endorsements
“I love Steve Hagen’s books! He manages to write about the most abstruse truths and make them sound as sensible and as straightforward as baseball scores—how does he do it? This book—which is so much fun to read and is full of scientific as well as everyday examples—is written in the form of a dialog between Steve and ‘Anyone’ (you and I) in which everything Anyone thinks makes sense doesn’t. By the time Anyone gets to the end, Anyone agrees. This is a wonderful book.”

—Norman Fischer, poet, Zen priest, and author most recently of The World Could Be Otherwise (prose) and On A Train At Night(poetry)


“A brilliant philosophical masterpiece. Hagen explores some of our most cherished assumptions about reality and self in a thought-provoking yet lighthearted interview-style conversation. This book is bound to shake up how you understand your life.”

—Mark Van Buren, author of The Fool's Guide to Actual Happiness


“Steve Hagen's best and most ambitious book, where he gets to the bottom of religion, philosophy, and science and settles the deepest questions that have long bedeviled human beings. Amazingly, he succeeds at all of the above in a book that's immensely readable, enjoyable, and accessible.” 
 
—Scott Edelstein, author of The User's Guide to Spiritual Teachers 


 “A thought-provoking read. Steve Hagen has a knack for taking complex ideas and presenting them simply and straightforwardly.”
—Tim Burkett, author of Nothing Holy About It ​​​
table of contents
Contents
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Big Unsettled Questions 1

Part I: Mind, Matter, Motion, and Music
1. The Ultimate Question     7
2. Sublime or Trivial?     11
3. Breaking Out of Habitual Thought     13
4. Neither Edged nor Edgeless     17
5. How We Perpetuate Ignorance     21
6. Substantial Confusion     31
7. A Universe of Mindstuff     39
8. No Need to Explain Everything     49
9. No Stand-In for Reality     53
10. What We’re Missing     57
11. Seeing Is Not Believing     63
12. Who Do We Think We Are?     73
13. How We Make Up Trees, the Universe,
      and Everything     79
14. The Persistent Illusion of Persistence     85
15. Forget What Happens     91
16. Different from Anything Else     97
17. Tasting Actual Knowledge     101
18. Slow Down 105
19. Consciousness, Awareness, and Reality     109
20. The Self Illusion     113
21. A Self Would Have to Be Something     119
22. This Illusory World     121
23. This Sizeless World     125
24. Mind Is Moving     131
25. How Motion Is Mind     137
26. There Is Only Mind     145

Part II: Grand Symmetry and Grand Delusion
27. What about God?     151
28. Belief Is the Culprit     159
29. Truth outside of Words     163
30. The Unwholesome Nature of Beliefs     167
31. Truth Doesn’t Belong to Anyone     171
32. Religion without Belief     179
33. Just Notice and Return     183
34. Leave Belief to Science     185
35. What Science Cannot Touch     191
36. The Two Truths     195
37. Settling the Matter     201

Appendix A: The Trouble with Truth Theories     209

Appendix B: Mind and Consciousness     215
Part 1—The Hard Problem Lies
in What We Imagine     216
Part 2—The Easy Problems Lie
in What We Can’t Imagine     220
Part 3—So, What’s the Problem?     227

Appendix C: The Flood and
Other True Fictions     229

Appendix D: Quagmires, Lacunas,
and Longstanding FEQs     245

Appendix E: The People Behind
the Quotations     255

Glossary: Understanding and Using
a Vocabulary of Enlightenment     259

Notes     271
​
About the Author     309

about steve hagen
Steve Hagen has been an instructor in religion at St. Olaf College and a science researcher for the University of Minnesota and the State of Alaska. In 1979 he was ordained a Zen priest, and in 1989 he received formal endorsement to teach. He has, however, no formal ties to any Zen or Buddhist hierarchy. In 1996, he founded Dharma Field Meditation and Learning Center in Minneapolis, where he continues to serve as the head teacher. He is the author of the bestselling Buddhism Plain and Simple and several other popular books on religion, science, and philosophy.
book details
​Publisher: Wisdom Publications
Published Date: October 13, 2020
Pages: 328
ISBN: 9781614296782
WHERE TO BUY

The grand delusion

This is a fun, unique book that goes deep into the great mysteries of knowing.

In The Grand Delusion, Steve Hagen drills deep into the most basic assumptions, strengths, and limitations of religion and belief, philosophy and inquiry, science and technology. In doing so, he shines new light on the question Why is there Something rather than Nothing?—and shines this light from an entirely unexpected (and largely unexplored) direction.

Using a provocative mix of examples from physics, philosophy, religion, myth, neuroscience, and mathematics—and a clever conversational exploration between Hagen and his interlocutor, “ANYONE”—this book also offers a fresh perspective on questions that science, philosophy, and religion have long grappled with. 

Layer by layer, Hagen examines the questions we ask, the way we ask them, the assumptions and beliefs we hold dear, and the ways in which we separate ourselves from the very answers we seek. In the process, he draws on sources that include Huang Po, Richard Feynman, Sir Arthur Eddington, Hui-Neng, Susan B. Anthony, Daniel Dennett, Joseph Campbell, Dogen, Emily Dickinson, Nagarjuna, Ikkyu, William I. McLaughlin, Sam Harris, and Henry David Thoreau.

Ultimately, this book reveals how all of these fundamental questions—and many, many more—stem from a single error, a single unwarranted belief, a single Grand Delusion.
If you've already read The Grand Delusion and have a question about it ask it here
For commentaries by Steve Hagen on the book, click here
If you would like to listen to Charles Ives' ​​The Unanswered Question mentioned in the book click here
Other books by Steve Hagen