harry hunt | Brock University (original) (raw)
Books by harry hunt
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1985
Recent criticisms of the place and function of "consciousness" in "cognitive science" are conside... more Recent criticisms of the place and function of "consciousness" in "cognitive science" are considered and rejected. Contrary to current orthodoxy subjective experience during abstract cognitive activity, especially when placed in its natural series with phenomenal accounts of so-called "altered states of consciousness," can provide unique and crucial evidence concerning just that core of "semantics" which eludes the automatized "syntax" of computer simulation. The "noetic" aspect of extreme altered states can be placed in relation to introspective descriptions of "insight." Various altered state fearuressynaesthesias, geometric/mandala imagery, reorganizations of "perceptual" dimcnsions and enhanced "self-referenceu-can be taken as direct "exteriorizations" of abstract symbolic processes as discussed by Neisser, Geschwind,
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1984
Traditional approaches to the psychology of religious-mystical and altered-state experience have ... more Traditional approaches to the psychology of religious-mystical and altered-state experience have divided between more psychoanalytic and psychiatric views that associate such experience with "schizophrenia," "regression," and "primitivity" and the more intuitive Jungian and transpersonalhumanistic assertions of a "higher" path of development ("self-actualization"). By considering the full range of empirical reports from mysticalmeditational, psychedelic, and schizophrenic settings, a "positive" cognitive psychology of the abstract symbolic processes underlying such states is developed-potentially reconciling those divergent approaches, explaining the place of these states at the center of culture in "primitive" and classical societies, and casting a unique light on the normally masked core of semantic processes. Features of the abstract, recombinatory, cross-modal operations posited by Neisser, Arnheim, Mead, and Geschwind as criterial for human symbolic capacity are located within the varieties of altered-state report and Rudolf Otto's phenemonology of the numinous. However, such an analysis only becomes powerful when the ostensibly "primitive," "negative," or "withdrawn" aspects of such experienceits association with phylogenetically primitive and defensive "tonic immobility," the subjective "death" or "annihilation" experience of catatonic schizophrenia, and the "white light of the void realization'' in deep meditation-are also shown to be consequences of a specifically human creative capacity based on cross-modal translation between touch, vision, and audition. Religious-mystical experience is a full exteriorization and completion of our cross-modal synaesthetic capacity. Entailing an inherent "abstract" stress, it is defensively impacted in paranold and chronic schizophrenia. Of the traditional "developmental" models suggesting that religious-mystical experience is a regression to fetal, phylogeneric, or normally msked, ultra-rapid microgenetic/iconic stages, only the latter, as demonstrated by a reinterpretation of classical introspectionist research, is consistent with the abstract cognitive features of such experience and the view that all higher mental processes involve a disassembling and reuse of microgenetically preliminary perceptual and affective parterns. The more "primitive" the sensory quality, the more abstract its potential reference when synaesthetically embodied. Accordingly, the "reality status" of mystical experience is addressed. 'Partial support for this study came from a Brodc Universiry research grant. I express my gratitude to Paul Seligman, professor emeritus, Waterloo University and Honorary President of the C. G. Jung Foundation of Ontario, for his encouragement and example, and his detailed commentary on the draft of this article. Thanks are also due to Kate Friedlein for her careful reading of this work. Reprint requests should be addressed ro
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 2000
An overview of the phenomenology of numinous experience in mysticism, religious conversion, and p... more An overview of the phenomenology of numinous experience in mysticism, religious conversion, and psychosis, based on the intersection of transpersonal psychologies of spiritual development and psychodynamic perspectives , and considered from cognitive-developmental, personality, and socio-cultural perspectives
Internationa Journal of Transpersonal Studies , 2020
This series of papers on early anticipations of a spiritual New Age ends with Carl Jung's version... more This series of papers on early anticipations of a spiritual New Age ends with Carl Jung's version of a futural planetary-wide unus mundus rejoining person and cosmos, based on his psychoid linkage of quantum physics and consciousness, and especially on the neo-shamanic worldview emerging out of his spirit guided initiation in the more recently published Red Book. A cognitive-psychological re-evaluation of Jung's archetypal imagination, the metaphoricity of his alchemical writings, and a comparison of Jung and Levi-Strauss on mythological thinking all support a contemporary view of Jung's active imagination and mythic amplification as a spiritual intelligence based on a formal operations in affect, as also reflected in his use of the multi-perspectival synchronicities of the I-Ching. A reconsideration of Bourguignon on the larger relations between trance and social structure further supports the neo-shamanic nature of Jung's Aquarian Age expectations.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2019
The phenomenology of numinous or Being-experience in the later Heidegger is the focus in this thi... more The phenomenology of numinous or Being-experience in the later Heidegger is the focus in this third in a series of papers on a group of independent figures-also including Jung, Reich, Toynbee, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil-who beginning in the crisis years of the 1930's envisioned versions of a futural "New Age" spirituality to address a globalizing
