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Super Consciousness: The Quest for the Peak Experience (2007/2009)
... The first issue in this context is levels of Consciousness. Colin Wilson (2009) suggests at least eight degrees of consciousness, from Level 0 to 7. They are: Level 0.deep sleep; Level 1.dreaming or hypnagogic; Level 2.mere awareness or unresponsive waking state; Level 3.self awareness that is dull and meaningless; Level 4.passive and reactive, normal consciousness that regards life 'as a grim battle'; Level 5.an active, spontaneous, happy consciousness in which life is exciting and interesting; Level 6.a transcendent level where time ceases to exist. Wilson does take note of further levels of consciousness as experienced by mystics but gives no details. ...
The science of Consciousness and Yoga is a vast subject to be discussed. Number of studies has been done in the area of Consciousness and Yoga, but the issues which should be radiated in present scenario is a subject of research. One can say that a lot have been written in the area of Yoga, so Consciousness is the important subject to be discussed first or vice a versa but can someone say that nothing can be added now? Science deals with investigations and enters into new dimension of research, thus Science of Consciousness and Yoga today is a subject of interest. To radiate the issues in this reference the study needed a systematic review of the past studies as well as the contemporary researches.
While going through the review, a tremendous surge of interest in the problem of consciousness has been seen. Though it has always lurked in the vicinity, for years there was little or no mention of consciousness as such in either the philosophical or scientific literature. Now books and articles are flowing in an ever widening stream. According to some of the authors the mind–body problem is the problem of consciousness. According to the findings of the study, it is consciousness that sits square across the advancing path of the scientific world view. Scientists are agree to accept the key role of Yoga in relation to body –mind coordination.
Yoga is one of the most powerful and time tested spiritual technique to go beyond the body consciousness and experience the subconscious and later on the super-conscious states of the self. In this stage, the individual consciousness enters the subtlest, the innermost and the divine core of life - the sheath of ultimate bliss.
This paper outlines two distinct perspectives on human psychological development, waking up and growing up, describing their differences and the ways they influence each other. It looks at both forms of development in the context of Buddhist modernism and contemporary social justice ethics and shows how they differently address such ethics. The latter part of the paper repudiates the one-dimensional transpersonal model describing its limitations and offers instead a two-dimensional model of human psycho-spiritual development.
This paper critically examines the philosophical foundations of Colin Wilson’s New Existentialism. I will show how Wilson’s writings promoted a phenomenological strategy for understanding states of ecstatic affirmation within so-called ‘peak experiences’. Wilson subsequently attempted to use the life affirming insights bestowed by peak states to establish an ontological ground for values to serve as a foundation for his New Existentialism. Because of its psychological focus however, I argue that Wilson’s New Existentialism contains an ambivalent framework for establishing ontological categories, which leads his thought into theoretical difficulties. More precisely, Wilson’s strategy runs into problems in coherently integrating its explicitly psychological interpretation of Husserl’s theory of intentionality within a broader, and philosophically coherent, phenomenological framework. Wilson’s psychological reading of Husserl’s transcendental reduction, for example, manifests tensions in how it reconciles the empirical basis of acts of transcendence with an essentialist conception of the self as a transcendental ego. The above tensions, I argue, ultimately render the New Existentialism susceptible to criticism from a Husserlian-transcendental perspective. After outlining a Husserlian critique of Wilson’s position, I end the paper by suggesting how some of the central insights of the New Existentialism might help to bridge the gap that persists between pure phenomenological description and metaphysics.
Please note: This is now the final draft of this paper, and replaces both the original article and the later part 2 article.
If you have never read A E van Vogt's novel "The Voyage of the Space Beagle", it's likely you will have never heard of Nexialism. Fortunately, van Vogt gave his readers a definition of this then putative new science at the start of Chapter 7. "Nexialism is the science of joining in an orderly fashion the knowledge of one field of learning with that of other fields." A. E. van Vogt, The Voyage of the Space Beagle, 1950. Essentially, Nexialism was an anticipation of the interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and multidisciplinary lines of research we now find proliferating in modern scholarship. But beyond that, van Vogt argues that to get scientists from different disciplines to work together in a truly effective way, a bridge-builder was needed: a properly trained specialist in the mechanics of interdisciplinary studies, who could bring the specialists together and facilitate communication between them. The novel was actually a working together of four separate Science Fiction stories. The first, "The Black Destroyer", was first published in July 1939, and it was in that story that van Vogt introduced his idea of Nexialism to the world 2 . And this, before the idea of having an interdisciplinary studies or conferences on any subject had become trendy. As I look back on my life the works of two authors, Colin Wilson and A. E. van Vogt, stand out as both inspirational and influential on my own intellectual development. It was from Wilson that I learnt about Phenomenology, the work of Edmund Husserl, and the idea of the intentionality of perception, on which I shall have more to say later. And Van Vogt introduced me to the idea of Nexialism.
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