TO THE STUDY OF CONSCIOUSNESS By Cam Danielson Cam Danielson is a partner at MESA Research Group, a management consulting company, where his work focuses on assisting leaders and management teams to revision future direction and opportunity amid the turbulence of personal, organizational, and societal change. For twenty years he led the Office of Executive Education at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. His recent research study, entitled, “The Effects of Long-Term Participation in The Monroe Institute Programs” was published in the TMI Journal (Spring, 2008) and the Integral Leadership Review (Spring, 2011). T he topic of consciousness elicits a wide range of responses, given the lack of consensus on its definition. Underscoring the challenge is the dialectical dilemma posed by Western scientific approaches versus various mystical traditions, both Western and Eastern. It is basically a subject-object problem:
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How can a dualistic state of being observe a nondualistic state of being? To further complicate the matter, even this description of the problem is unsatisfactory to those who would argue that consciousness is nothing more than ego consciousness. Carl Jung, who is considered rather mystical in his scientific orientation, nicely illustrates the subject-object problem of consciousness. He writes that, “consciousness is inconceivable without an ego; Nonetheless, the it is equated with the relation of contents to an ego. question of what If there is no ego there is nobody to be conscious of anything. . . . The Eastern mind, however, has no difficulty in conceiving of a consciousness without an ego. Consciousness is deemed capable of transcending its ego condition; indeed, in its ‘higher’ forms, the ego disappears altogether. . . . I do not doubt the existence of mental states transcending consciousness, but they comes first, the brain lose their consciousness to exactly the same degree that they transcend consciousness.” (“The Difference between Eastern and Western Thinking,” in The Portable Jung, ed. Joseph Campbell, 1976, p. 491.) or consciousness, can Jung’s proposition that consciousness has limitations comes from a man whose robust definition of the psyche includes the ego
(differentiated consciousness), the personal unconscious (undifferentiated consciousness), and the only be answered one collective unconscious (transpersonal consciousness). Clearly a time-space continuum is not a limiting factor in consciousness (ego awareness), but then way for logical positivists. Next Page 7 TMI JOURNAL 2012 what are the mental states transcending consciousness, or is this merely a case of linguistics, and we would all be better served by good comparative analysis of terminology? For those literal adherents of the scientific method, consciousness is framed by the physical boundaries of the earth-life system. Of course the definition of our physical boundaries is constantly under revision, but the approach is one of “empirical verification.” In essence, only what is observed through our physical senses is the proper study of science (laboratory instruments are extensions of our senses). Philosophically, this orientation is known as logical positivism and shows up in universities under the umbrella of cognitive studies. For these individuals, the study of consciousness is the study of the brain and its functioning and the effects on human behavior that result with