Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a deconstructive literary critic and theorist of Indian extraction. She is best-known for the article "Can the Subaltern Speak?", which was a founding text of postcolonialism, and also for her translation of Derrida's Of Grammatology. Spivak currently teaches at Columbia University, though she teaches abroad and travels frequently.

She was born Gayatri Chakravorty, in Calcutta, West Bengal, 24 February 1942, to a middle class family. She did her undergraduate in English at the University of Calcutta (1959), graduating with first class honours. After this she completed her Master's in English from Cornell University and then pursued her Ph.D. while teaching at University of Iowa. Her dissertation was on Yeats, directed by Paul de Man, titled Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats.

It was her subsequent work on Derrida's "Of Grammatology" which was a turning point for the self-confessed "insecure intellectual". She managed to apply Derridan deconstructivism to everything from Feminism and Marxism, to Literary Criticism and Post-Colonialism. Criticised by all the camps of thought she ventured into with her tools, she describes herself as a "para-disciplinary, ethical philosopher".

Spivak coined the term "strategic essentialism" which is critical for understanding how post-modernists can achieve a sort of temporary solidarity for the purpose of social action. For example, most feminists refuse to recognize "woman," or terms or concepts that portray woman as a collection of "essences." In other words, all women are individuals, and all attempts to make generalizations about them is wrong. This attitude makes it difficult for feminists to work for causes that may help fight oppression. "Strategic essentialism" allows feminists to temporarily accept an "essentialist" position about women specifically for the purpose of social action.

External links

Paul de Man

Paul de Man (1919-1983) was a deconstructive literary critic and theorist. He was born in Belgium and after World War II taught in the United States. He was a close friend of Jacques Derrida and applied his theories of deconstruction to literary criticism.

De Man is best known for subtle readings of romantic poetry and philosophy (The Rhetoric of Romanticism) and dense short essays on various literary and philosophical topics. The essay "The Resistance to Theory," which explores the task and philosophical bases of literary theory, was commissioned and then refused by the Modern Language Association for an introductory volume on literary study. The essay argues that the widespread and polemical resistance to theory is, in fact, a resistance to reading itself, a resistance to the use of "language about language."

De Man's influence on literary criticism was for many years mostly through his many influential students, though recently his work has become more widely read.

A controversy arose in the late 1980s, when, after de Man's death, his articles for a collaborationist Belgian newspaper during the war were rediscovered. The volume Responses : on Paul de Man's wartime journalism (edited by Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan; Nebraska, 1989) collects many articles from de Man's students, colleagues, and contemporaries about the articles' discovery and the ensuing controversy.

External links

Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory

Barbara Johnson

Barbara E. Johnson, Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society, Harvard.

Professor Johnson's main research and teaching interests include literary theory; French, English, and American literature of the nineteenth century; Afro-American literature; feminism; and translation. She is the author of Defigurations du langage poétique, The Critical Difference, and A World of Difference, The Wake of Deconstruction, and The Feminist Difference, and editor of The Pedagogical Imperative, Consequences of Theory (with Jonathan Arac), and Freedom and Interpretation: Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1992. Her most recent book, Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation, is forthcoming.

Escape from Freedom

Written by Erich Fromm and published in 1941, Escape from Freedom (Also published as The Fear of Freedom) exposes the spiritual corruption of democracy, where insecurity begets authority and authority becomes totalitarianism. A classic description of how a civilized Western democracy will sacrifice freedom for security.

Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm
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Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900 - March 18, 1980) was an internationally renowned German-American psychologist and humanistic philosopher. He began his career as an orthodox Freudian clinical psychologist in Berlin, Germany, but he emigrated to the United States on May 25, 1934, arriving in New York on May 31, 1934 and becoming a citizen of the United States on May 25, 1940. Fromm lived and worked in the United States until moving to Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1950 and spending most of the rest of his life working and teaching in Mexico. He moved to Muralto, Switzerland in 1974, and died at his home there five days before his eightieth birthday.

