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The Quest for Consciousness: Where Science Meets Zen
In a world obsessed with understanding the mind, Susan Blackmore's "Zen and the Art of Consciousness" stands as a rare bridge between scientific inquiry and contemplative practice. This book has become something of a cult classic among neuroscientists, philosophers, and meditation practitioners alike. When Sam Harris interviewed Blackmore for his podcast, he called it "one of the most honest accounts of consciousness exploration I've encountered." The book's influence extends beyond academic circles-director Christopher Nolan reportedly kept a copy on set while filming "Inception," inspired by its explorations of perception and reality. What makes this work so compelling is Blackmore's willingness to use her own mind as a laboratory, bringing together her scientific training and meditation practice to investigate consciousness from the inside out.
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Where Science Meets Meditation: A Personal Journey
Susan Blackmore's exploration of consciousness begins with a confession: thinking is her life's joy, yet she recognizes that certain questions about consciousness require more than logical analysis. These questions demand both thinking and the ability to refrain from thinking-precisely the skill taught in meditation. Unlike other spiritual traditions she explored that proved dogmatic, Zen appealed to her because, like science, it values questioning over blind faith and adapts to new discoveries rather than clinging to rigid doctrines.
Her meditation journey began as a student learning Zazen ("just sitting"), which she found surprisingly difficult. Later, she studied with John Crook, an English academic and Zen teacher who adapted Eastern practices for Westerners. Her first retreat at his remote Welsh farmhouse Maenllwyd-a stone house without electricity or phone-introduced her to serious practice despite frozen pipes and trudging through deep snow while eight months pregnant. During this first retreat, she meditated for hours in freezing conditions, exposing the chaotic mess in her mind rather than delivering enlightenment. John taught her to "Let it come. Let it be. Let it go"-allowing thoughts to arise without fighting them, then letting them pass naturally.
Mindfulness-being in the present moment-initially struck Blackmore as strange. When asking "Am I in the present moment now?" she'd always answer "yes," but felt she hadn't been present a moment before. During a seven-week intensive practice in Germany, mindfulness became both terrifying and transformative. It meant giving up nearly everything-thoughts of past and future, anticipation, regret, planning-keeping only what arose in the present moment. She discovered her endless mental chatter wasn't necessary for living; she could make decisions efficiently without it. Most surprisingly, the present moment itself was always alright-her troubles existed only in thoughts about past or future.
Rather than attempting lengthy meditation sessions, Blackmore maintains a simple commitment to just 15 minutes each morning. This approach has gradually deepened her practice while avoiding the disappointment of unrealistic expectations. The ten questions explored in her book emerged from different sources-some from her scientific work on consciousness, others from classic Buddhist inquiries. She developed a systematic approach bridging her scientific work and Zen practice: calming her mind through meditation, applying pressure by concentrating on the present moment, then tackling each question methodically while maintaining mental clarity.
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The Hard Problem: Mind Meets Matter
Consciousness is considered the greatest mystery facing science today-a modern version of the ancient mind-body problem. The dilemma is clear: on one hand, we have physical objects that behave predictably; on the other, we have private subjective experiences-the redness of wine, its taste and smell-that seem accessible only to ourselves. Philosophers call these private mental qualities "qualia." This division creates an apparent dualism between physical things and subjective experiences.
While dualism seems to be humanity's natural way of thinking-with beliefs about souls prevalent throughout history-it creates an unsolvable problem: if mind and matter are fundamentally different, how can they interact? Modern science faces what philosopher David Chalmers calls the "Hard Problem" of consciousness: how can objective brain processes give rise to subjective experience?
The escape from this dualism can be found in mystical traditions including Buddhism, which teaches that the apparent duality of the world is an illusion. Buddhism holds that all forms are empty of inherent selfhood, comparing the self to a carriage-just a collection of parts with no additional entity inside. Zen Buddhism particularly embraces this nonduality, with Dogen teaching "To study the way of the Buddha is to study your own self. To study your own self is to forget yourself."
Most scientists approach consciousness by assuming some brain processes are conscious while others are not. This leads to the search for neural correlates of consciousness and explanations for why consciousness evolved. The popular metaphor of "contents of consciousness" implies consciousness is a container-a space where some processes enter while others remain outside. Philosopher Daniel Dennett critiques these approaches as "Cartesian materialism"-scientists who reject dualism but still imagine a central place where consciousness happens, an impossibility in a brain with billions of interconnected neurons.
Vision illustrates these puzzles perfectly. We move our eyes five or six times per second yet perceive a stable world. We can only see clearly in a tiny area around our fixation point, yet feel we're seeing everything at once. "Change blindness" experiments reveal how limited our visual awareness actually is-people fail to notice massive changes to scenes when they occur during eye movements or blinks. This challenges our assumption that we build rich, detailed visual representations.
