Seeing vs. Understanding

The Nature of the Physical World, by Douglas Harding, author of On Having No Head

Science -- or rather, science misunderstood and gone haywire – has come up with a great deal of unscientific nonsense in its time. And the most prevalent, the most silly, the most absurd piece of pseudo-scientific nonsense is the dogma that consciousness is a by-product of matter -- a kind of incidental and accidental effluvium or subtle radiation that matter gives off when it gets sufficiently complex, as in human brains. The one thing led to the other, as if brains happened to grow a bump of consciousness in addition to the other bumps! As if the protuberance on the top of the head of images of the Buddha were the bump of that superconsciouness which he called enlightenment! In the beginning was a lot of stuff, and in the course of time it got around to noticing itself! Clever stuff! Wonder of wonders, object gives birth to subject. Are we astounded at such a maculate Conception and Nativity? Not at all. We take it in our stride. The primacy of matter over spirit is simply taken for granted. It is among the least challenged of the myths we live by.

That things should produce awareness of things -- and by chance, at that -- is, when you think of it, quite weird. It's like supposing that the movie-projector is operated by one of the actors on the screen. Equally odd is the notion that the subject can be examined from outside as if it were some kind of object. How can the subject be discovered except from within, by subjectivity itself? In any case there's not a particle of evidence of material things giving rise to consciousness. No one has ever observed it happen, or explained what to look for. In fact, the very idea is nonsensical.

What is a material object, according to science itself? It is a collection of phenomena (from the Greek phainein, to show), a set of regional appearances/pictures/readings which the scientist picks up and pieces together as he hovers round the "thing" he's surveying from various angles, at various distances, with the help of various instruments. What these regional appearances are appearances of, what nestles at their center, is hidden from him. However close he gets to that thing so-called, he remains too far off to say what it really is, intrinsically, at no distance from itself. The scientist, as such, is an outsider.

But he does have two clues to what's inside:

His first clue is that the nearer he gets to the thing the less "thingy" and the more empty it becomes. Progressively stripping it of assets, he comes to regions where all that remains of that seemingly solid object is space haunted by twists of energy, so to speak. Beauty and ugliness, utility, life, color, opacity, shape, even precise location -- all are left behind by the approaching observer. There's not a quality or function that will stand up to close inspection. It is distance that lends these enchantments. Go up to anything and you lose it.

But just a minute! Who goes up to that thing and loses it? Who registers the dismantling and disappearance of the object and its reduction to virtual emptiness? Why, the scientist himself, of course, as consciousness. He leaves all behind except awareness. You could say he takes it with him wherever he goes, because that is what he is. It's impossible for him to explore the physical world of cells and molecules and atoms and particles and leave it merely physical: his active presence there infects it through and through and at every level with spirit. As for the space that underlies all, how could his awareness of it be separated from that space? Just as there's no way of entering an [imaginary] house, so there's no way of contemplating mindless space. No wonder subatomic physics is forced by the facts to bring the observer into the picture. In fact, while the picture fades on ever-closer examination, the consciousness that illuminates it shines all the more brightly. Matter dissolves in favor of spirit.

Let me put it in another -- and I think better -- way. Things can be moved and carried around. Not so consciousness of things. It isn't a torch which the scientist takes along with him to shine on things, or an air freshener he sprays them with, or a laser beam he directs at them. Wherever he goes it's already there, inseparable from the very nature of those things. If for the word consciousness or spirit I read God (and there are many worse names for It) then I can say with the Psalmist:

Whither shall I go from thy spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou are there: if I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

In short, spirit or consciousness underlies all, and there is no such thing as the merely physical. A phenomenon or regional appearance by itself, without a central reality of which it is an appearance – what sort of nonsense is that, for heaven's sake?

There exist two distinct kinds of things (so-called) which are available for the scientist's inspection -- the observed thing and the observing thing. That is to say, other bodies, and his own body. We have just seen to what conclusions his examination of other bodies leads. Now let us find out whether they are confirmed by his examination of his own body, the specimen he carries around with him all the while.