After his final exam at the Wöler-Schule in Frankfurt in 1918, Fromm spent two semesters studying jurisprudence at the University of Frankfurt am Main. During the summer semester of 1919, Fromm studied at the University of Heidelberg, where he switched from studying jurisprudence to studying sociology under Alfred Weber (brother of Max Weber), Karl Jaspers, and Heinrich Rickers. Fromm received his Ph.D. in sociology from Heidelberg in 1922, and completed his psychoanalytical training in 1930 at the Psychoanalytical Institute in Berlin. In that same year, he began his own clinical practice and joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, which moved to Geneva fleeing Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, then, in 1934, to Columbia University in New York.

Fromm taught at Columbia University as a visiting professor from 1935 to 1939 while continuing his own clinical practice. After leaving Columbia, he helped form the New York Branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1943, and in 1945 the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology. He was also a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan from 1945 to 1947, and from 1948 to 1949 a visiting professor at Yale. Meanwhile, he was a member of the faculty at Bennington College, and became an adjunct professor of psychoanalysis at New York University.

When Fromm moved to Mexico City in 1950, he became a professor at the National Autonomous University in Mexico and established a psychoanalytic section at the medical school there. He taught at the university until his retirement in 1965. Meanwhile, he taught as a professor of psychology at Michigan State University from 1957 to 1961 and as an adjunct professor of psychology at the graduate division of Arts and Sciences at New York University after 1962. All the while, Fromm maintained his own clinical practice and published a series of books.

Beginning with his first seminal work, Escape from Freedom, first published in 1941, Fromm's writings were notable as much for their social and political commentary as for their philosophical and psychological underpinnings. His second seminal work, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, first published in 1947, was a continuation of Escape from Freedom. Taken together, these books outlined Fromm's theory of human character, which was a natural outgrowth of Fromm's theory of human nature. Fromm's most popular book was The Art of Loving, an international bestseller first published in 1956, which recapitulated and complemented the theoretical principles of human nature found in Escape from Freedom and Man for Himself, principles which were revisited in many of Fromm's other major works.

Central to Fromm's world view was his interpretation of the Talmud, which he began studying as a young man under Rabbi J. Horowitz and later studied under Rabbi Salman Baruch Rabinkow while working towards his doctorate in sociology at the University of Heidelberg and under Nehemia Nobel and Ludwig Krause while studying in Frankfurt. Fromm's grandfather and two great grandfathers on his father's side were rabbis, and a great uncle on his mother's side was a noted Talmudic scholar. However, Fromm turned away from orthodox Judaism in 1926 and turned towards secular interpretations of scriptural ideals.

The cornerstone of Fromm's humanistic philosophy is his interpretation of the biblical story of Adam and Eve's exile from the Garden of Eden. Drawing on his knowledge of the Talmud, Fromm pointed out that being able to distinguish between good and evil is generally considered to be a virtue, and that biblical scholars generally consider Adam and Eve to have sinned by disobeying God and eating from the Tree of Knowledge. However, departing from traditional religious orthodoxy, Fromm extolled the virtues of humans taking independent action and using reason to establish moral values rather than adhering to authoritarian moral values.

Beyond a simple condemnation of authoritarian value systems, Fromm used the story of Adam and Eve as an allegorical explanation for human biological evolution and existential angst, asserting that when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they became aware of themselves as being separate from nature while still being a part of it. This is why they felt "naked" and "ashamed": They had evolved into human beings, conscious of themselves, their own mortality, and their powerlessness before the forces of nature and society, and no longer united with the universe as they were in their instinctive, pre-human existence as animals. According to Fromm, the awareness of a disunited human existence is the source of all guilt and shame, and the solution to this existential dichotomy is found in the development of one's uniquely human powers of love and reason. However, Fromm so distinguished his concept of love from popular notions of love that his reference to this concept was virtually paradoxical.

Fromm considered love to be an interpersonal creative capacity rather than an emotion, and he distinguished this creative capacity from what he considered to be various forms of narcissistic neuroses and sado-masochistic tendencies that are commonly held out as proof of "true love." Indeed, Fromm viewed the experience of "falling in love" as evidence of one's failure to understand the true nature of love, which he believed always had the common elements of care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. Drawing from his knowledge of the Talmud, Fromm pointed to the story of Jonah, who did not wish to save the residents of Nineveh from the consequences of their sin, as demonstrative of his belief that the qualities of care and responsibility are generally absent from most human relationships. Fromm also asserted that few people in modern society had respect for the autonomy of their fellow human beings, much less the objective knowledge of what other people truly wanted and needed.

