Take aways from Michael Pollan’s “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness”
It’s no secret that I’ve long been interested in the existential and the mystical. Experiences I’ve had in mediation, with psychedelics and working with dying people have blown open my understanding and experience of consciousness, and thus what it means to be alive, and to be aware that we’re alive. Having several encounters with an all encompassing sense of universal consciousness have helped me in my personal and professional work to help others create a more pleasant life.
So when Michael Pollan, an esteemed writer who’s curiosity and vocabulary I adore, released a book on consciousness earlier this year, I was eager to get into it. But dang, it took slow wading through.
This book was a thoughtfully researched and contemplative attempt to penetrate one of the most (if not the most) perplexing quandaries of our existence: why and how is it that for all of us, it is like anything to be something.
While there is much to puzzle over in his 300 some pages, here are what I found to be the most interesting take aways:
Despite decades of research by scientists at the top of a variety of fields (neuroscience, computer and AI science, philosophy, plant neurobiology, cognitive psychology) we still cant pin down consciousness thanks to two primary factors, first being that consciousness is impossible to operationally define. Second, we have no means to observe consciousness other than through the lens of our own. It’s hard to read the label from inside the jar. Several experts interviewed suggest that the classic scientific method that’s been in use since Galileo may have reached its effective capacity when it comes to this topic of study.
Increasing use of psychedelic induced experiences of ego death and meta consciousness by said scientists in concert with recent findings in quantum physics (e.g., entanglement and observation dependent locality) are imploding the base assumption that the source of consciousness is the brain and brain like structures in other organisms.
Reminder that we are not born with a Self. It develops in our first years of life as we understand our separation from our mothers, and over time, our this sense of self and continuity of self is consolidated by memory. The experience of self (self consciousness) is likely an adaptive product of evolution that promotes survival by giving us a thing to be protecting, and thus also avoiding (extinction of self, that is, death).
The notion that the experience of self exists only as a survival mechanism maps well onto my beloved Internal Family Systems theory’s foundation assumptions, that each of us have a innate Core Self that is naturally elicited when we feel safe (read: free from physical, emotional or social threat) and that all other parts of self develop to protect that Self.
This understanding of self as an evolutionary protective device to “plunge us mercilessly forward” directly echos one of the five root causes of human suffering posited by Buddhism: clinging to life and fear of death or non existence.
