Chapter 9     The Spectrum of Mind

The awareness of knowing carries with it the awareness of not knowing; in fact we are living at all times in a space where knowing and not knowing seem to meet one another in various ways. I have said previously that our human mind actually thrives on this challenge and has used it to grow into the truly remarkable form in which we experience it today. We could say, therefore, that the business of the mind is not simply knowing, but includes not knowing as well. Any story of the mind must surely include a description of its capacity for appreciating mystery, experiencing awe and wonder and also its sense of beauty and bliss or peace and contentment, all of which include something of the unknown. I have hinted throughout the book that we will come to see the mind as a kind of spectrum or continuum that extends between knowing and not knowing, even though the extreme ends of this continuum may not be clearly defined.

The word, spectrum, most commonly refers to the range of colours we see in visible light under certain circumstances, e.g. in the colours of the rainbow. Scientifically speaking the seven principal colours are said to make up the central and largest portion of a whole chromatic spectrum described in terms of radiation wavelength or frequency. The word is also used, more metaphorically, to describe any range of values or even a variety of opinions spread between two extremes. In much earlier usage it included the idea of an apparition or spectre. This has connotations of visual illusion again and there are many examples of tricks you can play with colour. After you look at a bright coloured light an image of its complementary colour will remain in your sight, e.g. you will see a green image after looking at a red strip on white paper. Combinations of colours produce a completely different colour, e.g. a mixture of yellow and blue becomes green.

Maturana studied the neurobiology of colour vision and these studies contributed to his eventual insights into the proactive nature of perception. One thing he noticed was the lack of correlation between the wavelength of the coloured light and the perception of the colour. In the history of thinking about the mind the perception of colour has been a somewhat enigmatic topic because it is one of those aspects of our experience that John Locke called ‘secondary qualities’ (also known as qualia) that could not be objectified entirely and therefore would always be subjective. Although Newton demonstrated the different wavelengths associated with various colours, which was of great value to science, the perception of colour was explained more satisfactorily later by Goethe who showed that the colours arise in our mind from the circumstances under which we interact with the light. I will explain this work in more detail later because it is an important aspect of the metaphor of wholeness.

The spectrum of colour was associated by ancient philosophers with other series that had seven parts to them. The prime example of this is the most common musical scale that was said by Pythagoras to be the basis of all beauty and symmetry. He said: “the seven notes of music on the physical plane represent . . . the creative principle on which the cosmos was built.” Great significance was attached to the cycles of the seven known planets in earlier times. In fact the number seven has much significance attached to it in the scriptures and in freemasonry as well as in everyday affairs. We still have seven days of the week, seven seas, seven wonders and seven deadly sins and the list goes on and on. What all this tells us about the nature of our mind I have no idea. However, in order to do justice to this awesome human mind I suggest that a suitable metaphorical structure for its operation might start with the colours of the rainbow and the musical scale.

The metaphorical structure of this story

The problem I have with an explanation of the mind based entirely on conventional Western physiology is that it does not provide any sense of a continuum between knowing and not knowing. The physiological processes of the brain and body are described under fairly arbitrary classifications such as the various brain structures or the distinction between subconscious and conscious experience. The descriptions by Antonio Damasio of various levels of consciousness from ‘proto-self’ through ‘core consciousness’ to the ‘autobiographical self’ and ‘extended consciousness’ are amongst those I have found useful, but they do not describe the continuum of which I want to speak that is based in the practical experience of life. In the theological tradition Eugene Stockton has work in progress that I admire on ‘layers of perception’ that each have different rules of operation. As far back in Western mystical writing as The Cloud of Unknowing there is a description of “four levels and forms of Christian life” that denote different kinds of relationship with the unknowable God. None of these seems quite adequate for a spectrum of knowing.

After I retired from active research my thinking broadened and I realised that the Eastern tradition of knowledge about the mind did include descriptions of the continuum from knowing to not knowing that, superficially at least, had a simple and practical quality about them. The prime example is the set of seven chakras of the body (body-mind) described in yoga that were originally identified from Hindu religious practice. These are associated with levels of consciousness in ways that are outside the scope of my tradition of knowing so I do not claim to understand the full meaning of the chakras in their original sense. However, their continuity from the base chakra to the crown chakra is said to represent the transition from the physical to the spiritual planes of existence, which broadly correspond to the known and the unknown in my world view. I have emphasised the importance of not knowing in this book because without it a study of the human mind would be incomplete and I have referred to it as spiritual. That is the fundamental metaphor on which this story is based: that our mind operates between complete physicality, which can known, and complete spirituality, which cannot. The practicality of living with our mind and enjoying the best quality of life hinges on how well we can manage the interaction between these two aspects of being human.