The culmination of Fromm's social and political philosophy was his book The Sane Society, published in 1955, which argued in favor of communitarian socialism. Building primarily upon the works of Karl Marx, Fromm was the first political and social commentator in this school of thought to introduce the ideal of personal freedom, more frequently found in the writings of classic liberals, such as Frederic Bastiat, and objectivists, such as Ayn Rand. Fromm's unique brand of socialism rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet communism, which he saw as dehumanizing and bureaucratic social structures that resulted in a virtually universal modern phenomenon of alienation.

Fromm was very active in American politics. He joined the American Socialist Party in the 1950s, and did his best to help them provide an alternative viewpoint to the prevailing McCarthyism of the time, a viewpoint that was best expressed in his 1961 paper May Man Prevail? An Inquiry into the Facts and Fictions of Foreign Policy. However, as a co-founder of SANE, Fromm's strongest political interest was in the international peace movement, fighting against the nuclear arms race and America's involvement in the Vietnam war. After supporting then Senator Eugene McCarthy's losing bid for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination, Fromm more or less retreated from the American political scene, although he did write a paper in 1974 entitled Remarks on the Policy of Détente for a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Committee for Foreign Relations.

Fromm was married three times. His first wife was Frieda Reichmann, a physician and psychoanalytist, best known for her groundbreaking work with schizophrenics. Fromm and Reichmann worked together in a private clinic in Heidelberg.

Major works

External links


Erich Fromm (1900 - 1980)


Erich Fromm was born in 1900 in Frankfurt, Germany. he received his PhD from Heidelberg in 1922 and began a career as a psychotherapist. He moved to the U.S. in 1934 and settled in New York City. Here, he met many other great refugee thinkers, including Karen Horney, with whom he had an affair. Later in life, he moved to Mexico City, where he did considerable research into the relationship between economic class and personality types.

Theory

Fromm was an existentialist whose theory includes a peculiar blend of Freud (unconscious, biological drives, repression) and Marx (people are determined by their socioeconomic class).

He added to this combination of two deterministic systems the notion of freedom, which he defined as a transcendence of the determinations that Freud and Marx described. Fromm would go on to make this freedom the central feature of human nature. According to Fromm, freedom is difficult to maintain, and many people opt to fall back into a deterministic mode of living. Such deterministic modes of living are encouraged by authoritarianism, destructiveness, and automaton conformity. However, since humanity's "true nature" is freedom, any of these escapes into deterministic modes of living and away from freedom necessarily involves alienation of ourselves (from our true nature). from freedom alienates us from ourselves. Here's what Fromm had to say:

    Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision making which replace the principles of instincts. he has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another anger which is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind. (Fromm, 1968, p. 61)


 
Orientation Society Family Escape from Freedom
Receptive Peasant society Symbiotic (passive) Authoritarian (masochistic)
Exploitative Aristocratic society Symbiotic (active) Authoritarian (sadistic)
Hoarding Bourgeois society Withdrawing (puritanical) Perfectionist to destructive
Marketing Modern society Withdrawing (infantile) Automaton conformist
Productive Humanistic communitarian
socialism		 Loving and reasoning Freedom and responsibility acknowledged and accepted




   



 

 

   

 









Ellis was born in Pittsburgh in 1913, but grew up in New York. His initial career plans were to study accounting and retire at 30, but the Great Depression changed all of this. He ended up acquiring a doctorate from Columbia in 1947, and devoted himself to psychoanalysis over the next few years under the direction of Karen Horney.

In the late 1940s he taught at Rutgers and New York University. He also became the chief psychologist at the New Jersey Diagnostic Center and then at the New Jersey Department of Institutions and Agencies.

By 1955 Ellis had given up psychoanalysis and began concentrating on changing people's behavior by confronting them with their irrational beliefs and persuading them to adopt rational ones. This type of therapy he termed rational-emotive, and published his first book on rational-emotive behavioral therapy, or REBT, two years later. Two years later, he founded and organized the Institute for Rational Living.

