Body-Mind Integrity through Noetic Learning in Art, Education, & Consciousness

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

(Nota Bene: this article is still under construction. Do not quote)

ABSTRACT (290 words)

To the grave detriment of students, our schools and universities impose pre-existing learning structures and classifications of exclusion upon atypical learners who contrarily learn and come to knowledge using intuitive, non-discursive modalities. Their personal knowledge and tacit learning are neither recognized nor valued within prescribed, compartmentalized school curricula. Stigmatized by their cognitive-typical peers, as well as by faculty and staff who tightly manage academic choke-hold structures, nonconventional learners undergo cognitive splits and suffer scarring of their distinctive epistemic being that may last a lifetime and thereby tragically contributes to the present global mental health crisis. Our schools make cognitive fragmentation acceptable and impairment of mental and psycho-emotional fitness permissible. We must discontinue support of an exclusively narrow discursive and number-based educational model that, by itself, leads to stunted intellectual and emotional growth instead of individuated wholeness. The prevention of further mental health wounding caused by education is our dire ethical responsibility every bit as much as the restoration of well-being of those learners already harmed by schools. We need an educational approach that enhances epistemological and cognitive diversity and is suited to enhance effective decision making, problem solving, and assessing contradictory claims to truth in a democratic society currently adrift. ‘Healing education’ as discussed here is my human completion project, featuring ‘noetic literacy’ and ‘cognitive imagination’ developed through the arts and humanities as effective means to nurture ‘all-sided’ citizens suited for responsible democratic participation. Non-propositional, non-explicit noetic principles and values explored in this work are not intended to establish strict rules, a detailed roadmap, or a how-to, one-size-fits-all guide to holistic and integral curricula, pedagogy, and ways of knowing, so much as to provide a call across education for further epistemic research and collaborative development of an operative conceptual framework.

KEY CONCEPTS

noetic literacy, epistemic pluralism, ontological disjunction, epistemic harm/injustice, cognitive imagination

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HOLISTIC AND INTEGRAL PERSPECTIVES ON EDUCATION

As the home base of specialized knowledge, higher education may have to do a great deal more in coming decades to recognize, respect, codify and clarify the strengths and limitations of nonscientific ways of knowing vias-a-vis scientific knowledge. At the very least, colleges may want to think about designing curricula at different levels of sophistication to guide students through the thickets of various truth-seeking paths… – Daniel Yankelovich

To articulate and organize, and thereby recognize and understand, the problems of the world, we need a reform in thinking … The education of the future is faced with this universal problem because our compartmentalised, piecemeal, disjointed learning is deeply, drastically inadequate to grasp realities and problems which are ever more global, transnational, multidimensional, transversal, polydisciplinary and planetary. – Edgar Morin

After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of [them]selves? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. – Michael Foucault

In our time, it is the intellect making darkness, because we’ve let it take too big a place. Consciousness discriminates, judges, analyses, and emphasizes the contradictions. It’s necessary work up to a point, but analysis kills; synthesis brings to life. We must find out how to geteverything back to connection with everything else. We must resist the vice of intellectualism and get it understood that we cannot only understand. – C.G. Jung

The postindustrial information age is ultra-sensitive to the role of method in the critical questioning of assertions of knowledge. “How do we, and how can we know this or that?” “What are the criteria, credentials, and standards that serve as foundations for truthful claims to know something?” “What are the indicators that a person is beyond reasonable expectations of learning growth set by normative standards and who decides?” (James Kaufman, 1981). While at first blush these questions may seem overly philosophical and detached from lived experience, failure to adequately address them can and do have injurious educational and cultural effects that weaken our democracy. In a time of a political vitriol, volatility of financial markets, extreme nationalism, COVID-19, and ecological deterioration, it is essential that educators and leaders in all sectors reconsider conventional understanding of what, defines viable ways of knowing and authentic knowledge. Facing global crises calls for our adaptability, agility, innovation, and resilience, in order not only to survive unprecedented and unforeseen disruption but also to chart new pathways suitable to greater stability and sustainability in a world of rapid, ongoing discontinuous change.

The critical crises of our times constitute a jolting wake-up call to education, as well as to all other sectors of society, to strategically diversify school programming, delivery methods, pedagogy, and internal and external learning communities. Life presents us with complex, adaptive challenges, pushing us beyond our knowledge zones and demanding answers neither found in standard academic disciplines nor accessed by their typical skills. It is disappointing that schools and universities have failed to display a ‘response-ableness’, the ability to creatively optimize opportunities within ongoing serious disruptions to life. More than just coping with hardship, ‘response-ableness’ is attuned to paradox and contradictions inherent in most change-challenges, allowing us to see that problems often unexpectedly disclose potential possibilities embedded in borderland crossings of both/and phenomena and events.

The central philosophical problem of history, in the view of Willian James, is that of the one and the many. William James considers the complimentary viewpoints of monism (the belief in a single, fundamental reality) and pluralism (the belief in multiple, independent realities). He reasons that while the world can be understood as both one and many, the practical consequences of each view are significant, influencing our personal dispositions, worldview, and how we interact with life (James, “The One and the Many).The ‘world as one’ is a single indivisible reality, as James sees it, possesses a causal unity and single purpose. He suggests that the idea of a single, underlying reality can provide the beholder a sense of order and meaning. He sees the world as many defined by diversity and pluralism, giving credence to the particular traits of personal experience. (i.e., The one & the many (cf., W James, Pragmatism: A new Name for the Same Old Thing (Longmans, Green, 129).

James recommends a conjunctive approach of the one and many, since both views have merit and can lead to a meaningful life. We live in a remarkable time related to knowledge and its construction. With the emergence of the internet, cellphones, and globalism, we see for the first time in the history of the human adventure that knowledge is global. The accumulated wisdom, insights, perspectives, discoveries, and creations are virtually available across the world, though certainly not without issue of access related to technology, schools, and book based and digital libraries. Knowledge of premodern, modern, and postmodern societies are virtually available everywhere (Wilber, The Integral Vision, p.16). We have access to the intellectual, spiritual, aesthetic, psychological, and philosophical thought of diverse peoples and cultures. There can be little or no excuse for schools today not to draw freely from what the global community of human intelligence and what it has to offer toward formulating curricula featuring epistemologies and cognitive modalities depicted in the global arts and humanities.  

Unlike the balanced approach of William James, education, at all levels, imposes on student and faculty learners a materialist, number-based definition of reality as inter-objective truth that has rendered a radical subject-object rupture across education and all social sectors, at a time when global crises call for a balance or broad synthesis of polarities. In education, STEM’s (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) monolithic worldview is privileged as the exclusive legitimate means to make sense of a nuanced, contradictory world (Rojcewicz 2021). STEM is the current branding of the logico-scientific vision. This perspective stems from the Enlightenment project’s legacy of objective scientific detachment, independent of the ‘confounding’ effects of whatever is personal or intuitive, or whatever can’t be made explicit & rationally defended (McGilchrist, Master & Emissary, p.350). Here lies an assumption of separateness.

Western dualism treats all things of reality as inherently divided, disconnected, and ‘broken up’ into smaller constituent parts that are essentially independent and self-existent. And so, many scientists undervalue unscientific knowledge characteristic of the arts and humanities. For example, the only value of religious study, according to E.O. Wilson, is to ‘stimulate the sciences (E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge MA, 1978 Feyerabend, Farewell, p.22 note). Folk and indigenous wisdom, even less regarded than the humanities within the Western episteme, are considered feckless and simply do not count as significant knowledge. The truth of the matter, however, is that techno-scientific knowledge is neither an exclusive way of living nor does it provide a universal standard of a meaningful and fulfilled life. The essence of technology is an orientation to the material world Heidegger calls enframing, by which he means the human drive for precise, controllable knowledge of natural world (The Technological View of the World of Martin Heidegger, Future Lean, 22/08/19 3:31 pm).

As a vehicle of thinking and acting, the techno-scientific vision manifests irrefutable, pervasive powers of observation and description of the material world that ostensibly invites our ‘addiction’ to the point of a polarization. The hard sciences – when lacking augmentation by the methods and values of the arts and humanities – manifests a bumptious bravura that would exploit, subdue, and control nature. The grand narrative of the natural and technological sciences as an ostensibly universal representation of reality would smother all that is “wild and unpredictable” (Feyerabend, Farewell, p.26). As a complementary addition to that one-sided narrative, I shall consider a consilience of indigenous, folk, arts, and mythopoetic systems of knowledge, linking empirical science with tacit knowledge of diverse disciplines and cultures into a comprehensive educational theory of the whole-person will be offered here. Education at all levels exists and has long existed in the bubble of limited thinking. Our schools must necessarily experience their own cognitive dissonance by coming to recognize the error in things they currently or have longed believed to be true, like the universal superiority of calculative reason over intuition and perspicacious knowing, or the truth in things like suprarational systems of knowledge that they’ve rejected as false and so superfluous to knowing reality.

 My education project discussed here argues that global bodies of knowledge, premodern, modern, and postmodern must now be joined to form an integral, interleaving perspective on the world. An enlarged epistemic framework linking mythopoetic and scientific systems would invite us to see beyond fragmentation and to experience reality as an integration, that is “a fully completed and realized wholeness” and “the bringing about of an integrum…” (Jean Gebser, Ever-Present Origin 99). As an integrum, learning is an inner achievement and a tacit victory that links one to health, society, and the earth. Holistic and integral conceptions of humanity are essential to my argument concerning an education that heals school-generated (and culture supporting) ‘splits’, leading to partial human development. Holism features a unified way that integrates all aspects of one’s lived experience, including the rational, ethical, aesthetic, imaginal, and somatic, while promoting exploration of analogies and interconnections between seemingly unrelated fields and realms of inquiry. Holistic systems approaches enable one to recognize, conceptualize, and discern recurring patterns found in natural and human systems and provide a conceptual framework for synthesizing knowledge. Attention given to the senses, emotions, intuition, and reason within a transdisciplinary frame is envisioned here as forming a complete person with a healthy all-sided body-mind (Nakagawa, 2000; Miller & Nakagawa, 2002; Palmer & Zajonc, 2010). Holistic or postmodern approaches to health and learning challenge status quo modernist perspectives and practices regarding reality and what it means to be human. Holistic and integral approaches rest upon a comprehensive envisioning of human nature and human experience that, while it fails to form a single theory and practice, nevertheless share “a broad range of initiatives that share family resemblances” (S Forbes, Hol Ed 2003, p.11). The holistic paradigm emerged as a counter to modernity and its consensus consciousness.

Despite challenges from postmodernism, the modernist metanarrative alleging but one truth and one legitimate path of life that is rational, quantitative, material, and objective still dominates today’s culture. Modernity’s mechanistic worldview seeks control over nature that it sees composed of machine-like, measurable, physical parts. Its reductionist and compartmentalized worldview interprets wholes in terms of their parts. Because people are believed to be autonomous and separated from the earth, modernity’s view on humanity is one of ego-absorbed individualism and radical disjointedness. Empowered to control the material world through the techno-sciences, humanity believes itself superior to the more-than-human world it views as an inert ‘storehouse of goods’ (Heidegger). That position has long served as the normative knowledge-basis of schools. The modern worldview has facilitated significant achievements in technology, industry, and scientific research, of course, but it’s exclusionary, cognicentric model could not avoid and, perhaps, even triggered human fragmentation and planetary deterioration (Krippner, p. 135). 

More and more, schools are seen primarily, sometimes even exclusively, as businesses wherein the budgetary bottom line determines success over human transformation, producing traumatic emotional and intellectual consequences for faculty and student learners. When treated predominantly as a business, education is a commodity, students are consumers, and faculty a marketing and sales force. Influenced by commercial pressures, too many schools prioritize their profits over not student learning and development, losing sight of their fundamental mission and academic values and the public’s trust (Derek Bok, Univ in the Marketplace 2003). In that context, learners become self-absorbed, indulgent, or ethically indifferent to the socio-political needs of others. One’s inner spirit that promotes reflection, analysis, and creative expression leading to mental, physical, moral, and social well-being is crushed under the weight of market and professional values. The fact is that educating human spirit is central to liberating learning and learning from a subservience to job promotion. One’s creative, inquisitive spirit is an ineffable quality that includes but moves beyond physical and cultural determinants of self. When schools are treated predominantly as a business, the will of students slackens, incapable of critical judgment and effective agency, and imaginative cognitive is undernourished and grows anorexic. The danger then is that schools become subsidiaries of the commercial and industrial marketplace, and as such are merely interchangeable, and therefore disposable. The transactional application of capitalistic values to human relationships becomes a staple learning outcome resulting in tragic human injury.

The pluralistic view of holism instead offers an anti-oppressive position of cognitive freedom, ‘flow’, and ‘spirit’, understood generally as an intuitive “sense of purpose and meaning” that is not egocentric but committed to “service in relation to others” (Laurel H Campbell, 2006, p. 30). That interrelation commitment has important implications for effective democracy. Holism acknowledges a widespread, transcultural recognition of dynamic interconnection in the East with Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism (Krippner, Source**) and the West with Alfred North Whitehead’s organic philosophy, the cosmology of physicist and Brian Swimme, the epistemology of Gregory Bateson, and other systems theorists. To counter the fragmented worldview of modernity, holistic perspectives augment modernism’s mechanistic and reductionist assumptions with organic and diverse perspectives modernity rejected as mere superstition – folklore, myth, religion, and indigenous repositories of wisdom.

Healing education is my holistic human completion project, a harmonizing vision and practice for thinking and working across differences by which all distinct singularities form a complementary whole. The holistic paradigm promotes the nurturing of physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, imaginal, and social interacting human components embedded in the relational web of reality. It highly values epistemological pluralism, omnimodal cognition, cross-cultural multicultural communications, and social praxis. The holistic perspective “admits the possibility of scientifically anomalous events, subtle energies, and latent natural laws and principles that might necessitate a reconsideration of the materialistic worldview” (SOURCE? Nelson, Pacifica?? Krippner, Holistic Paradigm??). The systems orientation of the holistic paradigm moves from discrete objects to sentient relationships and from objective knowledge to contextual knowledge.  It values wholes as ontologically more than the sum of their interacting parts. Emergent properties, dissipative structures, synchronicities (Cambray **), deep ecology, and the implicate order of the kosmos noted by holism and integral theory make untenable the reductionist, mechanical view and method of modernity.

