Abstract
The dialogue between cognitive neuroscience and spirituality/mysticism has largely entailed measuring the neural and cognitive effects of spiritual practices. Such research follows from the spiritual traditions’ teachings about the intended psychological effects of practice. The ontologically more challenging postulates of spiritual traditions (e.g., mind beyond brain, ‘higher’ or ‘ultimate’ realities) are ignored when focusing in this way on measurable concomitants of practice. In this chapter I argue that the dialogue should be widened to include some of the ontologically more challenging concepts, where these involve references to the brain and psychological states. A specific example is examined in some detail: the kabbalistic worldview posits a correspondence between higher and lower levels in the cosmos (‘macrocosm’ and ‘microcosm’), and includes notions of unconscious thought arising in ‘brains’ in the Godhead. I demonstrate that the macrocosmic principles advanced in kabbalistic literature display a degree of concordance with the results of current research into the neural correlate of consciousness. I explore the implications of this concordance for the light it may cast on the enduring hard problem of consciousness.
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Notes
- 1.
Again, the reductive approach can cover a number of viewpoints, not all of which are necessarily dismissive of mystical practice. Mindful experiences, for example, may be viewed as constructive simply in terms of health benefits. However, my term ‘fantasies’ is meant to convey the fact that in the vast majority of the world’s spiritual traditions, such experiences include transcendent categories (‘soul’, ‘godhead’, ‘world soul’, etc.) which are dismissed as irrelevant in psychological discourse.
- 2.
The ‘deep blue sea’ may be a sacrilegious term to apply to the Ultimate, but I claim dispensation from Rabbi Meir’s aphorism that, ‘blue resembles the colour of the sea, and the sea resembles the colour of the sky, and the sky resembles the colour of the Throne of Glory’ (Talmud, Menakhot 43b)!
- 3.
Wolfson is writing here about the mystical experience of light, and therefore his interest lies with visionary experience. The point stands that more generally for the Jewish mystic, hermeneutics is intertwined with all forms of mystical experience.
The Zohar has assumed canonical status within Judaism as being the teaching par excellence of the ‘secrets of the Torah.’ Kabbalah holds that the Torah comprises revealed and concealed teachings, the latter pertaining to the nature of God and the ways to align oneself with God in order to promote divine beneficence to flow to the world. Thus, the mysticism that pervades the Zohar is one that promotes ‘ascent for the sake of descent,’ as Hellner-Eshed (2009, p. 317) characterises it. The Zohar comprises a corpus of writings, many of which are presented as esoteric commentary on the biblical text, with others cryptically elaborating the structure of the Godhead. Its authorship has been the subject of extensive scholarly debate. The major part of the corpus is seen by most scholars as having been penned in thirteenth-century Spain by Moses de León. This view is opposed by religious authorities who regard the Zohar as having been revealed through miraculous means to the second-century Shimon bar Yohai in the Land of Israel.
- 4.
This term refers to the intermediary realm between the unknowable transcendent God and the natural world. The sefirot are the emanations of God.
- 5.
I make no defence for my “wish to hold onto” this sense of mystery. The key point is that my sense of the mystery is independent of data in cognitive neuroscience. The data themselves do not justify any overarching belief for explanation, be it materialistic or transcendental. I hold onto the sense of mystery for a host of reasons, mainly relating to what I consider to be meaningful values and goals in life. In this chapter I am not attempting to ‘prove’ the truth of kabbalistic, or any other, insights. My point is simply that those insights are worthy of exploration for the relationship they have with observations in the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness.
- 6.
Genesis Rabbah 90:1; Leviticus Rabbah 24:9. The quote is given in the name of Rabbi Levi.
Midrash refers to a corpus of Jewish literature, dating from the second to the twelfth centuries C.E., and still of the utmost importance to the practice of Judaism today. The style of Midrash is largely homiletical, and frequently draws on word play to derive a teaching from a scriptural passage. Jewish mysticism largely draws its intellectual roots from the Midrashic imagination (Idel 1993).
- 7.
Terminology is always difficult here. Obviously, as soon as one engages with the unknown it is no longer ‘unknown!’ Indeed, the prefix ‘un-’ in ‘unconscious’ I find problematic, and for this reason I prefer to use the term ‘preconscious,’ although this does not fully resolve the problem (for further discussion, see Lancaster 2004). Introspectively, my sense is of a region of mind detached from the everyday imposition of I-centeredness, this detached region being always already engaged with the ‘Mystery’ (to use Ferrer and Sherman’s term mentioned earlier). Mystical practice builds bridges between this non-I-centred region of mind and the everyday realm of consciousness (see below).
- 8.
Zohar 2:184a.
- 9.
“Conscious states arise from the integration, or unification, of what are initially two distinct representations, a first-order representation of an external stimulus and a higher-order representation of that first-order representation; once the two representations are unified, they form a single representational state with two parts, one directed at the other and the other directed at the stimulus” (Kriegel 2007, p. 899). I would accord the neuronal input model in Figure 1 the status of first-order representation, and the schemata accessed from memory, the status of second-order representation.
- 10.
- 11.
It is difficult in a short treatment of kabbalistic imagery to substantiate fully my claims about the intended meanings in passages such as this. Indeed, concealment of meaning is one of the hallmarks of the medieval Kabbalah. I have explored this issue at greater length in Lancaster (2005).
- 12.
This verse from the book of Job is often translated as “From where may wisdom be found?” The Hebrew translated as “from where,” if taken more literally, means “from nothingness.” The mystics emphasised this latter meaning since it accords with their understanding that the sphere of Wisdom may be accessed only through annulment of the everyday sense of ‘I’; “Transformation comes about only by passing through nothingness,” writes The Maggid (cited in Matt 1995, p. 87).
- 13.
The point may be misunderstood on account of confusion over the appropriate direction in the spatial metaphor applied to notions of consciousness. Freud famously viewed the unconscious as lower – the portion of an iceberg under water, the basement of a house, etc. However, as Whyte (1962) pointed out, the unconscious might be thought of as higher than the conscious sphere on account of its importance for higher creative and spiritual abilities. It is unfortunate that we are compelled to understand these psychic ideas through spatial metaphor, since we confuse the metaphor with the meaning. There is no spatiality in the psyche. Kabbalistically, higher means closer to the divine. But, the parallel with neuro-cognitive terminology arises by virtue of the critical idea that the terms higher and closer to the divine mean that the process comes earlier in the generation of mental content. This is essentially the meaning of Dov Baer’s term kadmut ha-sekhel, which is why it should be translated as preconscious rather than unconscious.
- 14.
It is worth noting in passing that isomorphism as presented in Kabbalah is conceptually distinct from cognitivism’s representationalism, inasmuch as the latter entails an arbitrary relation between the representation and that represented. Kabbalah asserts that the “mirror” that relates two entities (such as God and human) entails an identity of substance. Indeed, it is axiomatic that such identity is critical for any knowledge; man can know God and God can know man only because they share an essential nature. As Wolfson (2005) remarks, this axiom implies ultimately that there is no non-divine reality. And, we might add, if there is no non-divine reality there is no explanatory gap!
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Lancaster, B.L. (2011). The Hard Problem Revisited: From Cognitive Neuroscience to Kabbalah and Back Again. In: Walach, H., Schmidt, S., Jonas, W. (eds) Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality. Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2079-4_14
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