Theory: Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy

Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy, or REBT, is a theory developed by Ellis which has close ties with the philosophy of Stoicism (i.e., Seneca, Spinoza). The essence of the Stoic philosophy is that everything occurs according to a determinate plan, or set of natural laws, or Reason, and since everything is already determined, it is of little use to fret over things, or to express regret over things that happened according to a necessity of which we have no control over. The belief that we have control and free-will is an illusion. Everything has already been determined, and everything evolves according to deterministic laws (or Reason or God), and so there is little point in wishing for things that were not meant to be.

According to Ellis, Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy begins with the ABC's, or Activating experiences (i.e., sources of unhappiness)Beliefs (usually the beliefs that are at the root cause of our unhappiness), and Consequences (i.e., symptoms such depression and rage which result from our beliefs.

Twelve Irrational Ideas That Cause and Sustain Neurosis

1. The idea that it is a dire necessity for adults to be loved by significant others for almost everything they do -- instead of their concentrating on their own self-respect, on winning approval for practical purposes, and on loving rather than on being loved.

2. The idea that certain acts are awful or wicked, and that people who perform such acts should be severely damned -- instead of the idea that certain acts are self-defeating or antisocial, and that people who perform such acts are behaving stupidly, ignorantly, or neurotically, and would be better helped to change. People's poor behaviors do not make them rotten individuals.

3. The idea that it is horrible when things are not the way we like them to be -- instead of the idea that it is too bad, that we would better try to change or control bad conditions so that they become more satisfactory, and, if that is not possible, we had better temporarily accept and gracefully lump their exis tence.

4. The idea that human misery is invariably externally caused and is forced on us by outside people and events -- instead of the idea that neurosis is largely caused by the view that we take of unfortunate conditions.

5. The idea that if something is or may be dangerous or fearsome we should be terribly upset and endlessly obsess about it -- instead of the idea that one would better frankly face it and render it non-dangerous and, when that is not possible, accept the inevitable.

6. The idea that it is easier to avoid than to face life difficulties and self-responsibilities -- instead of the idea that the so-called easy way is usually much harder in the long run.

7. The idea that we absolutely need something other or stronger or greater than ourself on which to rely -- instead of the idea that it is better to take the risks of thinking and acting less depen dently.

8. The idea that we should be thoroughly competent, intelligent, and achieving in all possible respects -- instead of the idea that we would better do rather than always need to do well and accept ourself as a quite imperfect creature, who has general human limitations and specific fallibilities.

9. The idea that because something once strongly affected our life, it should indefinitely affect it -- instead of the idea that we can learn from our past experiences but not be overly-attached to or prejudiced by them.

10. The idea that we must have certain and perfect control over things -- instead of the idea that the world is full of probability and chance and that we can still enjoy life despite this.

11. The idea that human happiness can be achieved by inertia and inaction -- instead of the idea that we tend to  be happiest when we are vitally absorbed in creative pursuits, or when we are devoting ourselves to people or projects outside ourselves.

12. The idea that we have virtually no control over our emotions and that we cannot help feeling disturbed about things -- instead of the idea that we have real control over our destructive emotions if we choose to work at changing the musturbatory hypotheses which we often employ to create them.

(From The Essence of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy by Albert Ellis, Ph.D. Revised, May 1994.

Personality Theories

Related: Self-Actualization / Expanding Consciousness / Personality Theory / Philosophy

CONTENTS :   

Psychoanalytic

Sigmund Freud
Anna Freud
Erik Erikson
Jean Piaget
Alfred Adler
Carl Jung

Behavioristic

Ivan Pavlov
B.F. Skinner
Albert Bandura
Hans Eysenck
E.C. Tolman

Humanistic/Existential

Edmund Husserl
Snygg and Combs
Martin Heidegger
Friedrich Nietzsche
Ludwig Binswanger
Medard Boss
Viktor Frankl
Rollo May
Albert Ellis
Kurt Goldstein
Karen Horney
Erich Fromm
William James
Otto Rank
Gordon Allport
George Kelly
Abraham Maslow
Carl Rogers
C.G. Jung
Ken Wilber
Expansion of Consciousness

related onsite links: philosophy / meditation / nootropics / drugs / universality of self / relativism / neural systems control / brain organization / the singularity
related offsite links: salviasupply.com / yage.net


We are the Universe conscious of Itself

Introduction

The evolution and expansion of consciousness is inevitable. With the expansion of consciousness comes new ways of seeing reality. Everything changes. You see things that you never could of conceived of before. Old philosophies and religions suddenly appear naive and give way to a far more profound understanding. Most religions and philosophies will not last long, simply because it is inevitable that a profound transformation in our consciousness, in our way of understanding and interacting with reality, is going to soon take place. It is inevitable because that is the direction that consciousness is headed.