Integral values and approaches to learning and consciousness are also valued here, Inspiration is drawn from Ken Wilber’s quadrant vision of wholeness, harmony, and health. Wilber’s model integrates the “four dimensional perspectives of objectivity, interobjectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity” (Esbjorn-Hargens, Integral Teacher) by finding patterns and features that connect with one another. A healthy, learner-centered education must necessarily address the four irreducible realms of life. The personal interior or the subjective ‘I’ (first person singular perspective) is the field of subjective awareness involving personal consciousness, thoughts, feelings, emotions, attitudes, and desires. It reveals what an individual “looks” like from the inside. The personal exterior or the objective ‘It’ (3^rd person singular perspective) presents the objective facts of a person and is the view of objective science, the material body, brain, and individual social behavior. The collective interior or the intersubjective ‘We’ (2^nd person perspective) is the view of intersubjective awareness that includes cultural worldviews, shared values, feelings, and ethos. It reveals what a group or culture looks like from the ‘inside’. The collective exterior or the interobjective ‘Its’ (3^rd person plural perspective) is the view of group social behavior studied by third-person sciences like systems theory, holism, and integral theory that study large socio-political, economic, religious, and ecological systems (Wilber, Theory of Everything). Whole-person, integral education looks at individuals and groups from the inside and outside, as part of a comprehensive whole-person approach to learning and living. Stunted learning and crippled personal development occur in schools when all quadrants of lived experience are not engaged through curricula, pedagogy, externships, co-curricular activities, field projects, and academic counseling. As such, education is inadequate to life as its lived and constitutes a danger to the health of society.

We need bold whole-person, all-quadrant, interconnection-centered scholarship that discloses ‘thinking’ not only on the margins of reason but also beyond them. We need schools to structure for learners’ exploration of the “unfamiliar possibilities of one’s world” and to “break perceptual constancies” that withhold personal and socio-political transcendence of status quo perspectives (M Murphy 1969:21). We need student mentoring to illuminate cognitive reframing and engages diverse perspectives across differences. Unfortunately, schools presently maintain exclusionary academic hierarchies, structures, and classificationsregarding what constitutes legitimate knowledge and learning that stunts atypical learners, causing self-doubt, mental confusion, and emotional estrangement from themselves and others. Too many schools are more concerned with upholding their outdated educational infrastructure and operating systems deemed necessary for accreditation, funding, and national rankings (Schools in Peril ?) than with developing all-sided learners able to effectively address issues facing democracy.

SICKNESS UNTO EDUCATION

If wholeness in knowledge, education, and human values is to be achieved,…it can only come through a transformation in our ways of thinking and knowing such as the meaning, qualities, the value of persons are seen as integral to our knowledge and the reality we seek to know…A thinking that is fragmented, detached, and rigid will continue to give us a world that is increasingly broken, fragmented, and dead. The possibility of a living, harmonious and meaningful world can only be grasped and realized by a thinking and knowing that are themselves living, whole, and engaged. – Douglas Sloan

…education has as its goal the fullest possible human development…with fitting into society and vocation having secondary importance. If such full development is seen as including ‘right’ relationships to the environment and consciousness…then ecology and meditation have importance in approaches to holistic education arising from those paradigms. – Scott H. Forbes

But today Necessity is master and bends degraded humanity beneath its tyrannous yoke. Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance. In these clumsy scales the spiritual services of art have no weight,…and the frontiers of art are contracted as the boundaries of science are enlarged. – Friedrich Schiller

As the home base of specialized knowledge, higher education may have to do a great deal more in coming decades to recognize, respect, codify, and clarify the strengths and limitations of nonscientific ways of knowing vis-à-vis scientific knowledge. At the very least, colleges may want to think about designing curricula at different levels of sophistication to guide students through the thickets of various truth-seeking paths… – Danel Yankelovich 

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Students enter school with an implicate identity embedded in personal ‘ways of knowing’ (cf., Buddhism, prajnas) and sense-making, existing before and beyond normative categorical academic identifications. Students with cognitive capacities that are nondiscursive, suprarational, andoutside conventional methods of assessment are either not recognized or intentionally disregarded by schools. Just as it has been indicated that during our daytime waking state uncanny information is filtered out, so too do schools impose cognitive numeral and verbal grids that filter out learners’ atypical insights. Noetic learners are unquestionably intelligent, but they are also dissentient, and distrustful of what is not derived from personal experience. In the words of Maxine Greene (Blue Guitar, 2001, p. 30), “The enterprise of schooling often emphasizes the need to accede to the world as a ‘given’, as officially and expertly described.” Learners with unique modes of knowing are often maligned as ‘non-academic’, shamed as ‘slow’, or marginalized in rigid program tracks designed for disabled or transgressive students. They are often ostracized by their cognitively conventional classmates and implicitly stigmatized by administrators and faculty who define the criteria and tightly control processes of academic success. In school environments of systemic exclusion, atypical leaners – including black, indigenous, Asian, and people of color (BIPOC) – often undergo micro-aggressions, isolation, invalidation, and diminished belonging (Nepton, et al, 2025 Exclusion & Racial Trauma).

In schools without broad epistemic inclusiveness, atypical learners are Othered and suffer disfigurement of Being via restrictive educational configurations that waylay the trajectory of identity development C.G. Jung termed ‘individuation’.[1] Students demonstrating anomalous learning abilities are implicitly and explicitly targeted on school campuses as academic ‘outlaws’, held back behind the bars of ‘no-entry’ into academic grace and ‘no-escape’ (Deardoff) from subordinate academic status. Learning in most schools is, therefore, a zero/sum game. That is, typical math and word-based learners ‘win’ and atypical, tacit learners ‘lose’. The epistemic need of nondiscursive, intuitive or bodily-kinesthetic learners to contribute to the cooperative inquiry of the classroom using noetic cognitive modalities is squashed and epistemic self-confidence lost. Atypical, perspicacious learners encounter stiff and ongoing pressure to silence themselves within a schools’ surveillance state of conventional learning. As an irreducible matter of professional ethics, schools must overcome their destructive legacy of creating adverse experiences (ACEs) that result from ‘splitting’ and exclusionary control over non-normative learning, isolating creativity and difference beyond the margins of curricula, and forsaking human wholeness. From a holistic, integral educational perspective, all censoring control is damage control, a maltreatment of human agency and its potential for transformation.

Almost everything in schools partakes in compartmentalization and specialization.[2] The field of mathematics, for example, is so wide and complex “that no single mathematician can fully understand any longer more than a fraction of mathematics” (Polyani, P.K. 1958:192). Writing about “Epistemic Injustice in Science,” Heidi Grasswick (Routledge Handbook, 2017:316) comments, “Particularly in a contemporary context where scientific work is highly specialized, research progress depends upon a strong cognitive division of labor” and scientists “rely on the research activities and testimony of other scientists whose specialties differ from their own.” But schools are larger and its programs more fluid than their scientific disciplines. Schools are ‘living’ systems wherein no one learns, let alone thrives in isolation. Healthy schools like life itself is lived through dialog (i.e., information passing through) at all levels of systems engagement. Learners thrive through constant informed interactions with one another.

It is not healthy to leave atypical learners behind, as it leads to discontent, apathy, cynicism, moving dangerously close to nihilism. What is excluded from a system atrophies, loses vital linkages, collapses. As such, specialized, exclusionary education betrays nonconventional learners and teachers alike and degrades their multi-perspectival consciousness, fashioned from unconscious, instinctual, intuitive, or tacit awareness and developed in early years through play, free-time exploration, improvisation (Nachmanovitch), hands-on art making (Peter London, No 2^nd Hand Art), and intimate learning in peer groups. Their “left-hand paths” of departure (Bruner, On Knowing) from normative understanding seen through the academic lens of conventional learning modalities are ‘ghosted’ within rigid intellectual values and exclusionary cognitive categories. Atypical knowers receive disapprovals from academic overseers of conventional judgments and so, their suchness – that is, such as they are in their implicate identity – remains hidden and ignored at best and, more likely, suffer significant ‘bruising’. Because true learning is a dynamic relational activity, ‘eccentric’ learners need communities of students supporting and learning from one another; they need caring, epistemically savvy teachers, school administrators and support staff. Without support and inspiration from a noetic learning community, atypical learners may never attain the body-mind equanimity necessary to show themselves in accord with their intrinsic potential, as opposed to being educated as the raw material for enhancing others’ political power or economic profit. How faculty respond to students’ use of anomalous cognition and learning modes in the classroom can determine their future academic success and ontological wellbeing. Refusing to see tacit knowing as a legitimate learning modality is a form of ‘epistemic injustice’ (Routledge, Kid, Medina, Polhaus, Jr., 2017). Faculty must support and model epistemological pluralism to mitigate and then eliminate injury to learners from abusive relationships with schooling.

How might a healing education initiative be fostered by schools? Working collaboratively on various aspects of a team project not only helps students use their atypical learning modalities to realize pragmatic applications of academic ideas, but also to understand what participatory life in a democracy requires: discussion, deliberation, consensus, multi-sensory work, multitasking, and working with peers and the community as viable learning resources (Eisner 93). We have seen that without such support, nonconventional learners are often held back from grade-level progression or high achievement, not because they are not smart, but because their schools execute a damaging reductionism regarding what constitutes intelligence. Instead of too easily dismissing anomalous cognition as invalid by evaluating them exclusively through the most familiar educational lenses, schools must learn more broadly and more deeply about extraordinary learners and their ‘subversive’ learning. However, the truth of the matter is education today lacks a pluralistic view of intelligence and because of its declension is unable to recognize the value of alternative knowledge within a larger vision of diverse intelligence and an integral model of human wholeness. Included here among atypical learners are neurodiverse students (e.g., dyslexia, autism spectrum, etc.), (Chelsea Wallis, Aeon 5/30/25), who often suffer lasting concussive outcomes.This is but one aspect of the current sickness systemic across American schools.[3] In part, it is also a matter of failure regarding educational ‘access’.

Education is the essential mechanism for upholding the tacit national compact to provide all its citizens access to social, cultural, personal, and economic development. Access must be wedded to challenging standards, flexible guidance, human caring, and arts activities.But for access to be more than a mere numbers game of enrollment and admission, it must be linked to human emergence and transformation. Schools must increase student opportunities to think creatively, grow emotionally, behave ethically, and expand psycho-spiritually. It isn’t enough that schools provide access to future employment and a paycheck, otherwise, graduates are trained and not educated, not wise. Rather than a means to access multiple epistemic faculties of broad knowing, education today, in the words of Curtis White, is a “massive, stupidifying vocationalism,” and as such, undergoes a severe crisis of alienation of institutional and personal Being. In a similar vein, Nietzsche proclaimed (Lecture Four, Delivered on the 5th of March 1872), “I for my own part know of only two exact contraries: institutions for teaching culture and institutions for teaching how to succeed in life. All our present institutions belong to the second class; but I am speaking only of the first.” Not much has chained since Nietzsche’s lament.

As such, graduates remain outside prevailing culture and subcultures, ignorant of their legacies of values, standards, practices, knowledge, and achievements. A broad-based curriculum of arts and sciences fostering multiculturalism, epistemological pluralism, and cognitive diversity is required to nurture and support a well-prepared citizenry. However, the absence of effective academic structures, functional learning categories, and faculty exemplars that support atypical knowing perpetrates a cruel betrayal of the nation’s education covenant. Disillusioned, cynical students become disgruntled citizens who move angrily through life and are but steps away from violence. Schools must regain their footing as the premier education agents of broad subject matter content and multiple learning modalities. We must end the psycho-emotional trauma caused when schools deny or ridicule the intuitive intelligence of learners, shackling their cognitive freedom and self-agency.

Being smart or creative includes more than matters of what subject matter we know or skills we possess. Learning is a mysterious phenomenon distributed across faculty, classrooms, campuses, administrative leadership, family, and culture. Cognition across all modalities is conditioned within a learning environment (Cf Plato, Republic, 3.401b). Learning potential is distributed across material and nonmaterial educational settings and can facilitate or debilitate successful learning. For example, when contextualized classroom cues disappear at the completion of an academic course, often so does the ostensible learning (Gardner, Unschooled Minds, p.223). We must not confuse true learning for what is only a ‘stimulus response activity’ whose cues are not rooted in the student’s everyday functional understanding (Barr and Tagg, “Fr Tachg to Learng”) or embedded in their implicate identity. When learners cannot understand and apply information in new and larger contexts within and beyond the classroom, deleterious academic and existential ‘splits’ occur.

In the story of healing education told here, ‘healing’ functions both as a verb and an adjective, and perhaps something more. Diversity and multiplicity within holistic and integral perspectives are at the center of my project. As a verb, Noetic literacy is an essential, active means of ‘healing’ the sickly institution of educationitself. As the objective, number-based techno-sciences that dominate most school curricula today are divorced from noetic epistemologies of folklore, mythology, indigenous wisdom systems, and the arts, they constrict leaners’ access to the full array of mental and somatic faculties, and thereby obstruct broad human development.[4] As an adjective, ‘healing’ describes a holistic educational theoretical and practical approach that would prevent splitting human totality into either/or categories of binary logic by recognizing ‘transgressive’ modalities as providing viable objective and subjective knowledge. My healing education initiative operates upon a theory of the interdependence of the body-mind-spirit, as well as humanity, culture, and earth. Its integral perspective emphasizes the holistic, cooperative, and relational; it rejects fragmentation and division as harmful. Healing education pursues the linkage of the mythic, symbolic, imaginal, ethical, cultural, and artistic knowledge with the analytical approach of modern empirical science. Ken Wilber argues, “If you leave out science, or leave out art, or leave out morals, something is going to be missing…” and that “Self, and culture, and nature are liberated together or not at all” (Wilber, The Integral Vision, p.68).

