"Monad and Thou"

[Telos]

I just found this little gem a few days ago in my university's library, while trying to see if we had any books on astral projection (we don't). The books we have on altered states of consciousness are notoriously bad, since they are written from an entirely demeaning psychological perspective. One book that had a chapter on lucid dreaming was hesitant to acknowledge that lucid dreaming actually existed, citing ambiguity and lack of subjects in LaBerge's studies, and its tendency to attract new age types.

Alright, enough of that.

This book is very heavy on philosophical terminology, although every sentence is soundly meticulous, feeling as if they are all puzzle pieces which fit together comfortably. Indeed, the author proclaims the book as his life's work, and is not a native English speaker.

It's an expansion on the ideas of monism from the ideas of Husserl, Heidegger, and Martin Buber, so reading the book also has the effect of reading all three of these people, as well as some other famous philosophers of mind (Descartes, Spinoza, etc.). The author is Japanese, and describes his interest in the subject birthing towards the end of WW2, in a spontaneous OBE while standing in the midst of attacking American planes.

http://www.ohiou.edu/oupress/monadandthou.htm

Although I haven't finished it yet, it is very good nighttime reading. If you're having difficulty wrapping your head around the philosophical rationality that "I and Thou" are the same, this book is definitely worth a look.

Regrettably, I'm the only one to have ever checked the book out from my library. Even though it was only published in 2000, every time I open it I have a coughing fit from the dust and mold. :( So read at your own risk!

[Telos]

Okay, I'm very close to finishing it now.

This book is really really heavy on the philosophy. I don't know what it is... maybe I had high expectations, maybe some of it went over my head, maybe I feel I know certain things better, etc.

But the theory in this book does not have any clear inroads to AP, nor any other experiential monistic phenomena. It provides a lot of good reasoning for the existence of monism, and its potential meaning, but not its applications. I was hoping that since the author was motivated to write this volume because of a kind of OBE in his youth, that it would light the path more than it did.

This book is probably not in many public libraries, and is probably restricted to academic libraries. Good thing, I guess. That's about the only context it might be useful - writing a philosophy paper, a master's thesis, or a doctoral thesis.