The Antidote (11 page)

‘See what happens', indeed, might be the motto of this entire approach to working and living, and it is a hard-headed message, not a woolly one. ‘The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning,' argued the social psychologist Erich Fromm. ‘Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.' Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities – for success, for happiness, for really living – are waiting.

‘To be a good human,' concludes the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, applying this perspective to her own field of ethics, ‘is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertainty, and on a willingness to be exposed. It's based on being more like a plant than a jewel: something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.'

Why are you unhappy? Because
99.9 per
cent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself – and there isn't one.

– Wei Wu Wei,
Ask the Awakened

I
F YOU HAD SPENT
any time in the park that dominates Russell Square, in central London, in the late 1970s, it is possible that you might have noticed a skinny man aged around thirty, with delicate, almost elfin features, sitting alone on a park bench and doing absolutely nothing. For almost two years, if his own account is to be believed, Ulrich Tolle sat on park benches all day, unless it was raining or snowing hard; then, he sought shelter in nearby public libraries. He spent his nights on the sofas of tolerant friends – or occasionally, when their tolerance expired, sleeping rough amid the bushes of Hampstead Heath. All things considered, though, it is unlikely that you'd have noticed him. Tolle was a nobody. And he would not have considered this label an insult, either, since from his perspective there was a sense in which it was literally true.

A few months prior to the beginning of his park-bench period, Tolle had been living alone in a bedsit in Belsize Park, in northwest London. He had recently completed a graduate degree at the University of London, and he was depressed to the point of regularly contemplating suicide. Then, the way he tells it, one night when he was filled with even more despair than usual, something snapped. Lying nearly paralysed on his bed in the dark, he underwent a terrifying, cataclysmic spiritual experience that, he claimed, erased his old identity completely. It was ‘a slow movement at first', he wrote, many years later. ‘I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake … I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself, rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that.' He lost consciousness.

When he awoke the next day, he knew instinctively that he was no longer the person he had been before. But what had happened seemed even more wrenching and elemental than that: somehow, in a way he couldn't properly put into words, it no longer felt as though he had a clearly bounded personal identity at all. His ‘me' was missing in action. In its place, he felt only a sense of ‘uninterrupted deep peace and bliss', which faded a little after a while, but never went away. ‘I walked around the city in utter amazement at the miracle of life on earth, as if I had just been born,' he wrote. After a while, he gave up the bedsit. With no personal agenda, no to-do list, no mental narrative telling him that he had to become someone or get anywhere other than what and who he was, the idea of spending his days on the park benches of Russell Square didn't strike him as strange behaviour. There was no reason not to. And so, in a state of peaceful contentment, he did.

Some time after his bedsit crisis, Ulrich Tolle changed his name
to Eckhart Tolle, and began to speak and write about his experiences. Several years after that, another cataclysmic force – Oprah Winfrey – helped propel him to the position he enjoys today, as the world's bestselling living ‘spiritual' author, with the arguable exception of the Dalai Lama. These facts do not enhance his credibility in every-one's eyes, and some sceptics have questioned his account of his transformation. Tolle says he doesn't mind the doubters, although you might argue that he doesn't have much choice: when you've told the world that you dwell in a realm of infinite equanimity, you can't start getting all snippy when people don't take you at your word.

You might also reasonably suspect that a figure such as Tolle would have little to contribute to the ‘negative path' to happiness. The books that clutter the mind/body/spirit shelves, where his reside, often embody the very worst of the ‘cult of optimism'. And Oprah's endorsement is no less troubling, given that it has also been bestowed upon the likes of the
The Secret,
that epitome of magical positive thinking, as well as upon a number of questionable self-help gurus. Tolle's own first bestseller,
The Power of Now,
was once photographed under the arm of the socialite Paris Hilton, as she prepared to serve a forty-five day jail sentence in 2007. None of this bodes well. But regardless of exactly what happened to him that night in Belsize Park, his insights are worth considering because of his perspective on a topic that most of us, most of the time, take entirely for granted: the idea of the self.