By including ‘marginal’ learning modalities of folk cultures or indigenous knowledge within mainstream education, the healing educational narrative invites new and possible engagements with life as it is often lived, directed by hunches, dreams, intuitions, epiphanies, visions, or somatic signals. Expanding the cognitive bandwidth underlying our school curricula and culture-at-large to include the equal validity of objective and subjective knowledge and rational and tacit learning would stabilize education’s polarized, directionless drift, bubble thinking, and expand discernment across multiple non-propositional domains. Because every system of knowledge is also a system of ignorance, something is also left out, creating gaps in understanding, even as they fill others, students need familiarity with scientific and indigenous information. Particular perceptual modes function well for some purposes, not for others. Students’ identity formation resultsfrom the continual exercise of their freedom to organize experiences of reality. This freedom is no small matter, for as C.G. Jung understood, “To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being and does not rise to personality, he has failed to realize his life’s meaning” (C.G. Jung, CW vol 17, p.183, para 314). Withholding the execution of that option from people denies democratic society citizens with a strong adaptation to the travails of life. As such, democratic engagement within the body politic is crippled.  

HERMENUETIC FRAMEWORK

The present conflict between the subjective and objective approaches to education is fruitless even destructive and cannot be made productive until these approaches are no longer in opposition to one another. We must learn to find that which is objective in the very heart of the subject and that which is subjective in the very heart of the object. Only in that way can we convert a stalemate into a creative process. – John Fentress Gardner

The goal of common learning is to understand the connectedness of things. – Ernest Boyer & Arthur Levine

Being is holistic…The journey to health or wholeness necessitates and expansion of consciousness which carries one into an evolutionary relationship to oneself and to humanity as a whole. The consequence of such expansion is the embracing of multi-dimensional perspectives about the nature of reality. – Richard Moss

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This article is an interim report on an arts and humanities inquiry conceived of some 20 plus years ago while I served as Chair and Professor, Department of Liberal Arts, The Juilliard School. Time consuming senior administrative roles and responsibilities in the years thereafter at several universities prevented sustained development and output, with exception of several published articles, invited presentations, and academic interviews.[5] The Healing Education approach to learning discussed here is my transdisciplinary, constructive postmodern critique of education’s compartmentalized curricula and reductive, hyper-rational orientation to the world. I use ‘Transdisciplinary’ to signify the interconnectedness of all aspects of reality. It transcends the dualistic dynamics of dialectical synthesis to grasp the total dynamics of reality in its completeness.

There is no true education appropriate for all students, at all times in all places. There is no perfect system, as all systems are valuable but limited in support of human wholeness. A ’true’ education, as only one can know it, avoids advocation of a single path of learning. A pluralistic epistemology or ways of knowing advocated for here rejects the notion that there is but one viable, metaphysical way of knowing appropriate at all times in all places for all learners. Besides rational, analytical analysis, I consider here various suprarational modalities of learning considered strange, feckless, or stupid. Just as there exist many dimensions of human experience, so an integral approach to understanding various life experiences of coming to knowledge must be multi-cognitive. My approach is therefore a comparative one in order to critically examine the diversity of methods and styles different people and cultures use to make sense of their experiences of learning and coming to know things. While knowledge of myself as a scholar-teacher-poet-fieldworker is important, I must bracket it and place it off to the side, so that my self-understanding does not blind me to what is different and valuable in the life experience of individuals and groups whose knowledge and ways of learning I consider here (Glassie source???).

Learning is an experiment, an arduous individual challenge that can exhaust the best of minds. We must learn through ongoing trial and error how our study objects of ideas and images might bring our body-mind-spirit instrument into alignment of equanimity. The goal of healing education project is to break through to higher states (temporary), stages (enduring), levels (progressive and permanent) and lines (intelligences that unfold in progressive stages) of developm, The Integral Invision, p.17) that facilitate emergence of a new human, creative and complete. My holistic and integral framework opens to mutual methods, theories, and disciplinary subject-matter content and sees the world from holistic, integral, systems, and depth psychological perspectives. It is derived from my immersive observation of more than two decades of observing atypical, noetic, perspicacious learning among fine and performing artists and protracted post-graduate study of diverse epistemic modalities embedded in folk ritual, ceremony, healings, storytelling, mysticism, altered states of consciousness, and shamanism.

This present work is the first work of which I am aware that examines the contributions of a wide aggregate of nonscientific knowledge, including multicultural and tribal wisdom systems, in regard to their contributions to education and learnings vis-à-vis scientific knowledge. Noetic literacy, epistemic pluralism, cognitive diversity, and hermeneutic egalitarianism comprise the red threads throughline of the human completion project. That said, I want to avoid the appearance of unique origins and wish to honor the significant epistemic labor of the ‘interdependence of knowers’ (Gail Poulhaus, Routledge, 2017: 15) that have brilliantly elucidated various aspects of atypical, perspicacious knowledge *ftnte (Hermanson, W James, Sandra Lee Dennis, Krippner, Eliade, Jung, Edith Turner, Felicitas Goodman,  Henri Corbin, W. James, Michael Grosso, Kenneth Ring, David Hufford, C.G. Jung) used explicitly and implicitly as  part of my hermeneutic approach. The noetic theory, principles, and values discussed here are not offered as strict rules or formulae, so much as a preliminary orientation toward learning and knowledge that belies education’s implicit noetic denial policies. In addition, I do not offer a detailed roadmap or a how-to, one-size-fits-all guide to establishing a Healing Education curriculum or pedagogy that includes noetic literacy. I hold my concepts softly and use them practically. I encourage educators across all levels of education to develop new integrative vocabularies, theories, and structures as part of a collaborative framework to point out how and under what conditions noetic insights engender new understanding and deep transformation. I interrogate narrow, ruinous schooling and argue for a corrective focal attention upon diverse ways of knowing more suited to engage an indeterminate world that is ultimately unapproachable by any single cognitive faculty or academic discipline.

My descriptive phenomenology and hermeneutical methods rely upon salient ideas from the arts, humanities, sciences, depth psychology, folklore, myth, religious studies, poetry, and indigenous wisdom as legitimate depositories of knowledge with in-depth taxonomies of noetic experiences. Finally, I see my transdisciplinary approach to comprehensive learning and human development not as a new discipline but a way of being complete that”is inseparable from personal life and extends far beyond the professional activities of a researcher” (Cyrille Rigolot, 2020, p.1). My hermeneutical approach draws inspiration from Anthony Gidden (Suicide, 1978) whoposited the notion of a ‘double hermeneutic.’ As seen by Gidden (p.42), “Theory not only creates meaning, but it also concretely transforms and shapes its subject matter.” That is to say, theory both interprets and establishes reality. By extension, the epistemological pluralism that makes up noetic literacy is akin to ontological pluralism. Healing education project is not only psychoactive for learners, activating their noetic capacities as a result of engaging in an arts and humanities curricula rich in imaginal content that honors nondiscursive, perspicacious knowing; it is also constitutive of reality, activating and shaping noetic capabilities in society by engaging with reality in its distinctive ways (see Esbjorn-Hargens, “Integral Pluralism,” J of Integral Th & Prac, Vol. 5, No.1, 210:157).

Education leading to an all-sided consciousness must necessarily move beyond definitions of knowledge as strictly quantifiable and learning in terms of what can only be assessed by tests of strict quantification. John Fentress Gardner makes the point, “The present conflict between the subjective and objective approaches to education is fruitless even destructive and cannot be made productive until these approaches are no longer in opposition to one another” . However, at the heart of education today there operates a logic of sameness. Aristotle stated, “The mind can always intend, and know when it intends, to think the same.” In “The Principles of Psychology” Willian James (1890) stated, “The sense of sameness is the very keel and backbone of our thinking.” Disciplining the mind to the logic of sameness has its value, but, according to James, “there is also loss, the rejection (or ignoring) of everything in ourselves and in the world that does not conform to those rules, a “kind of dying to oneself,” as Kierkegaard put it, a half century before James.” (quoted in Neirenberg, Uncountable, p7) SCIENCE OF SAMENESS (Nirenberg pp. 7-10); David Bohm, Implicate Order, pp. 16-17).

As a way of inquiry, it is undeniably the case that by relying on sameness, the techno-scientific paradigm has produced undeniably important inventions and tools that have authentically helped relieve human suffering. The paradox, however, is that science and technology’s “promises of control over our internal and external environments never became true” (Jurgen W Kramer, The Dark Night, p.179), with so much of society, finance, and ecology gone astray, as a result. Fortified with a hermeneutical approach of holism and integral principles, the learning story narrated here is an ecological partnership of our complete humanity: critical reasoning with the observing eye, accurate touch, perceptive tongue, discriminating nose, differentiating ear, thinking heart, and contemplative body-mind.

My human completion project seeks to make available to learners more, not less, than abstract reasoning. A deep decay presently lies at the core of our schools. Given hyper-rational nature of education at all levels, wherein learners’ creative spirit suffers from a brutality of objective facts and what Vico called the ‘barbarism of reason’ (Grosso, Vico ??). What begins in schools as the instrumentation of reason and a daily routine of transactional thinking, shows up later as the mechanization of life that provides little, if any, room for cognitive freedom, creative imagination, and love of lifelong learning. Healing education initiative seeks simultaneously to debilitate and illuminate schools that currently calculative thought and techno-economics over non-testable informal, personal knowledge. My project is a call to all educators, cultural leaders, parents, and friends of schools to help instigate shifts away from the “epistemological territorilisation” (Jennifer Gidley 2008, 119) and exclusive status of scientific positivism and inter-objectivity that masquerades as the only legitimate path to meaningful living, toward conceptualizing a more complete, fully knowing human being, as part of a school mission. Healing Education’s theory and concepts advocate for the marriage of ‘omnijective’ (i.e., hybrid of objective and subjective(Talbot, Holographic Paradigm)learning and knowledge, a voicing of noetic philology with ontic, logical exposition. I shall attempt, after Michael Polanyi, “to lay bare the inarticulate manifestations of intelligence by which we know things in a purely personal manner (Personal Knowledge 1958:64).

All knowing, regardless of discipline, has a personal, tacit aspect as an action of skill and “requires the subordination of a set of particulars, as clues or tools” used to fashion and complete a task (Polanyi, P.K., 1958:vii). The ‘clues and tools’ are akin to the nuts and bolts of the action that are so fundamental to execution that they lay beyond our primary awareness (my emphasis). We are but “subordinarily aware” of the specific clues and tools within our “focal awareness” of an act of knowing as whole. For example, to be a successful baseball hitter, batters must not focus their primary attention on the particulars of their bat size, hand grip, leg stance and stride, or whether their shoulder is squared to the pitcher, etc. A player’s self-conscious, over thinking lucidity of the various particular ‘nuts and bolts’ or tools of hitting disrupts the unselfconscious, organic ‘flow’ needed to effectively launch a baseball, and is, therefore, self-defeating. As Polanyi succinctly puts it, “We know more than we can say” (Polanyi, Tacit Dimension, p.8). The ‘particulars’ of hitting a baseball function as ‘extensions’ of body-mind knowledge and when a player interiorizes them, they transform their very body-mind Being. And so, in an unseen way, a student of batting becomes a ‘hitter,’ a process arguably not unlike that involved when a student of physics becomes a ‘physicist’, a student of music becomes a ‘musician’, or like “the wordless moment when the artist awakes in someone’s spirit” (Booth, 2009:265).

Polanyi has noted, “In every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and this coefficient is no mere imperfection but a vital component of his knowledge” (Polanyi, 1958:viii). The baseball batter and physicist alike are personally invested in and subjectively committed to their ‘arts’ of knowing and doing. This personal and participatory investment on part of the knower occurs in all things known. “The very notion of a value-free science was a privilege of the past,” writes Helmut Wautischer, and “No longer can scientific research claim a special status in the production of knowledge” (Anthropo of Consciousness (1994, p.1). Still, Polanyi argues that it does not make the action wholly subjective.Personal, nondiscursive knowledge even within the field of science is an antimonial fusion of personal and objective terms. Inspired by Polanyi’s work, I seek to dissolve illusionary brackets within educational and cultural environments that exclude unofficial varieties of perspicacious knowing that function below typical personal, educational, and cultural awareness. Toward those ends, I explore several principles essential to my argument but that should not be construed as my offering a formal organon. Healing education project:

1) maintains that because the world is interconnected and multidimensional, education must necessarily offer diverse methodologies, learning modalities, knowledge disciplines, epistemologies, and pedagogies; it is a theory and practice of learning and whole knowing that leads to the integration of self, Others, community, planet, and Kosmos.

2) refutes the notion of a single generative cognitive function and the epistemological privileging of calculative reason in schools. It values tacit, nondiscursive knowledge that involves intuition and unconscious processes.

3) seeks to set right the sickness unto education and subsequent epistemic harm done to atypical learners by calling on schools to support a broad portfolio of nonconventional epistemological and cognitive options that would ultimately benefit a democratic society.

4) commits to overcoming subject/object splits via noetic literacy, leading to ontological transformation and trans-existential consciousness of learners, students and teachers. Splitting is arbitrary and results from a dualistic, mechanical or positivistic mode of perceiving when from an integral perspective there is actually no fragmentation.

5) recognizes the cognitive imagination (to be discussed below) as a hybrid of rational and suprarational knowledge and consciousness and positions it at the core of a new connection-centered narrative of whole-person learning essential to creative humanity. As the optimum cognitive faculty, cognitive imagination includes and transcends thinking in its instrumental and calculative aspects.

6) envisions a noetic humanity capable of ‘seeing through’ (Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology) surface appearances to disclose psycho-emotional and socio-political realities of individuals and groups, essential for a citizenry capable of discerning implicit and explicit messages and meanings to ensure effective participatory democracy.

