Overview
This handbook explores the major domains of philosophical psychology, an inquiry into various notions about mind or The Mind. These domains include: psychological methodology, the criteria of mentality, the relation between mind and consciousness, the existence of the unconscious and subconscious mind, the structure of the mind, the genesis of mind, the nature of the self, the mind-body relation, the freedom of the will, and mind and cognition. The author discusses these domains from the attitudinal presupposition that one is responsible for the integrity of one's mentality.
The author's purpose in writing this handbook was to intentionally provide the phenomenologically open reader with a direct experience of mind as the organizational principle of the brain. By a dialectically oriented, dispassionate and detached thought-engaged exposition in handbook form, the reader can directly engender a sense of responsibility for the integrity of his or her life. The reader who reads these words expressing a neutral contemplative reality experiences wisdom. Conversely, the reader who sees these words and experiences a need to comment here, disagree there, question or deny any particular statement is the reader who is not yet ready to read this handbook. Yet, again, s/he is — from another perceptual view-point. This handbook lets the reader experience directly how s/he has thus far organized his or her own being-in-the-world.
Thus, this handbook serves as a ground and point of departure for the nascent field of metapersonal psychology, the study of being beyond the classical ego needs of being-in-the-world. The subject matter of metapersonal psychology is one's self-identity as absolute contradiction. Self-identity as absolute contradiction perceives the oneness of cause and effect, knowing one and not two or more. The mind of such self-identity is unconscious of itself rather than in an intellectually bifurcated state of consciousness that knows only dualism. As a result, this paper serves as a philosophical reference for formal and systematic research into the various domains of metapersonal psychology: time, space, energy, duration, synergy, unifying fields within the context of human beings being human rather than being doctors, lawyers, or employees or bosses — being the role one can play in life.
This handbook maintains a basic gestalt orientation in a Sufi harmonic presence to and within the inherent oneness before one and two, polished with Soto Zen overtones. This orientation emerged from the Judeo-Christian mystical tradition grounded in Plotinus, Avicenna, The Desert Fathers, Scotus Erigena, Bernard of Clairvaux, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, and Rudolf Otto, and tangentially, the tradition of Zen Buddhism. This orientation finds empirical support and validation in the demonstrated synergistic denominator of the quantum universe and the simultaniety of matter and energy expressed in the Einsteinian equation E=MC2.
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