Synaesthesia
I first came to think about the possible transformation in consciousness as synaesthesia, from a book I read over 20 years ago: Harry T. Hunt’s On the Nature of Consciousness. Although he himself was a transpersonal psychologist and mystic, Hunt dedicated his project to “the necessity of physical metaphor for any description of consciousness, with its implications of an inseparability of consciousness and world.”
Hunt wanted to integrate ideas from transpersonal psychology, meditative and altered states of consciousness, mystical experience with the views of consciousness in cognitive science, neurophysiology and animal psychology, and he put perceptual awareness as the core of consciousness as shared across species, and viewed human self-referential symbolic consciousness as continuous with that by reason of being based on a capacity for cross-modal translation and transformation among multiple perceptual modalities.
In other words, Hunt had a hunch that human consciousness was a result of more interconnections and cross modal interactions between the different perceptual systems, including the kinesthetic and other bodily sensations. Put simply, human consciousness arises not because we have more wires in our perceptual brains, but because those wires are crossed many more times over. 4
Hunt’s idea predates the work of Lakoff and Johnson (among others) who see semantic properties of human cognition as arising from “metaphors” and “conceptual blending.” These “linguistic constructions” occur at the subconscious level and we will take them up in the next module of the course.5
Hunt said something deeper was happening at the unconscious level. He said that metaphorical thinking and conceptual blending come from the fact that our perceptual systems are already blending information among themselves.
Hunt surmised that the transpersonal and mystical were heightened, or hyper-active versions of cross-modal synesthesia--- which I am now referring to as synaesthesia. 6
Accordingly then, synasthetics precedes the metaphor, because it is born in the perceptual and sensorial organs of the body, before it rises “up the hierarchy” into the fields of the imagination. Like rising dough due to the activities of living yeast, imagination begins in the activities of the sensorial and perceptual organs which are already entangled and inter-interactive; begins to rise from the cross-modal echoes of them, and finally coalesces as virtualized representations in the mind.
Of course, the process doesn’t stop there, as the virtual representations further function as stimuli that arouse the body sensorium into novel states of cross-modal processing, generating a virtuous cycle (or viciously psychical) imaginal creativity.
Since the imaginal comes from the body sensorium, few scientists ever detect where or how their breakthrough ideas come from, given the strong bias they have against the “lower” processes of the animal bodymind. The philosopher-psychologist Eugene Gendlin, however, built his entire legacy around the experience of these factors and processes, which he called the felt sense.
Now we have a rigorous way to discern what is happening when people claim to be following Gendlin’s “TAE” (thinking at the edge) process, and when they are not. TAE must start in the body sensorium, not in the patterns of memory, imagination or thought. When memory, imagination or thought predispose the body sensorium to activate cross-modal processing, the practice is effectively driven from top-down, not bottom-up, as is necessary in Gendlin’s work. Furthermore, “bottom-up” doesn’t mean from the depths of your body up. It requires participation of body sensorium at the depths of world itself. The better one is at getting to these depths, the more one experiences the felt sense as something the world is saying, not something my body is saying. The saying, therefore, lives in the world, and opening up the felt sense is fundamentally like opening up a communications cable at the interface of self and world.
Gendlin’s other practice “focusing” then becomes a process of opening up a communications cable at the interface of self and world, *in the presence of another *who is also communicating directly from the world in the same way. Notice that this is not inherently dialogic or intersubjective, it is the world opening up to itself. Hence it is transubjective and *aperspectival. *In his life work, Gendlin had often argued for “a new theory of the body”, which he believed would come through the power of thinking at the edge. Until Gendlin, there were two competing theories around bodily relation with the surrounding world: “mediational” and “contact.”
According to the first, we have no meaningful relationship to the outside world except through intermediate terms (for example, sense data, images, representations); for the second, we are directly contiguous with the world at all time, and this basic contact sanctions knowledge about its contents.8 Eugene Gendlin took up a third approach whereby:
the body ingresses into its environment