Ordinary consciousness

An interesting question comes up in connection with psychotic patients suffering from dementia praecox catatonia. The psychosis is due unquestionably to an over-dispersed state, and we must therefore conclude either that the sleep of such patients is theoretically quite different from ordinary sleep or that the centers of consciousness may be over-agglomerated while some centers of thinking are over-dispersed. So far as I can learn, these patients do sleep normally as a rule. Consequently one portion of the brain must be over-agglomerated at times, even though another portion of the brain is over-dispersed. 

Existence and the ordinary turmoil of life, the struggle and the confusion which sooner or later binds consciousness by manifold links to an unevolved infantile and emotional attitude towards life, create anxiety and deep-seated fears. Fear and anxiety give rise in early life to automatisms and compulsive behaviour, to what might be... 

As I listened, I thought the story apocryphal and terribly ironic. I remembered that in December, I had spoken to Dr. Wolff about Van and mentioned some of his limitations. He commented that Van seemed to be a rather ordinary man. For the great professor to have spent virtually his last moments of consciousness in the arms of my rather ordinary boss at Edgewood was mind-boggling. 

Historians tend to agree that Earth Day had a profound effect on the environmental consciousness of public officials and ordinary citizens. The 1970s saw the adoption of a series of environmental programs at both federal and state levels. Two major acts passed during this period were the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Federal Water Pollution Act of 1972. 

Because the target object or event and the perdpient are at different locations, a model that makes sense in our ordinary state of consciousness requires some sort of channel over which the information travels from the object to the percipient. By definition, this cannot be any known physical channel. A psi experiment deliberately blocks all relevant physical channels over which the information could travel. 

The model of the clairvoyance process can also serve as a model of the precognition (and retrocognition) process if we postulate some kind of channel over which information can flow backward (or forward) in time (i.e., if we assume that psi information about a future object or event can somehow flow to our present space and time location and be detectable). It is simple to say this is what happens in terms of the model we need, but the idea that only the present exists and that therefore the past is long gone and the future does not yet exist is deeply imbedded in the assumptive structive of our ordinary consciousness. It is difficult to be really open to the idea of information from the future reaching the present, much less to envision how this works. 

In our ordinary state of consciousness, we infer the existence of the unconscious mind because people behave in ways that do not make sense in terms of what they can describe about their conscious processes but that do fit a theory that they are being influenced by certain kinds of mental processes going on outside their awareness. For example, a psychoanalytic patient might be talking about how much he loves his brother, but the analyst notices that the patient s hands make strangling movements,... 

We can ask numerous questions that we don t have answers to yet about this information flow, not only general psychological ones as to how information passes from the unconscious mind to the conscious mind and what sort of transformations our unconscious processes work on information, but even more specific ones about whether psi information is processed in the same or a different way as sensory and memory information is in the unconscious mind. In the telepathic dream reported in Chapter 6, for example, there was a different feeling quality associated with this dream than with ordinary dreams. We also need to know what sort of conditions in the conscious mind can facilitate the flow of information from the unconscious, i.e., how do we draw out information from this normally inaccessible part of the mind What sorts of conscious conditions or actions minimize the distortion that seems to occur in the process Given that our direct, conscious use of psi is so poor, these are very important questions. 

I have spent most of my professional career investigating our ordinary state of consciousness and d-ASCs, and I can only touch on the ideas I have developed in these connections here. Although this chapter can be read by itself, the discussions will have greater meaning if the reader will refer to my recent States of Consciousness [173]. 

This is an illustration of a particular situation and reaction being processed through the system within our ordinary state of consciousness, but it does not illustrate the overall nature of that ordinary state or show the limits of the variability of functioning within particular subsystems that the pattern of our ordinary state imposes. 

The psi target and the psi channel (in the upper right-hand corner of Figure 5-2) feed into a function that is primarily latent in ordinary consciousness, the Psi Receptor, which is whatever process or processes that transform the psi information coming over the channel into a form useful for processing in the mind or the brain. Once this latent psi function is activated, four routes of information flow are are possible. ... 

Route to the Unconscious mind and then to direct effects on the rest of consciousness, can also be greatly affected by d-ASCs. One way of describing some of the phenomena of d-ASCs is to say that what was unconscious in an ordinary state may become conscious in the d-ASC. That is, people may directly experience certain aspects of their minds and personalities that they or others could only infer in their ordinary state. This could mean that some of the psi information that reaches the Unconscious might be directly experienceable, possibly in a less distorted form, because although some of the distortion may... 

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