The Measure of Thought
Delivered by
Bruce Arnold, July 20, 2008
At the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, New Bern, NC
This has been a hard sermon to put together. My usual
procedure is to have an idea of what my theme is. Then I come up with
anecdotes and quotes to flesh it out. It’s very important to me that, no
matter how abstract things may get, there is always something which acts
as a tether to the ground - to daily life as we live it.
I know
that, sometimes, despite my best intentions, it takes off into the
stratosphere. This time: ladies and gentlemen, please don your oxygen
masks, we may be leaving the atmosphere altogether.
Every religion has an experience which is central to
its beliefs. For Christianity (certain exceptions duly noted) it is the
experience of salvation: “For God so loved the world that he sent his
only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not die, but have
eternal life.” For Islam, it is the act of submission to Allah’s will
- “submission” being what the word Islam means. For Judaism, it is
being one of the Chosen People.
Travel east of the Fertile Crescent and the
Hindu Kush
mountains, and things take a radical change. There is an experience called
samadhi in Sanskrit, which is of enormous significance in Hinduism,
Buddhism, and Taoism. I will try to explain it.
Most of the time in our daily lives, we simply
experience what is happening: we recognize sensory impressions received
from the organs of sight, hearing, and so forth. We have memories. We
think thoughts. We imagine things. We feel emotions. This is all what some
experts call simple consciousness, and all animals have it to some degree.
Then there is another level of awareness. The higher
mammals display it to some degree. Humans have it to a more developed
level. It is the awareness of having the above experiences, of myself as a
separate living being. Humor depends on this 2nd level of
awareness. It is the moment when you stop being hungry, for instance, and
realize that you are hungry.
That you are hungry.
Once, when working as a stock boy at Christmastime at
the local J.C. Penney’s, I became aware of seven distinctly different
mental activities, all at once: I was aware of how to stock the items on
my cart; I was thinking about what I’d do next, as we were so busy and I
wanted to get done by quitting time; there was a Christmas song on the
Muzak and I was humming along with it; I was aware of the customers and
trying to stay out of their way; I had a memory of seeing my girlfriend
the evening before; I was tired; and I was happy.
In the East they teach another level of awareness,
and various techniques for achieving it: this is the level of pure
awareness. You are not aware of This and you are not aware of That. You
are not aware of Self nor of Other. In this state, you might say you are
One with the Universe, because you are aware of no distinctions.
30-some years ago, when I first learned the practice
of Transcendental Meditation they used a visual aid called the Bubble
Diagram to help explain this. I bet they still use it today, because it is
a great analogy.
Imagine a bubble of air originating way down at the
bottom of the ocean. As it rose, it would become bigger and bigger until
finally it would get to the surface and pop. Thoughts are like this. They
originate in our minds, way down near that field of pure awareness. As
they rise to the surface of normal consciousness, they become more and
more noticeable, or apparent, until finally we become conscious that we
are thinking this thought.
In T.M., you learn to become aware of the space
between thoughts. At first this is a fleeting moment, barely obvious. As
practice continues and deepens, those moments between thoughts - between
bubbles - become longer and more absorbing. It is possible for the
accomplished meditator to spend minutes or hours in this state of pure
awareness, the state of samadhi.
Recently, a friend asked me a great question. If in
the state of samadhi, there is no awareness of self, then how do you know
you’ve had it?
“You just do” is not an answer.
Let’s go back to that bubble diagram. The moment
that the bubble reaches the surface, when the thought becomes apparent,
that is the simple consciousness that all mammals have. You are thinking
the thought.
Let’s say you are thinking about getting an ice
cream cone. You may have a visual image of that cone, or the shop where
you’d buy it. You may think about the taste or the coldness.
Then you “come to” and realize that you are
thinking about the ice cream cone. Now you aren’t thinking about the
cone, you are thinking about the experience of thinking. This is not the
bubble at the surface. This is the bubble, a little ways down.
So we have simple consciousness at the surface, pure
awareness at the bottom, self-awareness partways down. What kind of
awareness, what kind of mental function, might we experience half-way
down? Two-thirds? Three-fourths? Nine-tenths? I think there is a clue here
to my friend’s question, “if you’re not aware of Self in pure
awareness, then how do you know you’ve been there?”
I don’t think it’s the whole answer. I have some
other clues. First is the role of intelligence. You don’t have to be
smart to experience pure awareness. Everyone has that little space between
thoughts, and anyone can learn to recognize it. But general intelligence
has something to do with how easily we learn, and this is a form of
learning.
It also helps, in any endeavor, to know what you’re
doing. You could teach a chimp to fly a plane straight and level. But
teaching him how to land, or what to do in an emergency, would be next to
impossible, because he doesn’t have the concepts to work with.
Someone of average intelligence can think about an
abstract concept, such as liberty or security. But to balance two
abstracts against each other - to balance liberty against security - in
other words, to reason abstractly, does not begin until the first standard
deviation, somewhere around I.Q. 116.
So people of higher intelligence don’t just do the
same thing better. They have other abilities that the rest of the world
does not have.
Einstein, for instance, said that he did his most
creative thinking with his whole body, not just his mind. This might be
one description of what it is like to recognize ideas when the bubble is
half-way down. Or is it ¾? This is not thought as we know it, what the
psychologists call cognition. I am sure that if you could have seen
Einstein’s brain activity on an MRI at one of those times, there would
be different brain centers in action, besides those he used for
mathematical calculation or writing his famous papers.
Here’s another clue. I believe there are dimensions
of thought. Just as we can measure length with a yardstick, time with a
clock, or weight with scales, I believe that thought has dimensions also.
Another comparison is in order. A gourmet is aware of
fine distinctions in taste and texture that a coarser palate cannot
distinguish. An artist is aware of fine variations in color, form, and
arrangement that most do not see.
Thought can also be measured on several dimensions:
clarity, logic, factuality, and refinement. It may be that with advanced
intelligence, one of these dimensions is added at each step, and that the
more dimensions one can access, the easier it is to ride that bubble down
to profounder levels of awareness.
This is the point where I suddenly come to the end of
my tether. I have some good questions and some good clues, but I can’t
carry it any farther. In a sense, this whole time I’ve just been
thinking out loud.
But I can say one more thing, about relevance. For
some of you this may all seem as remote as the dark side of the Moon. If
anyone wants to reply with a big “So what,” I won’t mind.
But there is something
worthwhile about exploring the outer reaches of human endeavor. I may
never go to
Antarctica
, but I want to know about it. I’ll never write songs as lovely as Bob
Dylan, but I loved reading his autobiography. And I can barely comprehend
Einstein’s achievements, but I want to know more about how he
accomplished them.
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