Consciously unconscious or unconsciously conscious?

I caught an article in the London Guardian yesterday about yet another "institute of consciousness" to be set up at the University of Sussex. The link, if you'd like to read it, is http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/may/09/root-of-consciousness-science-brain-psychiatry. (Note, by the way, that the article was in the technology section.)

Despite setting out to explore consciousness in a fresh spirit and with a multidisciplinary team, their starting point is the same fundamentally erroneous view which has bedeviled Western thought since Descartes, if not since Aristotle. In the words of Dr. Anil Seth, co-director of the center, "Consciousness exists, we know when we're conscious and when we're not, and what we're conscious of" - and there precisely lies the misconception which will prevent their team from discovering anything useful or interesting about consciousness.

The team includes "neuroscientists, psychiatrists, roboticists, philosophers and a hypnotist" - but, interestingly enough, no representatives of the cultural and spiritual traditions who have been examining and researching consciousness for over 2500 years. As any Buddhist could have told Dr. Seth if he had troubled to ask them, consciousness is the container, not the contents. Yes, it's quite possible that his scientists may uncover some clues as to the flux of mostly random stuff that occupies our waking minds most of the time - but it would be like studying rivers by looking at the chemical effluent and stray garbage which fills the most polluted ones. The river conveys the effluent and the garbage, but they're not what it is - or what it could be if cleansed of them.

A friend of mine used to travel past a mysterious small store on his bus ride to college; on the shelves in the window there would sometimes be potatoes and onions, sometimes nails, screws and tools and sometimes randomly assorted books. He became so curious as to what this shop actually sold, what these disparate objects could possibly have in common, that he got off the bus one day to find out. It was a shelf store. Like Dr. Seth, focusing exclusively on the contents he failed to see the container.

Whatever interest it may hold for scientists, consciousness seen as a succession of random thoughts and emotions is of little benefit to us. The great spiritual traditions of humanity - including many Western ones - have shown us how to focus, sharpen and train consciousness so that it becomes a tool and a path. At this point it can be used to all kinds of interesting ends: to control and heal the physical body, for instance, or to communicate with higher non-ordinary sources of knowledge. There are many well-documented instances of these and other applications of trained and focused consciousness - and it's all too likely that Dr. Seth's team will fail to look at any of them.

How unfortunate that the "scientific" stance toward consciousness has largely become identified with a reductionist and shallowly materialistic view that leaves out of consideration a wide range of puzzling and certainly unexplained phenomena. Surely "scientific" should connote a pragmatic and evidence-based approach that tries to fit hypotheses to data, not the other way around.