Researched and Written by Leila Kincaid
for the School of Consciousness and Transformation,
California Institute for Integral Studies
TSD 6316: Consciousness and The Brain: An Integral Study of the Brain and the Mind
Dr. Allan Leslie Combs
October 15th, 2022
A core aspect of the mind is an embodied and relational process
that regulates the flow of energy and information.
~Daniel Siegel, The Developing Mind
I would only believe in a god who could dance.
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Consciousness is a big, confusing mystery. What is it? Are we thinking meat? Are we the universe experiencing itself as human beings? Where does consciousness go when we die?
What was the nature of my consciousness before I was born and did it exist? Am I merely my brainwaves and the mechanism of brain functions or a God created being with a soul?
These are difficult questions that have occupied my thoughts for as long as I can remember. My preoccupation in life has been the consternation about why we are conscious (in varying degrees and manners). It is a difficult and confusing state of quandary toward which I feel this course is helping me find more clarity of understanding.
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, Daniel Siegel, describes consciousness as an “embodied and relational process”. I think of this as a concantenation of consciousness and envision a picture of a dancing universe dancing us into being and emanating various patterns of consciousness that we emerge from and into, as we engage the dance ourselves through stages of identity manifested through states of mind. Siegel describes these states of mind as involving “a clustering of functionally synergistic processes that allow the mind as a whole to form a cohesive state of activity” (2012, 186). Much like the choreographic mise en scene of a dance performance in which each movement, posture, and dancer emerge on the stage as a unity, consciousness assembles and emerges in concantenated states. Charles Tart describes these states of consciousness as configurations of systems "of psychological structures or subsystems”, so that we can imagine layers of patterns resonating, entangling, and emerging into coherent, integral manifestations of meaning and unity. Inherent in Gebser, Wilber and Combs ideas of consciousness is this concantenating process toward integral and unity consciousness as an emergence of integral consciousness through dialogical approaches to oneness.
This sounds like gobbledygook, and it is, because my consciousness is grasping at an understanding of not only itself but the entirety of human consciousness, and consciousness itself, while battling through veils of sociological, historical, and material conditioning, stress reactions and coping complexes, and the unconscious mysteries of my own psyche. I sometimes strain to reach some semblance of sensicality with which I can communicate an intimation, perception, and an experience of being. A phrase that captures my intuition about the nature of consciousness is Combs’ “grand integral vision” (The Radiance of Being, 2002).
What words festered up here to yoke my consciousness to yours, the reader? Does something I emit usher forth to meet your own emerging eminence in concord or disarray? This is why I continue to study, to search, to reach out into the known and unknown universe of manifestation to find a gleaming light that shines on reality, that makes me feel that I have arrived, that I am home. For there is something a philosopher strives toward that is like a sense of home, a sense of belonging and knowing. I’m sure there is a thinker out there somewhere who has said something like that, but I am adrift in a sea of ideas, surrounded by the thoughts of thousands of seminal thinkers about the nature of consciousness, and at last I find that I need to meditate, to shush, and sit still. Here, I can know, most intimately and ultimately the true nature of my own being and being itself as an infinite field of consciousness emerging and manifesting in various forms.
When I open my eyes, I see that I tend to feel most attracted to and aligned with conceptions of consciousness as an emergent property of our evolving universe as in a field like John Searle’s background or Heidegger’s Dasein in which states of consciousness like the Hindu Brahman and Atman, Christ consciousness, Gaia consciousness, and Buddhamind are available to us as fields of emergent properties of processes in the universe. In a Jungian sense, our psyches are structured to tune into and tap into and know these fields of consciousness in the cosmos. Our very being seems organized to think about our nature, and to reach toward ultimate knowing in a teleological Whiteheadian sense.
I think there is something in the way I am slouching toward understanding of consciousness in the way Ken Wilber says that “science and religion, physics and spirituality” are “necessary for a complete and full and integral approach to reality” and that is why I am in school, taking courses, and think that I will until the day I die. The thing that makes the most sense to me when I stagnate at the door between confusion and enlightenment on this subject is Combs’ statement in Seeing into the Sun: True Intelligence, that “We are not objects, but events. We are process beings, down to the cells that form our biological bodies and up through the elusive mental processes which articulate our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Flux is our nature, but not random flux. Rather, we are intricate patterns of flow, hierarchical process structures.”
In this flux sense, in the sense of a system of processes, I see reality dancing in concantenation to summon us into being as focal points of consciousness and that we have the capacity as emergent focal points of consciousness in the universe to shift and move our consciousness to engage with fields of consciousness. I can, for instance, close my eyes to a shamanic drumbeat, summon up a guide and travel to the underworld and meet with great teachers and allies in human, animal, and various other forms for insight and new understanding about myself and the cosmos. This is a kind of shifting consciousness, traveling from one state to another, and engaging in alchemical transformation as I integrate new forms of consciousness into my own localized form of consciousness known as “Leila.” Or I can read Combs’ The Radiance of Being and transport my consciousness to the meaning he emits and thereby shift into his way of thinking and being, and thus become further transformed as a new manifestation of consciousness in a grand concantenization. Whatever the case, I need to keep researching, meditating, dreaming, and thinking about this, as Jung says, to shine light into the darkness of being.
Leila in the Dancing Universe (background image from James Web Space Telescope: Nasa Images)
References
Combs, Allan. “Seeing into the Sun: True Intelligence.” World Futures 145–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/02604027.1997.9972627.
Combs, Allan. 2002. The Radiance of Being: Understanding the Grand Integral Vision: Living the Integral Life. 2nd ed. St. Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House.
Gebser, Jean. (1949/1986). The ever‑present origin. (N. Barstad and A. Mickunas, Trans.). Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.
Jung C. G Gerhard Adler and R. F. C Hull. 2014. Collected Works of C.G. Jung Volume 16. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm and Walter Kaufmann. 1995. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. New York: Modern Library.
Searle, John R. 2004. Mind: A Brief Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10085231.
Siegel, Daniel J. 1999. The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience. New York: Guilford Press.
Whitehead Alfred North. 1929. The Function of Reason by Alfred North Whitehead. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wilber, Ken. 2001. Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists Rev. ed. Boston New York: Shambhala; Distributed in the U.S. by Random House.
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