Transpersonal Philosophy

  I accept two basic onto-epistemological Principles or Axioms: 1. Nothing comes out of nothing. Nihil ex Nihilo. 2. Nothing comes into Being except from Being .  The second is a related statement to the first. Chance, then, is a mental construct on our part to represent a priori certain emergences of that Being from Itself. Chance points towards something else than our way of thinking. That Self or Being is rather opaque to the linguistic formal processes of the Human Being.

      The gross matter-spirit opposition confuses more than clarifies. If our Western science has proven anything, despite all its limitations, it is that what we used to call "spirit" is less spiritual, or to put it another way: that we have called spiritual things that have a component closer to life and soul. On the other hand, matter has turned out to be less "material," something less obvious than what we take for granted. Theories about matter today give us such an abstract representation that it does not correspond to any intuition that has to do with the senses, to the point that if we want to define what is the material universe we have to use mathematical constructions. However, in practical terms, the matter-spirit opposition supposes a dogmatic mutual rejection of ontologies. Scientists and most of the philosophers of the analytic tradition (Western is no longer an adjective that applies to this group of thinkers) reject the spirit as naive

  Is consciousness independent of conscious organisms or systems? In other words, is consciousness objective? For scientific psychology the answer is negative, and when the entity "consciousness" is spoken of, it is done simply as the abstract reification of the property to which the term is attributed. We immediately find ourselves in the field of the ontological dispute of universals.  (Video on the Universals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doYHQf6PFQw&list=PLcX5IdGYTx51I5EGmTgOocAHEAxX5Ir31&index=47 ) Within empirical science, the general position rejects consciousness as objective 1 , as it denies the existence of universals. The paradox that has occurred since the beginning of mathematics and the science that is based on it is that universals are at the very root of rational thought, to the point that it is precisely the reification of properties which has made it possible to develop the powerful systems of abstraction of experience that make

       The traditional ontological question has been "what is there?", A question that we must undoubtedly ask ourselves at some point in our lives, as well as those that usually accompany it, such as "why is there something instead of nothing?" or "what is Reality?", which are variations on the same theme. Each generation asks the question again, and each time it must be answered anew. If this does not happen, philosophy gives way to the empty case of rational theology, no matter how much it masquerades as science.      Of course, one could give the same answer today as the one given two thousand years ago, even using new intellectual tools. The previous ontologies are not necessarily surpassed, as shown by the survival of religious ontologies, or Platonism, or atomist and Spinozist materialism, since there is no evidence capable of settling the disputes about what there is, however surprising this is to modern mind. Our ontologies have to

 This poem is part of the Navaho Blessing ceremony. It perfectly expresses the psychological spontaneity of the people who live in the Anima Mundi. In these verses I see the fitra that the Sufis speak of, the Original Nature of the Human Soul, seductive, powerful and delicate, like the Presence of newborns.   In beauty I walk With beauty before me I walk With beauty behind me I walk With beauty above me I walk With beauty around me I walk It has become beauty again Today I will walk out, today everything negative will leave me I will be as I was before, I will have a cool breeze over my body. I will have a light body, I will be happy forever, nothing will hinder me. I walk with beauty before me. I walk with beauty behind me. I walk with beauty below me. I walk with beauty above me. I walk with beauty around me. My words will be beautiful. In beauty all day long may I walk. Through the returning seasons, may I walk. On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.

       We have classified the different approaches to consciousness following the basic criterion that distinguishes between consciousness as an entity and consciousness as a property of an entity. In a less precise way, but more far reaching in the historical and cultural perspective of human reflection on consciousness, we can distinguish the opossed ontological positions of the materialist and the ascetic. We could call both of them with related names, like physicalist, pragmatic, immanentist to the first one, and spiritualist, idealist, transcendentalist to the second. All this terms are not synonyms, though the careless popular use some times equates them in everyday talk. For the time being let us consider them as general fuzzy tags for two distinct ontological approaches. One who believes that human life and the universe as a whole originates from purely physical principles, that reality begins and ends in physical experience as offered to us by the mind and senses,

  If we examine now what the prestigious Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says about the concept of "consciousness" we can build a first approximation to what the current academic world considers to be the domain of such a concept. First of all, it should be noted that we are talking about two interconnected terms, the noun "consciousness" and the adjective "conscious". Which shows us that we are going to find two ontological approaches to the question about the nature of consciousness. Consciousness as a noun, that is, it considers consciousness to be an entity, and consciousness as an adjective, which considers consciousness to be a property of an entity. The most common understanding is the adjectival: consciousness as a property of something else, particularly of mind, or of life in general. As a property, we can then speak of conscious animals, conscious people, or any conscious physical or non-physical system, and this property can be approac

