The Natural Mind: Revised Edition [Paperback]

Andrew T. Weil (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 20, 1986

Now revised and rejacketed, this is Dr. Andrew Weil's first bestseller, a classic work on the principles of consciousness, offering a new model for solving the drug problem by acknowledging our innate yearnings and offering an alternative. "Incisive, brilliant, and genuinely revolutionary".--Michael Crichton, author.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is an incredibly sane approach to the 'drug problem.' Somehow [Weil's] deep understanding of the dynamics and principles of consciousness [gives him] a very new and refreshing point of view." -- Alan Watts

"Incisive, brilliant, and genuinely revolutionary." -- Michael Crichton

About the Author

Andrew Weil, M.D., has degrees in biology and medicine from Harvard University. Author of the best-selling Spontaneous Healing and Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, he traveled the world experiencing and studying healers and healing systems and has earned an international reputation as an expert on alternative medicine, mind-body interactions, and medical botany. He is the associate director of the Division of Social Perspectives in Medicine and the director of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Product Details

• Paperback: 226 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company; Revised edition (February 20, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039540469X
• ISBN-13: 978-0395404690
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,097,953 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Andrew Weil, M.D., is a world-renowned leader and pioneer in the field of integrative medicine, a healing oriented approach to health care which encompasses body, mind, and spirit. His next book, "Spontaneous Happiness," will be released November 8, 2011.

Combining a Harvard education and a lifetime of practicing natural and preventive medicine, Dr. Weil is the founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, where he is also a Clinical Professor of Medicine and Professor of Public Health and the Lovell-Jones Professor of Integrative Rheumatology. Dr. Weil received both his medical degree and his undergraduate AB degree in biology (botany) from Harvard University.

Dr. Weil is an internationally-recognized expert for his views on leading a healthy lifestyle, his philosophy of healthy aging, and his critique of the future of medicine and health care. Approximately 10 million copies of Dr. Weil's books have been sold, including "Spontaneous Healing," "8 Weeks to Optimum Health," "Eating Well for Optimum Health," "The Healthy Kitchen," "Healthy Aging," and "Why Our Health Matters."

Online, he is the editorial director of DrWeil.com, the leading web resource for healthy living based on the philosophy of integrative medicine. He can be found on Facebook at facebook.com/DrWeil, Twitter at twitter.com/DrWeil, and Dr. Weil's Daily Health Tips blog at drweilblog.com.

See a comprehensive list of Dr. Weil's information: about.me/DrWeil

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

61 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Revised "The Natural Mind" Is An Unexpected Pleasure, January 23, 1999

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Natural Mind: An Investigation of Drugs and the Higher Consciousness (Paperback)

It is one of life's unexpected pleasures to discover Doctor Weil's original trail-blazing book on consciousness now revised and re-released. This book is a genuine countercultural classic. Along with millions of others, I have watched with interest as Doctor Weil's writing career has progressed from his concern with drug use and consciousness into his current writings educating the American public as to the values of wholistic alternative medical practices. Yet, most of his new fans are unfamiliar with this earlier work. Remedy that one fast, friend! With the publication of this book in the 1970s Weil established himself as a singular and original thinker not bound by the traditional and nearly exclusively rational allopathic medical viewpoints promulgated in western medical education. In spite of his eminent credentials as a Harvard-educated physician, Weil debunks conventional wisdom as to drug use and the so-called drug problem. As Weil states in the book, contemporary society doesn't have a drug problem so much as it has a consciousness problem, one exacerbated by the increasing use of rational thought as the exclusively legitimate path to knowing and understanding ourselves as well as the world around us. Instead, Weil counsels the reader as to how the act of recognizing the role of one's attitude and personal intellectual/ mental approach to experience can positively or negatively affect the nature of one's perceptions, experiences, and consciousness. His viewpoints and insights regarding the relative properties and values of inductive versus deductive reasoning is worth the price of the book alone. Wow! I haven't had this much fun anticipating anything since my lady friend came back from her sabbatical in London. Now we won't have to haunt the old used books stores in search of old copies of Doctor Weil's work. Enjoy!