Another impetus I had in this direction was a comment my physiotherapist made to me about acupuncture. He used it because it worked, but he said it was based only on a metaphor of how the human body worked, not on any real science. A metaphorical structure that works in practice was what I was looking for to speak about the mind so I resolved to learn more about these patterns of ‘energy’ that are said to flow through the meridians and around the chakras of our body. My own limited experience of yoga and tai chi made it quite easy for me to accept that, as well as the dense chemical body with which I was familiar, there is what Charlie Zhang and others call an electromagnetic body that makes its presence felt in the daily operation of my body and my mind. I found that the electromagnetic body is now an important area of basic medical and scientific research although this research is beset by major difficulties. Even if you think of it as the classic electromagnetic field we know from conventional physics there is the problem that the field is invisible and it connects or communicates internally at something approaching the speed of light, which is far too fast for us to follow. Nothing measurable about the field remains still and it can be altered by such subtle intervention as the touch of a finger, a body movement or putting a needle through the skin in certain places. Nevertheless I have found it useful to think of this field as an ‘invisible region of influence,’ as Sheldrake put it, or a complex of patterns of vibration whose frequency and wavelength may vary.

Chakras and the electromagnetic body

A chakra is defined by Anodea Judith as a centre of activity that receives, assimilates and expresses the life force energy. She also referred to it as a “spinning vortex of energy created within ourselves by the interpenetration of consciousness and the physical body.” The word, chakra, is a Sanskrit term meaning wheel, so this may be visualised as a spinning sphere of bioenergetic activity. Seven of these wheels are apparently stacked horizontally in a column of energy that spans from the base of the spine to the top of the head. The meaning of these concepts has been derived, like all meaning, from practical experience so it cannot be denied. The problem is, if you have not experienced it yourself, the meaning seems rather vague.

The life force energy or prana (Sanskrit meaning breath) is said to be a property of the whole universe and the chakra is described as the nexus of the metaphysical and the biophysical energy so the nature of this energy cannot be explained in scientific terms. That does not mean it does not exist; just that as scientists it is not known to us. Some researchers suggest that the chakra bioenergetic activity emanates from the major nerve ganglia situated nearby. These are constellations of nerves that form major junctions or hubs of activity within the nervous system. Others have said that the electromagnetic body is a more important indicator of health than the dense chemical body because the emotional state of the body is more closely reflected in the energy fields than in the blood levels of hormones or the nervous system activity. The position of the chakras also corresponds roughly with major hormone producing glands in the body. There is some hope that the relatively new mathematics of chaos theory can represent some of the characteristics of these fields as ‘strange attractors’ in the same way it has produced new insights into heart rhythm disorders and new theories about cancer.

Several of the chakras have alternate names, but I will be using the one I consider to be the simplest. The base chakra is situated approximately at the level of the base of the spine. The belly chakra, also commonly called the sacral chakra, is at the level of your abdomen a bit below the navel and the solar plexus chakra is located as it is named around that sensitive collection of nerves in the centre of your body just below the level of your ribs. The heart chakra lies around the centre of your chest and the throat chakra as you would expect across the throat. The brow chakra, sometimes called the third eye, embraces the middle of your forehead and the crown chakra encircles your body at the level of the very top of your head. They are usually numbered from one to seven in the order I have described them. The picture at the end of the Chapter shows the symbols for each chakra and their Sanskrit names.

There are also apparently twelve primary meridians or vertical channels of energy. The meridians are said to deliver the energy throughout the body while the chakras bathe the body in this energy. I know from experience that with a little practice it is possible to experience bodily sensations that correspond to the location of the chakras in one’s body. Adepts at this can use auditory and visual imagery where the tones and the colours correspond to individual chakras to produce profound effects at the physiological level, i.e. within the dense chemical body. Acupuncture and related procedures are known by even the most sceptical Westerner to produce dramatic effects on the experience of pain supposedly because of energy transfer along the meridians. There can be no doubt about the experiential validity of the electromagnetic body and the seven chakras. I have given examples at the end of this Chapter of two experiments that you could do to experience body energies for yourself. The point for this book, however, is that the chakras provide a useful framework for discussing modern cognitive science in a way that makes it a little clearer, simpler and more relevant to the practical use of our mind in everyday life.

