It is interesting that you spend long periods focusing on specific writers because I jump backwards and forwards reading them. I usually have about 3 novels and 5 non fiction on the go. I can't multitask with practical matters but I find dipping in and out of books sort of works for me. But your approach probably allows for more systematic order and focus.

I do agree that it is usually a series of events and experiences which motivates us to try to find new ways of seeing and thinking. This is because the process of repeated knocks or certain experiences is so much more profound for us because it can really throw us beyond our usual balance.

I do see the point of your analogy, although I think psychological change may be a bit more complicated than changing a bulb. Mind you, I have lived in places where the underlying electrical wiring is faulty to take the symbolism of your story a little bit further. Right now, one of the people in the house I live is taking the washing machine apart, trying to repair it, so maybe that is another metaphorical story for thinking about taking apart the broken in ourselves and in views, and probably locating the underlying source of the problem is the hardest part.

But you are probably right to say that we may be able to get in touch with something that is dormant in ourselves. We probably spend a lot of wasted time and energy looking widely for solutions, missing the most obvious ones.

Well most of my dreams don't come true so hopefully that dream won't come true. However, I do think that in some cases the more we dwell on possibilities we are in danger of creating self fulfilling prophecies. However, even when my worst fears do come true it is usually in a slightly different way from what I have imagined might happen. Generally, I feel that life can be hard to predict in an exact way.

It is interesting that you speak of going through different phases at different ages. Strangely, I went through my Nietszche phase before I really questioned my religious background. However, I have generally preferred to see him as more of a poet than take his ideas literally, especially the idea of superman. It seems to be so ego inflated.

As you know, I am into the rock and alternative music and that has been as much as my worldview in relation to psychological change. I would say that it was during one of my most difficult periods that I embraced nu metal music and began going to dark metal live music events. It was while I was studying art psychotherapy, and the whole psychodynamic approach to life.

I also wonder about my question in relation to having worked in mental health care. I have seen people who have been driven beyond their breaking point. I do believe that some people don't just find books and music to cope. Of course, this is complex because it does depend on genetics and support structures people have. I do believe that we all have our limits as to what would be too much to cope with in some ways.

I often think about worse possible scenarios. My own are becoming blind or becoming homeless. Either could happen because I do have some minor retinal abnormalities and securing long term accommodation in London is extremely difficult. I do wonder how I would cope if one of these two ever occurred. But, it is quite likely that neither will happen and if they did I would cope better than imagined. It can sometimes be the unexpected smaller things which can be the stumbling blocks.

I am not sure that we are best thinking too much about the worst possible things which could happen too much. But, I think that it is useful to be aware of them partly as a way of thinking about life and the minor setbacks in proportion, and probably being grateful that the worst have not happened and possibly never will. I also think that the underlying philosophy of CBT can be useful for reflecting on experience in a critical but positive way.

Your idea that you may end up in heaven meeting important thinkers is interesting and one which I never thought about even in my most religious moments. But, yes, it would seem embarrassing to say to Plato that you never got round to meeting them. The writer I would probably like to meet with is William Blake. But, the other question is if we were in a life after death would all the philosophical questions be revealed.


I think that I would rather come back in another human body, but if people really believe in reincarnation they ought to think about working to ensure that humanity survives, or else they won't be able to come back at all, at least in this cycle of existence.

Thanks for your lengthy contribution.Your experience does sound interesting and I do believe that we can go to extremes of all kinds in our searching. I can remember a time when I was attending evangelical churches and Marxist meetings simultaneously.

I think that I may have known someone who may have been a terrorist, but I was uncertain of his actual involvement, but I knew that he had personal problems. He was asleep on the floor in my room while I was sitting on my bed writing an essay. Despite being completely against religion, he shouted out,'Jesus was a revolutionary' in his sleep.

I am not sure because people can get really sensitive, especially around politics. I have been struggling with getting into bits of discussion on various threads in the night when I couldn't sleep. When I did sleep I dreamt that someone was creating endless threads, almost taking over the site, and the moderators were trying to delete them and the whole site crashed. But, I didn't sleep much, so I am not good today...

I think that certain experiences, especially the harshest ones can break us or stretch us to explore beyond the familiar. Of course, it is all so individual and we all have our coping mechanisms and different degrees of resilience. Psychologists often divide people into personalities types A and B. They also speak of type C which don't become hyperactive or passive, but just go a bit strange in response to stress, and I think that I probably fall into that category.

