Thomas Metzinger (MIT Press)
Books about consciousness don’t come any more radical (or with a longer title) than The Elephant and the Blind: The experience of pure consciousness – philosophy, science, and 500+ experiential reports. As you might guess, its author, , has carried out a monumental study of the state of “pure”, or “minimal”, consciousness, experienced during meditation and of which we may all have had glimpses.
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In his book, Metzinger sends a powerful triple message: we should rethink how to study consciousness scientifically; celebrate the wonder of these experiences of pure consciousness in our own lives; and learn from them to deal with the ruthless competition for attention that characterises social media.
It is a big book (over 600 pages) with big ambitions, but Metzinger, a theoretical philosopher at the University of Mainz in Germany, has never been a conventional thinker. Along with meditation, which he practises, his interests include out-of-the-body experiences and “mind wandering”, when we are conscious but our thoughts aren’t under the control of a “self”.
In his popular 2009 book, The Ego Tunnel, he controversially proposed that the self was a kind of illusion. He had previously taken that idea apart in Being No One, a book for philosophers, which opened with the statement “no such things as selves exist in the world”. His new book goes further, arguing that, as we still aren’t close to a single theory of consciousness, research might gain fresh insights by studying the state of minimal consciousness. In it, “consciousness can exist not only in the absence of thought and sensory perception, but even without time experience, without self-location in a spatial frame of reference, and without any egoic form of bodily self-consciousness”.
There is no mysticism here: evidence comes from his online survey of meditators from 57 countries, providing over 500 reports for the book. You can read a tiny sample (see “Views from the meditators” below) and consider if you believe there really might be states in which there is no longer any self, perhaps not even a sense of “I”, but only pure consciousness.
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Whatever doubts you may have, Metzinger has achieved something wonderful. The full collection can be read as if it were an anthology of poems, describing some of humanity’s profoundest experiences, often in moving language. To this we will return.
Accepting (even temporarily) what the meditators describe could certainly change views on consciousness. Research has been largely tied to a first-person perspective, where our private view of the world, full of feelings, and the outer world of empirically observable facts look so different that they seem impossible to reconcile. The states reported in this book, pure experience without self-awareness, suggest that a first-person perspective isn’t necessary for consciousness at all: your sense of self, of a continuous “you”, is part of the content of consciousness, not consciousness itself.
“The ‘selfiness’ and the ‘perspectivalness’ of ordinary conscious experience are part of the movie, if you like, whereas pure awareness is more like the projector’s light beam,” Metzinger writes. He wants us to study that beam, not merely the movie.
For decades, Metzinger has been saying that a big problem with consciousness research is that nobody is clear what we are trying to explain. More and more researchers, including the physicists entering the field (see New Scientist‘s special issue on consciousness, 24 February), might agree that our everyday view of consciousness hides different states and processes. In this context, Metzinger’s “new strategic route”, in which we try to study what happens in the simplest form of conscious experience we know, makes sense.
Many researchers will be sceptical, questioning whether the self really vanishes in these states and, if so, in what sense. But it surprised me that Metzinger’s main motive for writing this book isn’t to shake up science. As he writes: “I simply want to share something with the wider public.”
He believes, and I think he is right, that the meditators’ experiences are important for us all. Everyone will recognise something similar: perhaps some moment of joy, of transcendence, of love, and perhaps we fail to speak of and value these experiences as much as we should. Metzinger is clear: “Yes, you do already know what this pure awareness thing is! Maybe you just never saw why it should be interesting… Maybe you saw the simplicity but not the profundity.”
Why? Metzinger quotes the old Tibetan saying, “it is simply too close for us to see, too profound for us to fathom, too simple for us to believe, or even too good for us to accept”. Perhaps we aren’t registering the full value of certain states of mind? Stop and think: it might be important to you. Then follow Metzinger into his third strand, to Bewusstseinskultur, or consciousness culture, which forms a short epilogue to the book.
He has been thinking about this for years, defining it now as “a culture that values and cultivates the mental states of its members in an ethical and evidence-based way”. Or, in other words, if we agree that certain states of mind are good for us and the world, we should try to nurture them.
Twenty years ago, when I first read about Bewusstseinskultur, it seemed a forlorn hope. Now, it seems a necessity. Reading the epilogue, you can’t fail to conclude that human consciousness itself needs an upgrade – desperately. Metzinger doesn’t spare our faults. On climate change, he writes that “everything points to the conclusion that humanity will fail in the face of this problem, and it will fail with its eyes open… We will no longer be able to take ourselves seriously, for our behavior does not change even when we clearly recognize that it must.”
We are also, he says, being overwhelmed as “social media and tech firms aim to maximize user engagement by creating ever better attention sinks and developing pathological, addictive forms of media consumption”. Our attention, says Metzinger, is the resource they want and that entails destroying our mental autonomy – our ability to control the focus of our minds – ceding it to who knows what algorithm.
Bewusstseinskultur‘s core question asks how we can increase that autonomy. So what is in Metzinger’s toolbox? Of course, meditation, which both opens up new states of consciousness and provides mental control. He asks whether it should be a standard part of education, and argues strongly for robust intellectual honesty, as well as old-fashioned values like integrity and sincerity. We need, he suggests, a fusion of critical rationality with mindful attention to help us grapple with rapid techno-cultural change.
A powerful thought, but I must end with a caution. Metzinger’s book may be radical, and its thesis fascinating, but it is huge. He divides meditators’ reports into many categories of experience, such as “peace” and “clarity”, each with a deep philosophical commentary. Ultimately, we see that, as in the Indian parable alluded to in the book’s title, the meditators – equivalent to the blind people who all touch different parts of an elephant – find that, despite their different experiences, they have all been touching the same “pure consciousness”. This vast odyssey will appeal best to philosophers and to meditators who can delve into the deep experience of others.
If you are neither, then you can take inspiration from Metzinger’s ideas, but the book itself may be a challenge. That is a pity. He brings new insights into consciousness and has created a poetics of meditative experience. This, in turn, inspires us to ask whether we are training our brains in the right way for the relentless, overwhelming, distracting torrent of information we are immersed in. We need all the help we can get.
Views from the meditators
"Space expanded and time no longer played a role, there was only pure being, a pure feeling of happiness"
"It reveals itself as pure presence, no thoughts, no physical sensations. A feeling of fullness and emptiness at the same time"
"The perception of the body disappears... One notices the disconnection only when consciousness realizes that it moves completely free as light in an infinite space"
"There was no self-experience, but sounds were perceptible. My body schema no longer existed... no experience of time, no words"
"There was a sensation of 'being turned inside out,' as if I had slipped through the eye of a needle, and everything dissolved"
Article amended on 25 April 2024
We removed a reference to Metzinger’s book being “expensive”, as although it retails for US$80 in paperback, it has also been made available as open access.
