The Phenomenology of Nondual Awareness

This book explores the terrain where poetry becomes philosophical and philosophy becomes poetic. Great poets have all dealt with profound philosophical themes and great philosophers have recognized that poetic language has deep philosophical implications. The Phenomenology of Nondual Awareness is a journey into the inner workings of the meaning-making processes of the mind that reveals the nondual awareness at the ground of human nature. This book is a manual on modern visionary aestheticism. It is a journey within using the tools of phenomenology to explore how the mind makes meaning and how to use this knowledge as art and poetry to integrate the dual and nondual. In ancient times, before the advent of the written word, literature was memorized and recited in poetic measure in a bardic tradition thousands of years old. When writing first entered human history about five thousand years ago the myths, legends and sacred texts were written in poetic stanzas. Then, gradually over time prose slowly replaced poetry. Poetry was the precursor to all the arts and the form of expression for the arts as they developed. It was the poetic principle of metaphor and symbolism that served as the template for the creation of the other arts. The ancient philosopher Parmenides still wrote in verse but by Plato's time philosophy was written in prose. When poetry was the means of expression for philosophy, the philosophers were all poets. This book brings poetry and philosophy back together, giving philosophy poetic expression and making poetry philosophical. Phenomenology is the philosophy of awareness that examines the inner workings of the mind to uncover how meanings are made. Phenomenology has taken on the task of describing how the mind processes the raw material of the senses to give meaning to the world around us. Phenomenology shifts the focus of attention from the external world to the awareness of the inner working of the mind. There is a long history of phenomenological research, starting with Kant and Hegel, then flowering in the work of Husserl and Heidegger. Western philosophy has been built on the dualistic paradigm of an inner subject observing an outer object. These poems are descriptions of the inwardness of the mind. They illuminate the processes taking place, spontaneously and automatically, in the mind. This meaning-making is based on certain inceptual principles that are the metalogic that precipitates conception out of perception. This is based on the principle of identity and difference, of the one in the many. This spontaneous unconscious recognition of the determinative characteristics of each thing is the constitution of the essence that is embodied in the words we use. This unconscious process creates concepts for each object of perception. The mind recognizes the essential characteristics that have to be there for anything to have identity and bundles them together to form the essence of that thing, which is then represented by a concept we use as the identity of that thing. Revealing these neural algorithms is revolutionary. It opens the possibility of making changes that can create new viral paradigms that change not just what we think but the way we think and who we are. The Phenomenology of Nondual Awareness turns attention inward to examine the pristine presence at the ground of our common nature. This philosophical perspective allows nondual awareness to stand out in ways that are not religious or mystical but as an aspect of the mind studied under the lens of phenomenology.