7) rests upon the premise that ‘wholeness’ defines a person’s intrinsic being. The oneness of an individual requires addressing the importance of both physical and psychic factors. Bodily traits are not merely material, and mental traits are not purely psychic. Human oneness is a matrix, but it is the rational intellect, when operating exclusively, that divides the unity into an artificial dichotomy. The body means little minus psyche, as does psyche without body. We ourselves in our entirety are the psyche (Jung, Four Functions).  

8) maintains that integration of the fragmented self and self with others, including the earth, equals ‘health’ and well-being for an individual and society and that fragmentation is ‘illness’ of limited growth, one-sided development, and a crippled selfhood. William Butler Yates wrote, “Nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.” The ultimate form of being rent is ‘death’, understood in its depth psychological sense as a ‘dying’ to rigid one-sidedness and partial development. We are challenged to integrate ‘death’ in the personal and collective psyche, “so that wholeness is both growth and demise in a balance from which the new human/humankind emerges” (Richard Moss, The Indiv & Collective Levels of Consciousness and their Relationship to Health-Disease, 1979:9). Accepting ‘death’ in all fashions, we are not simply a part of wholeness; we are wholeness and failure to develop our human completeness means we are vulnerable to splitting, impairment, disease, and suffering of identity disintegration.

9) argues that teachers themselves must accomplish their own interior mental and emotional growth to provide important models to encourage learners’ development. Both students and teachers need sufficient opportunities to think and formally/informally structure reflection time concerning noetic consciousness – i.e., “casting the mind back across experience” – essential to self-growth (Booth, Music Teaching Artist’s Bible. 2009, Oxford, pp. 160-166, 168). More than supporting the noetic development of students, teachers as noetic learners themselves must take an ontological turn to all-sided being.

10) contends that schools must strategically design and implement their own arts-based approaches to noetic learning in accord with their institutional missions, visions, values, and institutional priorities. No one-size-fits-all approach to nurturing broad cognitive capacities of behalf of atypical learners is recommended.

 Education, reflecting society as a whole, is both disorienting to students and estranged from its integral purpose of leading learners out from one-sidedness (i.e., educare) to the greater knowing of human completeness. It is immediately important how nonconventional student learning is handled in and beyond the classroom. The problem is that too few teachers are prepared to make room for and promote nondiscursive intelligence within conventional academic operations.[6] Schools must offer courses explicitly devoted to the support of noetic literacy and diverse forms of understanding and include tacit learning modules in their Teaching and Learning Centers, where they exist. Forming transdisciplinary teams of inquiry from the natural and human sciences that use a holistic both/and logic that is more reflective of complex issues of reality would heal dualistic either/or logic. Filling teaching positions with faculty whose professional practice reveal a respect for tacit knowledge and noetic literacy must follow.

Faculty knowledge of the arts and art making is essential for a depth appreciation of suprarational learning and knowledge. Advising structures, academic achievement classifications, and classroom pedagogy will need careful recalibration to accommodate cognitive diversity, including normative and atypical student and faculty learning. Designated residence floors for nonconventional college learners in a Living and Learning Community can be an effective means of student support, where various noetic learning activities can help build bridges from residence halls to the curriculum. An environment of trust is essential for atypical learners to be a successful part of “an experiment in being more of one’s whole potential” (Moss, 1979:5).

CHALLENGES OF LANGUAGE

Unless you are at home in the metaphor…unless you have had your proper education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. – Robert Frost

It is difficult to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably everyday for lack / of what is found there. – William Carlos Wiliams

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Noetic literacy offers schools a pathway to direct, unmediated experiences of learning and subject-object unity. Noetic consciousness is rich in archetypal structures and symbols of ‘wild’ or ‘far-out’ mythic, folkloric, and ritual associations and transformations. Because noetic literacy involves tacit, personal knowledge of informal and nondual states that are ostensibly ineffable, educators encounter significant challenges to their teaching and scholarship when using a “linear, argumentative, and critical style” (K.E. Lorena, Subj & Aesth Interface). How does one disclose the fluid, both/and nature of noetic consciousness when using academic prose and its binary either/or logic?

It must be understood that I do not present noetic principles here as definitive rules or formulae, as the mythopoetic nature of noesis defies separation through language-use into discrete constituent elements (i.e., ontic knowledge) and cannot be fully disclosed as self-evident by logical exposition (i.e., apodictic). Paradoxically, this article, at least in part, is an ontic and discursive language-construct attempting to explore noetic, suprarational knowing and the nature of consciousness transformation beyond self-actualization. Academic language is significantly different from and less accurate when describing the phenomenology of noetic consciousness. Here lies the issue of translatability. What do I mean by this?

Scholarly works are generated, contested, and disseminated within discursive disciplines and their technologically tacit knowledge. The academy’s language of knowing originates and is negotiated within dominant academic models, which today means science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The expected language of academic knowing is rational, “disinterested, objective, and value free” and characteristic of number-based sciences (Polarized Mind). The position of ‘semantic positivism’ (Philip Wheelright 38-9) has it that all viable research inquiries must proceed in a scientific manner, using logico-scientific language. On the other hand, the natural ‘language’ of noesis is ‘poetry’, and it addresses an omnijective reality that embraces suprarational, numinous, spiritual, and ethical elements.

The language of noesis speaks of and to the emotional effect of dreams, visions, revelations, intuitions, altered states of consciousness. It is wisdom of nothing less than everything – specters of high strangeness, deep obfuscation, argot of soul. In my conceptual framework, the ontic and poetic languages of concepts and images, numbers and symbols must cooperate in mutual service of overcoming subject-object divisions. The language of academic apodictic knowing can touch the soul of mind; but it is the poetry of noesis that touches the soul of soul. This present work only begins to address the issue of scholarship that synthesizes mythopoetic language andacademic parlance, something akin to Schoenberg’s sprechstimme, a voice between logos and poesis, image and concept, speech and song.[7]

QUESTION OF ASSESSMENT

Moreover, the legal profession is in flux. What lawyers need to know and what skills and abilities they need to have will change rapidly. There is a mismatch between an exam designed to meet the needs of an industrial economy and a test of competency necessary to meet the needs of a rapidly evolving knowledge economy. Using the same examination format introduced 100 years ago is inadequate to assess the competency of a 21st century attorney. – Jackie Gardina

We are responsible for preparing our students to address problems we cannot foresee with knowledge that has not yet been developed using technology not yet invented. – Albert Einstein

** See Eliot Eisner on Assessment from The Schools We Need **

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Noetic learning is a unique epistemic event resisting viable assessment by conventional means developed for and presently used to measure student achievement of, say, math and verbal outcomes. There are currently no generally accepted norms, standards, or definitions of atypical learning and knowledge for assessment of noetic literacy and determining the validity and reliability of assessment processes, structures, and standards. It is generally understood that assessment tools must accurately measure prescribed learning goals. Regarding evaluation of noetic learning, schools must establish effective epistemic and multi-cognitive learning outcomes that do not exclude atypical learning. Even if common tools of quantitative and qualitative measurement are developed and agreed upon, it would be important to consider how guiding definitions of noetic learning and anomalous cognition vary among specific assessment tools. Looking at assessment efforts in other fields, such as intuitive medicine and how mental health professionals evaluate the nature and impact of non-religious ‘spirituality’ in achieving well-being, could prove profitable. 8 In addition, it would be essential that state, regional, or federal accrediting agencies include and support noetic learning modalities and outcomes when assessing schools included in their oversight portfolio. Moreover, it would be in proper service of student development for accreditation overseers not to stipulate precisely how the assessment of the noetic learning is to be achieved, leaving the task to each school, as part of the alignment of program learning outcomes with overall institutional teaching and learning philosophy, learning objectives, and strategic direction.

Assessment tools developed by any one school should not be unilaterally used by another school. That said, innovative use of student learning portfolios (Booth, 2009:156, 172-3) that record, describe, reflect, and reflect upon their qualitative, atypical coming-to-know can be effectively used. Students can, alone or in cooperation with peers and faculty, self-assess their selected portfolio works as to how successful their entries, art works, and reflections, evaluations may document their perspicacious learning. They can compare and reflect upon them in relation to those of others in the classroom or major figures in the arts and sciences who have documented their noetic knowledge. Students can be encouraged to ‘translate’ their tacit knowledge from one expressive domain to another, say from the visual to the narrative or bodily kinesthetic domain. Because noetic learning occurs as part of our pre-conceptual, pre-objective lived experience “the subject matter of learning should focus on cultural and social learning activities (“…the intersection and integration of content between subjects.” – see Hang Hu, “Deeper Learning, A Voice from Laboratory to Classroom” Routledge 2022) as much as classroom-based activities. It is essential that students in general and aspiring artists in particular “…have a direct experience of other cultures through physical participation in art and ritual if their education is to adequately integrate convergent cultural traditions” (Mike Grady p.84).

NOETIC LITERACY

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in our days, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall the vision by some sort of sign. It in this hope that the arts were invented. Sign posts on the way to what may be. Sign posts toward greater knowledge. -Robert Henri

We now truly stand in need not as scientists but as a civilization of the artist’s cognitive capacities. – Arthur Zajonc

The aim of education is therefore the creation of artists – of people efficient in various modes of expression. – Herbert Read

Scientific reasoning is constructed with movable images, just as poetry is.” – Jerome Friedman

I believe that experimental physics is about bringing abstract ideas to life, like artists. – Silke Weinfurtner

The most sublime labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons… This philological-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world’s childhood men were by nature sublime poets… – Giambattista Vico

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Healing education initiative traffics in the interactive field between abstract, number-based knowledge and sensual, image based experiential knowledge. The project addresses the nation’s unsatisfied yearnings for nonscientific ways of seeking truth as found in the arts. The key cognitive element in the arts is image making. There is inherent in the images of the specific ‘language’ of the arts something that prepares the mind for sophisticated cognitive activities – conceptual, perceptual, productive, and reflective. The subtle faculties of artistic perception open the psyche to the imaginal realm in which meanings are encoded in images. Mythopoesis, or image making, is the mind’s fundamental means of knowing; no cognitive operation is more central to consciousness (Hannaford, Smart Moves). New learning results when lived experiences provide, confirm, or modify images of self and the world (Speidel and Troy 1985:21 Imagery in Ed). Not simply metaphors for ideas, images relate to how we practically acquire, organize, retrieve, and use information, and so noetic literacy involves authentic knowing. Development of the intersensory images inherent in the arts lead to a broad-based literacy of transrational modalities of human creative, emotional, and mental development meant to supplement mathematical knowing and scientific knowledge.

Mathematics is a sine qua non or essential condition that is absolutely necessary for many occupations (White, 2000, p.79).  The notion of mathematical thinking in itself is considered in some way superior to other academic forms of thinking, like those of the historian or literary critic, as well as the practical reasoning on which we rely day-to-day in the planning of our personal and institutional lives (White, 2000, p.72). This privileging of number-based knowledge is sometimes referred to a ‘epistemological scientism’. Science focuses on external observation and is grounded in dispassionate evaluation, measurement, and experimentation. This is indispensable to objectivity and reducing bias and inaccuracy as we interpret what we observe. But another way of knowing is subjective and includes gut feelings, intuition, hunches. It is the way you know you love your family, or uncanny experiences that cannot be explained or proven, but feel absolutely real, nonetheless. From the Greek noesis/noētikos, this atypical knowing is noetic, meaning inner wisdom, direct knowing, or subjective understanding (Cassandra Vieten, PhD, “What Are Noetic Sciences?” Psychology Today, May 10, 2011).

Noetic literacy is a meta literacy of literacies, a more inclusive conception than simply calculating numbers, or speaking, reading, or writing in a native or foreign tongue. Noetic literacy of nondiscursive knowledge and perspicacious ways of knowing enables one to ‘read’, interpret, and communicate via images, symbols, signs, representations, behaviors, gestures, sounds, intonations, or the spirit of the times (i.e., Zeitgeist). ‘Reading’ inter-sensory images across the spectrum of artistic, intellectual, cultural, and ecological domains allows for a deeper discernment of life across all mediums in which meaning and purpose are expressed. It can, in the words of Philip Wheelwright, be considered a metapoetics, which is to say an ontology not so much of concepts as of poetic sensitivity”- where does quote begin here (Metaphors & Reality, p. 20). William Blake (Marriage of H&H) valued possessing a ‘double vision’, that is, a capacity to perceive a thing in at least two ways simultaneously, unlike the single vision of science (i.e., “Newton’s sleep”). Image-fluency means recovering the ancient, perhaps innate capacity to grasp the vocabulary of creative acts that form the picture language of soul. It is a challenge to the literal, reductionist mind, allowing exploration of what Giambattista Vico called ‘imaginative universals’ (Vico, New Science) or shared, poetic ways of knowing through resonant images that together compose signposts of diverse intelligence embedded in personal creative consciousness and the cultural imagination. 

People possessing noetic literacy apprehend human intelligence in music, dance, painting, literature, and sculpture, folklore, myth, and tribal wisdom systems, as well as expressive psychic depths of imaginalia beyond access by numerical calculation. Noetic minded individuals and groups find meanings in images that are linguistic/verbal, aural/sonic, somatic/kinesthetic, and proxemic. Noetic fluency in multiple interpretive codes and cognitive modes unleashes the powers to make intersensory connections and orientate oneself in the reality of imaginal (H Corbin, J Hillman, M Watkins, Averns) states, including dreams, visions, meditations, trances, and revelations. The new literacy of healing education recognizes multiple modalities that include seeing, feeling, hearing, knowing, and doing beyond our usual understanding. Possessing noetic literacy means being integrally of one’s multiple intelligences. The arts and sciences together make available to the mind-body more than logic, not less, integrating bodily perceptions with rational thought. Fluency in noetic modalities and wisdom systems formulate the body-mind on behalf of its greater internal and external conjunction that is essential to wholeness and new perspectives of an educated citizenry and enhanced noetic humanity able to engage self and world in more comprehensive and effective ways.

