Sciousness [Paperback]

Jonathan Bricklin (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0979998905 | ISBN-13: 978-0979998904 | Publication Date: November 5, 2007 | Edition: 2nd

James's notion of sciousness or 'pure experience' is akin to Zen tathata (suchness). Japan's renowned philosopher Kitaro Nishida, in fact, used James's concept to explain tathata to the Japanese themselves. As this collection of essays makes clear, Western practioners of Zen and other nondual practices need not be spiritual vagabonds. We need, rather, to claim our inheritance from the 'father of American psychology.'

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...full of interest and originality...the ghost of William James is surely happy to see it!" --Oliver Sacks

"Most interesting and profitable...a new and significant light on William James" --William Lyons, Former Head, Philosophy Department, Trinity College, Dublin, and author of The Disappearance of Introspection

"Bricklin’s work—Sciousness—should also be widely read for its nondual offering from a Western thinker that runs counter to many assumptions about Western philosophy. I hope that many follow its suggestion and increase the number of studies exploring Buddhism and pragmatism together. Hopefully Bricklin has opened the floodgates."  --Benjamin J. Chicka, Buddhist-Christian Studies (University of Hawaii)

"This collection is delightful. It brings together important texts from the later life of William James, some of which are not very known, even in academic circles. Jonathan Bricklin's discussion of James is insightful, erudite and illuminating." --Benny Shanon, Professor of Psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of The Antipodes of the Mind

"The last couple of years have seen a resurgence of interest in William James, one of modern psychology's most widely respected pioneers. ...But nothing has quite highlighted the depth of his thought like Jonathan Bricklin's Sciousness." --What is Enlightenment? magazine

About the Author

Jonathan Bricklin began researching William James in 1990 in response to fundamental shifts in consciousness experienced on Vipassana retreats at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massacusetts. The Non-Reality of Will, Self and Time: William James's Reluctant Guide to Enlightenment will be published next year. Several excerpts from the book have been published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies and The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. His essay "A Variety of Religious Experience: William James and the Non-Reality of Free Will" was anthologized in the book The Volitional Brain: Toward a Neuroscience of Free Will. Brian Lancaster, Principal Lecturer in Psychology at Liverpool John Moores University, hailed this essay as an "invaluable contribution." Jonathan is a Program Director of the New York Open Center.

Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: Eirini Press; 2nd edition (November 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0979998905
• ISBN-13: 978-0979998904
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,784,225 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb anthology of James's nondual writings, June 4, 2008

By 

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

This review is from: Sciousness (Paperback)

A New Publisher of Nonduality Books:

Eirini Press is a new publisher of nonduality books, filling the niche of the Western contribution. Sciousness is their only title at this time. If Sciousness exemplifies, in both content and design, the quality of their forthcoming books, Eirini Press is positioned for serious success.

Beyond "The Varieties of Religious Experience":

Those who have enjoyed James's The Varieties of Religious Experience will discover what James could not talk about in that series of lectures: the truth of "pure experience" or nondual awareness. The following quotation is an example of about how far James could go in "Varieties" toward approaching nonduality:

"It is evident that from the point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great subliminal or transmarginal region of which science is beginning to admit the existence, but of which so little is really known."

"Varieties" was a series of lectures delivered in 1901-1902. In 1890, James first suggested the nonduality thesis but did not develop it until 1904. This book collects James's nondual writings published during 1904 -1905, with short writings from 1890 and 1912. The intended audience is students, scholars, readers of Western philosophy as well as followers of the literature of nonduality.

Sciousness:

If sciousness sounds to you like "suchness," that's the point. James recognized that nondual experience knows no "with-suchness," only suchness, or pure experience, or the essence of Zen. Con-sciousness is suchness accompanied by the sense of "I," or a "me," a "myself." A great effort is made in this book to describe the "I."

Radical Empiricism:

James called his nondualism radical empiricism. His empiricism is radical because it absorbs what is directly experienced and ALL that is directly experienced, including unifying experiences and nondual experience.

He brought ordinary empiricism up to speed by showing that nonseparateness is to be included, along with separateness, along with collectionism and abstraction as part of a description of reality.

In that effort, James brought Rationalism down to earth by showing that nonseparateness, unity, or Truth is not a separate order of reality eventually requiring corrective agencies of unification.

A Definitive Anthology:

In Sciousness, Jonathan Bricklin has constructed a definitive anthology that conveys completeness and unity in the presentation of William James's nondual expression. This work is driven by intellectual argument and is based in James's confession of nondual knowing. It is elevated by elements of charm and poetry which arise out of the anthology's design and the writings by all the three authors. Most importantly, this work is founded in Bricklin's understanding of what nonduality is.

This is mainly a collection of James's writings. The book opens with its crowning achievement, without which James's nondual writings on their own would not likely be published for a broad audience of philosophy and spirituality readers. The book's crown is Bricklin's article, Sciousness and Con-sciousness, which introduces and analyzes James's nondual work, making it readily understandable.

The article is followed by six writings by James. The book ends with an article on radical empiricism by Theodore Flournoy, one of the few contemporaries of James who understood and appreciated his thesis, and which served in its day as a crowning (if little known) achievement on behalf of James.

