Consciousness Explained Better: Towards an Integral Understanding of the Multifaceted Nature of Consciousness / Edition 1

by Allan Combs

Overview

Consciousness Explained Better is a unique contribution. This compact volume represents thousands of years of humanity's struggle to understand consciousness from a wide variety of perspectives. It is an up-to-date digest of the search in bite-sized chapters. Allan Combs has managed to encapsulate and synthesize vast bodies of thought and research without dilution. He has made even the most mind-twisting arguments and questions comprehensible, and he has brought forward scholarship and rigorous inquiry in language that speaks to the heart as well as the head. This book satisfies with its comprehensiveness yet intrigues with all that still remains enigmatic. It brings forward the yearning, the brilliance, the awe, and the outrageous audacity of our search to understand conscious. It reminds us that, in a world where much of our lives on a mundane basis has been reduced to the trivial, the logistical, and the manageable, everything about that world and about ourselves is still completely beyond our grasp. We still live and move in the Great Mystery. —From the Foreword by Jenny Wade, author of Changes of Mind and Transcendent Sex

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781557788832
Publisher:	Paragon House Publishers
Publication date:	09/01/2009
Pages:	300
Sales rank:	375,799
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Allan Combs teaches at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, and The Saybrook Institute in San Francisco. He is the author of over fifty articles, chapters, and books on consciousness and the brain. His recent books include Synchronicity: Science, Myth, and the Trickster with Mark Holland. He is the cofounder of The Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and belongs to the 100-member Club of Budapest.

Read an Excerpt

"Consciousness Explained Better is a unique contribution. This compact volume represents thousands of years of humanity's struggle to understand consciousness from a wide variety of perspectives. It is an up-to-date digest of the search in bite-sized chapters. Allan Combs has managed to encapsulate and synthesize vast bodies of thought and research without dilution. He has made even the most mind-twisting arguments and questions comprehensible, and he has brought forward scholarship and rigorous inquiry in language that speaks to the heart as well as the head. This book satisfies with its comprehensiveness yet intrigues with all that still remains enigmatic. It brings forward the yearning, the brilliance, the awe, and the outrageous audacity of our search to understand conscious. It reminds us that, in a world where much of our lives on a mundane basis has been reduced to the trivial, the logistical, and the manageable, everything about that world and about ourselves is still completely beyond our grasp. We still live and move in the Great Mystery."
----From the Foreword by Jenny Wade, author of Changes of Mind and Transcendent Sex

Table of Contents

The Introduction
Chapter 1 - A Word Worn Smooth
Chapter 2 - Never at Rest
Chapter 3 - Four Streams of Experience
Chapter 4 - From One Great Blooming, Buzzing Confusion
Chapter 5 - The Adult Mind
Chapter 6 - States and Structures of Consciousness
Chapter 7 - The Hierarchy of Minds
Chapter 8 - Horizontal and Vertical Evolution of Consciousness
Chapter 9 - The Many Faces of Integral Consciousness
References
Index

What People are Saying About This

Michael Murphy

"Allan Combs brings new firepower to consciousness studies, joining Ken Wilber and others who are integrating contemporary research in neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and other fields with the lore of the sacred traditions. This book is like Luke Skywalker's torpedo headed straight into the Death Star of reductive materialism."--(Michael Murphy, founder of the Esalen Institute, and author of The Future of the Body)

Steve McIntosh

"Using a friendly and engaging writing style, Dr. Allan Combs's book Consciousness Explained Better examines the most advanced thinking to date on the compelling subject of human consciousness. Professor Combs' own profound understanding of the field results in a clarity of focus that takes us to the heart of the matter. Moreover, as a prominent thinker within the integral philosophy movement, he writes with deep knowledge and abiding authority on the newly emerging "way of seeing" known as integral consciousness. I highly recommend this important book."--(Steve McIntosh, author of Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution)

Ken Wilber

"Allan Combs has written the finest book on consciousness in modern times, bar none. I give it my very highest recommendation."--(Ken Wilber, The Integral Vision)