Healing education project pursues the intimate engagement of myth, symbol, art, and religious systems of knowledge with the calculation and logic of modern empirical science. Mythopoetic thinking in images allows one to see all experiences as both literal and metaphoric, subject to interpretation and change. Philip Wheelwright (Metaphor and Reality p. ??) drives home the point, “The power of metaphor is visible when meanings and values emerge from previously ungrouped combinations of elements, and we see more deeply into the real order of things.” Noetic fluency means entering into the spirit of rational and mythic modes of consciousness and seeking to grasp their importance from within. Myth means “the telling word” and, for the ancient Greeks, ‘to tell’ via myth meant to lay bare and make appear the form of outer appearance and inner essence. Thus, myth can lead one to the noetic insight, ‘epiphany’, spiritual awakening (i.e., satori), or revelation. Similarly, ‘mythos’, after Heidegger (“What Is Thinking? p.10”), is what has its essence in its telling and the appeal of its ‘unconcealedness’. Mythos is an appeal of the foremost existential concern to think of what defines our intrinsic human condition, our implicate Being.

In addition to myth, noetic literacy opens us to understand ‘signals’ of intelligence inherent in play, art, poetry, dreams, mathematics, science, engineering, and architecture. One utilizes images to imaginatively unlock essential wisdom of ancestors and enter into diverse cultural designs and indigenous knowledge teachings that form the signposts of peak artistic and cultural achievements along the human adventure. ‘Reading’ extensively through diverse imagistic products pulls back the veil of ignorance (i.e., Hindu avidya) hiding there to uncover and disclose reality and the true state of affairs (i.e., Greek apocalypse). Noetic literacy offers us powerful antidotes to the literal, reductionist mind, fixated on a hegemonic techno-rational program of values and meanings that mold our hopes and expectations and that maintain power structures and un-equitable social conditions. Today’s traumatized world marks the fading light of reason. Our instrumental, hyper-technological times call us to recover the more instinctive, mythic knowing of poetry and the dream-speech of the unconscious mind from which humanity has always thrived and that compensates withering dominant collective perspectives.

By empowering us to discern deep imaginal and ‘spiritual’9 meanings through fluency in the noetic ‘languages’ not only of the arts and humanities, but also of quotidian life, image literacy helps us responsibly engage human and more-than-human Others in personal, socio-political, and environmental contexts. Today’s general loss of personal image-making intelligence to advertising, marketing, social media, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) threatens to neutralize our focal attention and creative agency for exploitation of humanity and the earth. It diminishes our aesthetic and critical abilities to find generative, life-enhancing meanings in theaters or concert halls; it deadens citizens’ capacity to perceive veiled messages and pseudo truths in political life; it clouds the spiritual seekers’ discrimination among sacred, iconic artifacts; it makes communities vulnerable to manipulation by lobbyists, special interests, or hate groups; it crushes the organic petals of the implicate self; it subdues the ‘voice of the earth’ that would call us to revere our coevolutionary role (Theodore Rorzack?). Here are several key elements of Noetic Literacy essential to the healing education initiative:

Personal Insight: Noetic literacy emphasizes the importance of informal learning, personal knowledge, tacit insights (Polanyi 1958? 1963?), imaginal experience, and aesthetic experiences in the process of learning and understanding. It encourages individuals to trust their intuition, hunches, somatic cues, archetypal dreams, revelations, epiphanies as valid sources of knowledge, decision making, and disclosures of Being.

Noetic Experience: Noetic literacy means direct and immediate access to perspicacious knowledge beyond what is available to our everyday senses and power of reason (cf., Institute for Noetic Sciences link); operate beyond intellectual articulation by words and numbers; constitutes a intersensory, ‘Bruce Managan’ (Feelings of Knowing, Source??) that includes a sense of rightness and meaning bath rational and suprarational. Kim Hewitt defines noetic insight as an unmediated knowledge and that, “It typically has to do with sensing the interconnectednessof all things and is informed by a feeling that one knows but without knowing how” (Hewitt, Abstract, the Psychedelic Sensorium, and Contemporary Neuroscience Shifting Contexts for Noetic Insight).

Interconnectedness: This concept highlights the interconnected nature of all knowledge and expanded selfhood, suggesting that personal insights can be linked to broader universal truths. It encourages individuals to explore how their noetic experiences relate to larger patterns and contexts that extend beyond their inherited cultural or familial inheritance and legacies toward what is transpersonal and integral.

Holistic Understanding: Noetic literacy promotes an integral, multifaceted approach to knowledge, synthesizing emotional, intellectual, spiritual, cultural, and systems level dimensions of lived experience. It recognizes that understanding is not limited to rational thought but also involves suprarational feelings, spirit, and the cognitive imagination. Its focal attention is upon contextual knowledge and not discrete abstracted knowledge.

Critical Thinking: While noetic literacy values personal experience and intuition, it also encourages critical thinking and discernment. The fact is that critical thinking occurs in the bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal, sonic/aural, and visual domains and so is materially different from critical thinking in number and word-based domains. Thinking as living, embodied thought is not accomplished by the brain but in and through the body-mind and leading to a whole intelligence. And so it is that dancers ‘think’ critically in the domain of bodily movement; singers think and make critical, reflective choices in the domain of music/vocalization; painters and sculptures discern in pigment and stone. Because critical thinking is not a free-floating, stand-alone capacity but part of a compound of cognitive capabilities, it cannot be isolated from dynamic engagements with other critical thinkers.

Applications: Noetic literacy principles can be applied in numerous fields, including art, depth psychology, folklore, spirituality, education, nursing, intuitive medicine, corporate management/leadership, and personal and community development, as well as in complimentary use with the major methodological families: empiricism, structuralism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and systems theory. It encourages practices that foster self-awareness, mindfulness, creativity, and increased understanding of oneself and one’s place in the world.

Exploration of Consciousness: Noetic literacy intersects with studies of consciousness and altered states, including ethnogens (i.e., psychedelics), exploring how awareness and perception shape understanding and influence the only worlds we can know and engage. This exploration can lead to greater self-discovery, personal growth, and a sense of intimacy with nature. Noetic literacy ensures that one possess a broad-based portfolio of cognitive modalities that include the suprarational. The noetic approach to learning is meant to enlarge and optimize consciousness.

In summary, noetic literacy encompasses multiple modalities of knowing that include the rational, intuitive, sensing, and feeling. It invites individuals to engage with their personal ‘indigenous’ wisdom, while considering the broader context of conventional knowledge and experience. Four psychological functions condition psychic processes and ways of knowing. Thinking and feeling are rational while sensing and intuiting are non-rational functions.  Thinking judges experience or reaches conclusions. Feelings are reasonable, discriminating, and logical psychological function, as consistent as thinking. Sensations provide perceptions that cannot be traced directly to conscious sensory experience. Sensation and intuition are perceptive in that they make us aware of what occurs around us but do not interpret or evaluate experience. They do not act selectively according to principles (CG Jung, p. 91-2) and are simply receptive of what happens, but ‘what happens’ is only nature and is therefore essentially non-rational. C.G. Jung points out that as ways of knowing, sensation establishes what is given; thinking enables us to discern its meaning; feeling indicates its value; and intuition “points to possibilities to whence and whither that lie within the immediate facts” (C.G. Jung, p.93).

There are multiple noetic approaches to comprehensive understanding and fostering noetic literacy. These approaches can vary based on philosophical, spiritual, and psycho-social perspectives brought to bear upon them.

Intuitive Knowledge: This non-typical path to knowledge accesses one’s hunches, big-picture revelations, epiphanies, and life-redirecting metanoia (i.e., reorganization of concepts that produce new percepts – i.e., ‘conversion’) as sources of knowledge. It encourages individuals to trust instincts, somatic cues, and feelings through practices such as meditation, mindfulness, reflective journaling or hands-on art making. Intuitive understanding is undermined by the linguistic, conceptual mind. Discursive mind replaces percepts with concepts. When that happens, our ability to experience reality directly as a perceiving and feeling being is compromised by the excessive engagement with ideas. Disembodied knowledge results. Intuitive knowledge is a state that “indicates full control and complete awareness, i.e., the state of Being – knowing without objectification, and detour through discursive thinking” (Ruth-Inge Heinze, “Apps of ASC in Daily Life”,  Anthro of Consciousness, p.8)

Experiential Learning: The failure of didactic verbal education to realize human completeness via teacher-controlled lectures and presentation has been noted by learning theorists, Rudolph Steiner, Maria Montessori, and Jean Piaget (Speidel &Troy, 1989:21-35 Imagery in Education). Learning is not acquired exclusively or most effectively by words but from experiences with the environment that students act on, whether individually or in teams in the social community. Nondiscursive teaching focuses on tacit, collaborative, and informal learning through personal or group experiences, rather than traditional book-bound and classroom confined educational models. It encourages individuals to openly engage in praxis involving transdisciplinary issues in the world, reflect deeply on their experiences, and derive noetic insights from them, emphasizing the importance of context and personal relevance to knowing and knowledge generation.

Mindfulness and Awareness: Mindfulness practices of ‘being present on purpose’ (Tich Nhat Hahn, Meditation) promote heightened awareness of thoughts, feelings, and sensations, allowing individuals to connect with and monitor their inner processes and content. Mindful attending to what one does as one is doing it can enhance noetic literacy by fostering a deeper understanding of oneself and one’s psychic and social responses to self and the world.

Depth and Transpersonal Psychology: These related branches of psychology appreciate the unconscious dimension of thought, behavior, and creativity and explore spiritual and transcendent aspects of the human experience (Sources??) It emphasizes the integration of subjective, ineffable experiences and personal insights into psychological understanding, fostering a deeper awareness of consciousness and the interconnectedness of all human and more-than-human beings. Familiarity with the unpredictable, paradoxical, and synchronistic, nature of the unconscious fosters a deeper understanding of the chaotic, oppositional, and emergent nature of the present world.

Philosophical Inquiry: Engaging in philosophical questioning and contemplation can enhance noetic literacy and the intellectual conscience. Achieving human completion means committing oneself to honesty and authenticity through ‘thoughtfulness’, the purpose of which is not to reach irrefutable truth, as it is to ‘give style to one’s life’ (Nietzsche, Gay Science?source?) and make it impossible to continue to deceive oneself and live dishonestly by assuming a mass-culture identity.

Creative Expression: Engaging in creative activities, such as art, poetry, music, or writing can facilitate noetic literacy because of their image rich and symbolic content. Creative expression often allows individuals to access their indigenous imagery, deeper emotions and noetic, perspicacious insights, providing a channel for exploring and articulating their personal knowledge and discerning meanings in the representations of life. In Plato’s dialogue, Phaedo, Socrates states that he often had dreams indicating he should “cultivate and make music.” Socrates had always believed that philosophy was the premier ‘music’, but when the same dream continued, he realized that the actual making of music was required. So, Socrates set Aesop’s fables to musical verse. Platonic wisdom implies that learning divorced from the arts does not lead to human completion and the intimate partnership of logos and eros.

Holistic Health Practices: Integrative approaches to health and personal well-being, such as yoga, meditation, energy work, sound healing, holistic therapies, and intuitive medicine can also promote somatic intelligence of noetic literacy. These practices often encourage individuals to mentally connect with their bodies, emotions, and spiritual selves, leading to expanded self-awareness in conjunction with other sentient beings and the earth.

Community and Dialogue: Hannah Arendt pointed out that some forms of truth cannot be appreciated by scientific approaches and must be approached instead through dialogue. In dialogue noetic perspectives and issues are engaged from multiple points of view and may only have a partial basis in what is ‘factual’. Education does not generally look kindly on such ways of knowing. “And yet,” according to Daniel Yankelovich, “for many of the emotional laden moral, political, and religious controversies that pervade our cultural lives, a disciplined form of dialogic discourse is better to seek truth seeking than are the specialized methods of gathering knowledge that now dominate higher education” (Yankelovich, “Ferment and Change, The Chronicle, http://chronicle.com, vol 52, issue 14, p. B6). Dialogue (Greek dia – across and legein – speech) is ‘meaning flowing through’ us. We can only understood things as part of larger wholes and not in isolation. In dialogue, we become people ‘flowing’ in intimate relationship wherein participation is a form of community intelligence.

            These various pathways to noetic literacy mentioned above highlight the importance of personal experience, pre-propositional intuition, direct, explicit learning, and holistic understanding in the quest for knowledge and individuation. By integrating different methods of inquiry, individuals can cultivate a richer and more nuanced understanding of themselves and their place in the world. Each approach offers unique tools and perspectives that can contribute to the development of noetic literacy. 10

BEYOND THE CEREBRAL: NOETIC COGNITION OFFERED BY THE ARTS

By ‘cognitive’ I mean all mental operations involved in the recovery, storing, and processing of information: sensory perceptions, memory, thinking, learning. The use of the term conflicts with one to which many psychologists are accustomed and which excludes the activity of the senses from cognition…Similarly, I see no way of withholding the name of ‘thinking’ from what goes on in perception. No thought processes seem to exist that cannot be found to operate, at least in principle, in perception. Visual thinking is visual thinking. – Rudolph Arnheim

The heart is an intelligence beyond intellect, a knowing that operates at a subconscious level, and the only human faculty expansive enough to embrace the infinite qualities of the universe…The heart is the faculty of knowing that can apprehend a qualitative universe. – Kabir Helminski

Between ‘understanding’ because another person seeks to impress upon us an explanation of a thing by speech, and ‘understanding’ the thing of ourselves, there is a measurable le distance; the two are comparable to the impression made in soft wax, which will subsequently be effaced and replaced by other impressions, and the form chiseled in the marble by an artist. – Maria Montessori

I think cybernetics goes awry without its metaphorical structure – you would end up thinking: machines actually are intelligent (!) or that minds actually are mechanical (!). – Ben Sweeting,

We must grow larger, go deeper, not smaller. – Massai People

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One way to begin healing cognitive and ontological splits resides in the noetic nature of art and artmaking. Noetic, from the Greek noesis/noētikos, meaning inner wisdom, direct knowing, intuition, or subjective understanding (Cassandra Vieten, PhD, “What Are Noetic Sciences?” Psychology Today, May 10, 2011). Noetic experience, as described by the Institute for Noetic Sciences, is an experience of “direct and immediate access to knowledge beyond what is available to our normal senses and the power of reason.” Equally relevant to my approach taken here is William James (1902, p.88) who in “Variety of Religious Experiences’, defined ‘noetic’ as “states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” Among those noetic states, James included “illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain…” that “as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority…” (James 1902: p.?) despite lying beyond normative academic categories of understanding. My critical agenda aims for an “existential intimacy of learning” (Rojcewicz, 2021), that is, a passion for a life of learning that unites traditional and emergent knowledge. Noetic cognitive modes essential to mind-body integrity are increasingly the focus of academic research and scholarship. This is evident in the areas of neurocognitive theory of higher mental emergence (Pansksepp, 2014); neuroscience and bio-behavior (Vanderkerckhove, 2014), the senses in social contexts (Hewitt, 2011), personal narrative and meditation practices in the field of evolutionary cosmology (Swimme), and trans-rational cognition through the arts (Rojcewicz, C Music and 2001, Myrifield 2025).

