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Podcast: New Books in Buddhist Studies
Episode: Peter D. Hershock, "Consciousness Mattering: A Buddhist Synthesis" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Description: Consciousness Mattering (Bloombury, 2023) presents a contemporary Buddhist theory in which brains, bodies, environments, and cultures are relational infrastructures for human consciousness. Drawing on insights from meditation, neuroscience, physics, and evolutionary theory, it demonstrates that human consciousness is not something that occurs only in our heads and consists in the creative elaboration of relations among sensed and sensing presences, and more fundamentally between matter and what matters. Peter Hershock argues that without consciousness there would only be either unordered sameness or nothing at all. Evolution is consciousness mattering.Shedding new light on the co-emergence of subjective awareness and cult...