A few of us have chosen to make consciousness our 'game', in all of its forms and degrees of intensity, as well as its neural basis, modification, manipulation, and expansion. We observe our own experiences during various different states of consciousness as both a psychologist and cognitive scientist would. We note how different modalities are effected and enhanced, how space and time are altered, and how our sense of 'self' is effected (assuming the ego is still intact). In sum, we note both qualitatively and semi-quantitatively how the myriad different dimensions of consciousness are transformed during altered states of consciousness. It is from such experiences that the unfathomable potential for the enhancement and extension of consciousness in all of its forms reveals itself.

Ordinary consciousness is simply too mundane and limiting. It is necessary to understand the neural basis of altered/heightened states of consciousness and to control the neural system so as to bring about these desired states of consciousness. Neuroscience is just reaching into the realm of expanded states of consciousness, though the future consequences of such are simply amazing, and are utterly beyond the imaginative capabilities of the vast majority of people.

How do we expand consciousness?

An oft-used method for expanding consciousness involves mind expanding/altering drugs , also known as entheogens, though more effective and permanent ways will be devised in the future. Unfortunately, the negative side effects associated with such drugs are oftentimes many, and include poor memory.

Nootropics, also known as "smart drugs", such as piracetam, hydergine, vasopressin, l-deprenyl, acetyl l-carnitine, and nicotine, can offset some of the negative side effects produced by entheogens, and in fact, will oftentimes produce a synergism, not only amongst themselves, but particularly if used simultaneously with entheogens.

Thus, with materials readily available to us today, we can engineer our mind-states and expand our consciousness along many different dimensions.

In the long term, however, it is crucial to identify the particular brain activities and key areas of the brain that are responsible for expanded/transcendent states of consciousness, because then we will be in a position to modulate neural activity in these brain areas using safer and more controlled techniques than what are currently available to us today. Possibly one such technique is Neural Systems Control. Another technique could involve brain-activity biofeedback (for example, EEG biofeedback, though current EEG is too crude a technique to be really useful for the purposes of expanding consciousness via brain-activity feedback).

What are these brain areas and what types of neural activity are responsible for expanded consciousness?

At this point, anything said is speculative, and is best disclosed at a future time when more certainty is obtained. What does seem certain, however, is the involvement of cingulate cortex, prefrontal cortex (and other associational cortices), and the thalamus.

Consciousness may be Expanded along Multiple Dimensions

Consciousness is a multi- dimensional phenomenon. There are many ways of expanding consciousness. The transcendent states achieved thru meditation, while important, are but one type of transcendent consciousness. Unfortunately, many people seem to be of the opinion that there exists only one type of transcendent consciousness, and that it can be reached thru meditation. However, this view is naive because it disregards the multi-dimensional aspects of consciousness, which may be expanded (or transcended) along many different dimensions to result in myriad different transcendent states of consciousness. The tendency to label such transcendent states as simply 'samadhi', 'nirvana', 'Buddha-consciousness', 'cosmic-consciousness', or 'satori' just reinforces the mistaken notion that there exists only one type of transcendent consciousness.

One of the objectives of BrainMeta.com, and in particular, this essay, is to educate others that there are multiple different types and modes of transcendent consciousness, not just those associated with the 'classic' mystical experience, and that these different types of consciousness will play a role in the evolution of our consciousness towards the Singularity, when our consciousness, at both the personal and species level, will transcend itself into something that is currently inconceivable for our species.

What is it like to Experience Expanded Consciousness?

In the following, some of the dimensions along which consciousness may be transformed and expanded will be described. These effects will not necessarily be experienced simultaneously, and are to some extent dependent on the individual. The following list is not meant to be exhaustive by any means, but rather highlights a few of the many interesting effects experienced during states of expanded consciousness.

