Overview

"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."

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9780262547109

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“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

Author Information

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).

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