Customer Reviews

Transformations in Consciousness: The Metaphysics and Epistemology

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The experience of enlightenment, or of an unitive awareness beyond subject-object dualisms has often been basic for mysticisms in all traditions. It has also been vigorously debated by philosophers with a general consensus reached during the Enlightenment that reason or logic was the unique quality of consciousness. Even today reductionisms attempt to limit consciousness to some energetic metaphor. Merrell-Wolff's experience is all the more important for he comes out of a rigorous mathematical and philosophical background. When confronted with this nondualistic consciousness and its transformative effects, Merrell-Wolff was hard put to explain it. Taking on Kant's mirror dependencies of consciousness, being contingent upon perception and conception, Merrell-Wolff formulated important accounts all based experientially upon his own illuminate nondual consciousness. His most important work, and least known is Introceptualism where he sets out a formal epistemology and metaphysics for this basic transcendent consciousness. He also modifies some of his earlier statements, attempting to clarify his account of mysticism as well as placing his idealism into juxtaposition to modernist naturalism, realism, idealism and pragmatism. These books reflect a life time effort to formulate an adequate philosophy that can include such radical nondual consciousness as a present reality and possibility. Somewhat reclusive during his long life, he refused to guide or instruct others in what he felt was a natural condition of human consciousness when left to its own nature. In many ways these books provide a place where critical philosophy is strictly mystical. Highly recommended

I'm not sure how to express my admiration for Merrell-Wolff's work beyond giving this book a "10". Cutting through the unfounded assertions of the major Western philosophical schools, while acknowledging some of their possibly valid assertions, Merrell-Wolff clearly establishes the potential of a third way of knowledge. This way Kant and his successors failed to fully elucidate. Merrell-Wolff was clearly inspired and writing from a direct experience of an extralogical recognition that lent itself to elaborate formulations of exhilirating beauty.

Franklin Merrell-Wolff is a very unique breed among philosophers and mystics alike. I am not aware of anyone that has written such a brilliant synthesis of western philosophy and at the sime time was able to ground it in a profound experience of enlightenment. Compared to this, all the modern philosophical discussions of consciousness in western circles are conducted by blind men. Literally. If you are philosophically inclined, after reading this work almost every other philosophy will seem to stand in a smaller peak. If you are more mystical, you probably will find greater rapport with his other work, Experience and Philosophy, since this one might seem a bit too analytical.