Thus the anthology is balanced: James's writings are located centrally, flanked the writings of Bricklin and Flournoy. The entryways of the book consist of the preface, in which Bricklin elegantly delivers the nugget that James prepared the way for quantum theory expositions on nonduality and for Western seekers, students, and teachers of nonduality; and six pages of an Eastern nondual confession by Seng-t'san (Sosan), Third Zen Patriarch. The exit is a quotation by Rilke.

Zen meets William James:

The Seng-t'san selection, On Believing in Mind (Hsin-Hsin-Ming), is a bowing to the East prior to the reader's turning to the West. Most readers and knowers of nonduality will be led into the Western mode of nondual writing through the Eastern description: "All things are the same at their core / but clinging to one and discarding another / Is living in illusion."

Or is it as simple as a bow and a turn to the West? In this book, East and West are not so separate. The turn is not from East to West, but from an emphasis on Eastern to an emphasis on Western thought and influence. Bricklin points out that D.T. Suzuki alerted his teacher Kitaro Nishida to James's writing and Nishida used James's phrase "pure experience" in his scholarly writings intended to bring East and West closer. Suzuki himself is well known as a bringer of Zen to the West. Martha Ramsey has pointed out to me that Zen and Buddhism rode into Western minds and hearts upon literary steeds of Romantic and American Transcendentalist traditions. Bricklin himself extracts the Zen nature of James's nondual writings and in the process he uses a Zen which itself was probably influenced by William James. That is, a Zen that is perhaps thinly infused by James is brought to today to explain James.

Show me the nonduality:

How nondual was William James? That's what today's audience wants to know. People today can read a few words and detect whether someone is speaking with authenticity or parroting someone else. Listen and decide for yourself:

"If the passing thought be the directly verifiable existent which no school has hitherto doubted it to be, then that thought is itself the thinker, and psychology need not look beyond."

"...things and thought are not at all fundamentally heterogeneous, but are made of one and the same stuff, a stuff which one cannot define as such, but only experience, and which one can call, if one wishes, the stuff of experience in general."

"I believe that consciousness, as it is commonly represented, either as an entity, or as pure activity, but in any case as fluid, unextended, diaphanous, devoid of all content of its own, but directly self-knowing - spiritual, in short -, I believe, I say, that this consciousness is a pure chimera, and that the sum of concrete realities which the word consciousness should cover deserves a quite different description."

"The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the `pure' experience. ... If the world were then and there to go out like a candle, it would remain truth absolute and objective, for it would be `the last word,' would have no critic, and no one would ever oppose the thought in it to the reality intended."

"The instant field of the present is always experience in its `pure' state, plain unqualified actuality, a simple that, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought, and only virtually classifiable as objective fact or as someone's opinion about fact."

Here James is on verge of refining "pure experience" into "pure silence:"
"Whatever differing contents our minds may eventually fill a place with, the place itself is a numerically identical content of the two minds, a piece of common property in which, through which, and over which they join. The receptacle of certain of our experiences being thus common, the experiences themselves might some day become common also. If that day ever did come, our thoughts would terminate in a complete empirical identity, there would be an end, so far as those experiences went, to our discussions about truth. No points of difference appearing, they would have to count as the same." Thirteenth century mystic Jnaneshvar (translated by Swami Abhayananda) echoes:

After such a discourse,
That speech is wise
Which drinks deeply of silence.

James's approach was soft:

James did not confess his knowings and leave them at that. Not without lengthy philosophical explanation and demonstration. Rather than simply state the way things are - and he knew - he would soften his confessions with phrases such as, "I believe," "I conclude," "I should like to convey," "I feel," "I say," "I am convinced." If someone uses those phrases today, they are deemed halfway up the mountain, even if they are not. "James theorized about pure experience sciousness more than he described instances of it," Bricklin writes.

Were James preaching to a congregation, the language would have been different. There is a sense that James wanted to simply be the preacher and tell it the way it is: In this passage he comes close: "I am as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing." Here too: "While still pure, or present, any experience - mine, for example, of what I write about in these very lines - passes for `truth.' The morrow may reduce it to `opinion.'" However, James asserts that this knowing of `truth' is valid: "When the whole universe seems only to be making itself valid and to be still incomplete (else why its ceaseless changing?), why, of all things, should knowing be exempt?"

There's a sense that James wants to leap from declaring his confidence to declaring the truth that he knows. In fact, Bricklin leaps for James - or let's just say he infers -- wonderfully and memorably in his article.

The limits of philosophy:

James called... Read more ›

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended reading for anyone who enjoys contemplating the nature of the world, October 11, 2008

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sciousness (Paperback)

What is consciousness really? "Sciousness" is a collection of thoughts and ponderings on the concept of consciousness and how humanity as a whole perceives the world around them. Zen Patriarchs, Editor Jonathan Bricklin, William James, and Theodore Flournoy all discuss perception, experience, consciousness, and more in this book for thinkers. "Sciousness" is highly recommended reading for anyone who enjoys contemplating the nature of the world.

3.0 out of 5 stars Sciousness, January 1, 2010

By 

Stephanie Gates "pandora_box82" (Sparta, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sciousness (Paperback)

While I do not have much background in philosophy beyond medieval philosophers, I found this book to be engaging and made me think more about the ways that Western society does categorize being and knowing. I enjoyed all of the James articles that were included, except for the end essay by Flournoy. For some reason, this article just seemed to not fit with what Bricklin was attempting to create in regards to all the other articles included. Highly recommended for those who enjoy philosophy and those wishing to learn more about the (non)duality of consciousness.