In this book so far, we have explored the many ways in which conventional approaches to happiness and success seem to backfire, for the same essential reason: that there is something about trying to
make ourselves
happy and successful that is precisely what sabotages the attempt. But there is an even more unsettling possibility. What if the problem is not just one of technique?
What if we are mistaken, not only about how to change ourselves but also about the nature of the selves we're trying to change? Calling into question our assumptions about what it means to talk about the self might prompt an entirely different approach to the psychology of happiness. And
The Power of Now –
which is, in fact, mercifully low on references to ‘energy fields', ‘vibrational frequencies', and the like – calls these assumptions into question with the title of its very first chapter: ‘You Are Not Your Mind'. Think about that, if you dare.

The notion that our commonplace assumptions about selfhood might need re-examining certainly didn't originate with Eckhart Tolle. It is an ancient thought, central to Buddhism and to numerous other philosophical and religious traditions – a theme recurring so frequently in the history of religion and spirituality, in fact, that it is a part of what Aldous Huxley and others labelled ‘the perennial philosophy'. Tolle was saying nothing new. But these reflections are often buried deep in ancient texts. I wanted to visit Tolle because he claimed to have experienced, at first hand, what this was all about. And he was willing to talk about it.

I had half-assumed, perhaps even half-hoped, that he might turn out to be a clichéd kind of guru, living in an ashram, fat and drunk on his own power, wearing elaborate robes and surrounded by adoring acolytes. It turned out, though, that he lived in a pleasant but slightly cramped top-floor apartment in a building in Vancouver, in Canada, just up the street from the campus of the University of British Columbia. He answered the door himself, stooping slightly. He was sixty now and birdlike, clad not in golden robes but in a strikingly unfashionable orange shirt and brown slacks. He indicated a leather armchair, on which I sat down, then seated himself on a sofa facing it, and waited for me to say something.

In Tolle's company, I soon learned, there was a lot of waiting. As on the benches of Russell Square, he seemed entirely comfortable with this, feeling no need to fill the silences, no pressure to move things along. I was less comfortable, because I couldn't think of anything sensible to say. Even ‘How are you?', I had suddenly realised, was a potentially problematic opening question when the word ‘you' – and what, exactly, that might mean – was the very thing I had come to discuss.

Few things seem so obvious, fundamental and undeniable as the self. Whatever uncertainties you might harbour about how to live – how to be happy, how to behave morally, what relationships to pursue, or what work to do – you probably retain the bedrock assumption that all these things are happening to an easily identifiable, single entity called you. This feels like such firm ground, in fact, that it forms the basis of what is arguably the most famous line in the history of Western philosophy: the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes's dictum
Cogito ergo sum:
I think, therefore I am. There are very few aspects of our experience of being alive, Descartes realised, about which we can truly be certain. But we can be confident that we are us – that, in the most basic sense, we are who we take ourselves to be.

It is worth following Descartes's argument quite closely here. Imagine, he begins, an evil demon who is determined to play as many tricks on you as possible – a demon ‘supremely powerful and cunning, [who] has devoted all his efforts to deceiving [you]'. How far could the demon's deceptions go? Don't forget, Descartes points out, that you rely for your entire understanding of the external world on your five senses: you can't know anything at all about what's going on outside your body unless you can touch,
see, hear, smell, or taste it. And so, in principle,
everything
you think you know about that world might in fact be a breathtakingly detailed and convincing illusion, concocted by the evil demon. Looking out from inside your head, Descartes asks, how could you ever be completely certain that ‘the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things' are not merely delusions, traps that the demon ‘has laid for [your] credulity'? You might respond that such a scenario is absurdly unlikely, but Descartes is not concerned with its likelihood. He is employing the philosophical technique that came to be known as ‘systematic doubt', attempting to isolate only that knowledge that he could regard as totally, unshakably certain.

