Blackmore envisions this "as a theory about what is happening in the brain, with groups of neurons organising themselves in different places, their patterns arising and falling away, though with no experiencing self."

She realizes that "Although I can label them differently, and they vary in vividness and how much confidence I have in their details, they all seemed to be made of the same kind of stuff."

Blackmore considers the metaphor of "life as a string of beads" and rejects it because her mind seems to contain "many streams" of experience that "arise and fall away, their observers coming and going with them."

Blackmore explores questions of reincarnation, self-continuity, and "the timeless, emptiness, or void, or whatever it is, out of which phenomena appear."

Steven Poole said Blackmore writes "in a style that is deliberately fragmentary, a succession of false starts or paths petering out into nothingness (which may also be the point)."

[4] Jenny Doe noted that Blackmore's prose "is not always up to the job of capturing the profundity and mystery of the Zen experience, and occasionally ends up reminiscent of the ramblings of a stoned student."

That said, Doe feels the book is a great starting point for laypeople to explore philosophy of mind.

"[7] Bodhipaksa calls Blackmore's "an extraordinary book: a sometimes heady but deeply rewarding read."

Bodhipaksa criticizes Blackmore's inference from becoming aware of sounds that happened in the past to assuming that her consciousness of them is "an attribution made later" because he points out that sounds can persist in echoic memory for 4 seconds: "A lot of Blackmore's descriptions of mindfulness seem to have involved paying attention to what’s in echoic memory rather than what she was currently listening to."

Finally, Bodhipaksa notes that some of Blackmore's use of terminology was loose and may reflect "a 'feeling' of significance that hasn't been fully thought out or articulated.

He found the book valuable as an account of what it feels like to be puzzled "about consciousness, freedom, self, the relationships between mind and brain," but he said it fails to consider the standpoint of designing a thinking system and therefore misses out on useful insights.

He feels "the attempt to understand consciousness simply by gazing inwardly at it can have limited success."

Sloman also feels that Blackmore's rejection of "contents of consciousness", "the self", and "free will" are based too much on confused notions of what those things mean, and "she has not considered the right sorts of explanations" for those concepts.

Nevertheless, Sloman thinks Zen and the Art of Consciousness "may become a classic because of the unique combination of qualities the author brings to it.