An Introduction to Awareness [Paperback]

James M. Corrigan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 13, 2006

Can Reason entertain a Reality different than that of the Material world that pervades our thought today? Are we wrong about the form of the world and the life that we are experiencing? Starting from the one incontrovertible truth - that we are present - the author develops a view of reality that encompasses all of human experience and in the process shows how what we call physical reality and what we call spiritual reality are not two things as they are seen today - that there is only one Reality and it is nondual Awareness. This book puts the question of what reality is to the ultimate test by removing every one of our unfounded assumptions about it.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

The philosopher James Corrigan spent three decades designing and developing computer software for major Fortune 50 companies. His work on automated software development and his focus on the faculty of intuitive understanding at work in the design of complex systems led him to forsake the idea that reasoning is a computational process and that conscious experience is an effect of physical mechanisms. His systematic treatment of Reality, explaining its non-dual nature, is focused on showing the perniciousness of the idea of physical reality and the mechanical view of Nature that it entails. He shows that our basic assumptions about awareness are fundamentally wrong and points to how this necessarily undermines the doctrines of Materialism.

Product Details

• Paperback: 212 pages
• Publisher: BookSurge Publishing (October 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1419648896
• ISBN-13: 978-1419648892
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,122,745 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

James Corrigan is a philosopher in the graduate program at Stony Brook University in New York. He returned to school to pursue a PhD after working for thirty years as a software designer. It was during this former career that his understanding of human creativity, a focus of his work, necessarily grew beyond the confines of a physicalist view of reality, which he had formerly held strongly to. Human creativity, as with the creativity evidenced by the evolutionary nature of life itself, is a spontaneous, yet conditioned, phenomenon that cannot be adequately explained in a mechanistic, causal, closed reality. Instead, James holds that this spontaneous creativity, as well as the hidebound habits of Nature, that we see exhibited all around us, is the natural manifestation of a shared nondual Nature. Nature, he says, is not measurable by science - only its manifestation as this world is - yet it is directly evidenced by this manifest world which stands as witness for it, if we will only look and pay attention.

James is not a student of any particular spiritual teacher, nor does he adhere to the work of any particular philosopher or school of philosophy. He points out that all conceptual systems are ultimately similar in that they are merely constructions of thought that attempt to model a certain understanding of reality, just as the programs he designed for computers modeled business processes. Yet no conceptual system has, or can capture, the fullness of Reality since words, he argues, are just not up to the task. Yet words can point the way, even though they cannot take us all the way, to a complete understanding. They can also become a dogmatic prison for us. Thus James has come to realize that these conceptual systems can be both help and hindrance for people who are trying to find their own way in life, since ideas intrude into our thoughts and can keep us locked in endless loops of speculation and doubt, if we misunderstand their proper use.

James' purpose is to counter both a prevalent prejudice within many spiritual traditions against systematic thought of any kind, and its opposite, attachment to concepts as if they truly represent the fullness of reality. Thinking is a fact of human existence, he points out, and it is part of our natural expression, and he feels it is better to engage it with clarity, rather than attempt to suppress it as if it has less validity than other aspects of our being, or elevate it as having more validity than our immediate experience of life. His writings are his attempt to accomplish this balance.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A New Enlightenment, September 29, 2007

By 

Ryan Davies (California, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: An Introduction to Awareness (Paperback)

'An Introduction to Awareness' is very convincing as a kind of document of secular enlightenment. The basic simplicity of the notion at its heart is presented somewhat ironically in layers of extremely rigorous and verbose academic battle-gear. I imagine that this is the case because such a tract was written to withstand what is anticipated to be withering criticism/attack from the philosophical/academic community over potentially many decades or even centuries as the tiniest chink is sought that might invalidate the entire idea.

Despite its complex and demanding verbiage, the book is never less that rigorously precise in its descriptions of its many quietly radical insights. You'll find that it sits quite comfortably next to others like Sogyal Rinpoche's 'Tibetan Book of Living and Dying' and one can hop back and forth from the most advanced Buddhist thought to 'An Introduction to Awareness' and detect essentially no delta at all between them. The effect is somewhat strange, as the book feels like the kernel of enlightenment stripped of any and all mystical, mythical or historical context; which one has to concede any sort of genuine enlightenment probably should be!

Highly recommended for students of Buddhist philosophy, those exploring revolutionary systems of thought or for anyone interested in learning to see the world in a different light.