F rom the perspective of the sociology of world religions developed by Max Weber (1963), figures ... more F rom the perspective of the sociology of world religions developed by Max Weber (1963), figures such as Nietzsche, Emerson, Jung, Heidegger, and Maslow-in their overlapping attempts at a broadly "naturalistic" understanding of spirituality-are exemplars of a contemporary "innerworldly" mysticism. It is "inner" or "this-worldly" in terms of their attempts to understand an experiential core of spirituality as a specifically human capacity. Inner-worldly mysticisms are directly cultivated while living within the everyday social world, in contrast to the ashrams, monasteries, or caves of the classical "other-worldly" mysticisms. Weber's colleague Ernst Troeltsch (1960) anticipated that naturalistically understood inner-worldly mysticisms would emerge as the "secret religion of the educated classes," consequent on the continuing secularization of the more prophetically based, mainstream Judeo-Christian tradition. This development is well illustrated in both "New Age" spiritualities and in the emergence of transpersonal psychology itself (Hunt, 2003). To paraphrase Weber on the Protestant Reformation as one source of the "spirit of capitalism,"we could now say that just as historical capitalism needed the ethical attitude to one's vocation as sacred, so our current society of individuals, autonomous and separate to the point of isolation, may not be fully liveable without the sense of presence, felt reality, or Being cultivated by the more contemplative spiritual traditions. However inevitable and needed this development, such a direct consciousness of the immediacy of Being seems especially vulnerable to the emotional trauma and frustration attendant on any radical personal openness in the midst of a less than supportive utilitarian society-and especially where vulnerabilities in sense of self and self esteem are so widespread. Weber, for instance, spoke of the attitude of "broken humility" associated with inner-worldly spirituality, while Jung saw dangers of a defensive, compensatory "inflation" in modern self-realization. It may not be an accident that recent transpersonal psychology has been increasingly exploring the close interrelationship between spiritual experience and character "metapathologies" related to narcissistic grandiosity, schizoid withdrawal, and despair (
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2018
An overview of Wilhelm Reich re-considered as a major precursor of transpersonal psychology, cen... more An overview of Wilhelm Reich re-considered as a major precursor of transpersonal psychology, centering on his final spiritual understanding of orgone energy, and the purgation-illumination of his later development and "dark night" crisis of his actual persecution and imprisonment,in the context of the perhaps inevitable spiritual meta-pathologies triggered by his own inner development in the context of those times.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2006
The relation between the phenomenologies of mystical experience and both ordinary perception, as ... more The relation between the phenomenologies of mystical experience and both ordinary perception, as understood by Gibson, metaphor as the basis of language and thought, as understood by Lakoff and Johnson, and the abstractions of modern physics are explored as a contemporary reformulation of the microcosm-macrocosm unites basic to traditional cultures.
Journal of Mind and Behavior, 2012
The existential-phenomenological approach of the early Heidegger and Max Scheler to religion as a... more The existential-phenomenological approach of the early Heidegger and Max Scheler to religion as an amplified empirical phenomenology of the human condition, combined with Heidegger's specific derivation of his Daseins-analysis from the Christianity of Eckart, Paul, and Kierkegaard, is shown to be broadly congruent with the contemporary transpersonal psychology of higher states of consciousness, largely based on Eastern meditative traditions. This descriptive transpersonal psychology of a mystical core to all religions based on the direct experience of presence or Being, as developed by Rudolf Otto and elaborated by Laski, Almaas, and others, is then applied to selected gospel narratives as a further step, past its beginnings in the early Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann, toward a reconstruction of specific numinous states in early Christianity. This derivation of facets of the numinous from their presumed doctrinal schematizations and/or amplifications places Christianity closer to the goals of the meditative traditions, and allows a more directly experiential understanding of doctrines of Christian redemption, loving compassion, and eternal life-as amplifications of the phenomenology of the inner forms of ordinary here and now consciousness, within which they are already foreshadowed.
Psychiatry, 1992
The dreams and lives of Freud and Jung exemplify in their reciprocal developments what Winnicott ... more The dreams and lives of Freud and Jung exemplify in their reciprocal developments what Winnicott would understand as the orientations and lines of development of Being and Doing as equally intrinsic to the human mind.
Journal of Consciousness Studies , 2009
Kant's account of the experience of the sublime in nature and the incommensurability of its bases... more Kant's account of the experience of the sublime in nature and the incommensurability of its bases in the two European traditions of philosophy that feed into modern cognitive psychology, the holism of Leibniz and the analytic reductionism of Locke, are used to develop a new theory of human nature in terms of developmental interactions between initially separate cognitive domains. More recent illustrations of this separation/interaction are found in debates over 'emergence' in modern science and theories of consciousness. Shifting from competitive epistemologies to a resulting ontology of human nature, the cognitive development of mind through childhood can itself be understood as multiple but necessarily incomplete fusions between person knowing ('theory of mind') and a thing/tool knowing ('naive physics'), based here on a Vygotskian model of their reciprocal internalizations, and leading into our ostensibly differentiated and humanly unique multiple adult intelligences. A consequence is that human consciousness, while based on these selective and
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2001
If consciousness emerges into ontological reality at some point in nature, as system complexity i... more If consciousness emerges into ontological reality at some point in nature, as system complexity increases, then it also 'submerges' at some adjoining point, as structures simplify. This has led some to posit a 'latent-consciousness' in what Bohr saw as the consciousness-like spontaneity of quantum phenomena. Yet to move on this basis to Whitehead's ontological pan-experientialism or to direct quantum explanations of consciousness (Hameroff and Penrose) faces serious epistemological limitations-perhaps being more unwittingly projective than genuinely explanatory. More reasonable would be an epistemological panexperientialism in the sense of the later James. Consciousness, as the ultimate lens and medium of all knowledge, is inseparable from the physical reality it would know, especially at the very limits of empirical observation in microphysics. 'Submerged' consciousness is better understood in Jamesian pragmatic terms than via assumed but unprovable ontologies. Approaches to consciousness in terms of quantum microphysics have often linked quantum field effects and states of consciousness in terms of their ostensibly shared features of holism, spontaneity, complementarity, and observational indeterminism (King, 1997; Rosenblum and Kuttner, 1999). However, these links can be understood either in terms of an ontology of what is real, or, more conservatively, in terms of an epistemology of what is knowable. If we take them as real, then a kind of proto-consciousness is being posited as part of quantum effects. This can be understood either as a reductionist explanation of consciousness itself, as in the original Hameroff-Penrose microtubule hypothesis, wherein consciousness is produced by quantum superimpositions in neuronal microtubules (Hameroff, 1994; Penrose, 1994), or in terms of a literal philosophical pan