Noetic learners perceive in both literal and aesthetic ways, analyze parts and synthesizes wholes. An educated noetic mind bridges the perennial Western split between ‘in here’ and ‘out there’, perceiving interconnection of life. I use ‘knowing’ to refer to the capacity to acquire, structure, retrieve, and use information to face problems, make decisions, construct products, accomplish goals, and assume responsibility for one’s life. ‘Knowing’ is a complex process of observation, action, analysis, and imagination; it is capable of altering perception of oneself, others, and the world. Cognition via the arts includes knowing that is quantitative and qualitative, rational and intuitive, conscious and unconscious, as well as sonic, somatic, visual, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (Gardner, Multiple Intelligences). The more closely conscious content aligns with unconscious content, the more intense the noetic feeling of ‘rightness’ and the more intense the sense of meaningfulness. This ‘feeling of knowing’ (Bruce Mangan, ??) manifests in moments of creative breakthroughs, mysticism, religious epiphany, flashes of intuition, and entheogenic (i.e., psychedelic) experience. Forms of noetic cognition demonstrated for millennia by shamans, artists, mediums, mystics, children, and our most creative scientists (Swimme, “Hidden Heart Cosmos (1996) include visions, trances, ecstasies, dreams, rapture, and the full variety of indigenous wisdom.

Reading intersensory images in every domain in which meaning is expressed means not constraining life to reductionist values. Noetic knowledge is more ancient than the analytic mind; it is wisdom more profound than spoken words or reckoning with numbers and opens us to the sum total of our body-mind faculties that is the cognitive imagination (discussed below). Noetic literacy addresses how we may unlearn and reframe Enlightenment certainty and objectivity that condemn subjectivity as error, obscures the seamless interdependence of life, and by exclusively “focusing on propositional knowledge as though it were the only form of knowing worth considering is itself a form of epistemic injustice” (Alexis Shotwell Routledge 2017: 79). The integral approach to learning advocated here is a critique of pure reason as the exclusive source of legitimate knowledge and acknowledges hybrid states of mental and somatic knowledge that are non-discursive, non-explicit, non-propositional, informal, and tacit in individuals and groups. This raises the issue of the pluralization of intelligence and fully developed thinking that transcends subject/object splits.

Noetic literacy features an organic understanding of the body-mind as a viable epistemological agent and the basis of all knowing. As a correction of course, education must seek a synthesis of the arts and humanities with the sciences. There is a core notion of the humanities that aligns with the goal of transformation of the healing education initiative.  Studia Humanitatis, or the study of the humanities, is an expression that emerged among the Italian humanists of the late 13^th century. It was a theory of education based on classical Greek and Roman models for shaping an ideal person. Human flourishing was conceived by Plato, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as a matter of deep knowing of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. The Good related to the manner of an individual’s social engagement with and treatment of others. As such, it was a matter of virtue, morality, and ethics. The Beautiful related to individual perceptual sensitivity and self-expression, inspiration, and awe, as understood by the adage “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Art was the significant domain of beauty. The True related to honesty, accuracy, and discernment of the lawful ordering of the external world. Science provided a pathway to objective, apodictic Truth (Wilber, The Integral Vision, 67-68).

L’uomo universale refers to the all-sided or whole person of Renaissance humanism who possessed innate potential to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the world through diverse knowledge and skills, including literary training of the imagination and practical morality. The Beautiful, the Good, and the True constitute real dimensions within each individual (Aristotle) at each stage of development and were considered premier virtues toward which a life should be directed Plato). To the extent that a person enhances their creative self-expression, conducts themselves virtuously in ethical relation to others in society, and honestly and accurately know the physical world, they were said to have elevated their humanity by realizing beauty, goodness, and truth within them. L’uomo universale provided the ideal image of an individual flourishing as a result of a synthesis of self (Beauty), culture (Goodness), and nature (Truth). The intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical versatility sought by Renaissance thinkers and artists enculturated the body-mind-spirit and disciplined the imagination.

The notion of a person ‘completed’ through cultural training and educational learning can be found from East to West. In Sufism, the completed person is the Pir who provides baraka or ‘grace’ to the community (Kabir, Source??). The Ch’un Tzu of Confucianism (cf, The Great Learning) is the morally superior person in possession of ren, ‘humanity’ or ‘benevolence’ that is an inherent trait that must be developed socially with others. Buddhism (cf., Dhammapada) values the Awakened person balanced between suffering and liberation, awareness and ignorance, joy and pain. Hinduism (cf., Religions of the World) speaks of the achievement of moksha or spiritual emancipation that results from following the appropriate life path: jnana yoga (knowledge), bhakti yoga (loving devotion), karma yoga (action), and raja yoga (meditation). In Christianity, the integration of body-mind-spirit defines the ideal individual. The purpose of a complete Christian is to live in a state of shalom – a state of peace and justice reflecting God’s reign. Shalom is Hebrew for ‘peace’, but it also conveys the values of wholeness, completeness, well-being, and safety. The complete individual of Judaism (cf. Talmud) is a holistic union of divine soul and material body created in the image of God (b’tzelemb Elohim). In ancient Greece, Hippocrates and Aristotle emphasized the indivisible relation of body and mind. The ideal person was envisioned as someone possessing a harmonious physical, mental, and emotional whole. The principle of the ‘Golden Mean’ or mesotes is the foundation of Greek moderation and balance. Aristotle (Nichomachean Ethics) defined ‘virtue’ as the intermediate middle position between the extreme of too much (excess) and the extreme of too little (deficiency). In addition, Plato’s mentions gnostikoi (gnosis) and gnostike episteme in his work Politikos (258e-267) where it stands for a noetic form of a higher intelligence. The most capable political leaders were to possess this unique knowledge demonstrative of the ability to rule. It was also a trait of the ideal learner at the Platonic Academy that required a high cognitive prowess to successfully make one’s way through its challenging curriculum.

The humanities, led by Italian Renaissance luminaries, including Petrarch and Pico della Mirandola, opposed an education heavily emphasizing the natural sciences and scholasticism, or what today we refer to as ‘academic’ philosophy with its emphasis on logic and things analytic, scientific, and materialistic. Paideia is an equivalent term to the Latin Humanitas, signifying a general education that was believed should be in the possession of all people in order to live well. Paideia intended the enhancement of human potentials via the disciplined rectification of intellect, body, and spirit through training in arts,humanities, science, moral instruction, and interior development. Paideia was to confirm education in all that was ‘Beautiful, ‘Good’, and ‘True’. To fashion oneself along optimum lines through study of the arts and humanities, one must cultivate the heart, manifest imagination, discipline reason, exhibit virtue, and expand and act upon the creative sense of the possible.

Italian humanists pointed to a ‘divine spark’ of creativity, the imago dei, that makes humanity distinct from other creatures. Each cognitive act touched the deep self.  For example, Socrates and his teacher Diotima devoted themselves to foster the god-like disposition within the soul of each of their students. This disposition could also be characterized as individuality, playfulness, or openness towards any source of knowledge. It is a precarious but worthwhile balance to achieve, living virtuously in light of this divine-like power. The use of power was to be appropriate to the purpose at hand. To impose divine-like power upon oneself is intended to shape oneself to one’s optimum and ideal humanity. Accepting responsibility for exercising such power over oneself requires strength of personality, character, and behavior. Renaissance thinker Niccolo Machiavelli (The Prince p.?) believed the successful leader must possess ‘virtue’ of the lion (i.e., strength) and the fox (wisdom). To constrain the chance occurrences of ‘Fortune’ to any degree possible, one needs to be adaptive, flexible, and artful. As such, ‘virtue’ is a creative composite quality comprising adaptability to fluid situations and unexpected change. Machiavelli’s ‘Prince’ must constrain himself to use only those means suited to realize stated ends.

More generally, Renaissance humanists understood virtue to be the strength of willed behavior that masters one’s appetites and self-interests. The moral power of cultivated virtue moves a humanist closer to wholeness and, as a result, calls forth the emergence of divine grace. While many associate the humanities with atheism, early Italian Renaissance humanists did not seek to reject the notion of God, but rather sought, through cultural, artistic, and scientific expressions, to realize divinity inherent in humanity. Renaissance thinkers eschewed the dualistic fragmentation between the secular and spiritual. Major humanist scholars of the age acknowledged an indivisible intimacy between the visible and invisible worlds, linking elements referred to as pagan and Christian, ancient, and modern (Grosso, personal exchanges 1990s). Italian humanists sought to avoid artificial splits to human completeness required to live in concord with one another and nature. For example, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola promoted the unity of truth and equality of religion and philosophy, an integral vision later referred to by Gottfried Leibniz as the ‘perennial philosophy’ (A Huxley ??).

It is difficult today to find many school curricula given to training the virtues. This is as understandable as it is sad, given that education reflects the larger consumer culture that values continuous self-indulgence of immediate excitement, stimulation, and sensation. One early Western case is a Cistercian example, founded by St. Benedict (480-543 CE) for whom the monastery served as a ‘school’ for the service of the divine. Zaleski asserts that the “…aim of such a school is to ‘apprehend reality as it fully and really is,’ in order to transform and liberate the truth in each person.” Cistercian monks willingly underwent the education of the new human, seeking transformation of consciousness of wholeness. Along similar lines, the Jesuits employ a holistic approach to education and life involving Cura Personalis, or the sacred care for the whole person. According to Philip Zaleski, “The classical Greek idea of Paideia, of cultivating perfection through disciplined training of intellect, body, and heart, in order to produce a new human governed by divine wisdom, has virtually disappeared.” (Zaleski, Search of Paideia,” Parabola, Spr 2003, p.46).  ‘Sacredness’ is the practice of the awareness of wholeness, a respectful approach to the world (Palmer in Heart of Learning p.11). A more recent educational attempt to realize the Paideia concept was Mortimer Adler’s Paideia Program K-12 (1984) which in Zaleski’s view was undeniably valuable as a comprehensive orientation in the arts, sciences, and humanities, but in Zaleski’s view, “failed completely to include moral instruction and, most tellingly, the training in the inner life” (Zaleski, Paideia,” Parabola, Spr 2003:46).

Today’s schools featuring dominant STEM curricula are even further separated from even Adler’s imperfect efforts in large part due to the distinct traits of scientific methodological reductionism. Its manner of reasoning rests firmly upon dispassionate observation and a common-sense basis of knowledge. Scientific method is atomistic, breaking things down to its constituent parts. It is rational, pragmatic, and empirical. The long view perspective is slighted. With the value of objectivity as its methodological cornerstone, science assumes a world that is “fixed and absolute, and so it is possible to separate observer from the observed and the measured” (Feyerabend, Farewell, pp. 5, 8). Its dualistic logic can be found in Aristotle, “A thing cannot be and not be at the same time.” And so, oppositions like ‘animate/inanimate’ became solidified in ‘definition’ and accepted as true reality. STEM’s technological savvy and quantitative focus seriously undervalue the cognitive imagination as found in the arts and humanities, whose holistic logic is an antimonial both/and, the basis for noetic literacy.

  Moreover, imagination is suffocated by dogma, financial bottom lines, outdated, exclusionary educational structures, and “closed systems with precise concepts and rules that are followed slavishly” and which “appear to be the only correct representations of thought” (Feyerabend, p. vii). Its preferred discourse becomes a self-limiting culture of numerical knowledge that imposes fixed patterns on thinking. Insofar as schools have virtually given themselves over to the techno-sciences, education provides little space forpersonal knowing and tacit truth. “Though the academy claims to value multiple modes of knowing, it honors only one – an ‘objective’ way of knowing that takes us into the ‘real’ world by taking us out of ourselves.” (Palmer Courage p. 18). The dominant discourse of STEM displays a “danger of objectifying vocabularies of understanding” and therefore closing off subjective options and suprarational  understandings (cf., K. Gergen, “Toward a Postmodern Psychology,” in S. Kvale (Ed.), Psychology and Postmodernism. Cited in E Nelson in Research in Analytical Psych, p. 24). STEM disciplines are valuable as far as they go, but by themselves they fail full human development; separate perception from cognition, narrow intuitive awareness, and enhance our appetite for nature’s domination. STEM treats the world as part of laws of instrumentation and casts an objectifying gaze upon nature’s organisms, reducing them to just another item in the ‘storehouse of goods’ to be exploited (Heidegger). STEM’S technological savvy and quantitative focus derive predictive power from a perception of sameness and ‘laws’ of repetition. Our schools’ current fixation with STEM instruction – supported by almost everything comprising global contemporary culture – forms a guillotine applied to the arts, humanities, and psycho-spiritual education of the inner life that reflects the present sickness unto education.

