Books on spirituality from a materialist perspective

[rousseau]

Hopefully the title of this thread hits what I'm interested in on the nose - basically I'm looking for recommendations from others on books they liked that approached spirituality from more of a philosophical, and materialist angle.

I've already read tons of this stuff, and a lot of it usually comes from the Asian tradition, one of them I've liked so far is The Essentials of Zen Buddhism by D.T. Suzuki. Another that I'm waiting on to be delivered right now is I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj , which incidentally was a recommendation from Leonard Cohen at the end of his life.

For the most part I'm well-read on the topic already, but looking for some recommendations if anyone has them. Stuff that might bend the mind a bit, but not ipso-facto descriptions of Asian philosophies.

 

[Treedbear]

... Another that I'm waiting on to be delivered right now is I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj , which incidentally was a recommendation from Leonard Cohen at the end of his life.
...

Available for free on-line in pdf format here: I AM THAT

Haven't read it myself. Most reviewers I've seen say that they've read it many times and that it's good for the first timer to "hopscotch" around if it becomes tedious.

Perusing Chapter One it appears that Maharaj teaches that the self is not material. Haven't gotten to where it explains what it is yet. I suspect I'll have to disagree. So far he basically says that the experiencer must come before that which is experienced. I'm convinced that the experiencer only exists in the virtual sense. Similar to a reflection in a mirror where the context of experience requires that the reflection becomes the reality in order to maintain a continuity required for existence. He says:

And in every experience there arises the experiencer of it. Memory creates the illusion of continuity. In reality each experience has its own experiencer and the sense of identity is due to the common factor at the root of all experiencer-experience relations. Identity and continuity are not the same.

I think that identity and continuity are the same in every way that's important.

 

[rousseau]

... Another that I'm waiting on to be delivered right now is I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj , which incidentally was a recommendation from Leonard Cohen at the end of his life.
...

Available for free on-line in pdf format here: I AM THAT

Haven't read it myself. Most reviewers I've seen say that they've read it many times and that it's good for the first timer to "hopscotch" around if it becomes tedious.

Perusing Chapter One it appears that Maharaj teaches that the self is not material. Haven't gotten to where it explains what it is yet. I suspect I'll have to disagree. So far he basically says that the experiencer must come before that which is experienced. I'm convinced that the experiencer only exists in the virtual sense. Similar to a reflection in a mirror where the context of experience requires that the reflection becomes the reality in order to maintain a continuity required for existence. He says:

And in every experience there arises the experiencer of it. Memory creates the illusion of continuity. In reality each experience has its own experiencer and the sense of identity is due to the common factor at the root of all experiencer-experience relations. Identity and continuity are not the same.

I think that identity and continuity are the same in every way that's important.

I finally got my hard copy and browsed through the first few sections. I didn't interpret him as meaning the self isn't material, but rather that the self has no static, definable identity. So for instance you can say something like I am not an extrovert, I am not a dog, but you can't say 'I am an introvert', the 'I am' cannot be defined by any single attribute or characteristic. Therefore the self, you, are a part of the universe. That's about as far as you can go, it has no consistent definition.

So the corollary of that is that our 'experience' comes from a kind of eternal, constant consciousness. You could call it 'virtual' if you want to, and I suspect he might agree.

I found it a bit harder to parse his bit on 'continuity', but I suspect the idea is that he considers life a series of events, the body being a new configuration that is reacting to new things, moment, by moment, in a continual evolution. Because we can remember the past and imagine a future, this gives us a sense that we 'are' a sum total of attributes in our memory, but the thing that's reacting to new events, day after day, can't be defined by those attributes in memory. The 'identity' that we are, is the indefinable self.

 

[rousseau]

I've been enjoying the book quite a bit myself. Apparently Maharaj was Hindu, which I haven't studied much, but there are obvious parallels with Buddhism. Lots of interesting comments throughout, so far I particularly enjoyed his thoughts on causation. Which were that no thing has a single cause, that from a certain perspective causation doesn't exist.

 

[rousseau]

Getting a bit further into it, I'd definitely recommend the book even to those who are already versed in Indian ideas. Definitely repetitive, but the repetition does serve to hammer home the central theme, and does so from new and interesting perspectives at times.

The overarching theme seems to be that there is no fundamental distinction between humans and the universe - that we, the world, the universe, are all one. Ok, following along. But the corollary of that statement is that there is an underlying awareness, consciousness, process, deeper than our subjective identity, that actually runs the show, and our ideas about our identity can't encapsulate what we really are and how we function. So all of these concepts and layers that we cake on to our own identity just distract us from a true awareness of what it means to be human. And that's where suffering and lack of peace comes from - when we're slaves to ideas about ourselves, slaves to our desires and fears.

This seems almost identical to Zen Buddhism in a lot of respects, but in the book there also seems to be some focus on how the body actually works within this framework.