Time Dilation

We've all experienced time dilation to some extent during 'normal' states of consciousness. In general, time dilation occurs when thought processes speed up while memory is left intact (if memory is not intact, you often sense something happened but you do not know what or how much subjective time has passed). It is interesting that time dilation occurs along a spectrum. Normally, we may feel like an hour of subjective time has passed after only five minutes of objective time. However, there does not seem to be a limit concerning how much we can potentially dilate subjective time, and some mind enhancing/altering drugs have the property of taking time dilation to the extreme. What seems like entire lifetimes can be experienced in a few minutes.

Vastness

Imagine the sense of 'vastness' you experience when you gaze into the clear night sky. Now imagine that sense of vastness magnified a million-fold or more and you may begin to appreciate the type of expansion of perceptual spaces that occurs during this experience so that they become extremely vast, beyond anything 'normally' conceivable.

Body Expansion

The experience of one's 'body consciousness' extending outwards, usually far beyond one's immediate body. This particular mode of consciousness falls under the category of 'Cosmic Consciousness'. Normally, we have a 'body-consciousness', meaning we're conscious of our arms and legs, as our own and not somebody elses. 'Body Expansion' occurs when your 'body consciousness' extends beyond, usually far beyond, your immediate physical body. It is as if your new body is your whole environment and that your 'old' body is simply a nexus or nodal point thru which your will exerts itself. Even during 'normal' consciousness, it is possible to willfully enter into the proper mind-set for 'Body Expansion', though naturally, not everyone is currently capable of doing this.

Ego-Death and the Experience of the 'Self'

The experience of the death of ones ego or 'self' can be frightening for some. Such experiences are often related to near-death experiences (NDEs), in the sense that the two often, but not always, occur hand-in-hand. Following ego-death, or the destruction of the individuals 'self', what remains is intense, non-reflective (or non-self-conscious) consciousness, the radiant 'Self' (presumably, this is the same 'Self' as revealed in ancient Eastern religious texts such as the Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanashads, the same as experienced during states of 'Cosmic Consciousness', and the same as experienced by religious mystics). This is why such experiences are invariably mystical and religious. Through the death of ones 'self' and unveiling of the 'Self', one soon learns to identify oneself completely with the 'Self' thereafter. Even if and when the individual's ego subsequently 're-crystallizes', it is transparent and seen through for the illusion it is.

Presence

It is not possible to put this ineffable experience into words, other than to say that it involves a vivid consciousness of a strong, ubiquitous 'presence' which has some relation or similarity to the 'presence' that we can be normally aware of when others are watching us.

Higher-Dimensional Space and Time

Normally, we construct space and it is limited to 3 spatial dimensions. However, because 3-dimensional space as we perceive it is nothing more than a mental construct, it is perhaps not surprising that this limitation to 3 spatial dimensions can be transcended. This grants one, among other things, the ability to discern patterns and connections in perceptual and conceptual thought not visible during 'normal' consciousness.

Similarly, our mental representation of time is normally of a flowing, continuous, and unitary nature, but this may be modified as well, in a way that is analogous to the modifications of our mental representations of space discussed above.

Ecstasy

This involves the experience of ecstasy and rapture far, far beyond what we are capable of experiencing normally. This experience has absolutely nothing to do with the 'ecstasy' experienced using the drug that goes by the same name, but rather involves an intensity and depth that far exceeds those produced by typical 'recreational' drugs.

Multi-Modal Integration

This experience involves integration across multiple modalities, such as visual, auditory, and proprioceptive, to yield new modalities that are greater than the sum of their parts.

God-Mode

God-Mode is a somewhat humorous name for an expanded state of consciousness that 'simultaneously' involves many of the above effects, including time dilation, body expansion, vastness, ecstasy, consciousness of the 'Self', and presence. There are many degrees and many types of 'Cosmic Consciousness'. God-Mode is perhaps the highest and most profound type of Cosmic Consciousness that our species has yet experienced.

A few more thoughts on the nature of expanded consciousness

The universe, as we directly experience and understand it, is but a construct of the brain that enables us to navigate about and get what we want. It's not a true picture of reality. There are many ways of constructing and experiencing reality, and there are ways of perceiving things other than the 'normal' construct that the vast majority of mankind employs.

These different constructs depend on different modes of consciousness.

