Divination has been practiced as a way of knowing and communicating for millennia. Diviners are experts who embrace the notion of moving from a boundless to a bounded realm of existence in their practice. They excel in insight, imagination, fluency in language, and knowledge of cultural traditions and human psychology. During a divination, they construct usable knowledge from oracular messages of various sorts. To do so, they link diverse domains of representational information and symbolism with emotional or presentational experience. Their (...) divinatory acts involve complementary modes of cognition associated with these rather different symbolic forms. In representational symbolism, intentional reference, within a relatively controlled inductive reality, is paramount, while in presentational symbolism, implicit experiential immersion, within a free-flowing context, is grasped intuitively. Wherever a theory of divination has been elicited from diviners, there is a clear recognition of the overlapping of inductive, intuitive, and interpretive techniques and ways of knowing. In order to arrive at a theory of practice for divination, as a form of practical consciousness or knowledge within different modes of cognition, one must take what diviners say and do seriously. Recent scientific studies reveal that consciousness is connected both to electrical information in the brain and nervous system and to electronic semi-conduction in body tissues. Brain consciousness is embedded in body consciousness and coupled to it. This validates the experience of mind-body consciousness diviners have used for millennia in their performances. (shrink)

This essay is a journey into the phenomenology of place and Goethe's science of nature by an Australian lecturer on the philosophies and practices of place-based education. It takes the form of a series of encounters with leading figures in the field— David Seamon, Henri Bortoft and Isis Brook, as well as an application of Goethean science to some granite outcroppings on the Cornish coast of England. The profundity of the phenomenological concepts of 'natural attitude' and 'lifeworld' is discussed together (...) with ideas behind Goethe's participative and intuitive practices. Goethean science and phenomenology have enormous potential to deepen the experience, understanding and expression of place relationships, but they put challenging demands upon students and lecturers within the structure of a university subject. (shrink)