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THE REALITY BOX

what is more real than consciousness?


It has always fascinated me the moment of penetrating the light, the
precise moment when, standing in the audience, we see the stage
door open and a performer comes into the light that iluminates stage
and public; or on the other hand, observing this moment from the
interpreter’s perspective, the precise moment when, waiting in obscu-
rity, he sees the same door open and he steps into the light.
I realised a few years ago why this moment is so special to me.
Whathever the point of view, it is similar to the circumstances of
birth, with those of the passage through a limiar that separates a
protector and confining shelter from the possibilities and risks of a
world that exists beyond that LIMIT.
I notice that the moment of penetrating the light is also a powerful
metaphor for conscience, for the beginning of knowledge, for the
moment at once simple and exciting of the of the entrance of the self
in the world of the mind.

António Damásio, in The Feeling of What Happens (1999)


WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS ?

Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness or of being aware of an external object or something within
oneself. It has been defined variously in terms of sentience, awareness, qualia, subjectivity, the ability to
experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood or soul, the fact that there is something “that it
is like” to “have” or “be” it, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition,
many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.
As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: “Anything that
we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the
most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.”

Western philosophers, since the time of Descartes and Locke, have struggled to comprehend the nature of
consciousness and identify its essential properties. Issues of concern in the philosophy of consciousness
include whether the concept is fundamentally coherent; whether consciousness can ever be explained mech-
anistically; whether non-human consciousness exists and if so how it can be recognized; how consciousness
relates to language; whether consciousness can be understood in a way that does not require a dualistic dis-
tinction between mental and physical states or properties; and whether it may ever be possible for computing
machines like computers or robots to be conscious, a topic studied in the field of artificial intelligence.

Thanks to developments in technology over the past few decades, consciousness has become a significant
topic of interdisciplinary research in cognitive science, with significant contributions from fields such as
psychology, anthropology, neuropsychology and neuroscience. The primary focus is on understanding what
it means biologically and psychologically for information to be present in consciousness—that is, on deter-
mining the neural and psychological correlates of consciousness. The majority of experimental studies assess
consciousness in humans by asking subjects for a verbal report of their experiences. Issues of interest include
phenomena such as subliminal perception, blindsight, denial of impairment, and altered states of conscious-
ness produced by alcohol and other drugs, or spiritual or meditative techniques.

In medicine, consciousness is assessed by observing a patient’s arousal and responsiveness, and can be seen as
a continuum of states ranging from full alertness and comprehension, through disorientation, delirium, loss
of meaningful communication, and finally loss of movement in response to painful stimuli. Issues of practical
concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill, comatose, or anesthetized
people, and how to treat conditions in which consciousness is impaired or disrupted.
Meditation II Of the Nature of the Human Mind; and that it is more easily known than
the Body.

René Descartes, in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)