However, I do think that stress does lead us to think more outside of the confines of the norms, and possibly has some use in leading us to become more critically aware as individuals.

Sometimes when I look at this site it seems like an organic being with a consciousness, threads fizzling and fading, and others being born.

Whatever have you been discussing? The mystery deepens. When I was awake in the night, looking at my phone, I kept seeing this thread flashing up and thought that the keys to the universe had been found...But, at least the thread has not lost consciousness just yet.

Yes, perhaps we do agree. I can reassure that when I was working in a hospital and assessing patients I did not stand there contemplating what did consciousness mean.

I wasn't just responding to your post, but the trail of the thread which does seem to be wishing to narrow down the use of the term. I thought that the OP was trying to explore the term rather than come up with the most commonplace definition.

I am not really opposing @Banno, because I can see that the medical idea of consciousness is extremely important. I have worked in hospitals and my working definition of assessing consciousness was the medical one and nothing else. This understanding of consciousness may be the best we have, but I am only saying that I don't think it is helpful to try to exclude all other usages of the term, because some people may be using it differently.

I'm afraid that I am having a problem with you wishing to narrow down the idea of consciousness to that of a first aid test. I am not saying that viewpoint isn't important. I have attended first aid training, so of course, it is an essential definition, but a medical one rather than a philosophical one. Thinkers within philosophy and other disciplines may use the term consciousness in differing ways, and surely, thinking about it should not be reduced to one way of seeing it.

I have come across the idea of a psychonaut,and at one stage at university I joined and went to some meetings of The Cosmic Space Cadets society. So, I have my roots as a psychonaut. I did experiment with mind altering substances for a while. The main reason I stopped was because along with another student, I got arrested. We had bought and smoked some skunk weed at Camden lock. My friend was driving his car and we ended up in a car chase through North London, getting handcuffed and kept in a police cell for hours, and let off with a caution. Fortunately, the caution has never showed up in police clearance checks for work.

But, I do read some psychonaut writing, including Slanislov Grof, Robert Anton Wilson. However, I have my limits with how far I wish to go in exploring such ideas. I still wish for the analytical perspective of philosophy to counterbalance it all. I guess that my question is putting philosophy on the couch. I'm don't really think philosophers are psychonauting, but it can become too academic at times. Also, having worked alongside psychologists I feel that they often don't think much about the philosophical assumptions behind their approaches. But, I probably think too much, and probably in too remote ways,cand don't just want to become a psychonaut, lost in esoterica.

Actually, I think that your thread question is fantastic. I was not criticising it, but simply read it when waking up in the middle of the night, so my response may have seemed a bit grungy. The reason why I think your question is so good is that we use the word so often on this site, and I know that I have written threads including the word consciousness. While people are inclined to seek definitions, I am not sure that there are many discussions here about the specific meaning of the term consciousness.

I suppose that I am just see it as an area for exploration rather any restrictive definitions. I know that you say that you have 'a meat and potatoes' philosophy and, as we already discussed in my thread on transformation of consciousness, I have a different position. My own understanding of consciousness incorporates a possible collective unconscious as a source of consciousness, or of levels of consciousness as dimensions. But, I will stop here, because I am going into what is consciousness and I believe that you are looking more specifically at what we mean by the term consciousness, although it is linked because people probably use the word differently.

I think that your definitions are fairly good, but I just wonder how the unconscious and subconscious fit into the picture, because consciousness is not a clear state, but a whole spectrum. It fades in and out during sleep, and can be altered, as occurs during intoxication. I am not really sure that I would clearly wish to come up with an overriding definition of consciousness, because it seems like trying to put it into a category. It seems larger than that, and even though human beings share many aspects of being conscious, we each have a unique stream of consciousness, because it is what our thoughts are composed from.

I definitely agree that reading has a large part to play in the process of changing viewpoints. My times of reflection have mostly been spent reading. Difficult experiences seem to lead me to read more, and that seems like an important connection between the two. But I would imagine that it could work the other way round with the experience of sudden moments of a change in one's ideas giving rise to anxiety too.

I have edited my title to make it more of a philosophy question rather than a psychological one, although it combines the two.

Perhaps we should have some grass sandwiches. When I got put into a situation where I was panicking because I was being expected to cook the supper for residents at a rehab hostel where I was working, a colleague suggested I make Jungian cuisine, with plenty of shadow.

At least your post has a bit of humour, or I interpret it that way, because sometimes this forum gets so heavy and heated.

