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Out of Our Depth and Treading Water: Reflections on Consciousness, Culture and New Learning Technologies
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The Construction of Reality in Waking Life and Dreaming Life
Get PDFShamans were the first dreamworkers and the first to ask traditional philosophical questions. They used (and still use) altered states of consciousness to travel into dreamtime, obtaining power and knowledge to help and heal members of their communities -- the social group that awarded them shamanic status. In psychological terms, shamans regulate their attention to obtain information not available to their peers, using it to reduce stress and improve the living conditions of members of their society.
Over the centuries, Western scientists and philosophers have dismissed shamanic journeying as fanciful at best, and delusional at worst. Julian Silverman (1967) postulated that shamanism is a form of socially sanctioned schizophrenia, and George Devereux (1961) took the position that shamans are neurotics and hysterics. Roger Walsh (1990) has pointed out the fallacies in these arguments and, in recent years, scientific data, numerous case studies, and anecdotal reports have emerged supporting the beneficial use of dreams (especially lucid dreams), imagination, and imagery to treat disease, improve sports performance, and enhance creativity (Krippner & Dillard, 1988; LaBerge, Levitan, & Dement, 1986). From this perspective, shamanic reports of journeying to the Lower World and the Upper World can be viewed as useful metaphors for the accessing of unconscious material and latent potentials.
A similar body of parapsychological literature, both anecdotal and experimental, supports the shamanic model of “journeying backward and forward in time and space. These accounts are rejected by most established academic institutions, allegedly because they are flawed, fraudulent, or fabricated (e.g., Grey, 1994). However, the French philosopher, Henri Bergson (1914), took the position that each person is, at each moment, potentially aware of all concurrent events as well as of his or her past experiences; to prevent being overwhelmed by this information, the brain acts as a filter to suppress all input except that which is relevant and practical. Though accounts of shamanic journeying do not easily adapt themselves to the practical pursuits of the West, even if a small number of them had merit, shamanic philosophy would deserve to be reconsidered (Krippner, 1994).
For the shaman, there were no rigid boundaries between waking life and dreaming life ; both were regarded as real” but full admission to the latter usually depended on training and discipline. Malidoma Patrice Some\u27 (1994), an African Dagara shaman, remarks, Nothing can be imagined that is not already there in the inner or outer worlds (p. 233). This assertion echoes the Greek philosopher Parmenides\u27 claim that what is there to be said and thought must needs be: for it is there for being, but nothing is not. Further, it has been observed that the fanciful travels Parmenides recounted in his poems resemble the journeys described by shamans (Kirk, Raven, & Schofield, 1983, pp. 242-243).
Before his initiation, Some\u27s mentor had asserted, “The dream world is real....It\u27s more real than what you are observing now (p. 211). During his lengthy initiation, Some\u27 knew that this procedure would prepare him to live “as if I were in a dream in which worlds collided and different realities confronted one another....The contrast between this state of mind and what I had been accustomed to...was the same as the difference between liquid and solid. It seemed to me that Dagara knowledge was liquid in the sense that what I was learning was living, breathing, flexible, and spontaneous. What I was learning made sense only in terms of relationship. It was not fixed, even when it appeared to be so....By contrast, I could see that the Western knowledge I had been given had the nature of a solid because it is wrapped in logical rhetoric to such a degree that it is stiff and inflexible. The learning one gets from a book, from the canons of the written tradition, is very different from the living, breathing knowledge that comes from within, from the soul....Could one reality contradict another? What kind of new reality was I being introduced to? What is reality predicated upon?” (p. 185).