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The Awakening Question: Am I Conscious Now?
The simple question "Am I conscious now?" produces a startling effect-an immediate sensation of waking up, as though consciousness itself activates in the asking. This creates a troubling paradox: if asking makes me conscious now, was I unconscious before? Blackmore practiced asking this question repeatedly over months and years, discovering that remembering to ask is surprisingly difficult.
The question acts as a gesture of openness toward the world, and with persistent practice, consciousness begins to feel less jerky and more continuous. The awakening becomes smoother, suggesting that awareness can become more stable through practice. Yet looking deeply into the nature of "now" reveals another puzzle-there is no clear boundary of the present moment. Events seem spread across time rather than happening in discrete instants.
When examining consciousness of past moments, Blackmore discovers a peculiar paradox. She can find multiple threads of experience-sounds like a purring cat or a siren, bodily sensations like an aching knee, visual awareness of a wooden floor-yet each seems disconnected from the others. Was she truly conscious of these things before searching for them? When a crow screeches overhead, she realizes she heard it only after it happened. She cannot distinguish between what she was genuinely conscious of and what she merely remembers being conscious of.
Looking deeper reveals something terrifying-when truly asking what she was conscious of a moment ago without grasping at threads, there's nothing there. Not darkness, just void. The present moment seems to emerge continuously from nothingness.
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The Elusive Self: Who Is Looking?
When Blackmore asks "Who is asking the question?" the inquiry initially makes no sense. She tries a simpler approach: who is looking at the wet flagstones outside her hut? She can see the stone clearly with its puddles and wet leaves. There's perspective-the stone is over there, and she is over here looking. But when she turns her attention inward to find who exactly is doing the looking, she finds nothing. She cannot grasp it. She knows something must be here-it's her, isn't it?-but it eludes her completely.
This investigation of the self leads to another question: "Where is this?" She begins with what's directly in front of her-three sprigs of bright yellow winter jasmine. The question seems simple but proves complex. Are the flowers "out there" where they appear to be, or inside her head? Both answers fail. The yellow isn't truly in the flowers, as it only appears yellow to her particular visual system-a bee would see it differently, perceiving ultraviolet patterns invisible to humans. The flowers and insect visual systems co-evolved, creating colors that don't exist independently.
But neither is the yellow in her head. Though neuroscientists might identify which neurons fire when she sees yellow, the firing itself isn't the experience of yellow. One neuron firing is much like another-sodium and calcium ions flowing, depolarization waves traveling. Where in these processes is the actual yellowness? This reveals why we have no satisfactory science of consciousness-the experience itself seems left out of our increasingly sophisticated descriptions of brain function.
As she contemplates this question further, she realizes "this" is the whole experience-not just the isolated yellow flowers but the entire field of awareness including the hut, garden, distant city sounds. When she mentally traverses the space between herself and the flowers, she finds something strange-right where she thought she should be are only the yellow flowers. She is just a nameless void filled with yellow flowers.
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Thoughts Without a Thinker: How Does Thought Arise?
During a retreat at Maenllwyd in March 1993, Blackmore embarked on an intensive exploration of thought emergence. The stark Welsh setting of the retreat center, with its minimalist accommodations and strict schedule, provided an ideal environment for such deep contemplation. Initially, she encountered significant emotional turbulence - experiencing waves of anger at fellow retreatants' movements and frustration with her inability to quiet her mind. The breakthrough came through a traditional Tibetan visualization practice centered on compassion, where practitioners imagine radiating loving-kindness to all beings in expanding circles.
Working with fundamental questions about the nature of tranquility and thought formation, she made a crucial discovery: when she abandoned the compulsion to label and categorize her experience, genuine tranquility emerged organically. This state wasn't forced or manufactured, but rather revealed itself when mental commentary subsided. The practice involved sitting in complete stillness, allowing awareness to rest without manipulation or agenda.
However, what repeatedly astounded her was the mysterious nature of thought arising. She would suddenly find herself deep in elaborate thought sequences about mundane matters - planning weekend activities, rehashing conversations, or worrying about practical issues like a fallen bird table in her garden - with no recollection of how these thoughts began. Through careful observation, she identified two distinct categories of mental activity: the immediate thoughts that arose within tranquility without disturbing it, like ripples on a still pond, and the more elaborate thought streams that seemed to hijack awareness entirely, often running for minutes before being noticed.
As her practice deepened, she observed how thoughts could manifest as both subtle whispers and overwhelming narratives. The immediate thoughts were like brief flashes - a word, an image, or a sensation that arose and dissolved without creating disturbance. The elaborate thoughts, in contrast, were like being caught in a current, carrying awareness away into complex scenarios and stories. This distinction became crucial in understanding how consciousness might operate without a central controller.
