On Becoming Aware: A Pragmatics of Experiencing edited by Natalie Depraz, Francisco J. Varela, & Pierre Vermersch (Volume 43 in the Advances in Consciousness Research: John Benjamins Publishing Company) searches for the sources and means for a disciplined, practical approach to exploring human experience. The spirit of the book is pragmatic and relies on a Husserlian phenomenology primarily understood as a method of exploring our experience. Depraz, Varela, & Vermersch 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 human beings can become aware is vast but this immanent ability is habitually ignored or at best practiced unsystematically, blindly. Exploring human experience amounts to developing and cultivating this basic ability through specific training. More

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