Yes, I do think that psychedelic experiences open up interesting perspectives of perception. I experimented briefly with a few substances. One of the best was a packet of morning glory seeds. The reason why I thought it was about the best was because I was able to function to the point where I was able to sketch the images I was seeing on the door. I could be tempted to try them again, but I got stomach ache for the night after taking them because they are coated in poison to deter people using them. I think that our culture has forced the tradition of vision questing underground, while this was probably revered in some other cultures.

You write well, and add interesting little pieces of inspiration to many threads. Thanks for your contribution.

I was just adding to the comment I wrote, that maybe you could come up with one. My threads are maybe becoming a bit repetitive. I was hoping that this was a bit different from the one I wrote last week. I may need to take a bit of a break from creating new threads, but sometimes I find it a bit hard writing in the ones others create, a bit like going into other people's houses. However, I say that with some humour, and may be it is time for me to creep outside the safety of my own home...

So are you saying that I should be formulating questions which are more conceptual? I probably go into areas which are on the edges between philosophy and psychology, but, for me, that feels be a less stagnant ground than many other territories. I am interested in exploring the catalyst as a means of exploring, because I am not sure that a detached analysis of concepts is able to get to grips with what lies beneath the surface fully. The concepts occur and are tools within our minds in the first instance, even though this involves shared meanings within cultures, or even on a universal basis for human beings.

I am really interested in opening up areas beyond the psychological, including the anthropological. Perhaps, I am just framing my questions wrongly, or maybe I have just written too many threads in a short space of time. Have you written any threads? Maybe you could come up with an interesting discussion, to really get people thinking and exploring..

I am glad that you can see the angle which I am coming from. Certainly, my life as a student seemed to be an exploration of experience and ideas in conjunction with one another. If my life had gone so smoothly, I probably would not have not have questioned that deeply. As it was, I ended up taking lots of caffeine tablets, as a student, beyond the recommended doses on the box, because I was just needing to think so clearly trying to put life and ideas together.

Even now, I am using this site, exploring all kinds of philosophy questions, and that probably would not have happened to me at all if I had not lost my job last year. Some people may think this is all about me, but I am inclined to wonder if most of the people on this site, or those who read philosophy books, are doing it without there being any underlying psychological dimensions to it. In saying that, I am not trying to reduce philosophy to the psychological, but just suggesting that it is interlinked.

I can see that my question may fall more into the scope of psychology rather than philosophy. However, the reason why I raise it is because from my point about view the psychology comes into our philosophical constructs.

I am not talking about simply what we wish to believe but how our life experiences are so based in the experiential. For example, I would probably have never questioned religious beliefs of Catholicism if it had been for difficult experiences, such as knowing a couple of people who committed suicide, and the way certain ideas gave me a deep sense of guilt. I remember when I was exploring all kinds of ideas, explaining to a woman who I was talking to, about my own thinking and she remarked that, for her, it would just be too much work to question the ideas she had grown up to believe.

You might think that my question is only relevant for religious questions, but I do think it goes beyond this, even to political ideas. For example, certain experiences of inequality may lead people to challenge certain previous political assumptions. Some people's ideas seem more static, while others seem to shift, and that is where I think experience comes into play. I am not sure that the philosophical and the psychological can be separated that clearly.

The question of empathy in connection with experience is interesting because it may be that experience of suffering may make people more empathetic. On the other hand, it could be that certain experiences have an effect of numbing emotions, and becoming more self centred. It could even go through different stages for any individual.

I find that I feel more compassionate as a result of personal knock downs and setbacks, but at times I do wallow.

One other aspect is that I do believe that it is possible to have compassion fatigue if one tunes into others needs constantly, especially if it is not reciprocated.

I am thinking of our individual experiences but they take place within a cultural context. So, for example, so many people must have been affected by the pandemic throughout the world. However, we have all had our own unique experiences, according to our life circumstances.

I have read Jung's ideas on alchemy, as he is about my favourite writer. That was how I first came across the idea of alchemy in the first place, so I have always seen it as a symbolic process more than in any other way. Generally, I approach most esoteric ideas from that angle, but that doesn't mean dismissing them, because the symbolic is the language of the psyche.

Thanks for the links to the websites. I had a look at them this afternoon and they are very interesting. I am just finding so much to read that my head will explode eventually, with broken pieces of mysteries falling everywhere. I am thinking that Hermetic ideas are something I wish to analyse, because they do seem to have played such a central role in many developments of systems of ideas.