Here, nearer than near, is his second clue to what things really are, as distinct from what they look like at a distance. Here is his very own sample lump of matter, always handy, requiring no laboratory or instruments for its most searching examination, constantly reporting on its true and intrinsic nature, transparent through and through to his direct inspection. If (and it's a very big if) he takes seriously this unique and precious sample -- if and when he dares to look at what he's looking out of, inspecting it from inside that one thing on which he is the final authority -- why then he finds it to be quite
empty, and in fact no kind of thing at all. A nothing keenly aware of itself as just that. Such is the view of himself at no distance from himself, provided he is honest and attentive enough. Which is to say, truly scientific.

Notice how nicely these two clues confirm each other. Whether looked at from outside or inside, bodies dissolve, matter vanishes, spirit remains -- once we bother to go into the matter. "Spirit is the living body seen from within, and the body is the outer manifestation of the living spirit." Extend this statement by Carl Jung to all bodies from electrons to galaxies, and you have the ultimate physics.

To understand the primacy of spirit is good. To realize it, to see it, wordlessly to experience it, to be it without thinking about it -- this is incomparably better. And incomparably easier: in fact, understanding must always be about its object, hovering round and about it and never gaining admittance. That is why the rest of this chapter is a heartfelt invitation to the reader to do one or two little experiments, which will surely lead to this direct perception of what would otherwise remain a mere set of lifeless concepts.

Observe this thing you are now holding. What in reality is this object called "book"? I mean this actual wad of paper with printing. There it is, a solid enough lump of stuff a few inches wide and long and less than an inch thick, weighing rather less than a pound, covered with (I trust) meaningful black marks on a white surface. Now where are these meaningful patterns that you are currently taking in? Are they over there, some 12 inches away, or are they where you are? Well, let's put the matter to the test. Go right up to the page and see. Apply your eye to this printing, as if you were putting on a
contact lens. Yes please, all the way. If you feel a bit ridiculous, remember what's at stake. Namely Reality itself, and your status within it. Go on ...

What did you see? I venture to say that what you found there was not meaningful sentences, not loose words, not a string of letters, not even fuzzy black marks on a white ground, but an illegible blur. And, on contact, nothing at all. You lost everything, but you didn't lose consciousness. It was the book, not you, that passed away. The nothing you found wasn't just nothing at all -- whatever that monster could be -- it was Nothing but Awareness. "There is a Light by which things are
seen," says Ramana Maharshi, "and if divested of things the Light alone remains."

So much for where these printed words are coming from. Where are they going to? Who is reading them now, on present evidence? What is taking them in? In your firsthand experience at this moment, is it a solid, rounded, hairy thing with two peepholes in it? Only you -- you who are your own closest inspector -- are in a position to say. Again, isn't it true that what you go right up to you lose? You certainly go all the way to you. So it's no wonder that you vanish, just as the page did, leaving only awareness. Intrinsically, then, the Reader is the same as the Read, and none other than Spirit which is indivisible. To put it picturesquely, this page of printing is a letter from Spirit to Spirit, a love-letter from You to You. And, of course, what's true of this page is true of the other pages in this book when you come to them, and of the hands that are now holding it, and of the furniture in the room, and of all that's going on outside. They are views of You, messages from You, displayed to You. At root, all you perceive is Yourself, heavily disguised as someone else, for your entertainment
and refreshment.

It would be difficult to overstate the practical importance of this discovery, its consequences for everyday living. All alienation, all separation, the many-sided threat of hostile things and persons and situations -- these are no more than bad dreams. All is You. How could you fear Yourself? How could you despise, resent, be bored by Yourself? How could you not love Yourself?

All this and more than this. Everything you see and hear and handle is something you want to say to yourself, something well worth saying, something significant -- even if it's only about an oncoming bus. There can be no dreadful or garbled or meaningless messages from you to You. News about You, read by You, is good news, however bad it may sound to the hearer who is deaf to its Source and Destiny in himself as Spirit. To him Ramana says: "The imperfection appears to you. God is perfection. His work also is perfection. But you see it as imperfection because of your wrong identification ... Find out if you are physical."

In conclusion, then, the spirit which is one and the same in all beings is the true nature of what we take to be the physical world. Things as such have no substance and no reality and no power at all. You could call them pictures of God held up by God for his own inspection, and in themselves less than paper-thin. All you have to do to live from this realization is to go on seeing who's doing it. And I mean seeing, not understanding.