The Meditation of yesterday filled my mind with so many doubts that it is no longer in my power to forget
them. And yet I do not see in what manner I can resolve them; and, just as if I had all of a sudden fallen into
very deep water, I am so disconcerted that I can neither make certain of setting my feet on the bottom, nor
can I swim and so support myself on the surface. I shall nevertheless make an effort and follow anew the
same path as that on which I yesterday entered, i.e. I shall proceed by setting aside all that in which the least
doubt could be supposed to exist, just as if I had discovered that it was absolutely false; and I shall ever follow
in this road until I have met with something which is certain, or at least, if I can do nothing else, until I have
learned for certain that there is nothing in the world that is certain. Archimedes, in order that he might draw
the terrestrial globe out of its place, and transport it elsewhere, demanded only that one point should be fixed
and immoveable; in the same way I shall have the right to conceive high hopes if I am happy enough to dis-
cover one thing only which is certain and indubitable.
I suppose, then, that all the things that I see are false; I persuade myself that nothing has ever existed of all
that my fallacious memory represents to me. I consider that I possess no senses; I imagine that body, figure,
extension, movement and place are but the fictions of my mind. What, then, can be esteemed as true? Per-
haps nothing at all, unless that there is nothing in the world that is certain.
But how can I know there is not something different from those things that I have just considered, of which
one cannot have the slightest doubt? Is there not some God, or some other being by whatever name we call
it, who puts these reflections into my mind? That is not necessary, for is it not possible that I am capable of
producing them myself? I myself, am I not at least something? But I have already denied that I had senses
and body. Yet I hesitate, for what follows from that? Am I so dependent on body and senses that I cannot
exist without these? But I was persuaded that there was nothing in all the world, that there was no heaven, no
earth, that there were no minds, nor any bodies: was I not then likewise persuaded that I did not exist? Not at
all; of a surety I myself did exist since I persuaded myself of something [or merely because I thought of some-
thing]. But there is some deceiver or other, very powerful and very cunning, who ever employs his ingenuity
in deceiving me. Then without doubt I exist also if he deceives me, and let him deceive me as much as he will,
he can never cause me to be nothing so long as I think that I am something. So that after having reflected well
and carefully examined all things, we must come to the definite conclusion that this proposition: I am, I exist,
is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it.
that I am; and hence I must be careful to see that I do not imprudently take some other object in place of my-
self, and thus that I do not go astray in respect of this knowledge that I hold to be the most certain and most
evident of all that I have formerly learned. That is why I shall now consider anew what I believed myself to be
before I embarked upon these last reflections; and of my former opinions I shall withdraw all that might even
in a small degree be invalidated by the reasons which I have just brought forward, in order that there may be
nothing at all left beyond what is absolutely certain and indubitable.
What then did I formerly believe myself to be? Undoubtedly I believed myself to beaman. But what is a man?
Shall I say a reasonable animal? Certainly not; for then I should have to inquire what an animal is, and what
is reasonable; and thus from a single question I should insensibly fall into an infinitude of others more diffi-
cult; and I should not wish to waste the little time and leisure remaining to me in trying to unravel subtleties
like these. But I shall rather stop here to consider the thoughts which of themselves spring up in my mind,
and which were not inspired by anything beyond my own nature alone when I applied myself to the consid-
eration of my being. In the first place, then, I considered myself as having a face, hands, arms, and all that sys-
tem of members composed on bones and flesh as seen in a corpse which I designated by the name of body. In
addition to this I considered that I was nourished, that I walked, that I felt, and that I thought, and I referred
all these actions to the soul: but I did not stop to consider what the soul was, or if I did stop, I imagined that
it was something extremely rare and subtle like a wind, a flame, or an ether, which was spread throughout my
grosser parts. As to body I had no manner of doubt about its nature, but thought I had a very clear knowl-
edge of it; and if I had desired to explain it according to the notions that I had then formed of it, I should
have described it thus: By the body I understand all that which can be defined by a certain figure: something
which can be confined in a certain place, and which can fill a given space in such a way that every other body
will be excluded from it; which can be perceived either by touch, or by sight, or by hearing, or by taste, or by
smell: which can be moved in many ways not, in truth, by itself, but by something which is foreign to it, by
which it is touched [and from which it receives impressions]: for to have the power of self- movement, as also
of feeling or of thinking, I did not consider to appertain to the nature of body: on the contrary, I was rather
astonished to find that faculties similar to them existed in some bodies.
But I do not yet know clearly enough what I am, I who am certain
But what am I, now that I suppose that there is a certain genius which is extremely powerful, and, if I may say
so, malicious, who employs all his powers in deceiving me? Can I affirm that I possess the least of all those
things which I have just said pertain to the nature of body? I pause to consider, I revolve all these things in
my mind, and I find none of which I can say that it pertains to me. It would be tedious to stop to enumerate
them. Let us pass to the attributes of soul and see if there is any one which is in me? What of nutrition or
walking [the first mentioned]? But if it is so that I have no body it is also true that I can neither walk nor take
nourishment. Another attribute is sensation. But one cannot feel without body, and besides I have thought I
perceived many things during sleep that I recognized in my waking moments as not having been experienced
at all. What of thinking? I find here that thought is an attribute that belongs to me; it alone cannot be separat-
ed from me. I am, I exist, that is certain. But how often? Just when I think; for it might possibly be the case if
I ceased entirely to think, that I should likewise cease altogether to exist. I do not now admit anything which
is not necessarily true: to speak accurately I am not more than a thing which thinks, that is to say a mind or
a soul, or an understanding, or a reason, which are terms whose significance was formerly unknown to me. I
am, however, a real thing and really exist; but what thing? I have answered: a thing which thinks.
And what more? I shall exercise my imagination [in order to see if I am not something more]. I am not a col-
lection of members which we call the human body: I am not a subtle air distributed through these members,
I am not a wind, a fire, a vapour, a breath, nor anything at all which I can imagine or conceive; because I have
assumed that all these were nothing. Without changing that supposition I find that I only leave myself certain
of the fact that I am somewhat. But perhaps it is true that these same things which I supposed were non-ex-
istent because they are unknown to me, are really not different from the self which I know. I am not sure
about this, I shall not dispute about it now; I can only give judgment on things that are known to me. I know
that I exist, and I inquire what I am, I whom I know to exist. But it is very certain that the knowledge of my
existence taken in its precise significance does not depend on things whose existence is not yet known to me;
consequently it does not depend on those which I can feign in imagination. And indeed the very term feign
in imagination proves to me my error, for I really do this if I image myself a something, since to imagine is
nothing else than to contemplate the figure or image of a corporeal thing. But I already know for certain that
I am, and that it may be that all these images, and, speaking generally, all things that relate to the nature of
body are nothing but dreams [and chimeras]. For this reason I see clearly that I have as little reason to say, “I
shall stimulate my imagination in order to know more distinctly what I am,” than if I were to say, “I am now
awake, and I perceive somewhat that is real and true: but because I do not yet perceive it distinctly enough, I
shall go to sleep of express purpose, so that my dreams may represent the perception with greatest truth and
evidence.” And, thus, I know for certain that nothing of all that I can understand by means of my imagination
belongs to this knowledge which I have of myself, and that it is necessary to recall the mind from this mode
of thought with the utmost diligence in order that it may be able to know its own nature with perfect distinct-
ness.
But what then am I? A thing which thinks. What is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts, under-
stands, [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels.
Certainly it is no small matter if all these things pertain to my nature. But why should they not so pertain?
Am I not that being who now doubts nearly everything, who nevertheless understands certain things, who
affirms that one only is true, who denies all the others, who desires to know more, is averse from being
deceived, who imagines many things, sometimes indeed despite his will, and who perceives many likewise,
as by the intervention of the bodily organs? Is there nothing in all this which is as true as it is certain that I
exist, even though I should always sleep and though he who has given me being employed all his ingenuity
in deceiving me? Is there likewise any one of these attributes which can be distinguished from my thought,
or which might be said to be separated from myself? For it is so evident of itself that it is I who doubts, who
understands, and who desires, that there is no reason here to add anything to explain it. And I have certainly
the power of imagining likewise; for although it may happen (as I formerly supposed) that none of the things
which I imagine are true, nevertheless this power of imagining does not cease to be really in use, and it forms
part of my thought. Finally, I am the same who feels, that is to say, who perceives certain things, as by the
organs of sense, since in truth I see light, I hear noise, I feel heat. But it will be said that these phenomena are
false and that I am dreaming. Let it be so; still it is at least quite certain that it seems to me that I see light, that
I hear noise and that I feel heat. That cannot be false; properly speaking it is what is in me called feeling; and
used in this precise sense that is no other thing than thinking.
From this time I begin to know what I am with a little more clearness and distinction than before; but never-
theless it still seems to me, and I cannot prevent myself from thinking, that corporeal things, whose images
are framed by thought, which are tested by the senses, are much more distinctly known than that obscure
part of me which does not come under the imagination. Although really it is very strange to say that I know
and understand more distinctly these things whose existence seems to me dubious, which are unknown to
me, and which do not belong to me, than others of the truth of which I am convinced, which are known to
me and which pertain to my real nature, in a word, than myself. But I see clearly how the case stands: my
mind loves to wander, and cannot yet suffer itself to be retained within the just limits of truth. Very good, let
us once more give it the freest rein, so that, when afterwards we seize the proper occasion for pulling up, it
may the more easily be regulated and controlled.
Let us begin by considering the commonest matters, those which we believe to be the most distinctly com-
prehended, to wit, the bodies which we touch and see; not indeed bodies in general, for these general ideas
are usually a little more confused, but let us consider one body in particular. Let us take, for example, this
piece of wax: it has been taken quite freshly from the hive, and it has not yet lost the sweetness of the hon-
ey which it contains; it still retains somewhat of the odour of the flowers from which it has been culled; its
colour, its figure, its size are apparent; it is hard, cold, easily handled, and if you strike it with the finger, it
will emit a sound. Finally all the things which are requisite to cause us distinctly to recognize a body, are met
with in it. But notice that while I speak and approach the fire what remained of the taste is exhaled, the smell
evaporates, the colour alters, the figure is destroyed, the size increases, it becomes liquid, it heats, scarcely can
one handle it, and when one strikes it, no sound is emitted. Does the same wax remain after this change? We
must confess that it remains; none would judge otherwise. What then did I know so distinctly in this piece of
wax? It could certainly be nothing of all that the senses brought to my notice, since all these things which fall
under taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing, are found to be changed, and yet the same wax remains.
Perhaps it was what I now think, viz. that this wax was not that sweetness of honey, nor that agreeable scent
of flowers, nor that particular whiteness, nor that figure, nor that sound, but simply a body which a little
while before appeared to me as perceptible under these forms, and which is now perceptible under others.
But what, precisely, is it that I imagine when I form such conceptions? Let us attentively consider this, and,
abstracting from all that does not belong to the wax, let us see what remains. Certainly nothing remains
excepting a certain extended thing which is flexible and movable. But what is the meaning of flexible and
movable? Is it not that I imagine that this piece of wax being round is capable of becoming square and of
passing from a square to a triangular figure? No, certainly it is not that, since I imagine it admits of an infin-
itude of similar changes, and I nevertheless do not know how to compass the infinitude by my imagination,
and consequently this conception which I have of the wax is not brought about by the faculty of imagination.
What now is this extension? Is it not also unknown? For it becomes greater when the wax is melted, greater
when it is boiled, and greater still when the heat increases; and I should not conceive [clearly] according to
truth what wax is, if I did not think that even this piece that we are considering is capable of receiving more
variations in extension than I have ever imagined. We must then grant that I could not even understand
through the imagination what this piece of wax is, and that it is my mind alone which perceives it. I say this
piece of wax in particular, for as to wax in general it is yet clearer. But what is this piece of wax which cannot
be understood excepting by the [understanding or] mind? It is certainly the same that I see, touch, imagine,
and finally it is the same which I have always believed it to be from the beginning. But what must particularly
be observed is that its perception is neither an act of vision, nor of touch, nor of imagination, and has never
been such although it may have appeared formerly to be so, but only an intuition of the mind, which may be
imperfect and confused as it was formerly, or clear and distinct as it is at present, according as my attention is
more or less directed to the elements which are found in it, and of which it is composed.
Yet in the meantime I am greatly astonished when I consider [the great feebleness of mind] and its proneness
to fall [insensibly] into error; for although without giving expression to my thought I consider all this in my
own mind, words often impede me and I am almost deceived by the terms of ordinary language. For we say
that we see the same wax, if it is present, and not that we simply judge that it is the same from its having the
same colour and figure. From this I should conclude that I knew the wax by means of vision and not simply
by the intuition of the mind; unless by chance I remember that, when looking from a window and saying I
see men who pass in the street, I really do not see them, but infer that what I see is men, just as I say that I see
wax. And yet what do I see from the window but hats and coats which may cover automatic machines? Yet I
judge these to be men. And similarly solely by the faculty of judgment which rests in my mind, I comprehend
that which I believed I saw with my eyes.
A man who makes it his aim to raise his knowledge above the common should be ashamed to derive the
occasion for doubting from the forms of speech invented by the vulgar; I prefer to pass on and consider
whether I had a more evident and perfect conception of what the wax was when I first perceived it, and when
I believed I knew it by means of the external senses or at least by the common sense as it is called, that is to
say by the imaginative faculty, or whether my present conception is clearer now that I have most carefully
examined what it is, and in what way it can be known. It would certainly be absurd to doubt as to this. For
what was there in this first perception which was distinct? What was there which might not as well have been
perceived by any of the animals? But when I distinguish the wax from its external forms, and when, just as if
I had taken from it its vestments, I consider it quite naked, it is certain that although some error may still be
found in my judgment, I can nevertheless not perceive it thus without a human mind.
But finally what shall I say of this mind, that is, of myself, for up to this point I do not admit in myself any-
thing but mind? What then, I who seem to perceive this piece of wax so distinctly, do I not know myself, not
only with much more truth and certainty, but also with much more distinctness and clearness? For if I judge
that the wax is or exists from the fact that I see it, it certainly follows much more clearly that I am or that I
exist myself from the fact that I see it. For it may be that what I see is not really wax, it may also be that I do
not possess eyes with which to see anything; but it cannot be that when I see, or (for I no longer take account
of the distinction) when I think I see, that I myself who think am nought. So if I judge that the wax exists
from the fact that I touch it, the same thing will follow, to wit, that I am; and if I judge that my imagination,
or some other cause, whatever it is, persuades me that the wax exists, I shall still conclude the same. And
what I have here remarked of wax may be applied to all other things which are external to me [and which are
met with outside of me]. And further, if the [notion or] perception of wax has seemed to me clearer and more
distinct, not only after the sight or the touch, but also after many other causes have rendered it quite manifest
to me, with how much more [evidence] and distinctness must it be said that I now know myself, since all the
reasons which contribute to the knowledge of wax, or any other body whatever, are yet better proofs of the
nature of my mind! And there are so many other things in the mind itself which may contribute to the eluci-
dation of its nature, that those which depend on body such as these just mentioned, hardly merit being taken
into account.
But finally here I am, having insensibly reverted to the point I desired, for, since it is now manifest to me
that even bodies are not properly speaking known by the senses or by the faculty of imagination, but by
the understanding only, and since they are not known from the fact that they are seen or touched, but only
because they are understood, I see clearly that there is nothing which is easier for me to know than my mind.
But because it is difficult to rid oneself so promptly of an opinion to which one was accustomed for so long,
it will be well that I should halt a little at this point, so that by the length of my meditation I may more deeply
imprint on my memory this new knowledge.
The Doors of Perception (excerpt)
Aldous Huxley (1954)

