When I was twelve, I slipped on a hill of ice and broke my wrist. A few seconds of confusion led to a rapid slide into shock, and I was soon overwhelmed by deep nausea. I panicked and sought out a friend, who led me into the school building with his arm around my shoulder. And then I was looking at the scene as though from above, impassively: my friend with his arm around me, the two of us at the point of an arrowhead of curious children streaming into the school building, the hallway with its yellow light leading to the principal’s office.

One night at age twenty-two, a car not using its turn signal drove directly into the side of my bicycle, crushing my leg between the car’s grill and the bike’s frame before sending me over the hood, against the windshield, and onto the pavement. It was summer, and with my arms and legs outstretched while facing down, the first layer of my uncovered skin peeled away as my body rotated against the road in a full circle before stopping. Immediately and uncontrollably, a primeval howl of pain came up from the pit of my stomach. With near-total objectivity, I was then observing things as though from a distance. The pain in my leg and on the surface of my skin was total, certainly the most pain I’d felt before or since. But, intensely curious, I took note of the way my body writhed on the pavement. The night air was cool on my forehead, budding with sweat; there was a musical clatter of running shoes on the road as some kids from a nearby park ran to help me. The old woman who’d been driving the car stooped over me, breathing heavily. Somebody from one of the houses attempted to talk to me over my screaming, to ask for a phone number they should call. At once the impassive observer stepped forward, quieted the screams, and spoke the number evenly and calmly before allowing the pain, the writhing, and the vocalization to overwhelm me again.

Some years ago while meditating, I suddenly had the unbidden sensation of being watched. The observer was clearly myself. This was no schizophrenic episode, but a very intense sensation of “I” being cooly, impassively observed by “me”. “I” was lying outstretched on the bed, breathing deeply, hyper-aware of my surroundings but in a state of complete meditative relaxation. “Me” was a depthless reservoir of my consciousness, ever curious but universally impartial, an objective, dispassionate observer.

I, defined

After eviscerating religious faith and stripping it of its claim to moral authority of any kind, Sam Harris closes The End of Faith with a chapter on the nature of consciousness and the self. He argues deftly for a non-dualistic conception of consciousness that ultimately does not require “I” to be an important element to consciousness at all. He disposes with the notion that the self is either merely the body, with its self-regulating systems teeming with all manner of life, or the generic components that make up the mind, considering that, in the end, only genetics and social environments account for the myriad expressions of behaviour in human beings, and that one’s “self” is nowhere to be found in them. In fact, without wondering at the evolutionary path that may have led to such a state, he suggests that the concept of the individuated self is nothing more than a biological function of the brain, transmitting impressions collected from the environment to the receiving entity it has created for the purpose, called “I”. This “I”, this self, is not necessary for consciousness to exist; it is merely handy, and the apparent duality of our relationship to the universe, of a subject that perceives and an object that is perceived, is, on close inspection, wholly without substance.¹

Harris accepts nothing without evidence, so how are we to prove this for ourselves? Introspection through meditation, as evidenced by what he considers the empirically selected practices of Eastern mysticism, exposes the merely utilitarian nature of the concept of self. The act of investigating the self, of looking for “I” in the sea of one’s consciousness while meditating, reveals it to be illusory.

There is a further paradox: the best expression of selflessness, the best route to ethical behaviour and concern for others, occurs when one is sufficiently introspective in order to recognize that “I” might not exist.

Toward the within

Much of this is anathema to atheists, who connect the kind of mysticism that Harris is talking about with dogmatic positions of faith, or acceptance of propositions without evidence. But meditation is available to everyone, and the results of studied introspection will speak for themselves. There is nothing here that need be accepted on faith. It is merely the West’s allergic reaction to the potential abandonment of identity that stands in the way of honest inquiry into the nature of personal consciousness. Even for atheists, there should be an exciting terrain within reach, if only one would close one’s eyes and quiet the chattering observations of consciousness offered by the self, to investigate the nature of consciousness itself.

1. Sam Harris, The End of Faith, W.W. Norton & Company, 2004, p. 210 ff. [↩]

Louis Meditation, Morality, Mysticism Consciousness, Introspection, Meditation, Mysticism, Sam Harris, Selfishness, Selflessness