The global humanities comprise the study of what human beings create and add to the world – language, culture, folklore, religion, arts, architecture, law, social institutions, etc. The hard sciences, on the other hand, study the basic forces of nature through the laws of motion, gravity, fundamental particles, etc. They address needs of the analytical mind but bypass nurture of the integrative, noetic mind. Likewise, the privileging on STEM studies in today’s school’s curricula, marginalizes life’s spiritual, aesthetic, ethical, and imaginal potentials. To be equal to the challenges of a world of complex, unpredictable change, learners must ‘stand on two feet’, that is, balanced firmly on disciplined knowledge of both the external and internal worlds. As self-knowledge precedes and accompanies all other learning, intellectual and professional accomplishments need to be balanced by psycho-emotional maturity. The humanities are not an exotic study that sets one apart from the world but is rather a path to human completion in the world. The study of the humanities is the study of the various ‘arts’ through which people humanize themselves. The ‘arts’ of human knowing and human doing intentionally seek a change of heightened consciousness. The ‘difficult-to-explain knowledge’ and related noetic insights via the arts and humanities shift the center of gravity in our awareness away from the narrow, rational empiricism currently at core of what most schools insist constitutes the only true knowledge and its related learning practices.

Arts and humanities students with noetic literacy display an intellectual and somatic versatility and epistemological holism. They signal a cognitive turn toward pluralization of knowing as an achievement of a fully animated, embodied consciousness, and sense making that includes and moves beyond rational operations and not simply specialized marketplace skills. “To be human,” according to Apostolos-Cappadona and De Staebler, “means more than to be able to think: it encompasses the integration of all the senses and faculties we associate with the human person” (in Campbell, p.31). “In order to educate an individual to completeness and independence, we need to bring to fruition all those functions which have been hitherto attained but with little conscious development or none at all (C.G. Jung, Gen Aspects of Dream Psych Princeton, 31-33). Cognitive experiences in the arts and humanities refute the notion of intelligence as single generative cognitive function. Knowing in and through the arts can be rational and intuitive, objective and subjective, conceptual, and somatic. Noetic insights are qualitatively different from the mechanical, measured, calculative ways of intellectually solving a problem. They are processed at different levels of consciousness, produce qualitatively different outcomes, and lead to understandings but without knowing how to explain them. What does that mean?

Noetic learning gained through the arts is direct, non-propositional, and non-explicit understanding that precedes explanation. They are important elements of our immediately lived experience, prior to all scientific thoughts about it. In the late Renaissance, Giambattista Vico proclaimed verum et factum convertuntur,11 meaning the true and the made are convertible (Berlin, Vico & Herder p.?). Reacting against the rationalism of Descartes, Vico believed truth is not a matter of discrete, ontic ideas but derives from acts of creation. From that perspective, human ‘truth’ includes history, philosophy, literature, as well anything else people fabricate or fashion. And so it is, artists, and other makers of things, can comprehend their creative products in noetic ways denied to mere observers at a distance who are not involved in the creation. The knowledge of an observer of the external world differs in principle from the insider’s nondiscursive knowledge of the artifacts we ourselves create and which ostensibly follow principles we ourselves impose. The arts and humanities position us well to bring deep focal “attention to the epistemic resources involved in implicit understanding and knowing” (Alexis Shotwell, Routledge, 2017:79).

So it is, musical composers know aural perception of sound structures, musical patterns, processes, and a broad range of rational relationships within their aesthetic choices and critical decisions. Following Vico, what we create can be known in the “superior ‘inside’ fashion, for which our knowledge of the external world cannot possibly be the paradigm” (Berlin, Vico & Herder p. ?). Musicians ‘think’ critically and make decisions in the medium of sound, and not simply about sound in order to intimately experience musical values and passion. But in this, the arts are no longer seen as opposed to but are in fact continuous with science. Whether one utilizes a framework that is a mathematical theory, a symphony, or a poem, it will ultimately require people ‘dwelling in them’ (Polanyi 1967:18, Tacit Dimension) to understand their meaning. That is, an astronomer, music composer, or mathematician necessarily ‘dwells’ in experiences of science, art, and mathematics to obtain insider knowledge that is ‘truth’. In their respective domains, each loses themselves and ‘surrenders’ to works in order ‘to live in them’ (Polanyi, P.K. 1958:195, 196). The primary goal of muscular, hands-on participation in the arts, as in the sciences, is achievement of a profound shift of a participant’s perception away from exclusive thinking, judging, acting, and acquiring the artistic métier and toward an embodied cognition. Our normal mode of self-agency is suspended and the ‘subjectivity’ inscribed in the music comes forward as a generative ‘Other’ we engage with our body-mind and by which we are transformed.

The body is the quintessential instrument of all intellectual and practical knowledge (Polanyi, Tacit D 1967:15). It is through our awareness of the body’s contact with things that we are able to attend to the world. Dancers, as well as actors and musicians, utilize somatic ‘body in the mind’ intelligence (Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh) to realize creative goals and personal aspirations. Kinesthetic forms of subjective learning present their non-discursive meanings directly, not mediated linguistically. Because it involves unconscious processes, non-discursive knowledge defies precise description in words (Langer 1976: 163-180). Moreover, observing dance involves more than visually viewing the beauty of form and design. It demands we unconsciously grasp the multivalent potentiality of bodies in motion. Dance activates in us primal understanding of transrational kinesthetic knowing. Dance releases muscle memory of dancers and audience that activates the body’s internal sense of patterned response. The body understands what intellect cannot. When we listen to music or engage dance or art in general, a new kind of worldly interaction and a new subjectivity (i.e., Being/ontology) come forward. According to Elizabeth Grosz (Volatile Bodies 1994), our psycho-emotional ‘subjectivity’ is not strictly an ‘inner’ reality but rather emerges from ongoing engagements of the unique conditions of the physical body with the environment, forming an omnijective intimacy with the world.

Two specific global examples of non-discursive embodied knowing may be helpful here. The first comes from Africa. The Bantu word sikia refers to somatic/auditory knowledge. Among the Bantu, visual, musical, and kinesthetic perception equals visual, musical, and kinesthetic thinking. There is no specific Bantu word for “listening or hearing” – because it wouldn’t capture the integrated knowing that occurs. Sikia means that one sees, listens, moves, understands, and dances to music as a unified experience. For the Bantu, there can be no meaning, no reality divorced from indivisible sensory participation in a group. In any performing ensemble, as in nature, a tendency exists toward entrainment (Nachmanovitch, Free Play), that is, the synchronization of two or more rhythmic systems into what is virtually a single pulse. This alignment is a prime example of ‘analogical correspondence’ (Bjorkvold, Muse Within). In artmaking – as in children’s play ‐ music, thoughts, words, songs, feelings, and the entire spectrum of bodily‐kinesthetic movements integrate analogically with the entire neural network as different learning modalities of the artists’ total experience; forms of creative expression unite with forms of learning. In such moments of insight, there emerges a recursive ‘biocultural’ (Edith Cobb, The Ecology of Play) interface of body-mind-world. Mind extends beyond the body into the social environment, just as ideas extend the mind into the somatic environment.

This biocultural link is a form of natural care, reciprocity, and mutual ecological respect between human and humus. David Abrams comments on that reciprocity, “Genuine art does not stifle the nonhuman element but, rather, allows whatever is Other in the materials to continue to live and to breathe.” He continues, “In return, these materials contribute their more-than-human resonances to human culture” (Abrams, Spell, 288, ftnte. 22). The synchronization of the body-mind’s focus with its artistic function creates moments of indivisible unity of self, setting, and performance. Somatic and musical synchronization is noted by international teaching-artist specialist and author Eric Booth regarding the El Sistema Venezuela orchestra instructors who, rather than establishing norms for bodily movement during performances, merely allow it to emerge from the priority of emotional connection to the music. The result over 35 years is the formation of El Sistema orchestras that “move more like fish in the flow of the music.” 12  Following the work of Csikszentmihalyi (Flow 19??), neuroscientist Julia F. Christensen defines ‘flow’ as “a fleeting, immersive state in which time and space seem to compress or expand, accompanied by a delicious fusion of movement and awareness – where you don’t just move: you are the movement” (“Ingredients for Brilliance,” Aeon 9 June, 2025).

Entrainment, analogical correspondence, reciprocity, and flow mark a non‐discursive learning and knowledge-construction through immersive participation. Such interactions of indivisible mutuality involve one’s complete self. El Sistema’s orchestral children play, learn, and think in “ecological totalities” (Cobb, Ecology of Play). Observers have noted how audiences move physically and emotionally to cadences of musicians, poets, and preachers. Dancers, musicians/singers, and actors read subtle kinesthetic and proxemic cues and move increasingly in synch with the living pulse of the ensemble. Improvising musicians depend upon this natural resource to integrate their music, as they breathe, pulse, think, and act together. When singing in harmony, choral voices do not create an absolute uniformity of sound; they move in and out of each other’s frequency, always maintaining their vocal integrity (Nachmanovitch, Free Play p.??).

The second example of non-discursive corporeal intelligence comes from China. The words ti-hui indicate that when involved in knowing and knowledge attainment, one has to use the body first, say with physical gesture or mime, and then, and only then, can the mental function of reflective thinking begin. Somatic researcher Richard Shusterman offers the concept of somaesthetics that “highlights and explores the soma – the living, sentient, purposive body – as the indispensable medium for all perception.” (see Shusterman’s quote in Jessica Hemmings, “Can That Be Taught? Lessons in Embodied Knowledge from Memoir Writing for Craft & Design Education” – published in Somaesthetics and Design Culture, edited by Balint Veres and Richard Shusterman (Brill: 2023). This authority of the body leads to what researchers in the field of embodied cognition describe as whole-body thought and whole-body thinking. The body is a fundamental “subject of awareness” (Spell, 59), an organic basis of thought and intelligence, possessing a sensual imagination (Spell 47). As such, Noetic cognition as manifests through the arts is direct, intimate, and synthetic knowing. Noetic understanding is enhanced by hands-on, intersensory engagement with the arts, that leads to qualitative, muscular reasoning. Joining the entrainment of the head and heart through art restructures our humanity using a model of corporeality that bypasses body-mind dualism. As such, art heals intrapersonal and interpersonal fragmentation and achieves the union of consciousness, sense, need, impulse, and action. The resourcefulness of integration we achieve through art forms a powerful entrainment with personal, ecological, and socio-cultural life.

BODY-MIND RECIPROCITY

What a delicious thing writing is – not to be yourself anymore but to move through the whole universe you’re talking about. Take me today for instance: I was a man and a woman, lover and mistress; I went riding in a forest on a fall afternoon beneath the yellow leaves, and I was the horse, the leaves, the wind, the words he and she spoke and the red sun beating on their half-closed eyelids, which were already heavy with passion. – Gustave Flaubert

Thought is a man in his wholeness, wholly attending. – D.H. Lawrence

I believe that experimental physics is about bringing abstract ideas to life, like artists. – Silke Weinfurtner

A poem mustn’t mean but be. – Archibald MacLeish

Ah, not to be cut off, / not through the slightest partition / shut off from the law of the stars. / The inner – what is it? / If not intensified sky, / hurled through with birds and deep / with the birds of homecoming. – Rainer Maria Rilke

I am the observed relationship between myself and observing myself. – Heinz von Foerster

…Just as a lapis Philosophorum, with its miraculous powers, was never produced, so psychic wholeness will never be attained empirically, as consciousness is too narrow and too one-sided to comprehend the full inventory of the psyche. Always we shall have to begin again from the beginning… – C.G. Jung

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Failure of schools to understand the viability of noetic intelligence withholds from noetic oriented students and faculty “the possibility of learning from others” (Jeremy Wanderer, Routledge, 2017:27) in epistemic communities of support. Lacking even a minimal epistemic culture of atypical learners, classroom distrust emerges between students and instructors, as well as within noetic learners themselves. Concerning the latter, this failure ultimately divides learners’ cognitive experience into valid/invalid categories and their essential identity into fragments that can have devastative life-long implications. This is significant as the world we know and engage is a product of our thinking and knowing which themselves result from how we show up in the world. If our inner life detaches from our outer life, our heart from our head, or body from mind, we are broken people who drift from our true identity center. Individuation is forestalled or prevented. Furthermore, noetic faculty, working in conventional school curricula built exclusively upon ‘cognicentric’ epistemologies, face professional jeopardy and ontological numbing when their nondiscursive intelligence or neurodivergent knowing isn’t recognized by schools using traditional educational lenses. They face depression and anxiety in work environments that label them ‘lower tier’ learners-teacher-scholars or noetic student advocates.

Under the healing education umbrella, I envision noetic learners – students and faculty – employing a model of knowing whose dominant images shift away from the numerical symbol, the discursive word, and the observing eye toward the discriminating nose, the perceptive ear, the discerning tongue, and the accurate touch. Let us educate students to comprehend intersensory images across multiple channels of cognition to overthrow narrow consciousness and the maiming orthodoxy of privileging one way of seeing and performing in the world. Possessing rich, multiple images of diverse groups and cultures is an aptitude essential to democratic cooperation, providing us opportunities in which to discern “the Good, the Beautiful, and the True” in the various ways they live and value life. If the techno-scientific tools and applications come between people and their innate image-making powers, it can paralyze our mythopoetic intelligence and insight to what of life lies beneath convention and norms. By giving over our image making capacity to technology, we lose the cognitive function most fundamental to consciousness and personal agency. The result is a cataclysmic splintering of students’ inherent bundle of cognitive capacities, the loss of which contributes to the growing global mental health crisis facing education and all sectors of life.

