I acquired this book from LT's Early Reviewers program.

I quite enjoyed the opening piece “On Believing in Mind” by Seng-ts’an – it resonated quite nicely with some other Zen/Buddhist readings I have recently encountered.

Jonathan Bricklin’s piece “Sciousness and Con-sciousness: William James and the Prime Reality of Non-Dual Experience” lost me at times – but that may reflect my relative non-familiarity of the topic. Heavy use of italics (and parenthetical asides) for emphasis and clarification were, at times, rather distracting.

Once I got into the pieces by William James himself, I quickly found myself overwhelmed. I found that if I sat the book down one day and picked it up the next I was unable to pick up the thread and would have to start over again. The problem seem to consist of partly my naivety of the concepts discussed and partly the outdated language and academic tone. When I was able to sit down and focus the “thought experiments” were mind-expanding but I REALLY had to work at it. Overall the William James’ work reads like a work written for graduate students in philosophy at the turn of the century (unsurprising, since that is the era and environment of its writing). ( )

I assume that LT's early review algorithm chose me for this book because I have several books already on Zen and on 19th century philosophy - it isn't smart enough to take into account that I hadn't actually marked any of those as "read". That said, I am interested in a dilettantish way in theories of consciousness, and especially non-dual, simplifying ones, and I enjoyed this book, and got quite a lot out of it.

That said - it's hard going. The selections from James here aren't too bad, granted, as William James' writing goes; the Zen poetry (which I was hoping to get more of) was very Zen, but not overly so; and the other essays were actually quite readable. But it's *heavy* stuff, man. Not a book for casual reading. A book that you want to be able to sit and think hard about while you're reading it, because the concepts in here all make a great deal of sense - just not the kind of sense we're used to thinking in.

The basic idea here is William James's theory of "radical empiricism", the basis of which is the conception that noting exists except pure sensory experience, without taking it all the way through to pure solipsism; and the Zen principles which mirror this idea of sensory experience as prime reality. It all makes perfect sense if you follow the reasoning - you just have to be able to follow the reasoning.

I thought the essays selected here were good choices and a great introduction; I could have wished for the really long essays by James to be more broken up by other content, particularly more Zen content, because his prose isn't exactly *compelling*, and that's where I kept stalling out in reading it, and by the time I got through I'd lost track of most of the Zen stuff - but even the James essays are simply packed full of things to think about.

The book itself is very well-made - it survived months of being carried around as my day reading! - with an generally attractive design. I support the large print and lots of white space, as they made it quite a bit less scary, and the editorial intros and footnotes were great. The pull-quotes that were sometimes interspersed with the text didn't do much for me, though - they weren't distinct enough to stand out when skimming pages, and they sometimes ran into the general text too much.

Overall, a book I'd recommend for anyone who's into Zen and wants to look at similar Western ideas, or the other way around, and it is definitely staying on my reference shelf. ( )

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. ( )

I was interested in this book because of my reading of some of William James work. James was a prolific writer in the fields of psychology and philosophy. The writer or editor of this volume has used several of James essays and an essay of his own introduced by a selection by a Zen Buddhist patriarch.
As I understand the book the premise is to show how James' writing support the concept of non-dualism which is an important tenet of Zen. I started reading with some skepticism. Many advocates of Eastern thought misrepresent the ideas of Western philosophers in order to support their own agendas. I was happy to see that this author was honest in his presentation of James' ideas and showed how James' concept of consciousness truly advocates a non-dualist approach. The asterisk on the essay "A World of Pure Experience" stating it was revised will require locating another edition of the essay ti insure that the editor maintained his integrity.
I have read that James was the first writer to coin the term "stream of consciousness" to describe the processes of the mind. In the essays presented here that concept is simplified to sciousness and some of James later writings are set forth to emphasize how the cascade of present moments makes up the stream of consciousness.
The final essay by Theodore Flournoy titled Radical Empiricism went a bit over my head mixing psychological and philosophical terminology in setting forth James' ideas on pure experience. It will require careful rereading to improve my grasp of what is an increasingly elusive analysis of how reality is experienced.
The book was very interesting and I am sure I will learn more reading it a second time. The questions of what reality is, how it is perceived and how that perception becomes part of the human experience are fundamental and at the same time the subject of debate since they were first raised. The author has provided more food for thought on these questions and at the same time intellectual entertainment in his selection of readings. I would recommend the book for anyone interested in these ideas. I would also comment that it is not prohibitively thick reading and for anyone interested in James ideas rewarding.

The back's synopsis reads:

"Instead...of the stream of thought being one of con-sciousness, 'thinking its own existence along with whatever else it thinks'...it might better be called a stream of Sciousness pure and simple, thinking objects of some of which it makes what it calls a 'Me,' and only aware of its 'pure' Self in an abstract, hypothetic or conceptual way. Each 'section' of the stream would then be a bit of sciousness or knowledge of this sort, including and contemplating its 'me' and its 'not-me' as objects which work out their drama together, but not yet including or contemplating its own subjective being.
--William James"

My very first thought, on looking over the book, was, "Whoa. Hello, run-on sentence!"
So I suppose that I was, ironically, being a little close-minded.
A few pages in, things weren't much better, as I was wondering, "How the HELL am I supposed to give my opinion on a book that's about discovering your 'Budda Mind' and not having opinions?!?"

