my mind on books

Consciousness, Literature and Theatre: Theory and Beyond (Studies in Literature and Religion) by Peter Malekin and Ralph Yarrow (St. Martin’s Press, 1997)
This is a book that I read some time ago and took some notes on…..

We have so far sought to establish a model of the mind in which activity takes place on a ground of silence and a model of experiencing as process in which the mind and physiology move toward silence and back towards vigorous activity in a rhythmic pulsation (a factor which has implications for the function of metre and rhythm in verse). All rhythm is simply polarity; in this case the polarity of sound or activity and silence or nonactivity, laid as it were on its side and extended through time as we experience it. The polarity is, however, not a division, for each pole contains and implies the other. Literary work uses this rhythm, basic to all experience, and, partly by limiting its scope, gives it a controlled coherence that can powerfully affect, not only emotions and ideas, but the fabric of consciousness itself. One of its effects can be the activation of the reader’s own creativity, the tendency to bring the dynamic potentiality of silence into the flow of action in life, of which literature is merely a part. (p. 74-75)

Ralph Yarrow also has a new book coming out next month – Sacred Theatre (Intellect Books – Theatre and Consciousness)

Jeff Warren’s The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness is an entertaining tour with Warren as an enthusiastic and witty guide, who earnestly tries to figure it all out. Sometimes I laughed out loud, other times I tried to roll my eyes to the back of my head (an indicator of hypnotic capacity), and I wanted to check out many of the books and authors Warren consults along the way.

So following is a list of “further reading” for the consciousness tourist…

The Hypnogogic

Hypnagogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep by Andreas Mavromatis
The Mind At Night: The New Science Of How And Why We Dream by Andrea Rock

The Slow Wave

The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience by Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull

The Watch

At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past by A. Roger Ekirch

The REM Dream

Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep by J. Allan Hobson
(more…)

Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics by Richard Shusterman, Cambridge University Press, 2008. (“Search Inside the Book” available from Amazon).

From the book description:

Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one’s knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticized as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, Richard Shusterman refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness.

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(My New Year’s Resolution is to post something every day, which so far has meant lots of short posts! )

One of the books in the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program for this month is called “Sciousness.” I had never heard this term before, but it comes from William James (and of course has its own Wikipedia entry!)

James uses the term to refer to “pure experience” or “consciousness without self” (or maybe more precisely “consciousness prior to self”).

I hope I get a copy of this book to review!

ReadMe is a MetaFilter Wiki page collecting (and organizing) all the book-related topics from Ask MetaFilter, usually book recommendations on specific topics.

For example, filed on the wiki under “Science & Math: consciousness” – there are two entries: 1 (“recommend books about consciousness”) and 2 (“what to read after Dennett’s Consciousness Explained?”)

Also “recent books on cognitive science”

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Another good source of book lists is the site Lists of Bests, where I found “Mindpapers: 100 most cited works in the Philosophy of Mind”.