Consciousness

Welcome to issue 10, December 2021, of Pari Perspectives, which explores the topic of Consciousness.

It includes contributions from Valerie Hardcastle, Gary Lachman and Beverley Zabriskie who were presenters during our online What Is Consciousness event earlier in the year. Each contributor elaborates on their particular interests and fields of research. Additional contributors include Christiane de Morais Smith who asks ‘Can Consciousness be Explained by Quantum Physics?’ And Oliver Thorne who discusses a very different way of looking at the topic with his ‘Nishitani Keiji: The Japanese Philosophical Critique of Consciousness.’

The ‘More Perspectives’ section contains a 14-page fully illustrated spread of Leslie Allan Combs ‘Art and The Evolution of Consciousness.’ Combs declares that ‘The idea that consciousness, or experience, has evolved and may continue to evolve through time and history has been explored in one way or another by many philosophers and pioneers of the inner life, but is seen nowhere more clearly than in the history of art.’ Others would agree with him: F. David Peat’s essay is titled ‘The Alchemy of Creativity: Art, Consciousness and Embodiment.’ Ivana Gilgoric uses collage in ‘Art as a Mirror of Consciousness’ and we end with a fine essay and artwork from Tine Wilde ‘An Enquiry into the Nature of our Relationship with Reality.’

In addition, we touch on the related topics of Synchronicity and the I Ching with Martin Kandes’ essay ‘In the Shadows of Synchronicity’ and Eleanor Goodman’s ‘Changing in the Political and Domestic Spheres’ which examines, from both perspectives, the ambitious literary work Changing, a mosaic of poems based on the I Ching by Richard Berengarten. And from Hans Svalberg ‘A Transcendent Perspective on Reality and David Bohm’s Implicate and Explicate Orders’ in which Svalberg discusses his response in poetry to David Bohm’s worldview. And finally a fun piece from Mike Jay on the effects of nitrous oxide on the conscious state.