It was in 1886 that the German pharmacologist, Louis Lewin, published the first systematic study of the cac-
tus, to which his own name was subsequently given. Anhalonium lewinii was new to science. To primitive re-
ligion and the Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest it was a friend of immemorially long standing.
Indeed, it was much more than a friend. In the words of one of the early Spanish visitors to the New World,
“they eat a root which they call peyote, and which they venerate as though it were a deity.”
Why they should have venerated it as a deity became apparent when such eminent psychologists as Jaensch,
Havelock Ellis and Weir Mitchell began their experiments with mescalin, the active principle of peyote. True,
they stopped short at a point well this side of idolatry; but all concurred in assigning to mescalin a position
among drugs of unique distinction. Administered in suitable doses, it changes the quality of consciousness
more profoundly and yet is less toxic than any other substance in the pharmacologist’s repertory.
Mescalin research has been going on sporadically ever since the days of Lewin and Havelock Ellis. Chemists
have not merely isolated the alkaloid; they have learned how to synthesize it, so that the supply no longer
depends on the sparse and intermittent crop of a desert cactus. Alienists have dosed themselves with mesca-
lin in the hope thereby of coming to a better, a first-hand, understanding of their patients’ mental processes.
Working unfortunately upon too few subjects within too narrow a range of circumstances, psychologists have
observed and catalogued some of the drug’s more striking effects. Neurologists and physiologists have found
out something about the mechanism of its action upon the central nervous system. And at least one Pro-
fessional philosopher has taken mescalin for the light it may throw on such ancient, unsolved riddles as the
place of mind in nature and the relationship between brain and consciousness.
There matters rested until, two or three years ago, a new and perhaps highly significant fact was observed.
Actually the fact had been staring everyone in the face for several decades; but nobody, as it happened, had
noticed it until a Young English psychiatrist, at present working in Canada, was struck by the close simi-
larity, in chemical composition, between mescalin and adrenalin. Further research revealed that lysergic
acid, an extremely potent hallucinogen derived from ergot, has a structural biochemical relationship to the
others. Then came the discovery that adrenochrome, which is a product of the decomposition of adrenalin,
can produce many of the symptoms observed in mescalin intoxication. But adrenochrome probably occurs
spontaneously in the human body. In other words, each one of us may be capable of manufacturing a chemi-
cal, minute doses of which are known to cause Profound changes in consciousness. Certain of these changes
are similar to those which occur in that most characteristic plague of the twentieth century, schizophrenia. Is
the mental disorder due to a chemical disorder? And is the chemical disorder due, in its turn, to psychologi-
cal distresses affecting the adrenals? It would be rash and premature to affirm it. The most we can say is that
some kind of a prima facie case has been made out. Meanwhile the clue is being systematically followed, the
sleuths - biochemists , psychiatrists, psychologists - are on the trail.
By a series of, for me, extremely fortunate circumstances I found myself, in the spring of 1953, squarely
athwart that trail. One of the sleuths had come on business to California. In spite of seventy years of mescalin
research, the psychological material at his disposal was still absurdly inadequate, and he was anxious to add
to it. I was on the spot and willing, indeed eager, to be a guinea pig. Thus it came about that, one bright May
morning, I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait
for the results.
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by our-
selves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desper-
ately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every
embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are
private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about
experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of
island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of inferential understanding
or even of mutual empathy or “feeling into.” Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we
can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pick-
wickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even
nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are
so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of
memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The
things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.
To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as
they see themselves. But what if these others belong to a different species and inhabit a radically alien uni-
verse? For example, how can the sane get to know what it actually feels like to be mad? Or, short of being
born again as a visionary, a medium, or a musical genius, how can we ever visit the worlds which, to Blake,
to Swedenborg, to Johann Sebastian Bach, were home? And how can a man at the extreme limits of ectomor-
phy and cerebrotonia ever put himself in the place of one at the limits of endomorphy and viscerotonia, or,
except within certain circumscribed areas, share the feelings of one who stands at the limits of mesomorphy
and somatotonia? To the unmitigated behaviorist such questions, I suppose, are meaningless. But for those
who theoretically believe what in practice they know to be true - namely, that there is an inside to experience
as well as an outside - the problems posed are real problems, all the more grave for being, some completely
insoluble, some soluble only in exceptional circumstances and by methods not available to everyone. Thus,
it seems virtually certain that I shall never know what it feels like to be Sir John Falstaff or Joe Louis. On the
other hand, it had always seemed to me possible that, through hypnosis, for example, or autohypnosis, by
means of systematic meditation, or else by taking the appropriate drug, I might so change my ordinary mode
of consciousness as to be able to know, from the inside, what the visionary, the medium, even the mystic were
talking about.
From what I had read of the mescalin experience I was convinced in advance that the drug would admit me,
at least for a few hours, into the kind of inner world described by Blake and AE. But what I had expected
did not happen. I had expected to lie with my eyes shut, looking at visions of many- colored geometries, of
animated architectures, rich with gems and fabulously lovely, of landscapes with heroic figures, of symbolic
dramas trembling perpetually on the verge of the ultimate revelation. But I had not reckoned, it was evident,
with the idiosyncrasies of my mental make-up, the facts of my temperament, training and habits.
I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant
words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep.
When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. By an
effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon, of how the Lun-
garno used to look before the bridges were destroyed, of the Bayswater Road when the only buses were green
and tiny and drawn by aged horses at three and a half miles an hour. But such images have little substance
and absolutely no autonomous life of their own. They stand to real, perceived objects in the same relation as
Homer’s ghosts stood to the men of flesh and blood, who came to visit them in the shades. Only when I have
a high temperature do my mental images come to independent life. To those in whom the faculty of visuali-
zation is strong my inner world must seem curiously drab, limited and uninteresting. This was the world - a
poor thing but my own - which I expected to see transformed into something completely unlike itself.
The change which actually took place in that world was in no sense revolutionary. Half an hour after swallow-
ing the drug I became aware of a slow dance of golden lights. A little later there were sumptuous red surfaces
swelling and expanding from bright nodes of energy that vibrated with a continuously changing, patterned
life. At another time the closing of my eyes revealed a complex of gray structures, within which pale bluish
spheres kept emerging into intense solidity and, having emerged, would slide noiselessly upwards, out of
sight. But at no time were there faces or forms of men or animals. I saw no landscapes, no enormous spaces,
no magical growth and metamorphosis of buildings, nothing remotely like a drama or a parable. The other
world to which mescalin admitted me was not the world of visions; it existed out there, in what I could see
with my eyes open. The great change was in the realm of objective fact. What had happened to my subjective
universe was relatively unimportant.
I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass
vase. The vase contained only three flowers-a full-blown Belie of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every
petal’s base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end
of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke
all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of
its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was
seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation-the miracle, moment by moment, of naked exist-
ence.
“Is it agreeable?” somebody asked. (During this Part of the experiment, all conversations were recorded on a
dictating machine, and it has been possible for me to refresh my memory of what was said.)
“Neither agreeable nor disagreeable,” I answered. “it just is.”
Istigkeit - wasn’t that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? “Is-ness.” The Being of Platonic philosophy -
except that Plate seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becom-
ing and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen
a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the signif-
icance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so
intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were - a transience that was yet eternal
life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in
which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.
citações Carl
Jung
ART AND THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Allan Combs

