The Elephant and the Blind

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Elephant and the Blind
	The “Pure Awareness” Experience: What Is It Like?
	Old Concepts, New Concepts: The Emptiness of “Emptiness”
	The Elephant and the Blind
1. Relaxation
	Psychometrics, Nonsensational Awe, and Existential Ease
2. Peace
	Twelve Factors and Their Limitations
3. Silence
	Stillness and the Zero-Person Perspective
4. Wakefulness
	Tonic Alertness, Wakefulness, and Epistemic Openness
5. Clarity
	An Unobstructed Epistemic Space
6. Density
	Abstract Interoception and Ultrasmooth Embodiment
7. Soundness
	The E-fallacy
8. Nonidentification
	The Contraction Principle
9. Suchness
	Timeless Self-Evidencing and “Seeing What Is”
10. Presence
	Spontaneous Presence and the Dolphin Model of Meditation
11. Connectedness
	Peripersonal Space
12. The Most Natural State
	The C-fallacy
13. Coming Home
	Recognizing the Unfabricated Baseline
14. There Is Nothing Left to Do
	Ataraxia
15. Joy, Awe, Bliss, and Gratitude
	Spiritual but Not Religious?
16. Simplicity, Nothingness, and Absence
	Simplicity and Profundity
17. Emptiness and Fullness
	Emptiness, Meaning-Making, and Mortality Denial
18. Luminosity
	Empty Cognizance
19. Witnessing
	Sākṣin and the Ideal Observer
20. Pure Awareness during Dreamless Deep Sleep
	White Nights: Epistemic Openness and Minimal Consciousness in Sleep
21. Pure Awareness and Lucid Dreaming
	Pure Awareness, Different Kinds of Lucidity, and the Embodied You-Turn
22. From Timelessness to Timeless Change
	The Emptiness of Time Experience
23. Space without Structure, Center, or Periphery
	Centerlessness and Unboundedness
24. Bodiless Body-Experience
	Abstract Embodiment, Changing Units of Identification—and What Reincarnation Really Is
25. Ego Dissolution: Melting into the Phenomenal Field
	The Epistemic Agent Model
26. Nondual Being: Unity
	Seelengrund and “Groundless Ground”
27. Nondual Awareness: Insight
	What Is Nonduality?
28. Transparency, Translucency, and Virtuality
	Diaphanousness, Indeterminacy, and Weltinnenraum
29. The True Self
	Nonegoic Units of Identification and the View from Nowhere
30. Pure Awareness Knows Itself
	That Which Never Speaks
31. It Is Not an Experience
	Noumenal Awareness and Sympathy for the Devil
32. Meditation and Nonmeditation
	Spontaneity and Effortlessness
33. Timeless Continuity
	MPE as a Global Mode of Conscious Experience
34. The Elephant: What Is Pure Awareness?
	Pure Awareness: What Is It?
	The Subjectivity Argument
	Five Forms of Purity
	Contextualizing Purity
	A Minimal Model of Consciousness
	“Pure Awareness”: From Concepts and Psychometric Data to Qualitative Phenomenology
	From States to Modes
	Ten Open Questions
	The Elephant in the Room
Epilogue: Bewusstseinskultur
	Bewusstseinskultur
	Practical Philosophy of Mind
	The Systematic Cultivation of Positive States of Consciousness: Concrete Examples
	Enculturation
	The Wider Context: Secular Spirituality and the Planetary Crisis
	Intellectual Honesty
	Spirituality, Intellectual Honesty, and Bewusstseinskultur
Glossary of Terms
Notes
	Introduction
	Chapter 1
	Chapter 2
	Chapter 3
	Chapter 4
	Chapter 5
	Chapter 6
	Chapter 7
	Chapter 8
	Chapter 9
	Chapter 10
	Chapter 11
	Chapter 12
	Chapter 13
	Chapter 14
	Chapter 15
	Chapter 16
	Chapter 17
	Chapter 18
	Chapter 19
	Chapter 20
	Chapter 21
	Chapter 22
	Chapter 23
	Chapter 24
	Chapter 25
	Chapter 26
	Chapter 27
	Chapter 28
	Chapter 29
	Chapter 30
	Chapter 31
	Chapter 32
	Chapter 33
	Chapter 34
	Epilogue
References
Index