Archives of General Psychiatry, 1976
First experimental study of introspective sensitization as the most direct opening to psychedelic... more First experimental study of introspective sensitization as the most direct opening to psychedelic alterations of consciousness
Review of General Psychology, 2007
Phenomenological, clinical, and neurocognitive levels of analysis are combined to understand the ... more Phenomenological, clinical, and neurocognitive levels of analysis are combined to understand the cognitive bases of spirituality and spiritual suffering. In particular, the "dark night of the soul" in classical mysticism, with its painful "metapathological" loss of felt meaning is compared with the anhedonias central to the negative symptoms of schizophrenia and schizotypicality. Paul Schilder's early understanding of instabilities in the body image, as our core sense of self, offers a key to both the disorganized hallucinatory syndromes of psychosis and to the relative enhancements of body image/ecological self in spirituality. Expanded versus deleted felt presence/ embodiment, as outwardly indexed in measures of physical balance and spatial abilities, becomes the general dimension underlying integrative versus disintegrative transformations of consciousness. "Dark night" suffering can be seen as a semantic satiation leading to a relative deletion of experienced presence in the context of its previous enhancement, a focalized version of the more general anhedonic despair shared by clinical schizotypy and aspects of a larger secularized culture.
Review of General Psychology, 2005
The relativity of theory and research in psychology
journal of mind and behavior, 1989
The mutual relevance of non ordinary states of consciousness to a general cognitive psychology of... more The mutual relevance of non ordinary states of consciousness to a general cognitive psychology of meaning
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2023
Bases for an Empirical Neo-Shamanism Numinous experience-as the felt sense of the sacred-evokes f... more Bases for an Empirical Neo-Shamanism Numinous experience-as the felt sense of the sacred-evokes feelings of allone unity, communality, humility, and healing. Its schematization in the absolutes of traditional religion can also be seen as all-encompassing symbolic unifications of an otherwise fragmented human life-world-as more analytically depicted in the life-world phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger. In both feeling and concept the numinous would be the semantic amplification of the more concrete organism-surround nonduality of non symbolic organisms-as reflected in a primary consciousness shared across Uexkuell's sentient animal umwelten and Gibson's "envelopes of flow." Husserl's phenomenology of passive synthesis and James on pure experience can be understood as intuiting the implicit forms underlying such a primary transspecies consciousness, as both differentiated into these concrete lifeworlds, to the level of the inferably sentient protozoa, and abstractly amplified as the human numinous. The latter, with its original social template in an ethically responsible shamanism, becomes similarly responsible in the contemporary context of a human caused global climate crisis for the care and conservation of that Spirit it both develops as such and accurately intuits as a universal is-like shared with all sentient beings.
Intellectica, 2011
The continuum of synesthesias is considered in the context of evolution, childhood development, a... more The continuum of synesthesias is considered in the context of evolution, childhood development, adult creativity, and related states of imaginative absorption, as well as the anthropology and sociology of "collective consciousness". In Part I synesthesias are considered as part of the mid-childhood development of metacognition, based on a Vygotskian model of the internalization of an earlier animism and physiognomic perception, and as the precursor for an adult capacity for imaginative absorption central to creativity, metaphor, and the synesthetically based "higher states of consciousness" in spontaneous mystical experience, meditation, and psychedelic states. Supporting research is presented on childhood precocities of a fundamental synesthetic imagination that expands the current neuroscience of classical synesthetes into a broader, more spontaneous, and open-ended continuum of introspective cross modal processes that constitute the human self referential consciousness of "felt meaning". In Part II Levi-Strauss" analysis of the cross modal and synesthetic lattices underlying the mythologies of native peoples and their traditional animation thereby of surrounding nature as a self reflective metaphoric mirror, is illustrated by its partial survival and simplification in the Chinese I-Ching. Jung"s psychological analysis of the I-Ching, as a device for metaphorically based creative insight and as a prototype for the felt "synchronicities" underlying paranormal experience, is further extended into a model for a synesthetically and metaphorically based "collective consciousness". This metaphorically rooted and coordinated social field is explicit in mythologically centered, shamanic peoples but rendered largely unconscious in modern societies that fail to further educate and train the first spontaneous synesthetic imaginings of mid-childhood.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2014
D eleuze , Gendlin, and Bion were all after a "what it is like" of thought, perhaps also entailin... more D eleuze , Gendlin, and Bion were all after a "what it is like" of thought, perhaps also entailing their shared density and circularity of descriptive prose, to be more linearly unpacked in what follows. Deleuze In his The Logic of Sense (1969/1990) Deleuze suggests that beneath the more traditional "images of thought," based on classification and logic (Aristotle) or resolution of paradox (Plato), there is a deeper, directly sensed coherence/incoherence, as the immediately felt singularity or "thisness" of the unfolding event. Before we can decide a more standard propositional truth or falsity, there is the question of whether our felt understanding
Internatioanal Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2013
The writings of the French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962) offer their own contribution ... more The writings of the French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962) offer their own contribution to the descriptive phenomenology of mystical and numinous states, as well as a version of the modern secular or this-worldly mysticism variously anticipated by Jung and Nietzsche, and a highly original sociology and social psychology of transpersonal experience, influenced by Max Weber, that helps to open an area not widely developed in recent studies. At the same time, the trauma and personal difficulties in Bataille's life serve as a stark example of the often distortive effects of spiritual metapathologies on inner development. Bataille's views of ecstatic states as entirely an immanent human capacity, in which he was greatly influenced by Nietzsche, offer an opportunity to address larger issues of the "truth value" of mystical states in contemporary transpersonal studies.