Through sustained observation of both the active mind and moments of pure tranquility, she began to glimpse how neural patterns might naturally arise and dissipate without requiring a permanent, experiencing self. This aligned with both Buddhist teachings on emptiness and modern neuroscientific theories about consciousness emerging from distributed neural activity rather than a centralized "self" center. Just as she felt she was making significant progress with these investigations, her meditation notebook presented an even more profound question: Is the awareness that observes these various mental states somehow separate from the states themselves? This led to complex questions about the nature of time and consciousness that she realized would require much deeper investigation to address adequately.
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Beyond Time: There Is No Time. What Is Memory?
Working with the koan "There is no time. What is memory?" Blackmore developed a methodical approach to unraveling this paradoxical question. First agreeing with the statement "there is no time," she spent hours staring at the carpet, hallucinating crabs crawling across it due to severe sleep deprivation. Despite her intense focus, she found herself unable to perceive any concrete evidence of "time" as an independent phenomenon. But later, watching clouds drift slowly across the azure sky and leaves dancing in the wind, she questioned this initial premise-surely these movements require time to exist? This contradiction became her first breakthrough in understanding the koan's deeper meaning.
The koan proved ingeniously designed as a dual-edged philosophical tool: if she agreed there's no time, she became deeply perplexed about how memory could possibly exist without it; if she disagreed, she faced the equally challenging task of defining what time actually is beyond our subjective experience of it. Sitting before a flickering fire during evening meditation, she realized flames have no memory and therefore no concept of time-they simply exist in a continuous state of becoming and dissolving. This insight gradually expanded to encompass rocks, hills, trees, and ultimately the entire universe-perhaps nothing truly experiences time as we imagine it, but rather exists in an eternal present.
She discovered the koan functioned as what she termed a "magic converter," elegantly transforming wandering thoughts into mindfulness without the usual jarring disruption of forced concentration. When memories spontaneously arose during meditation, instead of forcibly pushing them away to return to the present moment, she could examine them through the contemplative lens of "what is memory?" During her interview with her teacher John, she demonstrated this by banging twice on the floor and asking what separated the sounds-time, naturally-yet we only perceive this separation through memory's lens, not through direct experience.
As the retreat progressed into its final days, she experienced a profound perceptual shift. The normal discontinuity of attention that characterizes ordinary consciousness disappeared-everything seemed to be "already happening" rather than sequentially coming into consciousness. Through sustained investigation, she realized experiences aren't actually grounded in ordered time as we typically imagine; there is no central headquarters or "Cartesian theater" in the brain where things "become conscious." Past memories and future projections feel remarkably identical-both are simply "mind stuff," mental constructs-with no definitively locatable "now" moment separating them. This insight revealed time itself as perhaps our most persistent and necessary illusion.
Through this deep contemplation, Blackmore began to understand how our usual conception of time as a flowing river carrying us from past to future might be fundamentally mistaken. Instead, she glimpsed a reality where all moments exist simultaneously, with our experience of temporal sequence being a construction of consciousness rather than an fundamental aspect of reality.
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The Illusion of Agency: What Am I Doing?
Sitting outside her hut on a warm summer day, surrounded by birdsong and buzzing bees, Blackmore contemplated what it means to truly "do" something. As she remained perfectly still, she questioned whether she was actively sitting, breathing, or hearing-or if these experiences simply arise and fall away without a doer. The question "What am I doing?" paradoxically froze her in a moment of not-doing.
She tested her supposed free will with a deliberate clap, but immediately recognized countless causal threads leading to this simple action. Even this seemingly spontaneous choice revealed itself as part of an endless causal chain, challenging the very notion that "I" am the one who acts.
The philosophical problem of free will haunted her as she sat in meditation. The universe appeared causally closed-everything interconnected in a web of cause and effect with no room for magical intervention. Both Western philosophy and Buddhism recognize this dilemma: if everything arises dependently, how can "I" act independently?
As she sat in her garden watching flowers and trees, she questioned whether she was truly "doing" anything. Even paying attention-supposedly an effort of will-revealed itself as something happening rather than something she controlled. When she turned inward, where "I" should be, there were only moving flowers and branches-no separate doer. Walking, picking raspberries, stroking cats-all these actions unfolded without a central controller. Decisions emerged from countless interactions, with the little voice claiming "I did that" always arriving after the fact.
The dissolution of self brought an existential crisis about responsibility. During a Zen retreat years earlier, as the world seeped into her and she disintegrated into it, she confronted this fear directly. In a formal interview, she told the Zen master her conclusion that ultimately no one is responsible for anything. He smiled warmly and said, "Yes, ultimately that's true." When she asked what to do about responsibility, his answer was simple: "You take responsibility." This paradoxical instruction-to take responsibility while knowing there's no separate self to take it-guided her as her sense of having free will gradually slipped away.