The idea that consciousness, or experience, has evolved and may continue to evolve through time and histo-
ry has been explored in one way or another by many philosophers and pioneers of the inner life, but is seen
nowhere more clearly than in the history of art.2 No one understood this better than the poet and cultural
historian Jean Gebser, who contributed perhaps more than any other scholar to understanding the history
of human consciousness. Gebser’s explorations of art and history beginning with a sudden recognition that
art at the fin de siècle represented a new kind of consciousness, a new way of seeing and experiencing reality.
With this in mind he searched backward through history to uncover a whole series of “structures of con-
sciousness” that had emerged in order, starting with the earliest humans. Each structure represented a major
way of understanding the world; though magic, myth, rational thought, or in an integral way which I will
have more to say about below.

The most ancient of these forms of experience was the archaic structure of consciousness, perhaps 200,000
years into our past. This structure, transitional from the animal, is now removed so far from our modern ex-
perience that it is difficult to get a clear impression of it. The archaic structure was followed by what appears
to be the first completely human form of experience, a form that Gebser termed the magical structure. Begin-
ning roughly 50,000 to 100,000 years ago it was characterized by an almost complete sense of space and time
as present in each moment, and an identity with the group or tribe as contrasted with the later evolution of a
sense of self as unique and individual. Indeed, the kind of personal identity we today take for granted would
not appear until much later in history.
The earliest human art seems to come from this period. Perhaps its most impressive representatives are found
the grand Paleolithic cave sanctuaries of southern Europe such as Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain.
These images exhibit a vigor and simplicity that has not been seen since. Their origins and purpose are largely
a mystery, though there are many theories. Some believe the artists to have been women, some teens, some
think the work was done by shamans. Perhaps the most authoritative is South African rock art expert David
Lewis-Williams’3 suggestion that these frolicking animal figures represent an underworld of animal spirits,
seen on the walls of caves like looking into a great aquarium tank to observe the undersea creatures that in-
habit the realms beyond.
Moving forward in time to roughly the onset of the agricultural revolution, around 10,000 BCE, the next
great structure of consciousness discovered by Gebser was the mythic form. In mythic consciousness the
great questions concerning the meaning of life and death, the origin and fate of the world, and for each of
us our place in it, are answered by grand overarching mythic narratives. The mythic world is ruled by grand
gods and goddesses rather than the local spirits of the streams and forests that inhabit the worlds of magical
consciousness.
Now, according to Gebser, each great structure of consciousness remains with us as history moves forward,
and so mythic consciousness continues even today as the root of the religious experience. Gebser believed,
and do I as well, that these earlier structures of experience were in no way inferior to modern rational con-
sciousness, and without them our modern lives today would become a kind of rational wasteland.
Today we celebrate the mythic consciousness more for the grand epics and stories it produced, such a the
Iliad and Odyssey, than for its visual arts, though many of the great visual works of art of the mental structure
to follow represent mythic themes as we will soon see. Among the images produced by the mythic structure,
however, are the graceful figures found on the walls of the old Minoan palace at Knossos, perhaps the last
major goddess centered civilization.
The mental structure of consciousness arose in significant part with the Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, the
first people in the Western world who attempted to answer basic questions about life and the cosmos through
reasoning and logic. With the exception of a regression back to mythic and magic forms of consciousness
during the Middle Ages, we still live with the mental structure as our dominant mode of experience. When
we need answers to how and why things happen, and how to confront or change them, we turn to reason, sci-
ence, and economics, rather than divination, shamanism, and ritual, though these have not been left behind
entirely.
Mental consciousness, the next major form of experience, came into full bloom during the Golden Age of
Greece (roughly 500 to 300 BCE), which produced some of the finest art in the entire catalogue of human
achievement. Though the great works of Greek sculpture at first appear to represent real people in various
poses, in fact the proportions, for example, of the lengths of the arms, legs, and torso, were worked out with
mathematical precision to correspond to the existing theories of the ideal dimensions of the body. They are
brilliant but completely rational productions.
The Renaissance brought an entirely new dimension to the human perception, which played an important
role in both the art and thought of that period. This was a keen sense of perspective. It is not to say that the
ancients had no awareness of visual depth or distance, but the fact is that the sense of standing at one point
in relation to an object of art, say, a painting, and seeing its content in depth from that exact position, was
and entirely new aspect of the human experience. It was a an awakening to a new dimension of vision and of
reality. And it was consciously celebrated in much Renaissance art.

