The Elephant and the Blind

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.

Startingwith 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.

Table of Contents

1. Relaxation

2. Peace

3. Silence

4. Wakefulness

5. Clarity

6. Density

7. Soundness

8. Nonidentification

9. Suchness

10. Presence

11. Connectedness

12. The Most Natural State

13. Coming Home

14. There Is Nothing Left to Do

15. Joy, Awe, Bliss, and Gratitude

16. Simplicity, Nothingness, and Absence

17. Emptiness and Fullness

18. Luminosity

19. Witnessing

20. Pure Awareness during Dreamless Deep Sleep

21. Pure Awareness and Lucid Dreaming

22. From Timelessness to Timeless Change

23. Space without Structure, Center, or Periphery

24. Bodiless Body-Experience

25. Ego Dissolution: Melting into the Phenomenal Field

26. Nondual Being: Unity

27. Nondual Awareness: Insight

28. Transparency, Translucency, and Virtuality

29. The True Self

30. Pure Awareness Knows Itself

31. It Is Not an Experience

32. Meditation and Nonmeditation

33. Timeless Continuity

34. The Elephant: What Is Pure Awareness?

Review

“This book achieves the impossible. It offers a narrative of the truly ineffable; namely, (sic), something that is “too close to see”. This is the elephant that thousands of people around the world have touched—or have been touched by—but never seen, at least as a knowing and seeing self. Such selfless experience may be consciousness laid bare, cast as a minimal phenomenal experience.”

—Karl J. Friston, Scientific Director, Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, London, UK

“Thomas Metzinger has done it again. Twenty years after his seminal Being No One, his new book opens entirely new directions for consciousness research by zeroing in on the phenomenon of “pure awareness”. The Elephant and the Blind is work of major importance and an essential resource for anyone with a serious interest in understanding consciousness. It will provoke, illuminate, and enlighten anyone who spends time with it.”

—Anil K. Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, University of Sussex, UK

“Not since William James has such meticulous attention been given to pure awareness experiences and their significance for science and philosophy. Metzinger has performed a Herculean labor, and no future science of consciousness will be possible without assimilating his findings and arguments.”

—Evan Thompson, Professor of Philosophy, University of British Columbia; author of Waking, Dreaming, Being; coauthor of The Embodied Mind and The Blind Spot (both with MIT Press)

“What a magnificent piece of work. When so many consciousness experts said that ‘pure consciousness’ was impossible, Metzinger has not only proved them wrong but with hundreds of accounts and a sympathetic analysis has laid the groundwork for a new understanding of unusual realms of consciousness.”

—Susan Blackmore, author of Consciousness

“Metzinger’s exceptional research was conducted with a high level of scientific rigor and philosophical caution, on the one hand, but is reported here in nonacademic prose in order to reach the widest audience possible, on the other hand. This work is a gift, a labor of love, and a must-read for anyone who wishes to gain a greater understanding of what it means to be conscious.”

—Rick Repetti, PhD (CUNY), editor of Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation

About the Author

Thomas Metzinger was Full Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at theJohannes Gutenberg-Universität 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).