Individuals operating within the scientific paradigm presume that the world is made of matter. Although the perspective engendered by this presupposition is very powerful, it excludes value and subjective experience from its fundamental ontology. In addition, it provides very little guidance with regards to the fundamentals of ethical action. Individuals within the religious paradigm, by contrast, presume that the world is made out of what matters. From such a perspective, the phenomenon of meaning is the primary reality. This meaning is (...) revealed both subjectively and objectively, and serves—under the appropriate conditions—as an unerring guide to ethical action.The ancient stories of Genesis cannot be properly understood without viewing them from within the religious paradigm. Genesis describes the primary categories of the world of meaning, as well as the eternal interactions of those categories. Order arises out of Chaos, through the creative intermediation of Logos, and man is manifested, in turn. Man, a constrained Logos, exists within a bounded state of being, Eden. Eden is a place where order and chaos, nature and culture, find their optimal state of balance. Because Eden is a walled garden, however—a bounded state of being—something is inevitably excluded. Unfortunately, what is excluded does not simply cease to exist. Every bounded paradise thus contains something forbidden and unknown. Man's curiosity inevitably drives him to investigate what has been excluded. The knowledge thus generated perpetually destroys the presuppositions and boundaries that allow his temporary Edens to exist. Thus, man is eternally fallen. The existential pain generated by this endlessly fallen state can undermine man's belief in the moral justifi0ability of being—and may turn him, like Cain, against brother and God. (shrink)

It is important for psychology - as a discipline of thought about the nature of psyche - and for psychotherapy, as its practice of understanding, to draw a distinction between neurotic and authentic suffering if it aims to assist a person to become an indivisible being. A difficulty with mainstream psychology is the conviction that psyche begins and ends in the realm of Reason as this conviction tends to establish a reality of permanence, absolutes and substance, and hence consequently, colludes (...) with the ‘ten thousand things’ of neurotic suffering. When reason sets the rules of reality, it is argued, a deep sense of alienation and meaninglessness takes root. A psychology stuck in this realm is unable to attend to authentic human suffering, which is the reconciliation and synthesis of opposites in human nature. In the dichotomy of subject and object, and unconscious and conscious, a psychology of the reason unwittingly identifies with and acts out that which it rejects as inferior. It thus suffers from the very condition it sets out to alleviate. The concepts of enlightenment and individuation on the other hand draw a clear distinction between neurotic and authentic suffering. They conceive of a reality in which subject and object are one, so providing support to one suffering authentically so as to remain true to oneself and thus to become an indivisible being. (shrink)

A general definition of consciousness that accommodates most views (Vimal, 2010b) is: “ ‘consciousness is a mental aspect of a system or a process, which is a conscious experience, a conscious function, or both depending on the context and particular bias (e.g. metaphysical assumptions)’, where experiences can be conscious experiences and/or non-conscious experiences and functions can be conscious functions and/or non-conscious functions that include qualities of objects. These are a posteriori definitions because they are based on observations and the categorization.” (...) Non-conscious experiences are equivalent to relevant proto-experiences and nonconscious functions are equivalent to related proto-functions at various levels as these terms are precursors of respective conscious subjective experiences and conscious functions aspect of consciousness. The non-conscious experiences and non-conscious functions may be considered as a part of the definition of mind and/or awareness. (shrink)

When so much is being written on conscious experience, it is past time to face the question whether experience happens that is not conscious of itself. The recognition that we and most other living things experience non-consciously has recently been firmly supported by experimental science, clinical studies, and theoretic investigations; the related if not identical philosophic notion of experience without a subject has a rich pedigree. Leaving aside the question of how experience could become conscious of itself, I aim here (...) to demonstrate that the terms experience and consciousness are not interchangeable. Experience is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down, but I see non-conscious experience as based mainly in momentary sensations, relational between bodies or systems, and probably common throughout the natural world. If this continuum of experience — from non-conscious, to conscious, to self-transcending awareness — can be understood and accepted, radical constructivism (the “outside” world as a construct of experience) will gain a firmer foundation, panexperientialism (a living universe) may gain credibility, and psi will find its medium. (shrink)

By accepting that the formal structure of human language is the key to understanding the uniquity of human culture and consciousness and by further accepting the late appearance of such language amongst the Cro-Magnon, I am free to focus on the causes that led to such an unprecedented threshold crossing. In the complex of causes that led to human being, I look to scholarship in linguistics, mythology, anthropology, paleontology, and to creation myths themselves for an answer. I conclude that prehumans (...) underwent an existential crisis, i.e., the realization of certain mortality, that could be borne only by the discovery-creation of the larger realm of symbolic consciousness once experienced as the sacred (but today we know it as "the world" – as opposed to our immediate natural environment and that of other animals). Thus, although we, the human species, are but one species among innumerable others, we differ in kind, not degree. This quality is our symbolically enabled self-consciousness, the fortress of cultural identity that empowers but also imprisons awareness. (shrink)

In his novel Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust argues that conventional descriptions of the phenomenology of consciousness are incomplete because they focus too much on the highly-salient sensory information that dominates each moment of awareness and ignore the network of associations that lies in the background. In this paper, I explicate Proust’s theory of conscious experience and show how it leads him directly to a theory of aesthetic perception. Proust’s division of awareness into two components roughly corresponds to William (...) James’ division of the stream of thought into a “nucleus” and “fringe.” Proust argues that the function of art is to evoke the underlying associative network indirectly in the mind of the observer by using carefully chosen sensory surfaces to control the stream of thought. I propose a possible neural basis for this Proustian/Jamesian phenomenology, and argue that the general principles of Proustian aesthetics can be applied to all forms of art. I conclude that a scientific theory of art should follow in a straightforward manner from a scientific theory of consciousness. (shrink)

