Nathalie Depraz

On Becoming Aware: A Pragmatics of Experiencing

This book searches for the sources and means for a disciplined practical approach to exploring human experience. The spirit of this book is pragmatic and relies on a Husserlian phenomenology primarily understood as a method of exploring our experience. The authors do not aim at a neo-Kantian a priori ‘new theory’ of experience but instead they describe a concrete activity: how we examine what we live through, how we become aware of our own mental life. The range of experiences of which we can become aware is vast: all the normal dimensions of human life (perception, motion, memory, imagination, speech, everyday social interactions), cognitive events that can be precisely defined as tasks in laboratory experiments (e.g., a protocol for visual attention), but also manifestations of mental life more fraught with meaning (dreaming, intense emotions, social tensions, altered states of consciousness). The central assertion in this work is that this immanent ability is habitually ignored or at best practiced unsystematically, that is to say, blindly. Exploring human experience amounts to developing and cultivating this basic ability through specific training. Only a hands-on, non-dogmatic approach can lead to progress, and that is what animates this book. (Series B)

Between Christianity and Buddhism: Towards a Phenomenology of the Body–Mind

This paper is situated in the broader context of an examination of the relationship between East and West from the particular perspective of our experience of the body. It is therefore based on two specific traditions, one belonging to the East – a particular strand of Tibetan Buddhism – the other to the West – the Orthodox tradition of the heart prayer – in order to try to show the similarities and differences in their approach to the body and attempt to compare them in the light of their respective ‘phenomenology’. In this sense phenomenology, as a western philosophical discipline, plays a pivotal role in this comparison and hopefully helps to bring new light to bear on this investigation. The early Eastern church evokes the concrete experience of the body as a holy body and sees it as an exemplary route to deification via the mystical practice of the ‘heart prayer’ (hesychasm). As regards Tibetan Buddhism, it advocates the gradual experience of the body as a rainbow body, defined as a path towards illumination, by means of ‘sitting meditation’ which brings liberation in bardo. In order to carry out this analysis, I shall refer to two recent books that are authorities in both these fields, Corps de mort et de gloire, Petite introduction à une théopoétique du corps by O. Clément1 and Rainbow Painting: A Collection of Miscellaneous Aspects of Development and Completion by Tulku Urguyen Rinpoché.2 Given the emphasis on the experience of the body in each religious context, I am going to highlight points that focus on the concrete attitude of the person who is seeking this kind of incarnation, as well as the subtle methods they use to cultivate this attitude. At the same time, I shall note the different features that characterize the various existing phenomenologies of the body, together with those that result from these spiritual experiences of incarnation as listed in Table 1. The four themes featured on the first line of Table 1 give an indication of the phenomenological method I use, starting from experiences of the lived body in an attitude of natural living embodiment and proceeding to develop phenomenological categorial features that may count as universal via the empirical characteristics of