Descartes's evil demon might go further still. (He is extremely evil, after all.) By sending the right sort of deceptive signals to your brain, he might even be responsible for your feeling that you possess a physical body. Maybe, in reality, you don't have a body. Maybe you're just a brain in a jar on a shelf in the demon's laboratory. How could you ever be sure? The parallels here with the 1999 movie
The Matrix
are not coincidental: that film is essentially a twentieth-century meditation on Descartes's seventeenth-century insights. ‘A viewer of
The Matrix',
as the philosopher Christopher Grau puts it, ‘is naturally led to wonder: how do I know I am not in the matrix? How do I know for sure the world is not a sophisticated charade, put forward by some superhuman intelligence in such a way that I cannot possibly detect the ruse?'

And yet despite all these possibilities for deception, there is exactly one thing and one thing only that cannot possibly be an illusion, Descartes maintains – and that is the fact that you are experiencing all this. Even the person who fears that he or she may be being fooled about literally everything else must know
for sure that there is a ‘him' or a ‘her' who's being fooled. The demon couldn't fake that. ‘The proposition “I think, therefore I am”', writes Descartes, ‘is the first and most certain which presents itself to whoever conducts his thoughts in order.' You might not be able to know much with utter certainty. But you know that you are you. The sense of being you
can't
be an illusion – because ‘you' is what's experiencing all these possibly illusory things in the first place. Somebody has to be there in order to be tricked.

Or do they? One of the first people to spot a potential flaw in this reasoning was a contemporary of Descartes, the French philosopher and priest Pierre Gassendi, who dedicated a significant part of his career to attempting – largely fruitlessly – to persuade Europe's intelligentsia that their star philosopher had got things badly wrong. Descartes's method of ‘systematic doubt' had been intended to uproot every unwarranted assumption about the nature of experience. But hidden inside
Cogito ergo sum,
Gassendi argued, one final devilish assumption remained. Just because thinking is going on, that didn't mean Descartes was justified in concluding that thinking is being done by one particular, unitary, thinking agent – by an ‘I'. As the German scientist Georg Lichtenberg would later phrase it, Descartes was entitled only to claim that ‘thinking is occurring', not ‘I think, therefore I am.'

It was the great Scottish philosopher David Hume, writing in the first half of the eighteenth century, who most vividly illustrated this hidden assumption, proposing a thought experiment of his own. Never mind systematic doubt, Hume suggested: instead, simply try turning your attention inwards, and trying to find this thing you call your self. Hume had made the attempt many times, he claimed, but he could never succeed. Instead of a self, all he ever found were specific processes: emotions, sensations, and
thoughts. Where was the self that was feeling those emotions, sensing those sensations, and thinking those thoughts? Hume was stumped:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov'd for any time, as by sound sleep, so long I am insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist … If any one upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him.

It isn't completely inconceivable, Hume concedes, that other people – possibly even all other people in the world, except him – do indeed have some kind of clearly identifiable, easily located self. The only interior world to which he has any direct access is David Hume's, so how could he ever hope to prove otherwise? But he doubts it. ‘I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind', he goes on, ‘that they [too] are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement.'

Modern neuroscience has provided strong support for the suspicion that the self is not the ‘thing' that we imagine it to be – that there is, in the words of the neuropsychologist Paul Broks, no ‘centre in the brain where things do all come together'. One good illustration of this emerges from experiments involving patients with ‘split brains' – people in whom the
corpus callosum,
which connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain, has been severed. As the psychologist Michael Gazzaniga has demonstrated, ‘split-brain' people behave as if each of their hemispheres were its own independent self. In one study, the word ‘walk' was projected only into the right side of a patient's brain. He got up and began to walk – but when asked why he had done so, the left side of his brain, responsible for language, quickly came up with a convincing reason: ‘To get a Coke.' Each hemisphere seems capable of acting in those ways that we tend to associate with a ‘self', casting doubt on the notion that there's any one region of the brain where such a thing might reside. The philosopher Julian Baggini points out that this isn't quite the same as saying that the self ‘doesn't exist'; just because we may be a complex collection of things, instead of one simple thing, it doesn't follow that we are not real. A ‘bundle of perceptions', to use Hume's phrase, is still a real bundle of perceptions. But the fact remains that we have been using a term and a concept – the self – that on closer inspection isn't at all what it seems.