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1985
Recent criticisms of the place and function of "consciousness" in "cognitive science" are conside... more Recent criticisms of the place and function of "consciousness" in "cognitive science" are considered and rejected. Contrary to current orthodoxy subjective experience during abstract cognitive activity, especially when placed in its natural series with phenomenal accounts of so-called "altered states of consciousness," can provide unique and crucial evidence concerning just that core of "semantics" which eludes the automatized "syntax" of computer simulation. The "noetic" aspect of extreme altered states can be placed in relation to introspective descriptions of "insight." Various altered state fearuressynaesthesias, geometric/mandala imagery, reorganizations of "perceptual" dimcnsions and enhanced "self-referenceu-can be taken as direct "exteriorizations" of abstract symbolic processes as discussed by Neisser, Geschwind,
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1984
Traditional approaches to the psychology of religious-mystical and altered-state experience have ... more Traditional approaches to the psychology of religious-mystical and altered-state experience have divided between more psychoanalytic and psychiatric views that associate such experience with "schizophrenia," "regression," and "primitivity" and the more intuitive Jungian and transpersonalhumanistic assertions of a "higher" path of development ("self-actualization"). By considering the full range of empirical reports from mysticalmeditational, psychedelic, and schizophrenic settings, a "positive" cognitive psychology of the abstract symbolic processes underlying such states is developed-potentially reconciling those divergent approaches, explaining the place of these states at the center of culture in "primitive" and classical societies, and casting a unique light on the normally masked core of semantic processes. Features of the abstract, recombinatory, cross-modal operations posited by Neisser, Arnheim, Mead, and Geschwind as criterial for human symbolic capacity are located within the varieties of altered-state report and Rudolf Otto's phenemonology of the numinous. However, such an analysis only becomes powerful when the ostensibly "primitive," "negative," or "withdrawn" aspects of such experienceits association with phylogenetically primitive and defensive "tonic immobility," the subjective "death" or "annihilation" experience of catatonic schizophrenia, and the "white light of the void realization'' in deep meditation-are also shown to be consequences of a specifically human creative capacity based on cross-modal translation between touch, vision, and audition. Religious-mystical experience is a full exteriorization and completion of our cross-modal synaesthetic capacity. Entailing an inherent "abstract" stress, it is defensively impacted in paranold and chronic schizophrenia. Of the traditional "developmental" models suggesting that religious-mystical experience is a regression to fetal, phylogeneric, or normally msked, ultra-rapid microgenetic/iconic stages, only the latter, as demonstrated by a reinterpretation of classical introspectionist research, is consistent with the abstract cognitive features of such experience and the view that all higher mental processes involve a disassembling and reuse of microgenetically preliminary perceptual and affective parterns. The more "primitive" the sensory quality, the more abstract its potential reference when synaesthetically embodied. Accordingly, the "reality status" of mystical experience is addressed. 'Partial support for this study came from a Brodc Universiry research grant. I express my gratitude to Paul Seligman, professor emeritus, Waterloo University and Honorary President of the C. G. Jung Foundation of Ontario, for his encouragement and example, and his detailed commentary on the draft of this article. Thanks are also due to Kate Friedlein for her careful reading of this work. Reprint requests should be addressed ro
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 2000
An overview of the phenomenology of numinous experience in mysticism, religious conversion, and p... more An overview of the phenomenology of numinous experience in mysticism, religious conversion, and psychosis, based on the intersection of transpersonal psychologies of spiritual development and psychodynamic perspectives , and considered from cognitive-developmental, personality, and socio-cultural perspectives
Internationa Journal of Transpersonal Studies , 2020
This series of papers on early anticipations of a spiritual New Age ends with Carl Jung's version... more This series of papers on early anticipations of a spiritual New Age ends with Carl Jung's version of a futural planetary-wide unus mundus rejoining person and cosmos, based on his psychoid linkage of quantum physics and consciousness, and especially on the neo-shamanic worldview emerging out of his spirit guided initiation in the more recently published Red Book. A cognitive-psychological re-evaluation of Jung's archetypal imagination, the metaphoricity of his alchemical writings, and a comparison of Jung and Levi-Strauss on mythological thinking all support a contemporary view of Jung's active imagination and mythic amplification as a spiritual intelligence based on a formal operations in affect, as also reflected in his use of the multi-perspectival synchronicities of the I-Ching. A reconsideration of Bourguignon on the larger relations between trance and social structure further supports the neo-shamanic nature of Jung's Aquarian Age expectations.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2019
