Book review: Searchless Responsiveness

I read a fair number of meditation books. In the last three years since I started meditating, I read about 15-18 such books.

Searchless Responsiveness is one of the densest. It has five "interstitials" — stream -of-consciousness interludes between themed sections. These are a page or two long, with perhaps 20 paragraphs (interstitial one has 19). Each one of those paragraphs has some idea to reflect on or engage with. A different book might spend an entire chapter on any one of these – here they whizz by in quick succession.

I like this book's density. The more expository books get tedious. This on the other hand doesn't waste my time and it gives me a reason to reflect on the ideas and come back to the book. I could reread this once a year for the next five years and I think I'd probably still benefit from further rereads.

With its range of material, I read this book as an excellent map of an arbitrary and interesting territory of being. The map indicates dangerous spots — where there are cliffs and landslides and falling trees — as well as a few spots with an overblown bad reputation. The map's evocative for me, a word-lover: I find myself wanting to know what all this strange verbiage is getting at. It often covers similar ideas from different perspectives, without fully aligned terminology. This is part of how the evocation works — because the vocabulary's not fully consistent it's harder to invest in the text as providing a system of concepts to obsess over, so one has to engage with trying to resolve the references instead (mission fucking accomplished?). The book often indicates at least a basic exercise or two that points in the right direction of a given region, and provides references to other more detailed maps/materials.

What's really nice is how it seems to cover "a full spectrum" of practices. There are a variety of formal set-aside practices, from sitting practices to movement practices, with many suggestions toward how they might bear fruit in everyday life. There are also many suggestions for everyday experiments not connected to any particular set-aside practice.

The connection to the everyday's important. I am not a monk nor secretly desiring to be a monk. Many meditation books are written by monks or people who learned from monks and absorbed a certain monkish way of presenting the material. Ari is not a monk nor secretly wishing he is a monk, nor from his bio do I think has he learned primarily or in much large part from monks. He has written clearly, without bullshit or the weight of traditional jargon, a text that applies to everyday being.

If you want a dense, clear, complete map of an interesting territory in the space of meditation for everyday life, this is that book. Read the book.