Feeling Higher Aspects in One’s Life and Being Involved With Them “With One’s (Whole) Self or ‘I’”

Abstract

In the “Consciousness in the Study of Human Life and Experience” articles, longer passages in interviews where the participant sincerely tries to make a sympathetic investigator understand her are considered as showing part of the participant’s current consciousness in her life (part of her “consciousness-and-‘I’”). The present article argues that a critical element in such passages is that the participant is involved in trying to make herself understood “with her (whole) ‘I,’” “her whole self.” This represents a particular kind of (spontaneous, nonverbal, “inner”) engagement of the single consciousness-and-“I.” The article argues using an example that “being involved with one’s self, one’s ‘I’” in the higher aspects that one is pursuing in one’s life is a fundamental type of phenomenon/experienced reality which is sui generis, and represents in the unfolding of the person a factor in its own right.