The phenomenology of numinous or Being-experience in the later Heidegger is the focus in this thi... more The phenomenology of numinous or Being-experience in the later Heidegger is the focus in this third in a series of papers on a group of independent figures-also including Jung, Reich, Toynbee, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil-who beginning in the crisis years of the 1930's envisioned versions of a futural "New Age" spirituality to address a globalizing
F rom the perspective of the sociology of world religions developed by Max Weber (1963), figures ... more F rom the perspective of the sociology of world religions developed by Max Weber (1963), figures such as Nietzsche, Emerson, Jung, Heidegger, and Maslow-in their overlapping attempts at a broadly "naturalistic" understanding of spirituality-are exemplars of a contemporary "innerworldly" mysticism. It is "inner" or "this-worldly" in terms of their attempts to understand an experiential core of spirituality as a specifically human capacity. Inner-worldly mysticisms are directly cultivated while living within the everyday social world, in contrast to the ashrams, monasteries, or caves of the classical "other-worldly" mysticisms. Weber's colleague Ernst Troeltsch (1960) anticipated that naturalistically understood inner-worldly mysticisms would emerge as the "secret religion of the educated classes," consequent on the continuing secularization of the more prophetically based, mainstream Judeo-Christian tradition. This development is well illustrated in both "New Age" spiritualities and in the emergence of transpersonal psychology itself (Hunt, 2003). To paraphrase Weber on the Protestant Reformation as one source of the "spirit of capitalism,"we could now say that just as historical capitalism needed the ethical attitude to one's vocation as sacred, so our current society of individuals, autonomous and separate to the point of isolation, may not be fully liveable without the sense of presence, felt reality, or Being cultivated by the more contemplative spiritual traditions. However inevitable and needed this development, such a direct consciousness of the immediacy of Being seems especially vulnerable to the emotional trauma and frustration attendant on any radical personal openness in the midst of a less than supportive utilitarian society-and especially where vulnerabilities in sense of self and self esteem are so widespread. Weber, for instance, spoke of the attitude of "broken humility" associated with inner-worldly spirituality, while Jung saw dangers of a defensive, compensatory "inflation" in modern self-realization. It may not be an accident that recent transpersonal psychology has been increasingly exploring the close interrelationship between spiritual experience and character "metapathologies" related to narcissistic grandiosity, schizoid withdrawal, and despair (
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2018
An overview of Wilhelm Reich re-considered as a major precursor of transpersonal psychology, cen... more An overview of Wilhelm Reich re-considered as a major precursor of transpersonal psychology, centering on his final spiritual understanding of orgone energy, and the purgation-illumination of his later development and "dark night" crisis of his actual persecution and imprisonment,in the context of the perhaps inevitable spiritual meta-pathologies triggered by his own inner development in the context of those times.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2006
The relation between the phenomenologies of mystical experience and both ordinary perception, as ... more The relation between the phenomenologies of mystical experience and both ordinary perception, as understood by Gibson, metaphor as the basis of language and thought, as understood by Lakoff and Johnson, and the abstractions of modern physics are explored as a contemporary reformulation of the microcosm-macrocosm unites basic to traditional cultures.
Journal of Mind and Behavior, 2012
The existential-phenomenological approach of the early Heidegger and Max Scheler to religion as a... more The existential-phenomenological approach of the early Heidegger and Max Scheler to religion as an amplified empirical phenomenology of the human condition, combined with Heidegger's specific derivation of his Daseins-analysis from the Christianity of Eckart, Paul, and Kierkegaard, is shown to be broadly congruent with the contemporary transpersonal psychology of higher states of consciousness, largely based on Eastern meditative traditions. This descriptive transpersonal psychology of a mystical core to all religions based on the direct experience of presence or Being, as developed by Rudolf Otto and elaborated by Laski, Almaas, and others, is then applied to selected gospel narratives as a further step, past its beginnings in the early Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann, toward a reconstruction of specific numinous states in early Christianity. This derivation of facets of the numinous from their presumed doctrinal schematizations and/or amplifications places Christianity closer to the goals of the meditative traditions, and allows a more directly experiential understanding of doctrines of Christian redemption, loving compassion, and eternal life-as amplifications of the phenomenology of the inner forms of ordinary here and now consciousness, within which they are already foreshadowed.
Psychiatry, 1992
The dreams and lives of Freud and Jung exemplify in their reciprocal developments what Winnicott ... more The dreams and lives of Freud and Jung exemplify in their reciprocal developments what Winnicott would understand as the orientations and lines of development of Being and Doing as equally intrinsic to the human mind.