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What Happens Next? Death and Continuity
The question of what happens after death hinges on understanding who we really are. Science sees no need for souls or spirits, while most religions promise personal survival through reincarnation or afterlife. Buddhism uniquely denies the existence of a permanent self, yet many Buddhists still believe in reincarnation. This paradox drove Blackmore to look directly at experience rather than doctrine.
Sitting in meditation, she noticed multiple threads of experience-birds singing, traffic noise, the cat beside her-with the peculiar sense that "someone" had already been experiencing these things before "she" became aware of them. This paradoxical feeling suggested a connection to the question of reincarnation. She set herself the task of investigating whether there truly is a continuous "me" experiencing things, or something else entirely.
The breakthrough came when she realized she'd misunderstood meditation instruction all along. "Let it come, let it be, let it go" isn't about a continuous self allowing experiences to enter and leave consciousness-it's about recognizing that myriad experiences arise, stay briefly, and fizzle out without requiring a central experiencer at all. This fits with neuroscience: the brain has no central processor, just multiple parallel pathways firing simultaneously.
The most surprising discovery came after letting go of threads-perhaps the continuity is just that of the universe doing its stuff. There is no need to fear, for experiences will keep arising or not. When this body dies, there will be no more yellow flowers seen from this position with these eyes, no beloved cat sitting at this side. But being born and dying again is how all life is. Birth and death are not a problem; they are just how it is.
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Consciousness as Illusion: A New Understanding
Consciousness, Blackmore concludes, is an illusion that convinces us our minds are separate from our bodies. This illusion has led consciousness studies in the wrong direction-grappling with the "hard problem" instead of asking how the illusion of dualism is created. When staring into arising experiences, the idea of a persistent self falls apart. There is no theater of mind where conscious experiences happen-just ephemeral sensations, perceptions and thoughts coming and going, sometimes in sequence but often in parallel.
Instead of accepting traditional claims about consciousness, we must reject many common assumptions: there is nothing it is like to be me; I am not a persisting conscious entity; I do not consciously cause my body's actions; consciousness is not a stream of experiences; seeing entails no vivid mental pictures; there is no unity of consciousness; brain activity is neither conscious nor unconscious; there are no contents of consciousness; there is no now.
At any time in a human brain, multiple parallel processes conjure perceptions, thoughts, and sensations. None of these are "in consciousness" because no such place exists. Most of the time there is no observer-consciousness is attributed later, assuming someone experienced past events when no one did. Sometimes processes become complex enough to support an apparent observer, but these are temporary.
The "top layers" are all the temporary observers, theories about the world, and illusions of continuity and agency that brains construct. When these are dropped, the world bubbles up as it is. In that state, experience aligns with what's happening in the brain: no persisting self, no mental theater, no power of consciousness, no free will, no duality-just complex interactions between body and world, arising and falling away for no one in particular.
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Beyond the Illusion: The Zen Master's Response
John Crook, Blackmore's Zen teacher, responded to her manuscript with both appreciation and critique. He praised her well-written, clear and provocative work, acknowledging her diligent inquiry using Zen methodology-a form of "subjective empiricism" rarely applied by Western psychologists. However, he noted that her investigation remained incomplete from a Zen perspective.
Crook identified a fundamental dualism in Blackmore's approach: by defining herself as "not a Buddhist" while practicing Zen methods, she created an identity opposition that limited her understanding. He observed that until page 79, her mindfulness investigations were exemplary, but then she began "picking and choosing"-rejecting certain tantric approaches despite their effectiveness and limiting herself by focusing too narrowly on her scientific questions rather than embracing the broader Zen process.
Crook observed that Blackmore had discovered "nothing" in several ways but had become attached to this nothingness, allowing it to shape her answers in a one-sided way. He quoted Tipun's warning about "deviations" or errors on the path: "Taking all phenomena to be like the sky one adopts a limitless attitude and goes astray... Taking all phenomena to be absolutely non-existent, by meditation one deviates into non-existence."
He argued that Blackmore's intellectual insights were shaping her responses and preventing further experiential insight. She was stuck on "Form is emptiness" without realizing "Emptiness is precisely Form." He concluded that both languages-one that identifies self through reification and one that apprehends the virtuality of language-are valid, and one shouldn't get stuck on either side.
Crook ended with encouragement-"What about enlightenment? Keep going!"-and the Zen-like observation: "It is easy to pass through the eye of a needle but difficult to pass the knee of an idol." This final exchange perfectly captures the tension at the heart of Blackmore's project: the attempt to use scientific inquiry and meditation to transcend the very self that is doing the investigating.
