Monks and Scientists Rethink the Nature of Consciousness
How ancient meditation and modern neuroscience converge to reveal that awareness begins with being, not thinking…
I first learned to meditate in 1968 when I took instruction in Transcendental Meditation from the Maharishi’s people (at the recommendation of the Beatles). I still practice it, although with a few variations I’ve learned over the years. When you get inside your head on a regular basis, you begin to wonder exactly what consciousness is, and where it comes from.
Recently a group of researchers at the Allen Institute in Seattle got two rival teams of neuroscientists into the same room and proposed what they called an adversarial collaboration. Each team believed in a different theory of how consciousness arises in the brain.
Rather than each side continuing to run experiments designed to confirm what they already believed, they were asked to design one large experiment together, subject it to the same measures, and see what the data actually said. It took seven years. The results were published last April in Nature, and the headline wrote itself: neither theory won.
The two theories are worth understanding, at least in outline, because they represent the two main ways serious scientists have been trying to solve the hardest problem in all of science.
The first, Integrated Information Theory, says consciousness emerges from the way information is unified and integrated across a system. The more integrated the information processing, the more conscious the system.
The second, Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, says consciousness is more like a spotlight in the brain, a broadcasting mechanism that takes information and makes it globally available across different cognitive systems, and that this broadcasting, this making-available, is what produces conscious experience.
Both theories are sophisticated. Both have generated genuine predictions and genuine research programs. Both have serious scientists behind them. And in the largest, most carefully designed adversarial test ever conducted in this field, with 256 human subjects and three separate brain-imaging methods, neither came out on top. The data didn’t fit cleanly into either framework.
What it did suggest was something that neither theory had particularly emphasized. Consciousness, the study found, seems to be rooted not in the frontal cortex, where planning and reasoning and the machinery of deliberate thought are centered, but in the sensory and perceptual areas at the back of the brain.
The prefrontal cortex matters for intelligence, for doing, for executing. But awareness itself, the sheer fact of experience, appears to arise further back, in the regions that process what we see and hear and feel.
One of the researchers put it with a precision that surprised me: intelligence is about doing, while consciousness is about being.
That this would not have surprised a single serious contemplative/meditative practitioner in the last three thousand years.
The entire project of meditation, across virtually every tradition that has developed it in depth, is predicated on a distinction that modern neuroscience is only now beginning to map.
There is the thinking mind, the part that plans and reasons and narrates and judges and produces the internal monologue that most of us identify as our self. And then there is the awareness that is aware of the thinking mind, the sky in which the clouds of thought appear and move and dissolve.
The contemplatives called it the witness, or rigpa, or the ground of the soul, or pure consciousness, or a dozen other names depending on the tradition. What they all agreed on is that it is not the same thing as thought. It is what watches thought. And you can learn to rest in it.
This is not an advanced teaching. It’s the first thing a serious meditation teacher points at. Sit down. Close your eyes. Notice that you are thinking. Notice that there is something that notices the thinking. One of my teachers called it “Beginner’s mind.”
That noticing, that bare awareness prior to any particular content, is what the researchers in Seattle were inadvertently pointing toward when they located consciousness in the perceptual rather than the executive brain. Perception precedes interpretation; being precedes doing. The awareness that registers experience is more fundamental than the machinery that processes it into plans and narratives and judgments.
NLP makes a version of this same distinction, approached from a different angle. “The map is not the territory,” which is the foundational principle Richard Bandler and John Grinder built the whole framework on, is another way of saying that your running commentary about experience is not the same thing as experience itself.
Most of us spend our entire lives inside the map, inside the story about what is happening, and we rarely if ever touch the raw sensory experience underneath.
The NLP techniques that involve slowing down internal representations, changing submodalities, stepping back from the content of thought to observe how it’s structured, these are all, at bottom, exercises in finding your way from the map back to the territory. From doing back to being. From the frontal cortex down to the back of the brain, if you want to use the neuroscience.
What the Nature study leaves open, and what I find most interesting, is why this discovery was so hard to arrive at.
The experiment took seven years to design, conduct, and analyze. It involved hundreds of subjects and the full weight of modern neuroimaging technology. And its primary finding is that consciousness is more about perceiving than reasoning, which is something that anyone who’s spent serious time in meditation has known from direct experience since long before brain scanning existed.
There’s no reproach in that observation, by the way. The scientific method requires what it requires: operationalizable hypotheses, controlled conditions, replicable measures, adversarial testing.
You can’t build a proper study around someone’s meditation practice, however deep. What you can do, and what I think the field is slowly moving toward, is treat the contemplatives as having conducted their own empirical investigations, just through a different method, and take their results seriously as data.
The inner laboratory, it turns out, is real. The experiments conducted there over thousands of years have produced consistent findings across cultures and traditions that had no contact with each other. That’s not nothing.
The finding that consciousness is about being rather than doing is, at one level, a neuroscientific result about where in the brain experience is generated.
At another level, it’s an invitation. Because if consciousness is not a product of the thinking, planning, executive mind but something that underlies it and precedes it, then the practice of resting in awareness, of letting thought arise and pass without grabbing it, of sitting with the sheer fact of being alive in this moment before the narrative kicks in, is not a retreat from engagement with life: it’s contact with its actual ground.
The monks knew. The scientists are catching up. And the rest of us get to benefit from both.