# The Elephant and the Blind  ## Metadata - Author: [[Thomas Metzinger]] - Full Title: The Elephant and the Blind - Category: #books ## Highlights - Our species does not respect humanity as a whole, neither in the present nor in the future. Collectively, we lack the ethical integrity, the quality of compassion, and the capacity for rational action that would have enabled us to avert medium- and long-term catastrophe at moderate medium- and short-term cost. We are causing an enormous amount of future suffering, and we are doing so knowingly. Very soon, therefore, it will no longer be possible to respect the behavior of large segments of humanity. We will no longer be able to take ourselves seriously, for our behavior does not change even when we clearly recognize that it must. ([Location 12807](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C4J7D132&location=12807)) - Whoever wants to become whole—a person of integrity—by gradually resolving all conflict between their actions and values must pursue this harmony with their inner actions as well. This requirement is especially true for their “epistemic actions”—actions for the sake of knowledge. We act epistemically whenever we strive for insight, knowledge, true belief, sincerity, and also authentic self-knowledge. To the extent that meditation is an epistemic practice, it cannot work without radical honesty toward oneself, without a self-critical ethics of belief. There is a bridge between spiritual practice and the ideal of reasonable, rational thought: Both involve an ethics of inner action for the sake of knowledge. Moreover, in both cases, the goal is a systematic enhancement of mental autonomy, of inner freedom. ([Location 12881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C4J7D132&location=12881)) - Immanuel Kant put this point in a completely different but particularly beautiful way. What is needed, he says, is the sincere intention of being honest towards oneself. ([Location 12888](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C4J7D132&location=12888)) - But you cannot choicelessly observe your own thoughts as they arise and disappear again if you are not prepared to honestly face what you will now begin to see: the painful restlessness of your very own mind, your violent fantasies, your desire for retaliation, your boredom, your loneliness, your existential despair, or your envy. At the beginning of this section, I offered one example of what Bewusstseinskultur could refer to: Cicero’s idea that truly loving wisdom, and thus being a philosopher, mean “taking care of and cultivating one’s soul.” Now we can view Kant’s point as a second example: In terms of Bewusstseinskultur, any genuine contemplative practice requires the sincere intention of being honest toward oneself. ([Location 12897](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C4J7D132&location=12897)) - Groundless ground: A Tibetan Buddhist concept (gzhi’i gzhi med) referring to the ground of all experience, which is not a metaphysical ground established by the usual sources of valid knowledge but rather is a matter of personally realized self-awareness. There are strong parallels in Western mysticism, and in some phenomenologies, pure awareness is the “foundationless foundation” of all experience. See also Seelengrund. See chapter 26. ([Location 13118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C4J7D132&location=13118)) ## New highlights added March 11, 2024 at 7:33 AM - The new culture of consciousness will come of age only if guided by a science of consciousness that can answer ancient questions in new ways. ([Location 211](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C4J7D132&location=211)) - As it will turn out, on the deepest level, consciousness is not a subjective phenomenon in any philosophically interesting sense, but it apparently knows itself, nonegoically. Paradoxical as it sounds, selfless forms of self-awareness do exist, and they are the key to understanding all the other kinds. ([Location 218](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C4J7D132&location=218)) - This means that—independently of the current existence or nonexistence of other consciously experienced contents—an “awareness of awareness” has emerged. In other words, we are interested in states in which we clearly and distinctly experience the quality of “consciousness” itself. ([Location 242](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C4J7D132&location=242)) - consciousness as such is something absolutely pristine. It is a wakeful, entirely silent, and uncontracted quality of clarity; it is the effortless experiential character of nonconceptually knowing itself—and it is also, as another of our participants said, “that which never speaks” ([Location 253](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C4J7D132&location=253)) - Dharmakāya, the “truth body” of the Buddhist Pāli canon Rigpa, in Tibetan Dzogchen, pure awareness, the “knowledge of the ground,” and the spontaneous presence of primordial wakefulness Sākṣin, the “witness consciousness” of classical Advaita Vedanta philosophy Samādhi, the “even intellect,” as we find it in the Bhagavad Gita or the Yoga Sūtra of Patañjali, a thoughtless state of equilibrium in which all distinctions between meditator, potential objects of meditation, and the process itself have disappeared Sat-chit-ananda, “existence, consciousness, and bliss” in Hindu philosophy Turīya, from the oldest Upanishads onward, the idea of a fourth state of “pure consciousness” underlying the three common states of waking, dreaming, and dreamless deep sleep Ye shes, the timeless awareness of original wakefulness, for example in Vajrayāna Buddhism ([Location 277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C4J7D132&location=277)) - one of my predictions will be that the neglected phenomenon that ancient Tibetan Buddhists have sometimes called “clear light sleep” will soon become one of the hottest topics in consciousness research. ([Location 401](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C4J7D132&location=401)) - pure-consciousness experiences are always ineffable while they unfold because any attempt to report them while they occur would immediately destroy them. The interesting question is what subjects can say about such states after they have occurred. ([Location 404](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C4J7D132&location=404)) - If you are anything like me, the discovery of such unexpected new perspectives on your own inner experience will really be what makes studying these reports rewarding. ([Location 523](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C4J7D132&location=523)) - “mind of clear light.” Here is one classical example taken from the Bardo Thödol, the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” (eighth century CE): This brilliant emptiness is the radiant essence of your own awareness. It is beyond substance, beyond characteristics, beyond colour. […] The instant of your own presence is empty, yet it is not a nihilistic emptiness, but unimpeded radiance, brilliant and vibrant. […] Your own awareness, a vast luminous expanse, clarity inseparable from emptiness, is also the Buddha of unchanging light, beyond birth and death. Just to perceive this is enough. If you recognize this brilliant essence of your own awareness as Buddha Nature, then gazing into it is to abide in the state of enlightenment.10 ([Location 5360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C4J7D132&location=5360)) - I claimed that consciousness can exist without an experiential first-person perspective and that, in this sense, consciousness may not be a subjective phenomenon at all. This claim, if true, may change the stakes of the entire consciousness debate; it also forms a deep link to the ethical goal of suffering reduction and the idea of a rational, evidence-based Bewusstseinskultur. ([Location 11953](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C4J7D132&location=11953)) - No, consciousness as such is not subjective, but yes, for humans, conscious experience almost always is because it has been contracted into and is now structured by a first-person perspective, by the brain’s model of a knowing self directed at the world (chapter 8). ([Location 11981](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C4J7D132&location=11981))