Space itself is but a mental construct. There are many ways to construct space other than the familiar Euclidean space most people experience.

Our perceptual constructs will soon give way to something far more profound, something currently inconceivable for the vast majority of humanity because they are all trapped in their little worlds, and they think it is reality, but it is not. We are the universe conscious of itself. Very soon, consciousness is going to experience an abrupt change. Humanity has been confined for so long in an illusion. Individuality will give way to the experience of something common, that sort of underlies the individuality.

Our perceptual realities are only the dimly lit surface of a vast sea of consciousness. This is not the Jungian collective unconscious per se, but rather something which is indeed very conscious. However, the great majority of our species has not experienced this directly because they are confined within their little, illusory perceptual shells which they think is somehow reflective of reality, but it is not.

We (our conscious worlds) are but waves or ripples on the surface of something vast, the Self, a consciousness which underlies and encompasses all the little spheres of self-consciousness. This is why being self-centered is naive. We, as a species, are moving inexorably towards Self-centeredness.

If you directly experience the bigger picture, you willl see just how much of an illusion our 'normal' perceptual reality is. For good reason, no-one can claim to experience the full, true picture. However, a few of us have experienced a much bigger picture, and know that this is the direction that consciousness is heading, that this is in our future.

People are stuck in their little waves of individuality, they never look deep beneath the surface, and there is something vast there that likely is common to all. It is something that you have to directly experience because explanations and descriptions will be empty without the actual experience, though it is not recommended that everybody attempt to experience it just yet. Nonetheless, it is where the future is headed.


Introduction

Personality theories are mainly concerned with the structure of the human mind or psyche, which subsumes explaining how individual psychological processes are organized and made coherent. As such, personality theories serve as the basis and synthesizing element for many other fields in psychology.

Intellectual Mistakes and Misinterpretations

Before proceeding much further, it's best to keep in mind that personality theorists often make intellectual mistakes in their theories, even the geniuses like Freud. Just a few of these mistakes are outlined below:

  • Ethnocentrism - biases due to one's culture. For example, Freud grew up in Vienna, not Tokyo or Africa. Hence, we expect his theories to be influenced by Viennese culture.
  • Egocentrism - biases due to one's individuality. These include temperament, genetics, family structure and dynamics, special personal experiences, education, etc. It could be said, not without too much exaggeration, that every personality theory may be explained in terms of the personality theorist's life experiences, and in fact, is limited by them.
  • Dogmatism - biases due to dogmatism; i.e. not allowing for questions, doubts, or new information. Often, dogmatic people will employ circular reasoning to validate their theories.

In addition, when trying to make sense of a personality theory, people will often run into the pitfall of misinterpretation. This is because words have many different associations and shades of meaning, and often we encounter a word used by a personality theorist that we unintentionally assign all sorts of associations and meanings to that the theorist did not have in mind.

For example, Freud's id, ego, and superego are all words used by his translators, though the original German terms were es, ich, and überich, which would be more properly translated as 'it', 'I', and 'over-I'.

In general, misinterpretations are prone to occur 1) when words are translated from other languages, 2) with neologisms (altogether new words), and 3) metaphors.

Evidence for personality theories comes in the following five varieties:

  • Anecdotal
  • Clinical
  • Phenomenological
  • Correlational
  • Experimental

Philosophical Assumptions

Philosophical assumptions underlying personality theories:

  • Free will vs. Determinism
  • Uniqueness vs. Universality
  • Physiological vs. Purposive Motivation
  • Conscious vs. Unconscious Motivation
  • Nature vs. Nurture
  • Stage vs. Non-Stage Theories of Development
  • Cultural Determinism vs. Cultural Transcendence
  • Early vs. Late Personality Formation
  • Continuous vs. Discontinuous Models of Mental Illness
  • Optimism vs. Pessimism

Classifying Personality Theories

  • Psychoanalytic - the Freudians and neo-Freudians, who for the most part, attribute signifacance to unconscious processes.
  • Behavioristic - focus on careful observation of behavior and environment and their relations. Behaviorists include Hans Eysenck, B. F. Skinner, and Albert Bandura.
  • Humanistic/Existential - focus on phenomenological methods and believe that the answers are to be found in consciousness or experience.