I honestly can’t remember when, it occurred to me that all these bits of (mainly) prose were something like my own road songs, much more than considered accounts of anything. Consequently, they’re not autobiographical as such; they don’t tell a connected story, but are more in the nature of snatches of music heard in passing.

Sometimes I’m guilty of biting off more than I can chew. In yesterday’s post ‘Atheism and contemplation‘ I attempted to introduce, by way of a few quotes from one of my favourite writers, Susan Blackmore, Daniel Dennett’s ‘multiple drafts’ model of consciousness. Now, I attempted to squeeze into a medium-length blog post something that takes Dennett – one of the great philosophers of our time – more than 450 pages (and two appendices) to set out (Consciousness Explained), using a few paragraphs lifted from the work of a psychologist, academic and memeticist. I am none of these things…

I am a contemplative, though, albeit an amateur, or freelance, one – being neither a monastic nor under any other sort of vows – and Dennett’s philosophy of mind is something that has spoken deeply to me. It put into words, and into careful argued thought, impressions that my own practice had already brought home. Reading Blackmore’s condensation of Dennett (Zen and the Art of Consciousness pp. 34ff.) was one of those, “Oh yes, of course!” moments for me – and it is this illumination I tried, rather than the theory itself, to squeeze into my post.

Does blogging work for these profound questions? Can it ever? I don’t know. I’m sure Daniel Dennett wouldn’t have written 450-odd pages (and two appendices) if he’d thought that 750 words would do.  But to convey the immediacy of experience? Yes, I think it may – and that’s why, despite the perils and obvious difficulties, I do still go on blogging after all these years.

I’ve been thinking…

(With apologies to Daniel Dennett)

Sitting quietly in what best seems called – in Krishnamurti’s phrase – “choiceless awareness” involves

paying attention to the sensation of the breath (this settles the mind and body), but then the instruction is to let our attention rest on whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness… awakening by engaging the whole of our experience fully, however it presents itself…  (Toni Bernhard)

Now of course “whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness” can often not be the sound of traffic on the road at the end of the garden, or the calls of the jackdaws settling down for the evening under the roof of the old water tower, nor even the slight discomfort in one’s left knee, but some thought, profound or (usually) pointless. And then the temptation is to follow the thought: to begin to cogitate, or ruminate, to calculate. What to do about it?

In some systems of meditation thoughts can be overlaid with a mantra (the nembutsu for instance) to which the attention is transferred, thus allowing the thought to die away naturally. The problem here is not only that the mantra will supplant open awareness itself, but that a mantra has content. It means something. Inevitably it has a religious context, and drags all manner of baggage in its wake. (The nembutsu involves the name of Amida Buddha, and the myths around Amida, and the several Amidist philosophies, and so on and on.)

Another approach is to anchor attention solidly, usually to the breath, not allowing it to stray. But then once more our open awareness has been replaced with focused attention, the quiet engagement of awareness with whatever is, that is central to our practice, replaced with a muscular effort of will.

But of course a thought is only another object of awareness. When we hear the blackbird singing in the hazels at the back of the garden his voice forms the object of our awareness – a response in the auditory cortex in our temporal lobes – and choiceless awareness would leave it at that. So with the thought. If we can leave it as just another object of awareness, rather than as the beginning of a train of thought, and return to the breath, the next object – a sound outside, a breath, a rumble in the tummy, another breath – that is all that is needed. And if we fail? Well, the train of thought we’ve just boarded is only another object of attention, and then we can return to the creak of the trees, the solidity of the floor, the quiet changes that pass, just what is…

Am I conscious now?

Susan Blackmore (Zen and the Art of Consciousness) asks the question, as a kind of koan, “Am I conscious now?”

It’s a good question. Am I? Have I been?

We must all be familiar with the sensation of listening to a favourite piece of music, and suddenly realising we’ve missed the best bit – the key change we love, the beginning of the bridge, whatever it is. We’ve been listening out for it, anticipating it, but when it comes our mind has wandered off into some fantasy, some memory, or a bird passing the window has caught our attention, and it is gone. Where? Were we aware of it?

Or we are meditating, paying attention to what is happening now, and we become aware (Blackmore uses this example herself, but I have had the identical experience many times) of a sound in the street outside. How long has it been going on? When we notice it, it has not just begun. And yet when we notice it, we are aware that we were aware of it already. It’s been going on for several seconds, quite distinctly, but we didn’t exactly notice. Now we do, and we remember, if that’s the right word, that it was happening already. Were we conscious then?

Here we are. For a moment, our whole attention is on now. Oh, the delicious freshness of it! We’re not remembering: we’re hearing it, feeling it, now! All that is, is now. There is nothing else. What else could there be?

Blackmore mentions Daniel Dennett’s objection to Cartesian dualism (which roughly states that there’s an I, sitting in here looking at a that, which is out there somewhere). But where is this I? There’s nowhere in the physical brain that could correspond to an I, no locus of consciousness, nor is there anywhere an incorporeal self (soul) could plug into the soggy assemblage of neurons between our ears. Dennett suggests rather that consciousness consists of “multiple drafts”. Blackmore writes (ibid.) “Dennett describes the self as a ‘benign user illusion’, and replaces the theatre with his theory of ‘multiple drafts’. According to this theory, the brain processes events in multiple ways, all in parallel and in different versions. None of the drafts is ‘in consciousness’ or ‘outside consciousness’; they appear so only when the system is probed in some way, such as by provoking a response or asking a question. Only then is one of the many drafts taken as what the person must have been conscious of. This is why he claims that ‘There are no fixed facts about the stream of consciousness independent of particular probes.’”

This makes more sense. Perhaps the light of attention picks out one or another draft, falls on one or another as the object of attention. But whose attention? Another draft’s attention? It’s all very puzzling.

But that moment. Now! That moment. There there is no sense of a shifting light of attention. There is only now. It has all come together in an instant, literally. This instant, now!

Perhaps we cannot know. Perhaps there is something here not susceptible of analysis. The bright instant is itself, represents no thing. It seems to rest in the ground of being directly, an isness that is only itself. Perhaps it is only light.