The idea of horizontal evolution of consciousness is suggested by the fact that over the course of human his-
tory there have arisen an increasing number of ways we human beings have come to experience the cosmos.
In plain language, the number of points of view from which a modern person can see and understand the
world is much greater than those available to our ancestors. As more perspectives have become possible the
net sum of human experience has become richer.

Consider the somewhat startling fact that the distinction we commonly make between our “inner” percep-
tions of thoughts, memories, and feelings, and our experience of the “outer” external world, has not always
been with us. Ancient philosophers and writers virtually never addressed to the presence of any kind of in-
ternal subjective actor as the owner of their thoughts, memories, and feelings.4 In the Iliad and Odyssey, for
instance, everything that we would today attribute to the inner life comes from the outside, often through the
mouths of gods or goddesses.

Ancient tales from around the world include exchanges between human beings and gods or goddesses. This,
plus the absence of any record of inner dialogue, led psychologist Julian Jaynes in 1976 to publish his now
famous book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind5, in which he argued
that the voices heard by ancients were actually hallucinations of the right hemisphere of the brain. This idea
holds little credibility today, but we are still left with the enigma of why intelligent men from Plato to Marcus
Aurelius failed to identify an inner actor as the source of their thoughts. A notable exception coming near the
end of the Roman Empire was St. Augustine of Hippo, whose inwardly centered Confessions seems amazing-
ly familiar to the modern mind.

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West around end of the 5th century personal diaries and journals
disappeared entirely and did not give any hint of the presence of inner subjective actors until the rise of the
Italian Renaissance. Most notably in the 14th century journals of Petrarch6 we find a return of self-reflec-
tion that soon began to spread. It was not until the publication of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy
in 1641, however, that the distinction between an inner world of thought and feeling and an outer world of
physical objects and objective reality was systematically defined. For this reason Descartes is sometimes said
to have “invented” the modern notion of consciousness as an inner dimension of experience.

With Descartes we can say that the world of human experience had become divided into two realms, or two
perspectives, an inner perspective and an outer perspective. This is an important instance of what I mean by
the horizontal evolution of consciousness, one in which a bifurcation in perspective has created two worlds of
experience out of one original world.

Let’s look a bit more closely at exactly what this all means. Suppose we go for a walk in the forest and find
ourselves confronted by a bear! Our immediate perception is that the bear is dangerous and frightening. That
is, we experience the qualities of danger and threat to reside in the bear. In this way they are experienced
outside ourselves as qualities of the bear. But wait a minute. Suddenly we notice that this animal is not a bear
at all but a huge friendly Saint Bernard dog. We now feel silly and realize on reflection that our fear resided
in yourselves all along and not in the animal. Freed of the fear of being attacked by a bear we are able to shift
your perspective to our inner experience and see that the fear was you own all along. This is a shift many
modern adults can make, but was probably not available to ancient people any more than it is available to
children today, who would simply experience the animal, once a bear and now a dog, as no longer frighten-
ing.

Reflecting on all this we realize that to observe the inner movement of our own thoughts and feelings we
must have a place to stand, a perspective that lends us the necessary objectivity to see our own inner stream
of experience. This perspective gives us what Wilber refers as “THE LOOK OF THE FEEL.” The develop-
ment of what Gebser termed perspectival consciousness during the Renaissance, the perception of being in a
particular location in space, made it possible for Descartes, in his Meditations, to adopt an “objective” stance,
even in his own mind, from which to view the realities of his inner life.

Interestingly, the inner and outer dimensions of our own internal experience mirror a larger relationship
between the inner subjectivity we all experience and the outer physical world in which we live. In fact, it is
only from the view of inner experience that objective outer experience solidifies into the concrete objective
world. This in mind, it is not surprising that materialism appeared full-blown only after Descartes created the
division of the cosmos into an inside, or “consciousness,” and an outside, or matter; the latter as we have seen,
made possible by the presence of perspectival consciousness. Descartes, and subsequently Newton, were ab-
solute materialists where the physical world was concerned, and believed in a theory of atoms by which tiny
solid particles interact and stick together because they are covered with little hooked bristles like nettles or
Velcro.

Materialistic science became widely accepted among European intellectuals during the 17th century Age of
Reason, at least in part because the physical world had acquired a new objectivity when placed beside Des-
cartes’ recently discovered, and separated, inner reality. In surprising contrast, it was not for another 200
years that a dialectic between the inner and outer aspects of matter itself came onto the scene, allowing scien-
tists began to look into the interior of matter itself. In 1925 while vacationing on the treeless island of Helgo-
land, where he enjoyed a thankful respite from a severe attack of hay fever, the brilliant young mathematician
Werner Heisenberg worked out the matrix algebra that would become foundational to the newly emerging
field of quantum mechanics.

At this point in history conceptual interiors of objective exteriors were not yet well crystallized in human
experience. Indeed, almost immediately the Danish physicist Niels Bohr developed an objective “Copenha-
gen Interpretation” of quantum mechanics which became widely accepted and, in a nutshell, stated that the
strange events depicted in the mathematics of quantum mechanics should be taken only as predictive of con-
crete facts in the laboratory  and not as representing actual realities interior to matter. This interpretation was
consistent with the prevalent philosophy of Logical Positivism, which clamed that all scientific statements
must be understood strictly in terms of objective observations.

It was not until roughly the 1960s that physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers, began to revisit the
question of quantum physics with the notion that its strange mathematics might actually depict something
real. When this happened the top blew off the whole field and physicists and philosophers began to examine
the deep mysteries it held. String Theory is one of the products of this examination, and has often criticized
as offering no testable laboratory implications whatsoever. In other words, it is only about the inside of matter
and has no outside parts at all, thus giving virtually no testable implications in the laboratory. It is the very
nemesis of Logical Positivism.

Twentieth century physics has benefited greatly by increasingly flexible perspectives into the inner nature of
matter. Many other fields have experienced similar transformations in the perspectives as well, examining the
personal and inner dimensions of experience as well as its outer dimension. One way to understand these is
in terms of a form of horizontal evolution of consciousness.

The history of art from the Renaissance until the turn of the 20th century is complex and variegated, but for
the most part can said to reflect classical ideals in one form or another; formal and restrained work exhibiting
a high regard for traditional themes, often from classical Greece or Rome, as well as many Christian motifs.
Full-fledged realism did not appear in the arts, however, until well into the 19th century, almost concurrently
with the discovery of the interior of matter. Speaking very roughly, it seems that the fin de siècle was a pivotal
time in human history when inner and outer perspectives began to appear clearly in human experience and
express themselves in many forms.

The objectification of the material world through artistic realism began in France as early as the mid 1800s,
and during the following decades became a clear and visible influence. Edward Manet’s Olympia is a promi-
nent and influential example, and can be contrasted with many reclining nudes that had been painted during
the preceding centuries. One of the earliest of these was Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, a work done as a wed-
ding present for a friend, and depicting the reclining nude as a classically idealized figure.
It was during the year 1900 that Paul Cézanne, said to be “the first phenomenologist of art,” labored in quite
a different direction to paint Mont Ste-Victoire exactly as it is experienced by the viewer. Thus he strove to
reproduce on canvas the essence of the subjective experience of the artist looking at the mountain. Similar
efforts, though less exacting, had been underway since the 1860s by French impressionists such as Claude
Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas, and even earlier by the British artist, J. M.
W. Turner.