Journal of Consciousness Studies , 2009
Kant's account of the experience of the sublime in nature and the incommensurability of its bases... more Kant's account of the experience of the sublime in nature and the incommensurability of its bases in the two European traditions of philosophy that feed into modern cognitive psychology, the holism of Leibniz and the analytic reductionism of Locke, are used to develop a new theory of human nature in terms of developmental interactions between initially separate cognitive domains. More recent illustrations of this separation/interaction are found in debates over 'emergence' in modern science and theories of consciousness. Shifting from competitive epistemologies to a resulting ontology of human nature, the cognitive development of mind through childhood can itself be understood as multiple but necessarily incomplete fusions between person knowing ('theory of mind') and a thing/tool knowing ('naive physics'), based here on a Vygotskian model of their reciprocal internalizations, and leading into our ostensibly differentiated and humanly unique multiple adult intelligences. A consequence is that human consciousness, while based on these selective and
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2001
If consciousness emerges into ontological reality at some point in nature, as system complexity i... more If consciousness emerges into ontological reality at some point in nature, as system complexity increases, then it also 'submerges' at some adjoining point, as structures simplify. This has led some to posit a 'latent-consciousness' in what Bohr saw as the consciousness-like spontaneity of quantum phenomena. Yet to move on this basis to Whitehead's ontological pan-experientialism or to direct quantum explanations of consciousness (Hameroff and Penrose) faces serious epistemological limitations-perhaps being more unwittingly projective than genuinely explanatory. More reasonable would be an epistemological panexperientialism in the sense of the later James. Consciousness, as the ultimate lens and medium of all knowledge, is inseparable from the physical reality it would know, especially at the very limits of empirical observation in microphysics. 'Submerged' consciousness is better understood in Jamesian pragmatic terms than via assumed but unprovable ontologies. Approaches to consciousness in terms of quantum microphysics have often linked quantum field effects and states of consciousness in terms of their ostensibly shared features of holism, spontaneity, complementarity, and observational indeterminism (King, 1997; Rosenblum and Kuttner, 1999). However, these links can be understood either in terms of an ontology of what is real, or, more conservatively, in terms of an epistemology of what is knowable. If we take them as real, then a kind of proto-consciousness is being posited as part of quantum effects. This can be understood either as a reductionist explanation of consciousness itself, as in the original Hameroff-Penrose microtubule hypothesis, wherein consciousness is produced by quantum superimpositions in neuronal microtubules (Hameroff, 1994; Penrose, 1994), or in terms of a literal philosophical pan
Archives of General Psychiatry, 1976
First experimental study of introspective sensitization as the most direct opening to psychedelic... more First experimental study of introspective sensitization as the most direct opening to psychedelic alterations of consciousness
Review of General Psychology, 2007
Phenomenological, clinical, and neurocognitive levels of analysis are combined to understand the ... more Phenomenological, clinical, and neurocognitive levels of analysis are combined to understand the cognitive bases of spirituality and spiritual suffering. In particular, the "dark night of the soul" in classical mysticism, with its painful "metapathological" loss of felt meaning is compared with the anhedonias central to the negative symptoms of schizophrenia and schizotypicality. Paul Schilder's early understanding of instabilities in the body image, as our core sense of self, offers a key to both the disorganized hallucinatory syndromes of psychosis and to the relative enhancements of body image/ecological self in spirituality. Expanded versus deleted felt presence/ embodiment, as outwardly indexed in measures of physical balance and spatial abilities, becomes the general dimension underlying integrative versus disintegrative transformations of consciousness. "Dark night" suffering can be seen as a semantic satiation leading to a relative deletion of experienced presence in the context of its previous enhancement, a focalized version of the more general anhedonic despair shared by clinical schizotypy and aspects of a larger secularized culture.
Review of General Psychology, 2005
The relativity of theory and research in psychology
journal of mind and behavior, 1989
The mutual relevance of non ordinary states of consciousness to a general cognitive psychology of... more The mutual relevance of non ordinary states of consciousness to a general cognitive psychology of meaning
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2023
Bases for an Empirical Neo-Shamanism Numinous experience-as the felt sense of the sacred-evokes f... more Bases for an Empirical Neo-Shamanism Numinous experience-as the felt sense of the sacred-evokes feelings of allone unity, communality, humility, and healing. Its schematization in the absolutes of traditional religion can also be seen as all-encompassing symbolic unifications of an otherwise fragmented human life-world-as more analytically depicted in the life-world phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger. In both feeling and concept the numinous would be the semantic amplification of the more concrete organism-surround nonduality of non symbolic organisms-as reflected in a primary consciousness shared across Uexkuell's sentient animal umwelten and Gibson's "envelopes of flow." Husserl's phenomenology of passive synthesis and James on pure experience can be understood as intuiting the implicit forms underlying such a primary transspecies consciousness, as both differentiated into these concrete lifeworlds, to the level of the inferably sentient protozoa, and abstractly amplified as the human numinous. The latter, with its original social template in an ethically responsible shamanism, becomes similarly responsible in the contemporary context of a human caused global climate crisis for the care and conservation of that Spirit it both develops as such and accurately intuits as a universal is-like shared with all sentient beings.
Intellectica, 2011
The continuum of synesthesias is considered in the context of evolution, childhood development, a... more The continuum of synesthesias is considered in the context of evolution, childhood development, adult creativity, and related states of imaginative absorption, as well as the anthropology and sociology of "collective consciousness". In Part I synesthesias are considered as part of the mid-childhood development of metacognition, based on a Vygotskian model of the internalization of an earlier animism and physiognomic perception, and as the precursor for an adult capacity for imaginative absorption central to creativity, metaphor, and the synesthetically based "higher states of consciousness" in spontaneous mystical experience, meditation, and psychedelic states. Supporting research is presented on childhood precocities of a fundamental synesthetic imagination that expands the current neuroscience of classical synesthetes into a broader, more spontaneous, and open-ended continuum of introspective cross modal processes that constitute the human self referential consciousness of "felt meaning". In Part II Levi-Strauss" analysis of the cross modal and synesthetic lattices underlying the mythologies of native peoples and their traditional animation thereby of surrounding nature as a self reflective metaphoric mirror, is illustrated by its partial survival and simplification in the Chinese I-Ching. Jung"s psychological analysis of the I-Ching, as a device for metaphorically based creative insight and as a prototype for the felt "synchronicities" underlying paranormal experience, is further extended into a model for a synesthetically and metaphorically based "collective consciousness". This metaphorically rooted and coordinated social field is explicit in mythologically centered, shamanic peoples but rendered largely unconscious in modern societies that fail to further educate and train the first spontaneous synesthetic imaginings of mid-childhood.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2014
D eleuze , Gendlin, and Bion were all after a "what it is like" of thought, perhaps also entailin... more D eleuze , Gendlin, and Bion were all after a "what it is like" of thought, perhaps also entailing their shared density and circularity of descriptive prose, to be more linearly unpacked in what follows. Deleuze In his The Logic of Sense (1969/1990) Deleuze suggests that beneath the more traditional "images of thought," based on classification and logic (Aristotle) or resolution of paradox (Plato), there is a deeper, directly sensed coherence/incoherence, as the immediately felt singularity or "thisness" of the unfolding event. Before we can decide a more standard propositional truth or falsity, there is the question of whether our felt understanding
Internatioanal Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2013
The writings of the French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962) offer their own contribution ... more The writings of the French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962) offer their own contribution to the descriptive phenomenology of mystical and numinous states, as well as a version of the modern secular or this-worldly mysticism variously anticipated by Jung and Nietzsche, and a highly original sociology and social psychology of transpersonal experience, influenced by Max Weber, that helps to open an area not widely developed in recent studies. At the same time, the trauma and personal difficulties in Bataille's life serve as a stark example of the often distortive effects of spiritual metapathologies on inner development. Bataille's views of ecstatic states as entirely an immanent human capacity, in which he was greatly influenced by Nietzsche, offer an opportunity to address larger issues of the "truth value" of mystical states in contemporary transpersonal studies.