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A completely different approach to finding wholeness, February 11, 2007

By 

Steve Nile (New York, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: An Introduction to Awareness (Paperback)

I have read this book through a number of times since I first bought it back in November. I continue to read chapters of it, randomly, as I sometimes do with the Upanishads and the teachings of Dogen, among others. I have been captivated by the distinctly unique approach that the author has taken to a perennial problem: how does one speak about reality in a way that does not cheapen or discount some aspect of it. Corrigan goes to great pains to leave us with a world in which Science works, but also one where the non-dual wholeness of Reality is both accepted and presented as such. This is no small feat, as you can imagine. He presents a conceptual model of Reality as a monistic dyad of immanent and transcendent aspects that both arise from the same source, which he shows is non-individuated Awareness; but he points out that this conceptual model is just that, a model, and cautions the reader to not become lost in the concept itself, for reasons that he explains very clearly. Rather, he tells us to use it to change how we take the world to be, so that we can open ourselves to greater understanding.

There is a bit of a blurb on the back cover about Corrigan's career in systems development and that history shows in his skillful tackling of the arguments of those that say reality consists of just the physical universe absent any kind of metaphysical underpinnings.

The writing is tight and clearly presented. It's a pleasure to read. You have to pay attention to the arguments though. If it was simple to escape our normal understanding of reality then we would not need to read books about it. This one is for those who really want to develop an understanding and are willing to make the effort to do so.

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From Archaelogy to Metis: A Walk to Nonduality., May 15, 2007

By 

Jerry Katz "Nonduality.com" (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: An Introduction to Awareness (Paperback)

James Corrigan writes on his website, "I have not studied with any particular teacher, although I have researched, and continue to research, many different philosophical and spiritual systems. ... [I] went back to school to get a PhD at age 50 so that I could engage people on a philosophical level -- for that after all, is what I am talking about." Corrigan studies in the philosophy department at Stony Brook University in New York. His prior full time work was designing and developing computer software for Fortune 50 companies.

The purpose of this book is to turn the reader's view of reality toward the nondual. The author says, "There is a fundamental assumption behind this work: that our difficulties are all indirectly caused by the way we view ourselves and the world around us, and that this must change if we are to survive, prosper, and find happiness once again."

This book is a philosophical presentation of the teaching of nonduality. James Corrigan uses a refined language to describe Awareness, one that establishes a position of strength from which to make judgments about world and self. The terminology includes archaelogy (not archaeology), apodictic, animadversion, omnific, surjectivity (and subjectivity), and others. These terms are available in a glossary, a wise and very useful inclusion at the back of the book.

Even the term "is" is included in the glossary and discussed within the book in a way that demonstrates the author's sharpness of consideration:

"Thus the statement `Awareness is real' can be interpreted as meaning: That which is necessary and non-contingent is presence for that which arises from it. The pitfall in this way of thinking is, as always with Awareness, to find some implication of separate existence in the above statement for Awareness. The difficulty with the copulative verb `to be' points up a very significant problem in delving deeper into Awareness. Language and discursive reasoning are inapplicable beyond a certain point. It is fine to talk abstractly about the concept of awareness; it is an error to do so about the real Awareness."

Further description of this book can be given by showing how this terminology comes together:

"Our habitual dichotomization of the mind and the body does not hold in the surjective view of reality in which Awareness animadverts, bringing into being and giving rise to consciousness of, that which it animadverts upon. It doesn't matter if this focus is a thought or a rock." ... "Awareness animadverts the world, including the framework and structure of it, spatially and temporally." ... "It is disconcerting to hold that the phenomena upon which Awareness animadverts exist, but have no separate reality and are not founded upon some substratum apart from Awareness."

Not disconcerting to those with Understanding, but to those who have lost happiness, who see things materialistically or physicalistically, and create lives and communities of difficulty and essential poverty. Ultimately, this book addresses ethics and reformation of consciousness, and calls for understanding the wholeness of reality.

While this book is pure philosophy, Corrigan makes note of the limitations: "Philosophy has been little more than a propagandizing of positions for at least the last two thousand years because each philosopher had an end-point in mind when they began the construction of their system. That is the nature of reasoning itself. It is always goal-directed. Poetry is therefore a much better vehicle for the `Love of Wisdom' that philosophy purports to be. How then, do we find the truth?"

How do we find truth? Well, answers are found throughout the book. In words that are relevant to philosophy itself, Corrigan points to the discovery of truth: "...thinking is a type of phenomenon that arises due to the activity of Awareness and not due to some phenomenal aspect of the world -- that which Awareness gives rise to. That is, it is not something that supervenes upon some aspect of the world. Nor is there any foundation for positing something separate and apart from Awareness itself. If we assume the form of the world in which matter and mind are two separate and distinct classes of being, then we must deal with where and how Mind arises. If we do not make any such assumption, but instead attend to what it is that does occur 'in reality,' and what the source of these 'occurrences' are, then we have no such dualistic problem."

An Introduction to Awareness is a philosophical walk toward an understanding of nonduality. Energized by metis, this book will fully change the world view of one who feels contained within a dualistic reality.

Jerry Katz