By the 1920s surrealism became a significant movement in the visual arts, music, theater, and literature, ex-
pressing innermost conscious and even unconscious processes of thought and the mind. Perhaps best known
among surrealist artists is Salvador Dali, while other notables included the Spanish painter Joan Miro and the
German-French sculptor and poet Jean Arp. These artists were dealing with the deep interior of the human
psyche, but framing their material in free-form artistic styles that indicate a significant level of subjective
detachment as well.

Surprisingly little attention was given to the inner dimension of shared or group experience. Certainly shared
or collective consciousness is not new to human experience. The German-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber
had published his celebrated essay, Ich und Du (I and Thou) in 1923, examining the intersubjective depths
experienced by persons sharing authentic relationships. Two French artists who celebrated intersubjectivi-
ty were Henri Matisse with his images of dancers, and Marc Chagall, who seemed caught up with a love for
fantasy and romance.

All this in the balance, it seems that sometime around turn of the 20th century the ability of artists to inten-
tionally shift between perspectives increased dramatically. Realism, as seen in Manet’s Olympia required a
consciously fixed perception of an external objective world so as not to contaminate the work with elements
of fantasy and imagination. Cézanne’s painting of Mount Sainte-Victoire was an intentional effort to depict
the mountain straight from the inner experience of the observer. Impressionism was seeking the same view,
but in a less analytic style. Soon after these artists a variety of expressionist schools such as surrealism were
digging into the depths of human psyche.

Pablo Picasso was remarkable for his fluent ability to represent multiple perspectives of the same physical
object while working these into abstract aesthetic forms. His paintings, such as his 1937 Guernica8, can be
said to be truly integral in their representation of multiple perspectives within a single experiential frame. In
this masterpiece we seem to step out of any limited point of observation to experience the terrible carnage of
Guernica in multiple frames, as if superimposed over each other in time and space.

Certain contemporary artists such as Mark Tansey seem to have a gift for exploiting multiple frames of refer-
ence. His work, 1981 work, The Innocent Eye Test, for instance, depicts a cow viewing a painting of two other
cows apparently relaxing by a tree, one standing and the other laying down while looking out of the painting
at the “real” cow. Nearby several middle-aged men in black suits look on, and someone in a lab coat is taking
notes. This all appears to take place in an art gallery with one of Monet’s paintings of a hay stack along the
wall in the background. It is difficult to count the number of inner and outer perspectives hinted at in this
work, but one thing for sure is that the artist intended for us to be aware of them.

Considering art created during the past two or three decades it is my own feeling that there is an increas-
ing tendency for at least certain works of visual art, theater, literature, and music to invite us into an artistic
moment in which we become aware of actually being conscious in the art experience. Perhaps this is the
meaning of Tansey’s The Innocent Eye Test. For my part, minimalist works such as Mark Rothko’s nearly
empty canvases seem to invite us to be aware of ourselves in the act of standing before them. Giving these
works titles such as #20 discourages the viewer from trying to read them as representational or even abstract
objects, and encourages us to simply experience the moment in their presence. Likewise, the productions of
the German performance artist and shaman Joseph Beuys seem to invite us into self-reflection rather than to-
ward interpretations of his creations. For his 1974 performance piece, I Like America and America Likes Me,
he arrived at the John F. Kennedy Airport wrapped in felt and was carried by ambulance to an art museum
where he spent a week in a large cage with a live coyote. This performance had something to do with his love
for animals, but no attempt to put a simple or even complex interpretation on it seems successful. Basically,
the event, which you can now see as a streaming video, seems to invite us into an altered sense of ourselves in
relationship to the coyote and the artist hidden in his felt blanket.

The thread of conscious experience as an intentional aspect of art can be traced in numerous contemporary
art shows, books, and performance works dedicated to just this topic. What is remarkable about all this is the
fluid perspective explicit or implicit in many forms of modern art. From the contemplative sounds of Pauline
Oliveros’ Deep Listening; to art exhibits such as the University of Kentucky Art Museum’s glass and pottery
show, Opening the Gates of Consciousness; to San Francisco’s 1999 CCAC Institute exhibit, Searchlight:
Consciousness at the Millennium actively exploring “conscious art” that encourages the viewer to be aware of
his or her own experience in the presence of these works, one cannot help but be impressed at the ease with
which contemporary artists such as Tansey play with experiential perspectives the way Picasso played with
spatial ones. Consistent with this line of thinking the contemporary Danish artist Olafur Eliasson describes
his art’s ultimate goal as creating a state of self-awareness and reflection which encourages us to you to “See
yourself seeing yourself.”

It would seem that the turn of the 21st century, like the turn of the 20th century before it, has brought fun-
damental shifts in the way we see and understand the world. In these shifts we see the appearance of a new
integral form of consciousness, a horizontal articulation and integration of perspectives unimagined even a
few decades ago. In this way emerging 21st century consciousness embraces a nimbleness that allows it access
to aspects of the cosmos unimagined by our ancestors.
Ways of seeing (excerpt)
John Berger

The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe. In the Middle Ages when men be-
lieved in the physical existence of Hell the sight of fire must have meant something different from what it
means today. Nevertheless their idea of Hell owed a lot to the sight of fire consuming and the ashes remaining
- as well as to their experience of the pain of burns.

When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a
completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate.

Yet this seeing which comes before words, and can never be quite covered by them, is not a question of
mechanically reacting to stimuli. (It can only be thought of in this way if one isolates the small part of the
process which concerns the eye’s retina.) We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result
of this act, what we see is brought within our reach - though not necessarily within arm’s reach. To touch
something is to situate oneself in relation to it. (Close your eyes, move round the room notice how the faculty
of touch is like a static, limited form of sight). We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at a rela-
tion between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding
things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.
Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combines with our own eye
to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world.
If we aceppt that we can see that hill over there, we propose that from that hill we can be seen. The reciprocal
nature of vision is more fundamental than that of spoken dialogue. And often dialogue is an attempt to
verbalize this -an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, ’you see things’, and an attempt to
discover how “he sees things”. In this sense, all images are man made.

An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced, it is an appearance, or a set of appearances,
which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved - for a
few moments or a few centuries. Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs
are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however
slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights. This is true even in
the most casual family snapshot. The photographer’s way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject. The
painter’s way of seeing is reconstituted by the marks he makes on the canvas or paper. Yet, although every
image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way
of seeing.
The Image World (excerpt)
Susan Sontag

Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images; and philosophers since Plato have tried to loosen our
dependence on images by evoking the standard of an image-free way of apprehending the real. But when, in the mid-nineteenth
century, the standard finally seemed attainable, the retreat of old religious and political illusions before the advance of humanis-
tic and scientific thinking did not—as anticipated—create mass defections to the real. On the contrary, the new age of unbelief
strengthened the allegiance to images. The credence that could no longer be given to realities understood in the form of images was
now being given to realities understood to be images, illusions. In the preface to the second edition (1843) of The Essence of Chris-
tianity, Feuerbach observes about “our era” that it “prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the
reality, appearance to being”—while being aware of doing just that. And his premonitory complaint has been transformed in the
twentieth century into a widely agreed-on diagnosis: that a society becomes “modern” when one of its chief activities is producing
and consuming images, when images that have extraordinary powers to determine our demands upon reality and are themselves
coveted substitutes for firsthand experience become indispensable to the health of the economy, the stability of the polity, and the
pursuit of private happiness.
Feuerbach’s words—he is writing a few years after the invention of the camera—seem, more specifically, a presentiment of the
impact of photography. For the images that have virtually unlimited authority in a modern society are mainly photographic images;
and the scope of that authority stems from the properties peculiar to images taken by cameras.
Such images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an
interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. While a paint-
ing, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph
is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects)—a material vestige of its subject in a way that
no painting can be. Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare
or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the
photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the hypothetical
photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a
photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.
Most contemporary expressions of concern that an image-world is replacing the real one continue to echo, as Feuerbach did, the
Platonic depreciation of the image: true insofar as it resembles something real, sham because it is no more than a resemblance.
But this venerable naïve realism is somewhat beside the point in the era of photographic images, for its blunt contrast between the
image (“copy”) and the thing depicted (the “original”)—which Plato repeatedly illustrates with the example of a painting—does
not fit a photograph in so simple a way. Neither does the contrast help in understanding image-making at its origins, when it was
a practical, magical activity, a means of appropriating or gaining power over something. The further back we go in history, as E. H.
Gombrich has observed, the less sharp is the distinction between images and real things; in primitive societies, the thing and its
image were simply two different, that is, physically distinct, manifestations of the same energy or spirit. Hence, the supposed effica-
cy of images in propitiating and gaining control over powerful presences. Those powers, those presences were present in them.
Simone Beauvoir (2º pa

Nietzche...
aragrafo)

But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words.
It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we
explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact
that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and
what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We
know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the
explanation, never quite fits the sight. The Surrealist painter Nlag-
ritte commented on this always-present gap between words and
seeing in a painting called The Key of Dreams.

John Berger in Ways of Seeing


‘A Momentous Leap’: Human Nature and Conscious Design

Daniel Christian Wahl

After more than a quarter century of research into how humans live, act, engage in decision- making pro-
cesses, and change as participants of complex systems, Graves provided a dynamic map of the developmental
stages of human consciousness, value systems and worldviews. He described a number of behavioural sys-
tems, based on the biological, psychological and social way of relating to the wider world — the whole — that
these “biopsychosocial systems” result in.
Ken Wilber — a major contributor to transpersonal psychology and the founder of ‘integral psychology’ — re-
cently emphasized that the Gravesian model has so far “been tested in more than fifty thousand people from
around the world, and there have been no major exceptions found in the general scheme (Wilber, 2001, p.6).
Clare Graves himself described his model of human psychological development that involves a progressive
transformation of the worldview employed as follows:

“Briefly what I am proposing is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent,
oscillating, spiralling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower order behavioural systems
to newer, higher-order systems as an individual’s existential problems change. Each successive stage, wave, or
level of existence is a state through which people pass on their way to other stages of being. When the human
is centralized in one state of existence, he or she has a psychology which is particular to that state. His or
her feelings, motivations, ethics and values, biochemistry, degree of neurological activation, learning sys-
tem, belief system, conception of mental health, ideas to what mental illness is and how it should be treated,
conceptions of and preferences for management, education, economics, political theory and practice are all
appropriate to that stage.”

Graves was convinced that a dynamic map of worldviews and their associated value systems could be a
useful tool for integrating insights and concerns voiced from within these different ways of seeing. If design
is worldview dependent, then a more holistic approach to design and decision-making in general should be
based on a constructive and co-operative dialogue that spans disciplines and value-systems.
Graves’ map may be able to provide a helpful framework for integration in such a dialogue process. In turn
this may facilitate the creation of more appropriate and sustainable design solutions based on a holistic or
integral (Wilber, 2001) perspective rather than the specialized and limited point of view of a particular val-
ue-system or academic discipline.
Human population growth and resource use reached ecological over-shoot in the 1970s. Currently, humanity
is producing waste and consuming resources at a 30% faster rate than the total bio-productive capacity of the
planet can absorb and replenish (Desai & Riddlestone, 2002, p.26). The most pressing design brief is how to
fit a technologically advanced and culturally diverse human species into the limits set by the bio-productive
capacity of the biosphere and its current solar income, while at the same time safe guarding human and plan-
etary health.
At the nexus of values, attitudes, needs and action, designers have the potential to act as trans-disciplinary fa-
cilitators of a process of integration and synthesis that can guide sustainable decision making from a holistic
perspective. Integrative, cross-disciplinary and scale-linking design thinking can ensure that our choices are
conscious and well informed by a holistic perspective, rather than hastily forced by the most powerful stake-
holders and based on the limited perspective of a specific, dominant discipline.
As Homo faber — human as maker — our material actions, mental constructs and value systems shape our
world and guide our perception of it. Design, when broadly conceived, can help us to integrate the remarka-
ble wealth of specialized knowledge and skill that rests within humanity.
All design is inspired by and an expression of the values, perceived needs, and basic assumptions about reality
that are predominant in a particular culture, academic discipline or professional sub-culture. As such, design
is fundamentally worldview dependent. It can either be informed by one or many points of view. Rittel sug-
gested in 1972: “For every wicked problem there is always more than one possible explanation, with explana-
tions depending on the Weltanschauung [worldview] of the designer” (in Buchanan, 1995, p.14).
This is precisely where the dynamic psychological map proposed by Clare Graves and developed as Spiral
Dynamics by Don Beck and Christopher C. Cowan (1996) may provide a powerful tool of integration and
facilitation of continuous dialogue and holistic design thinking.

If our design decisions are fundamentally worldview and value-system dependent, a dynamic map of the
emergence of progressively more inclusive worldviews in human society and consciousness could help us in
understanding past design decisions as well as provide a way for taking future design decisions from amore
holistic perspective. Such a perspective would be more fitting to the complex dynamics of the wicked design
problems of an interconnected and unpredictable complex world. A collective re-evaluation of human nature
may help us to reframe the guiding intentionality behind all design. This may lead to a more conscious ap-
proach to designing, from within a participatory understanding of reality and guided by world-centric ethics.
An integral perspective can access a whole range of value systems and discern adaptive and evolutionary
priorities, as well as which needs are best met materially and which immaterially.

The only way we now know of preventing contamination of our perception of nature, of society, or of ourselves
by human values is to be very conscious of these values at all times, to understand their influence on perception,
and with the aid of such an understanding to make the necessary corrections. (By contamination I mean the
confusion of psychic determinants with reality determinants, when it is the latter we seek to perceive). 

 Maslow, 1987

Abraham Maslow suggested that in order to meet true human needs effectively we have to be aware of the
role our operative value systems play in influencing or creating our intentions, goals, and perceived needs.
Through personal growth and healthy human development, we access more and more inclusive worldviews
and value systems. In the supportive environment of a healthy society this process of self-actualisation occurs
naturally. Maslow defined a “good society” as one “that gives its members the greatest possibility of becoming
sound and self-actualising human beings,” and argued that therefore “good society is synonymous with psy-
chologically healthy society, while bad society is synonymous with psychologically sick society, which in turn
means basic need gratifying and basic need thwarting respectively (i.e. not enough love, affection, protection,
respect, trust, and truth and too much hostility, humiliation, fear, contempt, and domination)”.
Robert Frager (1987) reports how in Maslow’s work, “human functioning is different for people who operate
in a state of positive health rather than a state of deficiency.” Maslow’s “Being-psychology” suggests self-actu-
alising people are motivated by “Being Values,” and describes these as “values that are naturally developed by
healthy human beings and are not imposed by religion or culture.” The values appreciated by self-actualizers
include: “truth, creativity, beauty, goodness, wholeness, aliveness, uniqueness, justice, simplicity, and self- suf-
ficiency”. The list below summarizes some of Maslow’s basic conclusions about self-actualising human nature.