Bricklin says, "[t]he moment that you start discriminating and preferring you miss the mark. ... Just let go. ... Decisions give rise to confusions and in confusion where can a mind go?" (13).

Let me also put this disclaimer in my review: I know this book wasn't released for a wide market, so don't think I'm ignorant when I discuss this.
Ok, now, I do find the idea of making your biased mind a clean slate appealing (and wouldn't things be a lot calmer if everyone did?), but it's really more idealistic than anything else. Just how practical is this?
It's not.
This book is good for Joe Above-And-Beyond--the man who can completely alter his life. I'm sorry, but just not everyone can do that. Opportunity is a welcome, rare gift in life, but it is needed to seriously follow a book like this.
What's more, and probably most obvious, is that not everyone is going to want to do follow a book like this.

For the average person, this book would be good for making minimal improvements to their life, if they so desire, or for discussing with anyone else who was interested in it.
That, of course, is where the limits of its market puts the book.

A great, interesting, thought-provoking read for someone who is intrigued by it and something for everyone else to roll their eyes at.

PS: This review is also a post on my blog. ( )

I received this book as part of LT's Early Reviewer program. This collection of essays edited by Jonathan Bricklin is the first offering from new publisher Eirini Press. I was pleased with the level of the material. It definitely presupposes familiarity with non-duality, with William James, and philosophy in general, but it is not written on the same level of "academese" as many other texts. Unlike the way many Eastern philosophy meets physics books (and I own several) distort the subject in an effort to show parallels with Eastern thought, this text does not misrepresent the views of James or take them vastly out of context just to match the author's bias. James is not represented in isolated quotes, but rather full passages, including Bricklin's fascinating translation from French of an address given at the 5th International Congress of Psychology.

The editor sets the mood with a brief Zen passage and then presents what amounts to a lengthy introduction to the non-duality inherent in the way James asserted pure experience, or sciousness, could be differentiated from consciousness. Bricklin notes that "James's conviction that sense or meaning is not generated by an "I" but conveyed by a passing thought, that the stream of consciousness creates the "I" (and not the other way around,) aligns him squarely with the central thesis of Eastern non-dual traditions from Advaita to Zen: Tat tvam asi, "That thou art."" Bricklin's use of the "old pond" haiku as a teaching aid was particularly helpful.

The ideas explored in the editor's essay tied nicely with other things I have read recently. The description of transitions between altered states--as with meditation, the boundaries of sleep, or in James's time experiments with ether--reminded me of Austin's Zen and the Brain. The feeling of the self originates in a turning toward or away from something, an embodiment notion reminiscent of Lakoff. Prior to the self, there is just an acceptance of what is without a felt opposition, and this pure awareness, or "sciousness" contrasts with an awareness WITH a self, a "con-sciousness."

The essays by James explore the nature of a unified pure experience, one which is "only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet." He explores the nature of the Now, but also the nature of the unbounded flow from past to present to future. James puts forward the proposition that experiences relate to one another to form reality, including that reality experienced as the self. He does not believe in Descartes's material/cognitive split, but rather that "thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are." Later essays detail some of James's system of "radical empiricism," concerning the relationships between experiences, the nature of truth, and the transition between experiences as an experience in its own right.

The book ends with an essay from a friend of James and fellow psychologist, Theodore Fluornoy. His essay provides another interesting perspective on this lesser-stressed aspect of James, who is known mainly for his general contribution to psychology and as a proponent of pragmatism.

Overall I found this book quite enjoyable. There were a few minor annoyances of the publication, such as inset quotes which weren't optimally distinguishable from the flow of the text itself, a little too much white space at the top of each page, and the lack of an index, but the value of the content overshadowed these formatting issues. I look forward to further publications by this new press.

Collection of essays primarily by the philosopher William James on the non-duality of thought, which he alternately refers to as "sciousness" and "pure experience." What is the difference between an object perceived as being externally real and the thought or memory of that object? James believes that there is no division between subject and object, mind and matter. Bricklin connects this theory to the core beliefs of Zen Buddhism, and briefly touches on quantum physics.

This is a challenging book to read; it seems more appropriate to a college class on philosophy than casual reading. James mentions the theories of fellow philosophers Immanuel Kant, Rene Descarte and George Berkely, assuming the reader is already familiar with them. I had a Philosophy 101 class in college, but that was quite some time ago. Much of this went over my head, but I understand the core principles being discussed. Good companion books would be Lynne McTaggart's "The Field" and Fritjof Capra's "The Tao of Physics." If you pause a moment to consider the assertions made by these books, it really is quite astonishing: the world that we all know and inhabit is not divided into "this" and "that," but rather exists as a unified whole. We are all one mind, one spirit. ( )