It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the notion of ecological and social embeddedness is one of the most exploited philosophical ideas these days, both in the academia and beyond. The most troublesome about the overall trend is that many proponents of the idea of social embeddedness simplistically consider selfhood as a form of aberration which merely provides vindication for inequality and violence. In this paper, instead of attacking the problem of the individual versus the collective (...) head-on, I approach it by way of a critique of Stephen Turner’s repudiation of transcendental collectivism. According to Turner, transcendental entities, such as tacit knowledge, presuppositions, or traditions, should be altogether removed from explanatory schemata in the social sciences. I believe that Turner’s razor cuts too deep and the rejection of implicit framing is at best premature. Against the background of the identified shortcomings of Turner’s model of interactive learning, I track the interrelations between social development and the development of the self with an eye to showing that the relationship between individual selves and social reality is an extremely complex and multifactorial matter which we cannot hope to navigate without a proper transcendental frame. The frame is what mediates the relationship between the individual and the collective. (shrink)

This is a 2020 revision of my 1988 dissertation "The Choreography of the Soul" with a new Foreword, a new Conclusion, a substantially revised Preface and Introduction, and many improvements to the body of the work. However, the thesis remains the same. A theory of consciousness and trance states--including psychedelic experience--is developed. Consciousness can be analyzed into two distinct but generally interrelated systems, which I call System X and System Y. System X is the emotional-visceral-kinaesthetic body. System X is a (...) harmonic system of "endokinetic" (internal bodily) and "ectokinetic" (emotionally expressive) movement. System Y is a "teleokinetic" (goal directed) system that includes language, cognition, perception, voluntary motor control, manipulation of the environment, etc. Contrary to theories of consciousness prevalent in the Western philosophical traditions that begin with Plato, I argue that System Y is secondary to and dependent upon System X, not the reverse. In building my thesis I draw upon the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, psychoanalysis, Jungian depth psychology, political anthropology, modern neuroscience, Pythagorean music theory, and the mathematical theory of harmonic systems. (shrink)

This research tests C.G. Jung’s suggestion that if protestant Christians think of God as a mythologem then it advances consciousness. There is an implied benefit of greater religious tolerance. The research methodology is to investigate the theoretical concepts involved, operationalise them, and then conduct an empirical test of their relationship. There are multiple problems that have to be overcome, including Jung’s amorphous and protean use of terminology. His concept of myth, in this context, is clarified and positioned within his philosophy, (...) the contemporary culture of materialism, and the primary beliefs of the target audience. The contemporary understanding of Jungian consciousness is also revisioned to incorporate Jung’s notion of advancement based on the transcendent function. There are no existing measures for ‘thinking mythologically’ nor ‘advancement’. The concepts do not lend themselves to established psychometric principles. Therefore, two new forms of questionnaire are devised to measure these concepts, alongside two new questionnaires of conventional design that collect information about demographics and religious tolerance. There is an Information Technology sub-project, using a bespoke database and set of programs, to develop, publish, and promote the questionnaires on the internet. There are then two stages of statistical analysis: one to develop reliable and valid measures for each concept; the other to measure the relationships between the concepts. The main result of the test is that the specific relationship Jung describes in the letter – between mythological thinking and advancement of consciousness – does not hold. However, the data does suggest there may be a direct relationship between mythological thinking and religious tolerance. Despite the failure of the main test, there are a number of useful lessons from the results and suggestions for future research. There are also several spin-offs from the thesis, in terms of both concepts and resources. These are reviewed in the final chapter. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to further an understanding of how a soul comes to despair and how the spirit of life is wounded. This question is approached from the perspective of death – in the form of death defying acts and voluntary death – as the dialectic aspect of being and non-being. Death can be a reflection of the life lived and the experience of who I am. The relation between ego and Self determines who I am. Two (...) forms of misrelating between ego and Self will be considered. One causes a sense of omnipotence as the ego identifies with Self, and the other causes a sense of alienation as the ego renounces the Self to establish an intellectual vacuum, which becomes a substitute for lived experience. In both instances, there is a growing despair of inauthenticiy and the experience of non-being, which voluntary death and death defying acts attempt to put an end to. Both manifestations of death are attempts to resolve the imbalance between the eternal and temporal dimensions of being – to put an end to the despair of being unconscious of Self – and to affirm being. It is only when there is a conscious dialectic between ego and Self that an authentic existence becomes possible. An authentic existence represents the ongoing commitment to incarnate the human reality that exists between the world of imagination and the world as it appears to our senses. This, I argue, amounts to a spirit with soul. (shrink)

A post-modernist analysis of human-centred technology (HCT) suggests the ideology which informs the theoretical and practical development of HCT resonates with ideological representations of machine intelligence portrayed in science fiction (sf) films. It is argued that such an ideology reflects and reinforces ontological dualisms which constrain our ability to imagine and realise our future relations with technology. This paper invites proponents of HCT to meet their shadows, to transgress, the cultural and discursive borders constructed in the name of modernism, and (...) to reflect on what is taken-for-granted and peripheralised within their own work. (shrink)

The text deals with the novel Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann as a source of a musico-literary poetics and mythopoetics. The archetypical symbol of the shadow is interpreted and amplified through the literary character of Adrian Leverkühn and a broader imagination tendencies of art and society in the first half of the 20th century. For this goal have been used approaches of the deep hermeneutics and the analytical psychology. The motif of the Faust has strong potential to express not only (...) an archetyp of the shadow, but its present is significant in the time of transformation and changes. (shrink)