 Question 1 Sogol : So based on the last paragraph, can we say that contemplating and self discovery leads to the Noetic self, and from there rising the level of consciousness? (she refers to the last paragraph of the Post “Some milestones in the long journey of our Human reflection upon Consciousness. I” ) Oscar : Thanks for your question, Sogol. The noetic Being for Plotinus is not the result of evolution but a matter of substance: the three forms of the Human Being are present simultaneously, although they are expressed at different moments of experience. The physical being or being of affections, the dianoetic being and the noetic being express different degrees of the human soul. Plotinus' noetic being would express the actions that we commonly associate with spirituality, but Plotinus is not an evolutionist, noesis is in the Human Soul ab initio, from the beginning. If what you are asking is whether self-inquiry and contemplation serve to raise the degree

  I would like to draw attention to Edmund Husserl 's phenomenological proposal regarding the nature of consciousness before moving on to discuss some of the contemporary perspectives on our subject. According to Husserl, we can talk about consciousness at least in a tripartite manner when our interest on the subject is epistemological. 1. Consciousness as the total real phenomenological consistency of the empirical self, as the intertwining of psychic experiences in the unity of their course. 2. Consciousness as an internal perception of one's own psychic experiences. 3. Consciousness as a collective name for all kinds of "psychic acts" or "intentional experiences." (Edmund Husserl. Logical Investigations. Volume 2 . p.81. Routledge. 2006) Obviously we are not exhausting all the perspectives, but the three selected by Husserl are of great interest for our understanding of the phenomenon. The first of these is of special interest t

  In European medieval philosophy the concept of conscience is fundamentally applied in its moral dimension. For Thomas Aquinas, consciousness is an application of knowledge to present action, that is, it is an expression of the synderesis of the human intellect. We understand synderesis as the innate principle in the moral consciousness of every man, a principle which directs the human being to good and restrains her/him from evil. Such understanding of consciousness is akin to the Eastern concept of dharma . We cannot consider it as a mere moral concept in terms of the contemporary ethical framework of Human Law . It is not a direction of action based on reflections that rest on pragmatic principles of ethical action such as those that we find embodied in contemporary political constitutions. Rather, it is a way of thinking anchored in a Universal Law that makes the human being a transcendental being capable of thinking in universal and transcendental terms. In Leibn

      Our thinking about our Human Nature has  an uninterrupted continuity of more than 50,000 years in the memory of the Australian tribes. The very fact of this continuity of memory shows us the depth and complexity of the problem of Human consciousness.     It is interesting to note that for classical Greek philosophers the concept of consciousness, as we understand it today in psychological and philosophical circles, does not exist. Instead, we find in the Platonic and Aristotelic discussions that of Psyche , an entity which in its highest form is immortal, expresses intelligence and is driven by self-knowledge. It is necessary to wait until Hellenism to find, already in a more Eastern sphere, the first reflections on consciousness, although the terminology is not yet equivalent to what we will find in the world of European philosophy in the modern world. It is during the Hellenism, in the Roman Egypt, during the second and third centuries of our current era, that we

       I am not asking what academic psychology is, what is taught at universities, but the question is more anthropological, broader: what is the human psyche? What is psychology in my life? What is my psychological dimension? Most of you have been studying it for years, but even those who approach it for the first time as a college subject have some more or less vague ideas about its scope and content. Its study appeals to you for various personal reasons. Some of you are interested in the application of psychology performed by our society, its individual and social therapeutic dimension. Others are thrown into the arms of psychology by an inner search, the need to better understand the nature of the human soul and the mind. In other terms, some of you choose to study psychology while others are chosen by it. These two paths start from a common source: the need for knowledge of oneself, the motto that could be read at the entrance to the sanctuary of Delphi: Gnosi Seaut

  Ila . You say that questions are neither true nor false. Are they then non-dual? Sura . Although the contents of the questions, their meanings, belong to the realm of human language, that is, to the world of representations, to the duality with which ordinary thought limits Reality, the action expressed by the fact of asking shows a creative drive that is spontaneous and non-dual.      