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mind expanding, October 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Natural Mind: An Investigation of Drugs and the Higher Consciousness (Paperback)

An excellent book about the inner workings of the mind.This book is a must read for those who have read Dr. Weil'srecent books about health and self care.The natural mind lays the ground work for these latter books, and is as relevant now as when it was first written in the early seventies.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars the believing mind, January 22, 2006

By 

peter d pipinis "mysticskeptic" (berri, s.a. australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Natural Mind: An Investigation of Drugs and the Higher Consciousness (Paperback)

'There is none who is worthy of my love or hatred'. - Krishna, Bhagavad Gita.

The Natural Mind by Andrew Weil is not so much concerned with drugs per se as it is with the nature of consciousness. Having obviously experienced profound mystical states of being, Weil outlines his 'conceptual model' of a world in which the 'limitless' powers of the mind have been freed from the restraints of non-intuitive, 'straight' thinking reponsible for virtually all our social problems and allowed, via 'non-ordinary', or 'stoned' thinking, to restore sanity, balance and health to our Western world.

It is vital to stress the overwhelming nature of attaining the highest levels of consciousness, through such methods as meditation. It is difficult to understand where the more visionary aspects of Weil's beliefs come from if we are unable to accept the self-authenticating validity of these experiences. They leave us - at least initially - with virtually no doubts as to the perfect rightness of the spiritual and psychological insights gained.

To my mind, the most valuable of these insights is emotional detachment from personal prejudices and biased thinking. The experience of highest consciousness permits us to look at social, personal and medical problems with a fresh perspective and find effective solutions, rather than continue using methods that have patently failed and too often only exacerbated them.

Weil shows how the problem of drugs has been so mismanaged that instead of facts (alcohol and tobacco, our two most damaging and addictive drugs, are considered safer than relatively harmless ones such as cocaine, and especially marijuana), we prefer to hear only the 'evidence' of 'experts' who pander to our fears and prejudices.

People are using substances, Weil asserts, because of an innate need to achieve an 'altered state of consciousness', in other words, to get 'high'. By linking this need to the ultimate high of meditation, he suggests drug users have been misled into thinking highs can only be found in things external to themselves (he calls this a 'materialistic' view) instead of experiences they can find within themselves that are infinitely more satisfying.

Many of Weil's beliefs are eminently sensible and useful, but a large number are problematic. He discounts the pharmacological properties of drugs and denies they are directly responsible for the highs of the user. Drugs are merely 'active placebos', he claims, that in the right 'setting' trigger the mind's natural tendency to enter into altered states. When he tells us psychotics are 'the evolutionary vanguard of our species' who 'possess the secret of changing reality by changing the mind', and that physical manifestations of disease are caused by 'non-material factors', we know the line between science and faith has been well and truly crossed.

As a 'spiritual' way of thinking, a lot of the views expressed by Weil are very attractive. All things within and without oneself - however 'bad' - must be loved whole-heartedly, thus encouraging them to respond positively in return. Wasps, and bees, can 'appear to behave differently' towards someone who sees them as similar to himself, who sees their 'extraordinary beauty'. Diseases are to be embraced rather than fought against, causing them to minimize the suffering they cause. We are assured 'all things tend to go in one direction only - always toward equilibrium, balance and harmony'.

Weil has been swept up in the euphoria of experiencing 'oneness', and come to believe - as many have before him - all of creation is working together for the common 'good', that all life - despite appearances - is inseparably united and harmonious. Accepting life in all its manifestations means, if this is true, the only options are co-operation and love.

The highest state of consciousness, however, when one takes a closer look, teaches a much tougher lesson. Attaining the perfect freedom of mystical experience takes us infinitely above our human need to love or to hate anything or anyone. From this level of complete detachment we see truly accepting living beings means wanting in no way to discourage their natural impulses to fight for survival and advantage for themselves and their own kind. We are as unaccepting of others if we expect them to suppress the anti-social, recalcitrant and deadly aspects of their nature because we are loving them as we would be if we were hating them.

I agree entirely that acceptance is essential to maximizing the degree to which co-operation is possible. But, where Weil believes transcendence will all but eliminate difference, conflict and suffering, I think irreconcilable differences, unending conflicts and the most terrible suffering can become, via highest consciousness, things we are able to endure with no damage done to our joy.