Abraham Maslow’s Notion of Self-actualising Human Nature and the Synergistic Society:
- Human beings have an innate tendency to move toward higher levels of health, creativity, and self-fulfill-
ment.
- Neurosis may be regarded as a blockage of the tendency towards self-actualisation.
- The evolution of a synergistic society is a natural and essential process. This is a society in which all individ-
uals may reach a high level of self-development, without restricting each others’ freedom.
- Business efficiency and personal growth are not incompatible. In fact the process of self-actualisation leads
each individual to highest levels of efficiency.

According to Maslow, for effective self-actualisation to be able to take place, basic human needs have to be
met. Once they are met, higher needs emerge. Maslow believed that “higher needs and lower needs have dif-
ferent properties, but they are the same in that both higher needs as well as lower needs must be included in
the repertory of basic and given human nature.” He emphasized: “They are not different or opposed to human
nature; they are part if human nature” (Maslow, 1987).
Our perceived needs and the value systems we spontaneously employ can change significantly dependent on
our immediate situation. More conscious decision-making and responsible design results from first becom-
ing clear about our fundamental intentions before we act in response to that situation. We can choose to
adjust our worldview and corresponding value system, thereby transforming the situation and the perceived
needs.
Maslow believed that “man has a higher nature and that this is part of his essence — or more simply, that
human beings can be wonderful out of their own human and biological nature” (in Maslow, 1987, p.246).
Maslow suggested that education could play an important role in supporting people’s effective self-actual-
isation of their higher human nature. “For Maslow, learning was in some way relevant to all human needs.
Learning involves not merely the acquisition of data and facts, but the holistic reintegration of the individual,
continually producing changes in self-image, feeling, behaviour, and relationship to the environment. He
viewed education as occurring during the entire span of life” (Ruth Cox in Maslow, 1987).
Education can help people to question and transcend the dominant value system of their society. It can help
them to self-actualise and meet their basic and higher needs in new ways, contributing to the emergence of
what Maslow called a synergistic and healthy society (Maslow, 1987). The self-actualisation of our higher
human nature is an important part of the transition towards a sustainable civilization and a necessary step
towards a more conscious and health promoting approach to design.
Scope not permitting, I will have to refrain from a detailed discussion of Maslow’s work on the basic hier-
archy of human needs within the context of a more conscious and self-actualising approach to design for
sustainability.
In summary, perhaps we may say that fundamental human needs are essential attributes related to human
evolution; satisfiers are forms of Being, Having, Doing and Interacting related to structures, and economic
goods are objects related to particular historical moments. … The speed of production and the diversification
of objects have become ends in themselves and as such are no longer able to satisfy any need whatsoever. Peo-
ple have grown more dependent on this system of production but, at the same time, more alienated from it.

It is only in some of the regions marginalized by the crisis, and in those groups which defy the prevailing styles of
development, that autonomous processes are generated in which satisfiers and economic goods become subordi-
nate once again to the actualisation of human needs. It is in these sectors that we can find examples of synergic
types of behaviour which offer a potential response to the crisis that looms over us. 

Manfred Max-Neef, 1991


Consciousness and the Nature of Reality
Nelson Abreu

Philosophers and consciousness scholars have a particular interest in what it is like to be or experience some-
thing, or qualia. The very existence of qualia continues to be the vexing problem of reductionist approaches
to consciousness. In other words, if awareness of self and our surround was developed according to the pre-
dominant biological evolution theories, is awareness just another accident of evolution, an illusion that ends
when the brain ceases to exist? The persistent question remains: is there even a biological survival advantage
to experiencing qualia? The most respected intellectuals in the field have come up short, as witnessed dur-
ing the 2004 Tucson Toward a Science of Consciousness, where some resigned the problem as impenetrable
(Pinker) and others simply argued it does not exist (Dennett), comparing it to the psychological value of
financial stock market shares.

The latter argument states the obvious: color, taste, love, pleasure, curiosity, motivation, creativity, humor,
beauty and other subjective experiences may have physical correlates, but they are not physical per se. Since
most consider reality to be limited to what can be repeatedly, objectively measured, they reach the conclusion
that everything else is not real. This is an epistemological bias, rather than a scientific conclusion.

For instance, while it is challenging to scientifically demonstrate that consciousness can exist beyond the
brain, it is supported by a growing body of evidence (eg. remote viewing, near-death experiences and out-of-
body experience research, anomalous physical effects) and a long history of anecdotal evidence from around
the world. On the other hand, it may be impossible to demonstrate that thought originates in the brain, for
instance. All we can show is that there are neural correlates to mental experience.

Consider, for instance, the nature of color. We can attempt to study color in objective terms such as the fre-
quency of electromagnetic waves in the visible light spectrum. This frequency can be measured in a scientific
way, but it is not color itself. Color is subjectively experienced and observed and it is known that two or more
people can interpret visible light of the same frequency in different ways for biological and subjective reasons.
Color, then, exists only in our minds and could be viewed as an extension of ourselves.

Physics is the study of laws that govern reality, engineering attempts to manipulate those laws to solve chal-
lenges though technology, and architecture is the study of the built environment: each approaches color
a different way (for instance, as frequency, as a signal, as an aesthetic element). We may judge it in purely
objective terms, but our judgment of color, spaces, forms, our experience of the built environment (or of
anything in our physical reality for that matter) is something inherently internal. The logical progression is to
view everything we consider “solid” or “physical” as an extension of ourselves. More than a poetic statement,
we challenge anyone to successfully argue otherwise.

For instance, when we admire a beautiful sunset, the sense of beauty exists only in our microcosm. However,
sight (of the form and color of the sun), though facilitated by physics and physiology, is experienced internal-
ly, as is the warmth we feel on our skin. The sun is particularly interesting, as the light that reaches our eyes
and skin has had to travel for minutes and then processed for milliseconds before it comes to our visual and
tactile awareness. However, if we were concentrated on driving a vehicle, our eyes might receive the same
light energy but not be consciously aware of the sunset, let alone awed by its perceived beauty. How do we
know the sun exists? We base the conclusion that it exists in some objective way on the consensus that others
also perceived it and share similar, though, not identical, experiences of the sun. This means that we base our
perception of an objective reality on subjective observation.

In fact, there is no way to prove that something exists independently of observers, as our judgment of reality
relies on some form of observation or measurement, which is itself ultimately internal. This view is support-
ed by quantum physics as argued by some of the greatest minds in history, like physicists Bohr, Schoedinger,
Pauli, and Wigner. Swiss consciousness scholar and physicist Massimiliano Sassolli de Bianchi stated that
particles studied by physicists do not exist. They “appear” into existence when we make a measurement. In
other words, they are an interpretation of our interaction with nano-scale reality. There is no evidence that
they exist as real corpuscular entities that are independent of the observational process.

Everything we consider physical, including the natural and built environment, and our own bodies is com-
posed of this same energy and is, therefore, intimately tied to our microcosm. External reality makes no sense
without internal reality, each one giving meaning to the other, acting as two complementary aspects of one
reality. The surround, the theater is inside us, it is us, and we are therefore not limited, localized entities, as is
also supported by remote perception research.
texto e citação Allan Watts
Allan Walace

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