When the Soul Speaks, the Self hurries to Her lap to listen.  Ila . What is finally the meaning of Life, Sura? What should I do in relation to my own Existence? Why do so many questions siege me, stealing my confidence after I thought I already understood? Years go by, and what yesterday filled me with joy today makes me a castaway on a lost beach. I search without knowing what I am looking for, without understanding what my Soul needs, actually, not understanding Her at all. I feel like a river that dried up its flow and remained stagnant in isolated pools and puddles, which neither flow nor dry completely in the midday sun, small pools in which all kinds of creatures and elusive desires thrive, blossomed by anxiety, flames of my burning ignorance that later transform into painful questions. Sura . Dear friend, what do your restless questions bring to the perfection of this moment? Are they not the perfume of your desiring mind, as you yourself have discovered? Don'

  Ila . And what can I do with this fire that presses me, with this boiling anxiety that conditions and limits me? There are times when I can't even formulate my question... and my frustration becomes unbearable. Sura . You cannot formulate the desire underlying your question because that desire is not in your Speech form. The mind reflects the impulses either of the Will or the Feeling, using the images of your particular cultural language. In any case, it is not as important that you express the question verbally as it is that you understand the desire that sustains it, the impulse that is reflected in your mind taking the form of a concept, or of numerous concepts. Your questions are a reflection of something that is not mental, of something much more basic that is present at the cellular level, and at the molecular level... It is an impulse so spontaneous and direct, so unique, that it does not presuppose nor admit a contrary movement.

  Ontology It answers the question: What is there? Our starting point is the human being as a living and thinking being in the world. Humans think about what there is the world and is part of their life, whether material or immaterial. We human try to give an orderly account of experience and in doing so we establish some fundamental relationships and produce objects (abstract or physical) upon which our way of life is based. These fundamental relationships and objects are what we call a particular or specific ontology. Not all societies have considered their fundamental relationships and objects in the same way. In fact, we observe that even the same society changes its ontological orders in its historical development. Epistemology It answers the questions: how do we know what is there? How could we know it? Asking such questions we begin an investigation into the processes that guide our human knowledge.  We call this research epistemology. Our thinking begins sponta

  Ila . Where does that creative impulse come from, dear Sura? Sura . From the game of creation and dissolution of forms that we call the Universe, forms that adopt the languages of Life. Sometimes the question acts as a force that extends the field of objects of perception. Thus, the questions formulated by contemporary physical sciences about the microscopic composition of beings and objects has led us to perceive, through scientific tools and instruments, entities and scenarios that were not revealed to our naked perception. In other cases, the question leads us to extend the field of conceptual objects, as occurs with the objects of the science of Ethics. It is through Speech, expressed in different linguistic forms, that the world appears, and is maintained by Speech, and dissolves when Speech dissipates.

  That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject. Thus it is the supporter of the world, that condition of all phenomena, of all objects which is always pre-supposed throughout experience; for all that exists, exists only for the subject. Every one finds himself to be subject, yet only in so far as he knows, not in so far as he is an object of knowledge. But his body is object, and therefore from this point of view we call it idea. For the body is an object among objects, and is conditioned by the laws of objects, although it is an immediate object. Like all objects of perception, it lies within the universal forms of knowledge, time and space, which are the conditions of multiplicity. The subject, on the contrary, which is always the knower, never the known, does not come under these forms, but is presupposed by them; it has therefore neither multiplicity nor its opposite, unity. We never know it, but it is always the knower wherever there is knowledge. Ar

 To clarify the concept of the Volitive Soul, it is necessary to understand well what the Will is, which leads us first to the understanding of the world as an Idea and then to the understanding of the world as Will. The sense in which Schopenhauer uses the concept "Idea" is the same as that of my concept "representation."    So then the world as idea, the only aspect in which we consider it at present, has two fundamental, necessary, and inseparable halves. The one half is the object, the forms of which are space and time, and through these multiplicity. The other half is the subject, which is not in space and time, for it is present, entire and undivided, in every percipient being. So that any one percipient being, with the object, constitutes the whole world as idea just as fully as the existing millions could do; but if this one were to disappear, then the whole world as idea would cease to be. These halves are therefore inseparable eve

       It is fascinating to observe how the veils fall over memory, the continuous and silent action of the force of Oblivion, the fine rain that dissolves the precarious transpersonal identities of our masks. Do you remember when you learned to read? Go back there for a moment, lift the veil. Do you remember the joy it gave you to achieve that feat? You thought you were making an effort to transform those signs into meaning, but your effort consisted simply of controlling your impulse to run and play. The effort was not the reading that came to you as an inheritance of your humanity, but rather managing for an instant and unconsciously to invoke Presence and focus your Child Consciousness, the effort of letting something in you begin to remember an invisible world appearing through words attached to meanings. You became ecstatic seeing things pop up from nowhere, breathed by your Divine Creative Breath, the Word that spoke the World, which placed it in front of you and around you than