(Published by Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, New Delhi, India, 2021.).

¨THE SEARCH FOR UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS¨ Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, Delhi. 2020. Surely the most prestigious publisher in India, founded in 1903. For more information about this publisher see Wikipedia.

In this treatise our author observes that all idealist philosophies have their origin in a transcendental intuition of fundamental Unity, which we find not only amongst thinkers but in all human beings as this Unity, according to him, is the very centre of the mind, not just of our species but of all living beings. In order to demonstrate this assertion, the author has followed and commented on the most sought after idealists from the origins till the present, and he ends with his transcendental idealism.

The value of the present work lies not just in the universal vision of the author, but also in that this vision is in line with a perspective, that he calls essential, that is used by Hinduism and Buddhism in its most essential and philosophical expressions. It can be said that the Search for Consciousness in the West is seen by a Western author from an Eastern perspective. This necessarily leads to the integration of the two cultures on a common footing.

Even if in India, philosophy and religion have always gone hand in hand, in the West, since the appearance of Christianity, these two disciplines have never been able to come to terms. For this reason the Quest elaborated and commented upon here is carried out on the margins of Christianity, which has shown itself to be incompatible with idealism, in the West and in the East.

The author insists on showing a universal idealism, a concept created and developed by him, in which Western philosophical idealism as well as the religious philosophical idealism of Hinduism and Buddhism are a part. But this is not an erudite work limited to making comparisons, nor does it try to establish a syncretism.

Conscious that we find our place in history for the first time in an age of globalization that demands an integration of ideals, Ozan Lavoisier sees the need to develop a cosmopolitan or universal philosophy. For this reason, particularly in this work, he describes his philosophy in extenso in which universal idealism naturally converge.

Words by Julio Ozán Lavoisier on the back of the book

¨…beyond the complexities of philosophial language and the differences tha may among the authors we have seen, there are simple truths in which all agree and that the reader must retain in their memory: a life without love, without kindness and without beauty, that is to say without an aspiration that takes us away from its repetitive, tedious, profane and animal side, without a quest and without the practice of meaningful paradigms, is a life of misery and, in the best of cases, a nightmare. This quest is not the task of idle intellectuals, but of sincere seekers of the reasons for our existence. These Ideas, that can be called Unity, Nirvana, Brahman or the Absolute, project us towardss the culminating point of our life, towards our plenitiude.¨