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- What is the meaning of the transcending of the ego. Is it merely a physical reaction of the cells and their processes?
And here we come to the nub of the matter. Consciousness is, whatever else you can say about it, a product of the brain metabolism, the oxidation of glucose. It is produced in the brain cells. It is not a cloud or mysterious vapour from the outer universe. It arises in the brain and nowhere else. When the heart stops beating that is the end of it. The “effortless awareness”, the “impersonal and untroubled consciousness”, which Huxley describes, is a state of mind in which the Ego is transcended. What does this actually mean? Let me explain
- You can think of the Ego, for all intents and purposes, as the speech system. It is in fact responsible for keeping that system in operation. By controlling the distribution of blood in the brain it ensures priority to the centres for talking, listening, reading and writing. The way it controls the blood distribution is by having a grip on the arteries in the brain; by constricting those leading elsewhere it concentrates the blood in the speech centres first and foremost.
Consciousness as a physical process merely is explained as blood supply to the brain, a premium put on cerebral spinal fluid as it has nowhere else to go. This explanation eliminates all extraneous mystical influences impinging from without in the cosmos at large.So it seems, and consequently is wanting as an explanation insofar as it limits to the physical processes alone.
And yet the man or mystic on the Clapham omnibus would in all probability
be shocked to have their “union with God” reduced to a matter of muscle and
blood! (I speak not absolutely literally here, because strictly speaking blood
vessels are not muscles, but they can be constricted to control the distribution
of blood, so it comes to much the same thing.)
And here we come to the nub of
the matter. Consciousness is, whatever else you can say about it, a product of
the brain metabolism, the oxidation of glucose. It is produced in the brain
cells. It is not a cloud or mysterious vapour from the outer universe. It arises
in the brain and nowhere else. When the heart stops beating that is the end of
it. The “effortless awareness”, the “impersonal and untroubled consciousness”,
which Huxley describes, is a state of mind in which the Ego is transcended. What
does this actually mean? Let me explain.
The Ego is the agency through which
the central nervous system directs the blood to the parts of the brain in
action. Which parts those are depends on whether the Ego allows the blood to get
to them or not. You can think of the Ego, for all intents and purposes, as the
speech system. It is in fact responsible for keeping that system in operation.
By controlling the distribution of blood in the brain it ensures priority to the
centres for talking, listening, reading and writing. The way it controls the
blood distribution is by having a grip on the arteries in the brain; by
constricting those leading elsewhere it concentrates the blood in the speech
centres first and foremost.
It is as if the brain is a sponge with a limited
amount of water in. To concentrate water in one part you must squeeze the sponge
and, in so doing, restrict the supply to the rest of the sponge.
In the brain
of the adult only about 5% of the cortical layer is in function at any one time.
There is not enough blood for more than that to function at the level of
consciousness. For the function of a brain cell to become conscious it requires
a certain volume of blood to reach it. Below that level it will survive, remain
in existence, but its specialized function will not reach consciousness. It
will, as it were, remain in the dark. Consciousness is like a beam of light
which can be directed onto the function of a cell, or a collection of cells, a
brain centre. Without that light directed onto it the particular function
remains unconscious. We are not aware of it. The light is the effect of the
oxidation of glucose. Glucose is the encapsulation of sunlight in a plant
through the process of photosynthesis. When it is combusted with oxygen in the
brain it releases the energy stored in it as consciousness, another form of
energy, or light. Glucose and oxygen reach the brain cells in the blood. So the
consciousness of a function, say the smell of coffee, depends on a sufficient
blood supply to that centre (the olfactory in this case). It will then light up
and we become aware of it. Alternatively, if we are concentrating very hard on a
piece of writing, for example – say, studying for an exam – we can completely
repress all other perceptions, including the smell of coffee, to keep totally
focussed on the meaning of the words.
The speech centres are the latest to
have evolved in the brain. They are situated in the cortical layer right at the
top, as far away from the heart as you can get. What Bart realized was that by
adopting the upright position man was placing himself in the position of a
hostage to gravity. The heart had to pump the blood up into his brain in direct
defiance of that universal force. There are two fluids in the brain, blood and
water (actually cerebrospinal fluid (csf), but essentially, for the purposes of
the present argument it is water). Blood is heavier than water and the csf is
produced and circulates only inside the central nervous system (the brain and
spinal cord), so it has squatters’ rights, so to speak, – it has nowhere else to
go – whereas the blood obviously circulates around the entire organism. The
result of this is the loss of some blood from the brain relative to the
horizontal position. As the blood drains away, it is replaced by the lighter
csf. The parts of the brain that will suffer most from this are obviously the
parts farthest from the heart, which would include the speech centres if the Ego
mechanism had not evolved to preclude this eventuality.
This loss means the
loss of a degree of consciousness, since there will be less blood available for
the brain cells and therefore less of them will be able to function at the
conscious level. Mythologically, this loss has been called the Fall of Man. We
have fallen from a state of animal grace. The “knowledge of good and evil” comes
with self-consciousness, a result of the creation of language.
