"A long, dense read, which was at times fascinating, and at others incredibly hard work.

Metzinger takes on one of the most intriguing and least understood concepts in current philosophy of mind and neuroscience - the nebulous debate around consciousness - from a novel angle: researching the most basic, simple forms of consciousness we know. These are termed 'Minimal Phenomenal Experiences' (MPEs), and his large-scale phenomenological study examines these experiences through long-term meditation practitioners.

The goal is bold, the approach is unique, and the questions raised are profound. Rather than trying to model consciousness in a top-down, computational method, or proceeding with speculative philosophy, he chooses to examine MPEs and their qualitative properties in order to create a groundwork for understanding what basic forms of consciousness feel like. The book is split up into 34 chapters, each examining a specific quality of 'pure awareness', by looking at experiential reports from meditators, and then examining some of the theoretical ideas behind each quality. These chapters range across disciplines - from ancient traditional texts across various spiritual/meditation lineages to cutting-edge lab findings, from Descartes to Nagel, from phenomenology to computational modelling.

The qualities being explored start off relatively easy to conceptualize: e.g. Silence, Clarity, Joy, Peace, Wakefulness, Presence. However, they become more complex and, at times, mystifying, later in the book: Nonduality, Virtuality, the seemingly paradoxical 'Timeless Change', as well as some more arcane descriptions ('Pure Awareness Knows Itself', for example).

This episodic structure perhaps means the book is best read in chunks, to be digested individually, before moving on. In fact, one of Metzinger's metaphors is that he is serving up starters and desserts, while leaving the reader to supply their own main course. Some of these chunks - he freely admits - are harder to swallow than others, and there were whole sections which I found impenetrable, or examples of protracted and painful circular reasoning about something ineffable. This is why the whole felt a lot less satisfying than the parts - long, intellectually honest attempts to put concepts into words which, by their nature, resist adequate description.

However, the food for thought on offer here is vast, even if the average reader will come away feeling a mixture of baffled but inspired (I hope). Thoughts about how we create consciousness, whether these MPEs are special cases or represent the background hum of the mind, and the ways in which these reports might help structure a new, bottom-up theory of mind/consciousness - all these are thrilling ventures into the giddy heights of the frontiers of what we know about how it is to be conscious.

It's definitely not a book to be taken on lightly, expecting answers. Instead, it's a series of deeply thought-through sketches of the phenomenology of consciousness in as basic/pure a state as we are perhaps capable of experiencing. These sketches exhilarate and frustrate in equal measure, however."

"



About a year ago, the concept of being aware of awareness started appearing more frequently in my reading about meditation. At first, it felt so abstract. I couldn't identify anything particularly special about awareness that seemed worth being aware of. But as I delved deeper into Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and even contemporary neuroscience, I kept encountering the idea that awareness—what Metzinger here uses interchangeably with consciousness—is not just another phenomenon but something unique.

This book is a study—or rather, a synthesis—of reports from people who have experienced pure awareness, pure consciousness, or what Metzinger calls minimal phenomenological experience. It's not just an exploration of mysticism, though mysticism is at its heart. Understanding consciousness in its purest form helps us better study and theorize about it in its more complex or conditioned states. One of the challenges of studying mystical experiences is that practitioners are often reluctant to talk about them—for many reasons, the most understandable being that these experiences, being nonconceptual, are inherently ineffable. They resist language. But Metzinger is undeterred. He gathers reports from some 1,500 people who have experienced pure consciousness, and the commonalities among them are striking.

Even just reading the table of contents is a low-grade religious experience. It's structured as a kind of ranked list of qualities people report in these states. The first five: relaxation, peace, silence, wakefulness, and clarity. It gets trippier from there, but those five alone help me hone in on where I'm trying to go in my own practice.

As I read, I kept seeing images—especially water and glass. I think both convey the clarity and pristine quality of a pure consciousness experience. The aquatic metaphors, in particular, capture its embodied, boundless, and honestly quite inviting nature. Here's one quote from the very first page of the relaxation section:

The non-conceptual awareness of awareness itself is something one can relax into or onto the surface of by gradually letting go, gently dissolving all residual tensions in body and mind.

That single instruction—relaxing into a pool—has been invaluable to my own practice. I think of awareness as a substance-less substance (yes, you'll hear paradoxes like that all the time in this book) that permeates my perception, something I can drop selfhood into and sink into at any moment.

If you don't meditate, you'll probably think I'm crazy. That's fair. If you do, you'll probably just nod and smile.

All in all, this is a truly transcendent book, one I know I'll return to year after year. Metzinger has said it's his last, and it really does feel like his parting gift—not just to philosophy, neuroscience, or cognitive science, but to the world at large. He explicitly addresses the introduction to artists, creatives, and poets—not the usual mystics or philosophers, but those who can take his words, find the experience they point to, and express it in their own way. I'm so incredibly grateful for that.

This is my offering."

"I've read a lot of Deepak's books, and I tend to like those that are more personal and anecdotal. This is an old book of his (1988?) and I also find the earlier books even more interesting.

I'm an Ayurvedic-trained Certified Yoga Therapist, and his book is all about the benefits of Ayurveda, though relayed in a way to make it easy for people to digest who have zero knowledge of the Indian life science. I think that was a great approach. Of course, he infuses loads of medical info to support the value of Ayurveda. But I most enjoyed hearing his personal tales, especially those from India or related to his family. "