The Soul and the Brain

Presented to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington

October 15, 2006

Rev. Paul Ratzlaff

One of my all time favorite teaching poems is Robert Bly’s translation of the mystical poet Kabir’s “This Clay Jug.”  Listen again:

Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains, and the maker of canyons and pine mountains!

All seven oceans are inside, and the hundreds of millions of stars.

The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels.

And the music from the strings no one touches, and the source of all water.

If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth: Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.

Inside this clay jug – this bony container – there are canyons.  Immediately a memory of our young family standing on the lip of the Grand Canyon comes to mind, then an image of a canyon we hiked at Sedona.  Are there canyons in your mind?  “And pine mountains” … what images flash through your brain?  I remember orienteering through the Ponderosa pines finding my way to Mt. Starr King above Yosemite Valley.  Or walking our way through pines to the entrance to Samaria Gorge in Crete.  How about you?

“All seven oceans are inside” … well I know of the oceans though I’ve not seen them all.  Yet I have a mental image.  “And hundreds of millions of stars” … glorious images of the pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope flood my mind.

“The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels.”  Inside this jug an ability to analyze, compare and discriminate.  We decide what is real, what is imposter, what is authentic, what is fake.  That’s all taking place even as we listen right now.

“And the music from the strings no one touches…”  We create new melodies, be they literal or metaphoric for other expressions.  We can imagine things entirely new, never heard or said before.

“The source of all water.”  Geez, Kabir, I haven’t a clue what you’re suggesting with that image.  My synapses are firing away, but I’m not experiencing any satisfaction from the contemplation, other than the excitement of trying to figure it out.  Inside this clay jug is puzzlement!

Isn’t it stunning what goes on in our brains!

What a gift each of us has received.  Millions of years of evolution have gifted us with this 3.3 pound mass of neural net that contains our memories, our imaginations, our hopes and our deepest spiritual yearnings.  How blessed we are!

Given the century and more of patient scientific investigation and observation, our appreciation grows exponentially.  Doctors observed that lesions, wounds, strokes affecting different areas of the brain had different consequences.  Then how many hundreds of thousands of research animals have been sacrificed to further our understanding.  Probes, increasingly delicate surgeries have teased apart the functions of the various cells.  Psychoactive drugs, PET scans, and all lead to understanding the fragile balances critical for psychological health.

I am humbled to encounter the neurologist’s acquaintance with the brain.  My understanding is at the most general level.  Knowing that the brain has evolved with the brain stem representing the most ancient level, which accounts for automatic systems, like heart beats and breathing, the limbic or mid-brain, evolved with our mammalian ancestors, which holds the emotions, and finally the cortex, latest addition that holds our thinking mind – this is about like saying I know America has an east coast a mid section and the west coast.  I know something of fear sending waves of neurochemicals that overwhelm the cerebral cortex.  But that’s about as precise as a national weather map.  However with the ever-accumulating research in the brain, specialists now map the billions of cells in neural networks much more precisely, having learned the intimate details of cells and conglomerates of cells.  My understanding is like seeing a map of the U.S. on the wall.  Their’s is like Google Earth, ready to zoom in on a house on a street in Northport.  I am so ignorant. 

To prepare for today, I read Zen and the Brain, by the James H. Austin, who is both a research M.D., Professor Emeritus of Neurology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, and a long-time committed practitioner of Zen Buddhism.  Austin uses the findings of brain research to offer possible explanations for the phenomena of alternate states of consciousness experienced by Zen practitioners.  697 pages of both fascinating and tedious reading.  “Tedious” because I was out of my league.  I got lost in the neighborhoods he described effortlessly – “lateral geniculate body, ventral tegmental area, substantia nigra, etc.

Words buzz around my head – acetylcholine, Beta-endorphin, dopamine, gamma-aminobutyric acid, glutamate, peptides, and on and on.

Nevertheless, in the same way that I find a collection of photos of the universe awesome, I find the descriptions of processes inside this clay jug awesome.

And yet, inside this clay jug can be found a lot of crap.  Our anxieties, our vanity, our minor and major disorders – our addictions, our paranoia, our autism, our bi-polar swings, our panic attacks – and on and on.  All of the ills, as well as the joys, of being human are inside this clay jug.

It used to be that people thought that all of this was too much to be based in the biological and chemical make-up of the brain as an organ of the body.  There had to be another kind of reality to explain the complexity and creativity of human consciousness.  Like the Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation, a symbolic dove would be breathed into the body to represent consciousness.  Along with the non-material “soul” came its companions, devils and evil spirits.  “The devil made me do it.”  And with that exorcisms and witch hunts. 