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1989
George Gillespie's valuable observations on light and lattice imageries are placed in the con... more George Gillespie's valuable observations on light and lattice imageries are placed in the context of current research and theory on cognitive imagery (Kosslyn, Pylyshyn), ordinary and lucid dreaming, representational geometric imagery in scientific thought, the author's previous writings on altered states of consciousness, and Gibson's views on perception and imagery. Gillespie's reports show categories of imagery deconstruction and abstraction that link these areas and suggest an integrative model of the varieties of symbolic imagery.
Dreaming, 1993
Three exploratory studies offer a conceptual and methodological critique of recent approaches tha... more Three exploratory studies offer a conceptual and methodological critique of recent approaches that interpret dream bizarreness as an artifact of dream report length and so regard previous correlations of bizarreness with measures of waking imagination as an artifact of report length and verbal intelligence. Study I demonstrates that describing a bizarre pictorial stimulus will entail the use of more words than a mundane stimulus, so that it seems more plausible to conclude that bizarreness causes length and not the other way around. Study ll develops a more appropriate way of distinguishing words describing or consequent upon bizarreness from words describing mundane parts of the dream, with statistical differences between these two measures in three dream samples attesting to the information lost in previous studies controlling bizarreness for total report length. Study III replicates this effect with a sample of dreams from humanities majors and shows that measures of nonverbal imaginativeness (imaginative absorption, physiognomic cue test) are much stronger in predicting bizarreness, and both report length measures, than a measure of verbal ability (College Vocabulary Test). It is concluded that controlling measures of dream bizarreness for report Length may be a methodological error that falsely dilutes a defining dimension of dreaming.
Intellectica. Revue de l'Association pour la Recherche Cognitive, 2011
Synesthesies, imagination synesthesique et metaphore dans le developpement cognitif individuel et... more Synesthesies, imagination synesthesique et metaphore dans le developpement cognitif individuel et dans la conscience collective. Le continuum des synesthesies est etudie dans son rapport a l'evolution, au developpement de l'enfant, a la creativite adulte avec ses etats d'absorption imaginative, ainsi que vis-a-vis de l'anthropologie et de la sociologie de la «conscience collective ». Dans la partie 1, les phenomenes synesthesiques sont traites comme relevant du developpement de la metacognition au milieu de l'enfance, en reference au modele vygotskien d'internalisation de l'animisme primitif et de la perception physionomique, et en tant que precurseurs de l'absorption imaginative chez l'adulte – cette derniere correspondant a une disposition essentielle pour la creativite et la metaphore, ainsi que pour les etats synesthesiques de «conscience aigue » qui se produisent dans l'experience mystique spontanee, la meditation et les etats psychedeliques. Les recherches sur le caractere precoce d'une imagination synesthesique fondamentale chez l'enfant permettent d'elargir le cadre des travaux contemporains sur les synesthesies classiques en neurosciences en direction d‟ un continuum ouvert de processus intros-pectifs intermodaux qui fondent la conscience autoreferentielle de la «signification sentie » . Dans la partie 2, l'analyse levi-straussienne des dimensions intermodales et synesthesiques des mythologies des peuples primitifs et de l'animisme de la nature en tant que miroir metaphorique auto-reflechi est illustre par leur partielle survivance et simplification dans le I-Ching chinois. La conception jungienne du I-Ching, comme un dispositif au service d'une faculte de saisie creative (de nature metaphorique) et comme un prototype des «synchronies » constitutives de l'experience paranormale, est reprise et elargie dans le cadre d'un modele de la «conscience collective » de type synesthesique et metaphorique. Un tel champ socialement coordonne et metaphoriquement fonde est particulierement manifeste chez les peuples dont la vie est fortement structuree par les mythologies et les pratiques shamaniques ; il est en revanche largement inconscient dans les societes modernes ou rien n'est fait pour eduquer et exercer l'imagination synesthesique de l'enfant.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2009
... Recent laboratory research has converged on either a bilateral parietal/angular gyrus involve... more ... Recent laboratory research has converged on either a bilateral parietal/angular gyrus involvement (Mulvenna and Walsh, 2006; Paulescu et al., 1995; Ramachandran et al., 2004) or most recently on a primary right pari-etal basis (Esterman et al., 2006; Muggleton et al., 2007 ...
