Stories & Perspectives

Stories of, reflections on, and practices around expanding consciousness

Maha Ghosananda in the Cambodian refugee camps in northern Thailand (told by Jack Kornfield, captured here)

And he decided to open a temple, in the middle of one of the biggest refugee camps — 50 or 100 thousand people in these tiny, little bamboo huts. [He] got permission from the UN […] and built a platform with a little roof over it, and put an alter with the traditional, Cambodian Buddha.

It was a camp with the Khmer Rouge underground, lots of them, and so they put the word out that if anyone went to be with this monk, when they got out of the camp back to Cambodia they would all be shot.

So we wondered who if anyone would come? […] And 25,000 people poured into the central square around this temple. And Maha Ghosananda sat there and he was a scholar, he spoke 15 languages, he was an extremely kind hearted human being who suffered enormously and transformed it into the kind of compassion that we think of the Dalai Lama…

There he was […] sitting, looking out at 25,000 people who had suffered immense traumas, and you could see there was a grandmother and the only two surviving children that she had, or an uncle and niece, and their faces were the faces of trauma, and of survivors.

And I thought, what is he going to say to them?

And he sat very quietly for a long time, just in their presence. And then he put his hands together, in this kind of modest way, and began to chant […] in Cambodian and in Sanskrit, or Pali, the Buddhist language, one of the first verses from the Buddhist texts that goes:

Hatred never ceases by hatred

But by love alone is healed

This is the ancient and eternal law

And he chanted it over and over in Khmer, and in Sanskrit/Pali, and pretty soon the chant was picked up and in a little while 25,000 people were chanting this verse with him. And I looked out and they were weeping, many of them because they hadn’t heard their sacred chant for years. But also because he was offering them a truth that was even bigger than their sorrows….

And they were sitting in the middle of the healing energy of the dharma of the teachings of the heart that can liberate us.

Schrodinger: How conscious is the cat?

In 1956, twenty-one years after developing his famous thought experiment now known as Schrodinger’s Cat, Erwin Schrodinger was invited to deliver the Tarner Lecture at Cambridge University. His topic was not quantum mechanics, for which he had been awarded a Nobel Prize in 1933 and was considered a luminary. Instead, he delivered a lecture entitled the Physical Basis of Consciousness and explored the question: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness?

“It is a special kind of mechanism by which the individual responds to alternative situations by accordingly alternating behavior, a mechanism for adaptation to a changing surrounding. It is the most elaborate and the most ingenious among all such mechanisms, and wherever it turns up it rapidly gains a dominating role.”

At the time, most biologists and physicists continued to dismiss the question of consciousness as one that “cannot be answered and which ought to be left to idle dreamers,” as Schrodinger himself described the perspective of many of his peers in the introduction to his lecture. Still, Schrodinger dove in and presented his tentative answer: Consciousness is an advanced biological mechanism for learning, adaptation, and evolution. Schrodinger concluded his lecture by revealing that he had been contemplating the topic of consciousness for more than thirty years. Perhaps the deeper question for Schrodinger all along was: How conscious is the cat?

One might say, metaphorically, that consciousness is the tutor who supervises the education of the living substance, but leaves his pupil alone to deal with all those tasks for which he is already sufficiently trained. But I wish to underline three times in red ink that I mean this only as a metaphor. The fact is only this, that new situations and the new responses they prompt are kept in the light of consciousness; old and well practiced ones are no longer so.”

Since then, understanding the nature of consciousness has captured the imaginations of many other scientific luminaries. Advances in medical technology have allowed us to study the nervous system and the brain with greater degrees of precision, and have fueled an expansion of research in neurobiology and psychology. While a detailed understanding and unified definition of consciousness, one that is shared by biologists, psychologists, philosophers and theologians, remains elusive, descriptions of the phenomenon of consciousness are increasingly aligned.