Current efforts to train people to dream lucidly, to engage in shamanic journeying, and to function psychically can be seen as renewed attempts to enter what anthropologists have designated dreamtime so as to engage in activities deemed impossible in ordinary states of consciousness. They may also be considered attempts to obtain a deeper truth than is available to ordinary awareness. Within the early Hindu religion, dream journeys were seen as intermediate states of the path toward divine truth (O\u27Flaherty, 1984, p. 15). While the early Hindus saw both the waking and dreaming states as operating within samsara, illustrating the propensity of human societies to decide what they opted to designate as reality, some Indian philosophers felt that dreamtime contained fewer of these “mortal distinctions (p. 18). Parmenides\u27 claims again seem relevant, namely his contrast between the truth in changeless being and the mere mortal opinions of most human beings. Reflecting on his dream research data, Harry Hunt (1989) has noted that while the dreamer\u27s body remains inert, his or her dream body seems to operate on its own, traveling to distant places and engaging in exotic activities.
There seems to be a perennial dichotomy between appearance and reality, between one\u27s perceptions of the world and the external world said to exist independently of that perception; this dichotomy has tilted in favor of mortal opinions and samsara in Western academia. This tilt is exemplified by the fact that in 1994, Princeton University’s graduate program did not teach a single course on Eastern, African, or Latin American philosophy out of a total of 64 listed in their information booklet. Princeton\u27s course, Philosophy of Religion, is described as providing readings from contemporary analytical philosophy of religion, and from historical sources in the Western tradition. Furthermore, the only philosophy course at Harvard University which explicitly mentions non-Western thought is entitled Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, despite the fact that only Buddha qualifies as non-Western
On Unity Experiences: A Review
Get PDFUnity is both complex and elegant which in itself reflects the Universe. Experiencing unity is examined philosophically as a natural human desire for reasoned reality. From a spiritual perspective it may be the return to our original divine essence. From a neuroscientific view, it may be neurocorrelates in the brain resonating with an electrical field. And from a physics perspective, it may be particle entanglement and spin-wave directionality. The debate is broad and deep. The prevailing western framework for exploring such a topic is rational cognitivism, and intersects several disciplines including; cognitive science, consciousness studies, neuroscience, philosophy, phenomenology, psychology and its subgroup transpersonal psychology, cosmology, spirituality, and most recently, quantum mechanics. Each of these frameworks engages a Cartesian-Newtonian methodology of dissecting component parts for study, and collecting empirical support for validation of the direct unity experience. There is a continued quest for reasoned certainty and absolutism with this method.
Alternatively, Eastern practices, particularly Buddhism, engage the disciplines of mindfulness, awareness and philosophical exploration. This is a discipline of openness that respects the isness of direct experience, unity experiences (UE’s) included. There is no absolute knowing or need for empiricism. Those are concepts of the mind that are considered illusory. The exploration takes the researcher into dissolution of form, attachment and illusion, and what constitutes conceptual illusory coverings of Buddha potential in all sentient beings. What is currently emerging in researching human experience is a blending of Eastern and Western operational paradigms. The Dalai Lamas’ interest and participation in neuroscientific research on meditating Buddhist monks attests to this development.
This literature review takes a meta-perspective in the discussion of unity and its apparent counterpoint, dualism. Definitions concerning unity experiences are embedded in the paper as we begin our exploration.
General themes addressed in this review of the literature include; subjective experience, experiential content and meaning-making, unity experience within a holographic framework, permeable membrane of perception in an autopoietic system, discrete and coherent perception of the discrete and coherent (repetition intentional). What is not addressed that may have some relevance to the unity experience, is cosmology and an in-depth review of the literature on neuroscience and physics. This paper focuses on the experience itself within an historical view of what has impacted our current thinking, and an East-West perspective on consciousness
Transforming the Invisible The Postmodernist Visual Artist as a Contemporary Mystic: A Review
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Art and the Evolution of Consciousness: A Look at the Work of Owen Barfield, Jean Gebser, and Gottfried Richter
Get PDFThis essay examines the concept of consciousness in three major twentieth century writers, Owen Barfield (1977, 1988), Jean Gebser (1984), and Gottfried Richter (1982). Fundamental to all three of these is the idea that human consciousness, and especially perception, evolves with the passage of historical time, and that this evolution is reflected in the production of art. In each thinker, consciousness of the self is seen primarily as a function of orientation in space and time. The evolution of this orientation is concretely expressed in many areas of cultural development, especially the arts (Gebser, 1985)
