As Pollan reaches the end of five years of research without firm answers, he speculates that he might be using the wrong approach. He decides to approach the question of consciousness from the perspective of Buddhism and meditation. To do so, he meets with Joan Halifax, the Buddhist abbot of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe.

Pollan plans to spend time at Upaya to interview Halifax, learn more about Buddhist thought on the self, and practice meditation. Instead, Halifax takes him to the cave, a retreat in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It is a literal cave in the mountains sealed with a glass sliding door, containing a single small bed and a woodstove, no running water and no electricity. He suspects that Halifax takes him here to avoid his questions but eventually realizes that she wishes for him to experience the meditative isolation that Zen Buddhists use to escape the self/ego.

Halifax explains that meditation “breaks down the ego” (233) primarily through repetition, boredom, and exhaustion. At some point, the meditator finds their own sense of self so uncomfortable that they “drop in” to a state of “being completely present in time and space” (233). At this point, the meditator temporarily loses their sense of a separate self and enters that state of no-self or pure awareness.

Pollan spends several silent, isolated days in the cave, using simple routines that become ritual-like and meditative. During this time, he again attempts Ricard’s exercise to search for the self in a series of rooms. This time, he does not find himself but images, sensations, and thoughts that appear unbidden. He can quickly chase these thoughts away to clear the mind. This, to him, suggests that there is still “something […] imbued with a point of view and agency” there to do the chasing (237). He concludes that the self may be both illusory and real at the same time.

One night, he looks up at the night sky and for the first time feels stripped of the subjective self. His “brain’s usual priors, predictions, and inferences about the night sky had broken down” (237), allowing him to see it more clearly than before. He believes that previous experiences of the night sky had been filtered or impacted by preconceived notions of what the sky is or should be. Now he is “fully, freshly present to the universe” (238) and sees it as it truly is.

He concludes that his efforts to solve the mystery of consciousness have prevented him from fully experiencing his own consciousness. He now decides that consciousness need not be a puzzle to be solved but a practice to engage with, which allows the individual to be present to life.