The table of correspondences

In a metaphorical structure it is the associations we can recognise between different features of our world that would otherwise be unrelated from which we gain clarity, simplicity and relevance for our explanation. An example of this is the way the imagery of the colours of the rainbow and the series of musical tones that are associated with the seven chakras enhances one’s experience of their energy fields and hence the understanding of what the chakras mean. Caroline Myss made good use of this in her book Anatomy of the Spirit in which she drew parallels between the chakras, the seven Christian sacraments, seven levels of the ten sephirot from the Jewish Tree of Life of the Kabbalah and what she called “seven stages of power and healing.” I have constructed a Table of Correspondences in which I have adapted from Caroline Myss seven ‘sacred truths,’ seven  kinds of power in our lives and seven ways we learn the lessons we need to know and aligned these with the seven aspects of knowing that I have come to recognise from modern cognitive science. I mentioned earlier that this book could be called Seven Aspects of Knowing and that there are seven principal blind spots I am hoping to expose. I have found that these draw extra meaning from their association with the chakras, colours, tones, sacraments and the various phrases used by Caroline Myss.

In doing this I am trying to avoid the practice that has been called ‘new age’ of appropriating something from another culture (often Eastern) and applying it in a way that distorts its original meaning and often leads to a conceptual mish-mash. I think what is useful about new age literature is that it can enrich our thinking through more colourful imagery, but it can also lead in fanciful directions and lack credibility in the light of everyday experience. I said earlier I am using only the superficial explanation of the chakras that is fairly commonly known amongst Westerners and purely to provide a scaffold for my ideas about seven aspects of knowing. I believe it is an appropriate framework and it has been helpful to me in understanding and explaining mind-body science. The other parallels drawn here with the aspects of knowing are also intended metaphorically and not to provide insight into the Christian sacraments, Jewish sephirot or the thinking of Caroline Myss.

The first aspect of knowing is the biological AUTONOMY that was explained earlier with respect to autopoiesis. It corresponds with the Christian sacrament of baptism, the Jewish sephirot of creation, the physical kind of power and the lessons we need to learn about the physical world. It also corresponds with the base chakra, which is said to represent our purely physical connection to the world, our ‘survival consciousness,’ our grounding or the solid basis for the stability of our mind and body. Although I have not shown it in the Table this chakra is also said to correspond with the element, earth. Its colour is red.

There cannot be autonomy without CONNECTION, which is the second aspect of knowing. That connection or structural coupling is accompanied by the important autopoietic feature called operational closure, as you may recall. Connection as an aspect of knowing corresponds with the sacrament of communion, the sephirot of foundation and represents the power of relationship. It implies lessons about sexuality and physical activity in the world and carries with it the telling sacred truth: to honour one another. The element is water, the colour is orange and the belly chakra refers to creativity, sexuality and wellbeing through joining together with others and the world. Yoga people say that our singleness becomes aware of duality and difference and hence movement between polarities and desire is introduced into our knowing. The solid earth becomes flowing water. A cognitive scientist would say that without this ability to connect we could not be an autonomous unity or know ourselves at all.

I hope you may recall from earlier in the book the three essentials of life according to Mary Clarke: autonomy, bonding and making meaning. Obviously the first two correspond to the first two aspects of knowing in my analysis of cognitive science and the first two chakras in an Eastern tradition of knowing. I draw some satisfaction from seeing the parallels between these quite different sources of knowledge. Yoga knowledge and cognitive science have very different histories, yet many people today have found some commonality between East and West with regard to an understanding of the human mind and what it is to be a human being. Mary Clarke’s third essential, the ability to make meaning, is the subject of the five remaining chakras and aspects of knowing.

The proactive nature of our PERCEPTION, expressed as the way we bring forth our world, is the third aspect of knowing and the first that deals directly with how we make meaning. It corresponds with personal power and is where we find our self esteem and our personality and come to the truth of honouring one’s self. It is worth noting that this follows after we honour one another because it depends on that connection having been made. The solar plexus chakra represents self will and assertion, but also vitality, laughter and joy. Its element is fire and it is said to radiate; its colour is yellow. It draws on desire to transform energy into action. It is sometimes expressed as a ‘gut feeling’ about something. The sacrament of confirmation is regarded as an important milestone in establishing one’s spiritual identity and commitment.