I really did have a tutor who thought that life after death might consist in us living eternally as disencarnate entities. However, the whole topic of bodies in afterlife is one which makes me laugh because my mum has always considered spoken of concern about what kind of bodies people would have after the resurrection, whether they would be glamorous and, whether the elderly would be given back their youth. Also, when I went to an evangelical church, I can remember people talking about what meals they would have after the resurrection. But, really, I think if you read the Bible, especially Paul, he is speaking more about spiritual bodies, rather than earthly ones.

Generally, I agree with your answer, because I am in favour of keeping an open forum. I am not absolutely sure about theism, because it does seem important for me still.

I grew up believing in God, and questioned the basis of my Catholic beliefs. I was extremely religious as a teenager, and really questioned it all after encounters with fundamentalists. Their extreme ideas seemed to point to the knots inherent in Christian thinking.

Now, amidst philosophy discussion, I am really unsure how the question of God. I am not sure that life is fully described by the most common philosophies of our time, especially materialistic determinism, and even neuroscience. I am not convinced that life is full of random events, which makes me wonder about God, but I just think that the understanding of God within theism may be a bit restrictive. So, I would not say that I describe myself as agnostic, because even that seems too much of a boxed in label. I am more in search of thinking beyond the categories, and wonder if the conception of God, which the theists described, needs updating.

It is just such an interesting area, about those who emphasise the nonmaterial and those who emphasise naturalism. It interweaves philosophy in the mainstream and the esoteric. Part of comes down to questions of pure metaphysics, and some of it is probably connected to the social and political construction of knowledge.

You are putting together a fantastic site. I appreciate it, and I am sure that many others do too.

I am not really wishing to suggest that theists have a superior knowledge or more peaceful life. Really, I was writing of the godless abyss more as a metaphorical truth, probably based on my own experiences of thinking outside of the religious background from which I was socialised. Ultimately, I try to be open, and non judgemental of anyone's ideas, and I keep an ongoing open understanding of any new ideas which I encounter.

I am not familiar with John Wheeler's ideas so I don't feel that I can talk about that really, but going back to your reply to my comment, I am curious about cognitive science investing religious experience. I really don't know where that might lead, but I would hope that it would not be too reductive. I feel that neuroscience is being given so much attention in philosophy, and I don't wish to dismiss it, but I am not convinced that it leads to all the answers.

I do find Kant's ideas on intuition as useful. Generally, I think that intuition is rather overlooked in philosophy and it does seem that reason is seen as the supreme principle.

Your post is interesting and I have just looked at your links, as there does indeed appear to be so much knowledge to be tapped into. In recent weeks, I am thinking that the Platonic mystics are of extreme importance. I try to read as widely as possible, but I have downloaded some books on on Greek ideas, and I am trying to find the time to read them. Thanks for your contributions to the discussion, and with regard to certain ideas being dismissed as mythical on this site, I try not to think as freely as possible.

One aspect of the questions which I see as an area linking religion and the empirical questions underlying the sciences is anthropology. It is an area which I have only read a certain amount about, because there is just so much to wonder and read about, but I do think that it can shed so much light on understanding the the emergence of religion. Writers such as Mary Douglas, on ideas about purity and danger, and the concept of savage mind of Levi Strauss are important. One book which is interesting is James Frazer's 'The Golden Bough' ,in the way which it traces the developments mankind went from magic to religion, to science, as a developmental process in thinking perspectives.

Generally, I think that if you limit your focus to the natural sciences, as suggested by your title, you may restrict your scope. The actual content of your questions goes beyond natural sciences. I would imagine that you chose the words natural science, with a view to thinking about the empirical methods of investigating. Of course, this is important as opposed to just introspection, but even if empirical methods are used, there is so many beyond that, in the whole interpretation of the findings. My own view is that the exploration of religion is one which may be best approached in a multidisciplinary way.

I have been wondering recently about your question of whether we are the originators of our thoughts, or controlled by forces outside of us. I believe that it is really the question underlying that of free will. It depends on to what extent we are reflective agents, and it is complex.

That is because we originate as parts of living systems, but as we develop, we have a determining role for ourselves, and in relation to other living systems. Perhaps the mind is like a channel, taking in and interacting with the environment, which appears to be objective reality. Subjective and objective may be like looking at two sides of the same coin, as the two interconnected aspects of duality.