I’m reminded of all the ways anthropologist record that humans have tried to propitiate that which they didn’t understand, sacrificing to the gods that they thought controlled the weather, externally and internally.  As we humans have increased our understanding, these “gods” have become quaint artifacts of an earlier age.

How grateful we can be that increasing scientific understanding leads to effective interventions in place of exorcisms and elaborate rituals.  Nothing works quite like a drug that enhances or inhibits out-of-balance receptors in the brain cell!

But there’s another dimension to this brain, which intrigues.  For more than 2,500 years religious practitioners have experimented with meditation to achieve a consciousness that differs radically from our everyday way of experiencing ourselves and the world.

Said broadly, this alternate consciousness drops out the ego in comprehending the world “as it is.”  Not as “I” want it to be, wish it was, remember it, judge it – not in any way related to me and my agenda.  Just as it is.  When that happens, meditators observed that what they saw was perfect in itself, timeless, without beginning or end.  Moreover they noticed that they changed after several of these experiences of alternate consciousness.  They became more compassionate, spontaneous, effective and efficient.  Without a lot of cogitation, they “saw” what the other person needed in that moment.

Of course, the roots of the ego are deeply embedded in our everyday consciousness.  Typically we are oblivious to how our needs, agendas, yearnings, fears – the whole bundle that makes up our egos – distort how we see others – and ourselves.

We know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of this ego-driven distortion. We all know what it feels like to be used by another person.  Occasionally, rarely perhaps, we have the experience of another being interested in us just as we are.  They don’t need us to do anything for them.  They don’t expect us to be any which way.  They don’t judge us against any standard.  They don’t bring any hope or fear to meeting us.  They simply want to appreciate us as we are.  Oh my, how wonderful that feels!

Rarely, perhaps never, do we bring that same appreciation to ourselves.  No judgments, no hopes, no fears, just kindly interest in whatever we are showing in the moment.

I think this is what Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher and theologian, might have meant in distinguishing I-Thou relations from I-It ones.  In I-Thou relations the other is not an object for us to use, to judge, to fit into our assumptions, hopes and fears.  Rather the other person (or being) is simply there to be known in itself, just as it is.

Most of the time, most of us don’t experience others that way.  Instead they satisfy us, or distress us, or leave us disinterested because our needs and wants dominate how we experience the other person.

So often our response to another is not “who is this person before me?”  Instead it’s an instinctive assessment “Is this person friendly or threatening?  Powerful or not?  Active or not?”  We then act in response to our assessment – how this person is perceived in relation to ME.  I-It.  Will this person be good to know?  Will this person matter to me?  Much of the time we do this subconsciously, inexplicably drawn to some, and drawing away from others.

What meditators, beginning with the Buddha, if not before, discovered is this.  Patient, ongoing practice can lead to cleansing one’s perceptions, so that ego-dominated perception drops out.

Now what’s exciting is that neuroscientists can begin to uncover the brain mechanisms that explain the underlying physical and biochemical structures and processes that account for these alternate states.

Meditation calms the clamoring I.  It does this first by developing concentration, what is sometimes called “One-pointedness.”  It’s a kind of “unlearning” or “breaking the chains of association” that normally go on.  It interrupts the pattern, allowing for new ways of being.  At the simplest level, instead of unthinkingly scratching an itch, the meditator observes what the itch feels like, how the sensations change, what happens in the rest of your body as your arm instinctively prepares to move to scratch.  At a deeper level you notice your anger, the sensations, the train of thoughts including the judgments, the stories you tell yourself, the impulses, and the changing of all of these.  Little by little you gain in awareness, and break the cycle of unthinking reaction.

Little by little you get to the mental space where you can experience the world as it is, ego having dropped away – a vision that refreshes, that invites peace and compassion – a very different kind of awareness from everyday ego-dominated consciousness.

I don’t claim to understand the neuroscience that Austin reports and contemplates.  But I find it very exciting that such a specialist can suggest means of empirical testing that would establish the mechanisms that underlie such an alternative consciousness.

Inside this clay jug are the means of investigating what’s inside this jug!

Kabir ends his poem in this way:  If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth: Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.

 Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.  This is not a God apart from the world, somehow above and separated, yet controlling the world.  Like Kabir, the “God whom I love” is within this juiciness that is life, within this incredible complexity of billions of cells communicating with each other that is happening right now in each of our brains.  The “God whom I love” is that relationship Buber named “I-Thou,” the Taoist calls “wu-wei,” the Buddhist calls being “awakened,” the Christian calls “the peace that passes understanding.”

This is available to each and every one of us.  The very structure of our brains make it so.  Amazing!