An engaging and insightful journey into human consciousness.
An engaging and insightful journey into human consciousness.
What if our goal had not been to land on Mars, but in pure consciousness? The experience of pure consciousness-what does it look like? What is the essence of human consciousness? In The Elephant and the Blind, influential philosopher Thomas Metzinger, one of the world's leading researchers on consciousness, brings together more than 500 experiential reports to offer the world's first comprehensive account of states of pure consciousness. Drawing on a large psychometric study of meditators in 57 countries, Metzinger focuses on ""pure awareness"" in meditation-the simplest form of experience there is-to illuminate the most fundamental aspects of how consciousness, the brain, and illusions of self all interact.
Starting with an exploration of existential ease and ending on Bewusstseinskultur, a culture of consciousness, Metzinger explores the increasingly non-egoic experiences of silence, wakefulness, and clarity, of bodiless body-experience, ego-dissolution, and nondual awareness. From there, he assembles a big picture-the elephant in the parable, from which the book's title comes-of what it would take to arrive at a minimal model explanation for conscious experience and create a genuine culture of consciousness. Freeing pure awareness from new-age gurus and old religions, The Elephant and the Blind combines personal reports of pure consciousness with incisive analysis to address the whole consciousness community, from neuroscientists to artists, and its accessibility echoes the author's career-long commitment to widening access to philosophy itself.
By:
Thomas Metzinger
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 178mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9780262547109
ISBN 10: 0262547104
Pages: 608
Publication Date: 12 March 2024
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Contents: Acknowledgments xi Introduction: The Elephant and the Blind xiii 1 Relaxation 1 2 Peace 9 3 Silence 21 4 Wakefulness 33 5 Clarity 45 6 Density 55 7 Soundness 63 8 Nonidentification 71 9 Suchness 85 10 Presence 103 11 Connectedness 113 12 The Most Natural State 123 13 Coming Home 129 14 There Is Nothing Left to Do 137 15 Joy, Awe, Bliss, and Gratitude 145 16 Simplicity, Nothingness, and Absence 155 17 Emptiness and Fullness 167 18 Luminosity 191 19 Witnessing 203 20 Pure Awareness during Dreamless Deep Sleep 213 21 Pure Awareness and Lucid Dreaming 233 22 From Timelessness to Timeless Change 247 23 Space without Structure, Center, or Periphery 257 24 Bodiless Body- Experience 271 25 Ego Dissolution: Melting into the Phenomenal Field 297 26 Nondual Being: Unity 307 27 Nondual Awareness: Insight 329 28 Transparency, Translucency, and Virtuality 353 29 The True Self 379 30 Pure Awareness Knows Itself 393 31 It Is Not an Experience 407 32 Meditation and Nonmeditation 421 33 Timeless Continuity 445 34 The Elephant: What Is Pure Awareness? 455 Epilogue: Bewusstseinskultur 479 Glossary of Terms 497 Notes 515 References 547 Index 583
Thomas Metzinger was Full Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universit t Mainz. He is the author of The Ego Tunnel and Being No One (MIT Press), the coeditor of Open MIND, and the editor of Neural Correlates of Consciousness (both MIT Press).
Reviews for The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports
“Books about consciousness don’t come any more radical...than The Elephant and the Blind....a monumental study of the state of ‘pure,’ or minimal,’ consciousness, experienced during meditation.... a big book (over 600 pages) with big ambitions, but Metzinger, a theoretical philosopher at the University of Mainz in Germany, has never been a conventional thinker....Metzinger has achieved something wonderful....brings new insights into consciousness and has created a poetics of meditative experience.” —New Scientist
