Proactive lucidity: Superconsciousness, creativity, and the virtually real
This thesis considers the significance and relevance of the distinction between artificial and natural environments and virtual reality experiences which seem to directly confront the question what is reality?. In focusing on challenges and changes to human conceptions of reality, current discourse on virtual technologies and their implications tends to assume that existing conceptions of time and space are fundamentally altered. This study investigates the creative resource that apparently exists beyond the commonly accepted spatial and temporal boundaries of human experience. The nature, processes, and forms of virtuality and dream lucidity encountered by demonstrably-creative, artistically-imaginative, technically-competent productive artists and composers involved with the visual media, are identified and investigated. Related consciousness experiences are further explored. Among the common factors in patterns which appear to most vitally prefigure and accompany the actual production of innovative art works, this study finds a strongly perceived and contextualised awareness of creative drive and a sense of directionality in that perception to be most significant. Integral theory, transpersonal psychology, holonic structuralism, feminist epistemology, and a participatory approach to research, guide and inform the conduct of these case studies. The introductory chapters explain the meaning of the term integral, outline the philosophy behind integral psychology, introduce the topic of location in respect of spirit and consciousness and art, and propose the dimensions of creativity. Longitudinally obtained results initially gathered under the focal headings of: forms of awareness, creative process and technology, and associated context, show that the foundations of most of the important issues in our lives cannot be found in physical space with simple location. Non-simple locus and worldspace, an idea which will be developed with reference to a theory of holons throughout the thesis, are addressed in terms of their phenomenologically-real referents. Context-dependency is reviewed in terms of multidimensional life experiences and reality as a whole, and the topic of integral semiotics is raised. This thesis unfolds a case for transpersonal healing and creativity enhancement through receptive multiple-state consciousness and lucid rehearsal. Proactive lucidity is found to be the deliberately receptive experience of extra-awareness, perception-enhancement, self-reflective insight, and natural activities which spontaneously occur during and across various 'altered' or 'multiple' states of consciousness. Such states include lucid dreams, witnessing dreaming, within-dream visions, and similar trance-like re/visualisations. This study finds proactive lucidity to be an invaluable problem-solving resource in helping people cope creatively with life issues. The latter chapters summarise the participants' insights into what they discern as causal factors underlying the core issues which deeply link the broad-ranging topics raised and explored in the course of this study. They identify parallels which indicate a form of inbuilt directionality in the developmental stages of human life and consciousness, and suggest how the spiritual domain might be related to creative currents in matter and life and mind. By way of real examples and metaphoric imagery, this study then proposes that these currents-in-conflict explain the devastating effects and consequences of a grand-scale hegemony of reductionism which manifests as a widespread loss of the spiritual in the West. It also explains the resultant collapse of the multidimensional Kosmos into a monological cosmos. Finally, in terms of transpersonal interpretation and superconsciousness, this study suggests there is actual form and structure in certain leanings or moral intuitions fundamental to human and non-human alike. It further suggests that in working for the individual such intuitions work for the greater good. The core of this thesis is about the exciting way a group of people exhibit their creative processes by using proactive lucidity to transcend ceilings. This study finds that the greater the depth of consciousness (=height of awareness) the clearer the intuition of the ground of creativity from which it issues and of which it is comprised.
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