The Inner Dimension: Philosophy and the Experience of Consciousness

The Inner Dimension examines the philosophical significance of a remarkable family of experiences central to Eastern meditation traditions and reported by creative geniuses in the West from Plato through Einstein. Research on people practicing Eastern meditation techniques indicates that these experiences reflect widely accessible universal potentials of human awareness. Prof. Shear responds to this research by exploring the significance of these experiences for a wide range of philosophical issues--self, knowledge, mind-and-matter, creativity, values, human potential--as articulated by major Western philosophers such as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Mill and Wittgenstein. Its analysis is straightforwardly empirical and non-metaphysical. Its implications, however, are revolutionary.