This is as far as we have gone in the story up to now. The remaining sections of the Table of Correspondences will be visited in future Chapters. There will also be a more detailed examination of the blind spots that are revealed by each aspect of knowing. The last column in the Table refers to an application of my work that will not be covered in this book, but may be of passing interest to you. It shows the parallel between these seven aspects of knowing and the work in corporate consulting done by Richard Barrett and others. At the base chakra (or autonomy) organisations or businesses are seeking viability and survival and it is integral with this that they develop their relationships (second chakra). Their self-esteem comes from efficiency and what is known as best practice. Some management consultants are saying that this is the stage many corporations have reached and are content with today. In many cases, however, there is the opportunity for them to attain a much greater degree of shared vision and employee fulfilment and to make a greater contribution to society.

I trust that a Table such as this may have some value in orienting your thinking in a way that makes sense of my world view, but I would urge you to throw it away after you have digested its contents because fixed structures such as this can do more harm than good to our knowing in the long run. Your mind is so flexible and capable of growing that it does not need to be constrained by anyone else’s ‘model’ or design that is simply one person’s artificial fabrication of the flowing reality that we experience with our mind. It also needs to be said that these seven aspects of knowing, though they may provide some clarity for our explanation by being separated from one another, are simply different angles, points of view or ways of looking at the whole. That is why I call them aspects. I like to visualise the human mind as a gigantic crystal in which most of the facets twinkle with mystery and are not known to me, but in which I can discern seven particular aspects that have meaning for me; this meaning brings me some satisfaction. They are not levels like steps in a staircase even though one may build upon the next. They seem to take you both up and down as is so beautifully represented in various drawings by M.C. Escher. Each one is like a particular colour in the rainbow or tone on the musical scale. At the end of the book I will offer them to you as a seven-pointed star.

The basic blind spots

The most fundamental and perhaps least obvious blind spots are associated with the first three aspects of knowing. We generally do not recognise our autonomy and think of ourselves as largely steered by outside influences. This means that we tend to look outside of ourselves for security and authority, particularly in the direction of institutions and experts. We generally feel rather alone and see around us fragmentation rather than wholeness. We often try to promote a false togetherness by various forms of monoculture such as wearing the same clothes or making our houses and shops all look the same and in doing so we forget to honour and respect the diversity on which our connectedness depends.  This is a subtle and largely subconscious blind spot, but I have found that some awareness of it can be helpful in unexpected ways.

Taking for granted our connections as we do, we often forget about them altogether and do not remember to honour them as they occur. On the whole we treat relationships quite casually rather than sincerely. This is reflected not only in sexual promiscuity, but in our attitudes to the people who serve us in shops or join us in queues or on buses. To a biologist every connection is precious no matter how brief. I have already highlighted as the biggest obstacle to communicating with one another the way we assume that meaning is totally transferable and then deplore the misunderstanding that plagues our lives. We are naturally blind to the operational closure of our cognitive process and the need to create our own individual meaning at all times. You and I have lived through the information age, which by its very nature demeaned the business of connecting by overvaluing the bits of information we are always trying to obtain. We worship the content when it is the process that is fundamentally important when seen in basic biological terms.

Misunderstanding the proactive and personal nature of our perception we tend to blame the world for how we see it. This is a constant source of difficulty for almost every human being yet we all know that people can be happy living in a shack and people can be unhappy living in a castle. We also waste much of our lives arguing about an external reality that can only either be validated by our own knowing or by some authority or institution in the end. In doing this we value ideas about objectivity and truth above personal relationships, which in a biological sense is not likely to be beneficial in the long run. This does not mean there is no need for ethics and responsibility in human affairs; of course there is. We are representing here only the third aspect of seven aspects of knowing. For clarity we need to distinguish these from one another lest we confuse different aspects of knowing, but what applies at the solar plexus chakra must eventually be joined with what applies at the heart, throat, brow and crown. Trusting our own gut feeling is something we often neglect through blindness about its usefulness to us, but it is not the only aspect of knowing that we need to employ.

The next chakra we will visit is the heart and it is the halfway or middle point in terms of our metaphorical course structure. Its centrality as an aspect of knowing will be reflected in the fact that several Chapters will be devoted to an exploration of our emotional mind.

To experiment with body energies

Sit comfortably with your hands outstretched, one palm turned downward and palm up. Open and close your fists tightly, as fast and for as long as is comfortable for you. Switch the positions of your palms and repeat the clenching of fists. Then drop your arms, open your fists and bring your palms together slowly, in and out, until you feel something like a ball of energy between them.

Another way to experience the hand chakras is using a crystal pendulum, which will begin to move in a circular motion when it is held above and close to your open hand. This is a very convincing demonstration of one aspect of the electromagnetic body.