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2017
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2018
This is the second part of a consideration of the later Wilhelm Reich as anticipating a future pl... more This is the second part of a consideration of the later Wilhelm Reich as anticipating a future planetary-wide “New Age” form of this-worldly spirituality in ways overlapping with figures from the same era of Western crisis from the 1930s through the 1950s, including Jung, Toynbee, Bergson, Heidegger, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil. Where the first part of this treatment of Reich as transpersonal psychologist traced his evolution from his bio-energetic psychotherapy to a Weberian this-worldly mysticism of a universal life energy, his cosmic orgone, with its attendant features of conflicted “spiritual emergency,” this second paper seeks to further develop some of its still largely unrealized implications. These include the relation of his later system to neo-shamanism; transpersonal psychologies of presence, Being-experience, and self actualization; essentializing reinterpretations of the historical Jesus; evolutionary continuities in contemporary consciousness studies; emergent...
Empirical Studies of the Arts, 1999
Nineteen visual artists and eighteen actors were compared to twenty-one imaginative controls, mat... more Nineteen visual artists and eighteen actors were compared to twenty-one imaginative controls, matched for high levels of imaginative absorption, all subjects female. Creatives had mystical experiences significantly more frequently than controls. In particular, the visual artists reported having had significantly more current, positive altered states of consciousness (lucid and archetypal-mythological dreaming, out of body experiences, and waking mystical experiences). These findings, taken with the fact that the creatives did not show a significantly greater tendency toward psychopathology as indexed by the multiple measures of trauma and emotional conflict, suggest that contrary to the stereotype, creatives may not be driven by conflict so much as by intense and constructive states of consciousness. Most previous studies of productive creatives have used lower absorption controls, making it more difficult to locate specific factors that make imaginative subjects into productive art...
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2010
Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2016
There has long been a view of transpersonal states as abstract forms of social or emotional intel... more There has long been a view of transpersonal states as abstract forms of social or emotional intelligence (Scheler, Mead). While some have posited their post-formal developmental status, the more parsimonious view, expanding on the notion of multiple forms of intelligence, would be that these states show a more basic ‘‘formal operations’’ in feeling (despite Piaget’s own skepticism). Here transpersonal development is understood in terms of a decentering, reversibility, and progressive equilibrium among Ricoeur’s inner forms of personhood as their higher realization. The growing self-awareness of an inner ‘‘stream of consciousness’’ in adolescence (James, Vygotsky), with its resulting sense of existential aloneness, serves both as abstract impetus and egocentric barrier to this formal operations in affect. Thus its often intense psychodynamic conflict and wide variations in developmental timing – from occasional childhood precocity, to the adolescent vision quests of traditional cultu...
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2013
is chiefly known for his historical relativism and his critique of modern institutional power ove... more is chiefly known for his historical relativism and his critique of modern institutional power over the individual, his late writings, as further extended by Pierre Hadot, centered on the post-Socratic spiritual practices of the experience of here and now presence or Being in the Stoics, Epicureans, and Cynics. For Foucault the positive, expansive self-actualization common to these traditions, and contrasting with Christian self-renunciation, offers a guidance for a contemporary spiritual crisis in valuation of the person. For Hadot each of the post-Socratic traditions was based on the imitation and further development of key characteristics of Socrates, much as the charismatic figure of Jesus inspired the multiple forms of earliest Christianity. These post-Socratic practices of the Hellenistic-Roman era are examples of what Max Weber termed a this-or inner-worldly mysticism, in contrast to both the more other-worldly mysticisms of the East and the Judeo-Christian prophetical traditions, and saw as the most likely line of spiritual renewal in the modern secularized West. Examples of this form of spirituality are reflected in the Sufi influenced Gurdjieff-Ouspensky movement, Jung's Self, Maslow's self-actualization, and the Diamond-Heart approach of Almaas. Foucault and Hadot locate its specifically Western historical geneaology, which, given Jung's controversial concerns over adopting spiritualities outside one's own cultural tradition, may offer some context and direction amidst presently contending New Age and transpersonal spiritual understandings.
Sociology of Religion, 2005
... The Journal of Mind and Behavior 19, 379414, 1998, © Institute of Mind and Behavior ... For ... more ... The Journal of Mind and Behavior 19, 379414, 1998, © Institute of Mind and Behavior ... For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700 ... Bogomils and Cathars, Jewish Kab-balistic mysticism, and later Renaissance visionary magic, and fi ...
Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 2004
Journal of Consciousness Studies, Dec 31, 2004
... Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010 For personal use only -- not for reproduction Page 3. 200... more ... Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010 For personal use only -- not for reproduction Page 3. 2001; Weiss et al., 2001; Nunn et al., 2002; Gray et al., 2002, Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001; Ramachandran et al., 2004). This research ...
Dreaming, 1991
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Review of General Psychology, 2005
Page 1. Why Psychology Is/Is Not Traditional Science: The Self-Referential Bases of Psychological... more Page 1. Why Psychology Is/Is Not Traditional Science: The Self-Referential Bases of Psychological Research and Theory Harry T. Hunt Brock University The hyperspecialization, fragmentation, curious faddishness of major research ...
Annals of Theoretical Psychology, 1986
Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain, 1988
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1992
A questionnaire was developed to assess adult recall for a range of transpersonal experiences thr... more A questionnaire was developed to assess adult recall for a range of transpersonal experiences throughout childhood and adolescence (mystical experience, out-of-body experience, lucid dreams, archetypal dreams, ESP), as well as nightmares and night terrors as indicators of more conflicted, negative states. In two exploratory studies this questionnaire was administered to subjects with high estimated levels of early transpersonal experiences and practising meditators, with respective undergraduate controls. A cognitive skills/precocity model of early transpersonal experience was contrasted with a vulnerability of self model by comparisons of these groups on questionnaire categories, imaginative absorption, neuroticism, and visual-spatial skills, with some support found for both models depending on experience type, age of estimated recall, and adult meditative practice.
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1997
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