Jen Pearly:
Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean by this, Eric. I'm not sure that I drew that conclusion from my experiences of Mind & Body. In MCTB2, in the front matter, Daniel talks about meditation as "rewiring" the "brain." I've pointed out there in marginalia that in MCTB1 he later says that we never experience as sense data any "brain." Elsewhere, Daniel has written that "mind" and "consciousness" don't really exist as entities, either: all that exists is "sensations" manifesting "awareness," where "awareness" is also a problematic reification. Trying to use a representational system to parse representational distinctions is dicey at best.
When I attended a Tibetan center, students there were taught about multiple "levels" of consciousness, the most subtle one having really no attributes, being only a kind of energetics that survives biological death, whereas all the other levels die with the physical brain's death. Their explanation was that the brain is a "support" for consciousness, though not the same as that subtle consciousness.
Much is written these days about the hypothesis that what we Westerners call "consciousness" is an epi-phenomenon of a complex brain, an "emergent" meta-behavior, such that the result is greater than the sum of its parts, though still reliant on them as a substratum.
Right, let me clarify.
The brain obviously plays a huge part in consciousness. Consciousness can be dramatically affected by brain trauma, psychoactive chemicals, medical conditions such as dementia, and so on. This is basically indisputable, and it would seem perfectly reasonable to say that the brain generates consciousness based on these cases as evidence.
But, there is some trouble with this approach. First of all, dreams. Why do we dream? There doesn't seem to be an answer in the scientific community, at least not yet. This is one example of a normal but very altered state of consciousness that doesn't seem to fit into the materialist framework. But it's not a huge problem, it's merely an oddity.
But there are some more data points that conflict with the materialist viewpoint. Near-death experiences, for example. There are cases when a patient reports floating above the room while being revived, and accurately reporting details such as the words of the medical staff. What do we do with this? Even the DMT-dump hypothesis (debunked in
this book, btw) can't explain things like this. Consciousness would have to exist independent of the brain for this to happen, which doesn't fly if we are adopting the materialist viewpoint.
And of course, the powers and the paranormal in general really fly in the face of the materialist view. If one masters concentration practice and hits really hard formless realms, or meditates with certain kasinas or mantras, this stuff is bound to pop up. Seeing visions, communicating with beings, and that sort of thing-- what is going on? Especially in situations where we can travel out of body and see what is going on in a certain location, and finding out later that we were perceiving accurately.
So we're at an impasse. On one hand, the brain is obviously very important in how consciousness manifests and operates. On the other hand, siddhis. What to make of all this?
Here's the theory I learned when I was first getting interested in this sort of thing, and I think I've seen it reiterated in a few other places. The brain and consciousness are like a television and a signal, respectively. The television does not generate the signal, but it interprets and "manifests" it. The signal is still quite independent of the television. If the television is damaged in any way, it does not mean that the signal is altered or destroyed. It simply means that the apparatus is not functioning properly.
As for Daniel talking about rewiring the brain, I can't speak for the man himself, but I think he's more or less using conventional language to communicate with a Western audience. Daniel also talks about powers, for example.
My personal pet theory, be it right or wrong, is that enlightenment is more fundamental than the brain. The brain is impermanent and not a self, part of the conditioned field of sensations that we call "reality." The fundamental shifts in perspective that are called Paths are not conditioned. Now, I'm certain that the brain of an arahat is very different than your average joe. The big question is: do changes in the brain cause enlightenment, or does enlightenment cause changes in the brain?
As for the first nana, it's another one of my pet theories, but notice: there are physical sensations, there are mental sensations, and there is also the primordial awareness that is watching both occur. Maybe I'm running into some kind of anagami-cage with this interpretation, but it seems that this awareness is separate from mental and physical sensations, and thus separate from the brain,
I hope all that makes sense.