Noetic knowledge straddles ontological borders – subject/object, interior/exterior, qualitative/quantitative – and is thus well suited to embrace oppositions and ambiguities of life. As such it bears a kinship with the transdisciplinary notion of the ‘included middle’, (Basarab Nicolescu, Manifesto 2002), representing a state across differences where opposing perspectives are neither absolutely true nor false and, thereby, capable of synthesis. This fact raises the issue of intersubjectivity. The logic of noesis is the antimonial both/and. Its rational and unconscious elements can neither be fixed nor discursively defined. Enlightenment legacy thinkers in today’s schools turn away from “…the discomforting co-existence of the rational and irrational, that includes the unfathomable, soul territory of all things,” (Eliz Nelson, Research in Analytical Psych, p. 30). Giambattista Vico held that one could ‘enter into’ and become ‘one’ with other cultures and histories via the reconstructive imagination of fantasia and, in that respect, he stood as “one of the true fathers of the doctrine of the unity of theory and practice (Berlin, p. 111). Artists often express their yearning for Otherness, for passionate, embodied fusion with that which is different or opposed to themselves. One thinks of Gustave Flaubert who realized in prose his yearning for imaginal intimacy, “I myself am Madame Bovary.”

Students of the arts and the humanities learn through literature and philosophy to cultivate the capacity to become the Other (Rojcewicz 2025 in press), entering into the imaginal life of literary characters, healing disjunctions between intuition and reason, logos and eros, learning and life. Arts and humanities integrate the individual and the world as vital Other, bringing diverse powers from beyond the self into the self, expanding and enriching the self. There are two outcomes important to learning and self-understanding that result from this capacity to enter the reality of what we study. First, we bring our abstract thoughts and feelings out into the world in concrete artistic forms that allow for our clear viewing and interrogation. Secondly, we experience the object of our study as a living ‘subject’, or ‘presence’ that is our ‘teacher’. In the first case, we step away from our subjectivity, concretizing our ideas, feelings, or aspirations through our study materials and gain distance of observation. For example, if a student with inchoate childhood fears writes a poem about them, structuring elements of their inner life through persona, sound, rhythm, line break, stanzas, and the expressive use of metaphor and symbol, a degree of control over those fears ostensibly occurs. Because the poem gives structure to content of their interior life, students learn about themself as a person and a learner, developing an intrapersonal intelligence. In addition, the palpably formed contents of our inner life as an artifact may now be of value to others and beneficial to society.

The second consequence of an intuitive identification with one’s study-object is an intimacy with and a healthy respect for what is Other and everything not myself. By penetrating the exterior surfaces of people and things, we gain imaginal access to them with our hearts, able to love who and what is studied, and tacitly understanding what we learn. Through use of the cognitive imagination, students interiorize a poem and think and feel and move in image, sound, and rhythm. They participate mentally and bodily in the imaginal reality of the artwork as an experience of whole knowing. To ‘know’ a subject matter like art in more than a factual sense, we imaginatively engage it as a living consciousness. In this way, noetic learning is not exclusively a matter of information acquisition, but a matter of intuitive vision (cf., Plato, Republic, 518b). As such, the instrumentalist facing a Mahler score perceives the work as a vital breathing subject. Before striking a first note, the musician implicitly entreats, “With your permission,” humbly requesting entrance into the life of the work. The music is ‘felt’ to be a kind of ‘affecting presence’ (Armstrong, Affecting Presence), more akin to a living entity than an inert thing,more likea creative intelligence, imbued and supported by the investment of consciousness of musicians who over the years poured themselves into the life of the musical score.

Similar to that process of noetic understanding, Vico posited the existence of the ‘reconstructive imagination’ (Berlin p. 30) or fantasia, a self-creating power of humanity to ‘enter into’ the mental life of other cultures, histories, and perspectives unlike our own which only the imagination can realize (Berlin, Vico & Herder xix, 32). If student and faculty learners are unable to discern the deep interior dimensions of the world as part of their overall knowledge, directly identify with it, understand what they learn as an organic part of an embodied whole, then their world lacks meaning, their schooling is lifeless, their humanity diminished. Schools must design programs to develop and celebrate the imagination, extending the mind beyond abstract reasoning and technical skills. Learners need to be nurtured as fully animated and embodied thinkers, capable of an intimate participation in life, rather than simply casual observation. John F. Gardner (Ed Search of Spirit, 1996) insists that “when knowledge is on-looking rather than in-working, there can be flowing of the self into another, or of the other into the self.” When learners creatively think with critical and disciplined feeling, they can intuit their study-objects – people and things – in terms of their inner spirit. Gardner insists that only when students can find the subjective in the core of the objective and the objective in the heart of the subjective empowered by a feeling and spirited intelligence can diverse Others around have personal meaning for learners.

What follows below are several examples of intimate, transformative participation with Otherness, characteristic of noetic fantasia (Vico) through the arts. In the line quoted below, American poet Walt Whitman presents an ontological fusion of Being between the poem’s ‘child’ as a perceiving subject and unnamed objects perceived in the world. Subject and object begin and end along the same border, as that state of Being is a holistic ‘both/and’ condition and not a dualistic ‘either/or’ condition of binary dualism. No confusion of separateness here. Whitman writes,

“There was a child went forth every day/And the first object he looked upon, that/object he became/And that object became part of him.”

Becoming the Other is an achievement of an ‘ontological peace’, that “refers to an absolute acceptance of all that which is as it is without such dualisms as good or bad” (Yoshiharu Nakagawa p. 220, Ed for Awakening). The noetic consciousness of artists has often been described as ‘child-like’. “Elementary school children,” observes educator John F. Gardner (Education in Search of Spirit, 1996: ??), “are not fully internalized as subjects, and the world has not been fully externalized as objects.” Cognitive psychologists agree that the mind is inherently embodied; thought is largely unconscious; and abstract concepts are fundamentally metaphoric (Lakoff & Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh). One could ostensibly claim that the embodied mind of Whitman’s ‘child’ is both sensing and sensible, capable of direct synthetic knowing of the intersubjectivity of objects. The same is true for artists and learners.

Students are themselves their primary ‘instruments’ of knowing and expressive activity. That learners themselves are their fundamental ‘instruments’ is obviously true for dancers and actors. It is equally true for musicians. Their violins and cellos are but material extensions of the psyche. “One cannot correctly describe a musician’s relation to his/her instrument in terms of the body manipulating a physical object,” Carl Erik Grennes (SOURCE ??) has written. He asserts that that the “body and instrument constitute a system that collectively exhibits the property of mind.” Musicians and their instruments, awareness and activity, are one. Musicians abide in a symbiotic, noetic state with their artistic instruments. A pianist’s fingers hear music as they contact the black and white keys. A horn player’s lips call forth the creative musical potential of the horn. The instrument and the musician become a single entity in the cooperative act of music making. Similarly, only those learners who are consubstantial with their body-mind-spirit instrument are ‘tuned’ for disciplined and integrated sensing, thinking, and learning as whole knowing. This is a form of poetic intelligence manifested by writers, artists, and other creative people. Their experience intersensory penetration of the subjectivity of the objective world and objectify their interior life through use of their artistic materials.

Sensations of touch can be presented by novelists to readers aurally, or sound rendered through a tactile sense. Speaking of a work by Virginia Woolf, Camille Caprioglio notes that Woolf’s fiction has ostensible kinship with features of autism, “Even sensations other than sight are rendered visually, so the reader sees what is heard of felt” (“A Poet on Mars,” Aeon, October 17, 2025). Michaelangelo is also known for his noetic ‘seeing’ capacity. By observing the first rays of the sun rising over the Carrara quarries, he proclaimed he could see a complete sculpture living whole inside the stone. He understood his art as a process of removing excess stone from the artefact. Michaelangelo created art via the physical powers of his visionary intelligence, a cognitive power he referred to as intelleto (Nachmanovitch Free Play). The Taoist Chuang Tzu identified the woodcutter Ch’ing possessing similar perceptual and productive powers. In order to make an artful bell stand, Ch’ing would fast for seven days to overcome automated thinking and assume a mind beyond thought of praise, blame, or reward. With his mind and skills concentrated and all outside distractions vanquished, Ch’ing entered the mountain forest in equanimity to examine the heavenly nature of trees: “If I find one superlative form, and I can see a bell stand there, I put my hand to the job of carving; if not, I let it go” (Source?) This noetic capacity for insight beyond the surface of appearances and for entering the interior life of things is fundamental to an artist’s way of knowing. The monism featured in the Whitman line above (i.e., “There was a child went forth evert day”) is echoed in the following lines, first from Wallace Stevens and, secondly, from Plotinus.  

“One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost on the boughs of the pines crusted with snow.”

Here, Stevens depicts a moment of noesis, featuring an indissoluble ontology between the body-mind intelligence of the poem’s speaker and the natural world. “We are not a part of the whole, we are the whole” (Helminski, Knowing Heart 2000:9). There, no slick Cartesian dualism separates human from humus. A wholly objective and transcendent reason separate from the environment is an erroneous product of an outdated model. Once asked to identify the nature of his consciousness during moments of noetic insight, Einstein did not describe his awareness as either algebraic or geometric. He said his moments of radical creativity had a somatic element of “the muscular type” (Swimme, 107-8). When contemplating the inscrutable Milky Way, Einstein did not muse upon it separate from his body-mind instrument, but experienced it directly in an imaginal manner, as if in communion with the ‘Old One’. He described his noetic epiphany into the dynamics of the mega-scale structure of space-time as transforming him physically and mentally. That example indicates that noetic comprehension is omnijective, that is, neither wholly objective nor wholly subjective (M Talbot???), but an amalgam that defies normative categories and pointing to how much our tacit knowing is unfathomable and yet happens every day. Likewise, in the line to follow, Plotinus insists,

“No one ever saw the sun without/Becoming sun-like, / nor can a / Soul see beauty without becoming beautiful.”  

Noetic insights are direct, experiential, non-explicit, and synthetic knowing that precedes explanation. Personal knowing moves us to the heart of our experience, and as we move outward from there, the perceived splits between soma and spirit drop away. Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty spoke of the ‘embodied mind’ that is neither subject nor object but a “connective tissue” or intermediate state joining the two (Sara Robinson ‘Body dwelling mind’ (cf. Nesting p.25). On this point, Nobel Prize recipient and geneticist Barbara McClintock insisted that one must take time to ‘look’ into and ‘listen’ to what one’s materials of study have to ‘say’ and must necessarily possess a ‘feeling’ for the organism as a form of openness to “let it come to you.” (Evelyn Fox Keller, A feeling for the Organism 1983, quoted in Palmer, Courage, 55). Creative scientists like McClintock demonstrate a cognitive portfolio of logic and data with direct intersensory knowing of their subject-matter content, that is ontologically inseparable in their productive cooperation and existential intimacy.

Noetic extended sentience is a wisdom older than the cerebral mind, deeper than words or numbers (Abrams, Spell, 20), and more inclusive than the enframing (cf., Heidegger) of technology. It is wrong-headed to believe that our senses are distinct and unrelated to one another and the earth we perceive. Alfred North Whitehead pointed out, “For the very meaning of things known is wrapped up in their relationships, beyond themselves” (quoted in Elizabeth Coleman in Teacher-Scholar, vol. 2, no. 1 Fall 2010 www.fhsu.edu/teacher-scholar). As we step up and into direct human experience, Abrams notes we start “to live the unique outputs of our eyes, ears, nose, and skin, we experience the full participation of our sensing body with the sensuous world” (Spell, p.60). In John Moffet’s lines to follow, it is understood that one’s implicate identity is largely shaped by the reciprocity of unconventional sense-making of the embodied mind and our intersubjective engagements with the world: 

“To look at this green and say, I have seen spring in these / Woods will not do-you must / Be the thing.”  

In each example above, deep understanding requires both imaginative and rational cognitive functions. Healing Education theory re-conceptualizes in practice the primary relationship of thinking and knowing to doing and Being. Our reflection by means of images and ideas is a substantive action, and action itself is a significant image and idea. Actions always express and concretize content of the body-mind. To assume their false dichotomy is to assume a broken self. The speaker of Moffet’s poem insists that comprehension of the relational identity of a human and the more-than-human world of the springtime woods depends on intersensory ‘seeing’ and ‘speaking’. The ancient Greeks referred to such perspicacious insights as episteme and held that it was the polar opposite to inferential reasoning. Episteme was a visual intelligence, a beholding, or direct perception of things, not a calculative reasoning, and could not be brought forth at will (Arthur Zajonc, Heart of Higher Education, p. 96). Likewise, tribal shamans in their roles as cultural wisdom carriers of indigenous lineages assume intimate, immersive identifications of with nature’s ‘animal powers’ that assist them in healing, hunting, teaching, and advising community members (Harner, Way of the Shaman). It is also the case that contemporary neuroscience notes a special mental state defined by “a serene presence,” where one floats in the moment, “simply being” (Christensen, Aeon, June 9, 2025).

In the Neo-Platonic sense, to know something is to become it. To ‘know’ is to be united with the known. To ‘see’ spring, as in the Moffet line above, means to understand it phenomenologically, as if ‘dwelling in’ spring (Polyani 1967:18) as an equal participant with nature and not simply as a by-stander. Knowledge acquisition through the arts and art making unites our mind with both our artistic ‘object’ and our performance function, forming a poly-perspectival consciousness. To be the thing requires we necessarily draw a new circle to traffic the frontier of diverse perceptual worlds. Such transformations of intrinsic Being result from intuitive signals, gut feelings, hunches, somatic markers, and revelations. To become what currently we are not means activating a noetic, shared modality Vico called the ‘heroic mind’ (Vico, The Heroic Mind) “…to lead ourselves beyond our believed capacities, to enter areas of thought for which we do not think ourselves prepared” (Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination, p.20). Unlike the crisis of rapport with cognitive Othering currently taking place in schools, artists and all cultural creatives share an ontological relationship of ‘adoration with the Other’ (I. Livingston, Uncons Roots, p.175). This is the essence of a trans-ontological apprehension of presence shared between items that previously were ostensibly discrete and separatebut now are experienced as consubstantial with themselves. The mutuality of presence leads to true knowledge that conjuncts the language of the body with the language of philosophy; here thought is physical perception, and body is simultaneously mind that speaks a language of polysyllabic, not monosyllabic thought.

Noetic literacy discloses presence between and among things. In the words of Nicola Parkin (Parkin??), presence is a form of relational ‘betweeness’, a linking of ‘interiorities’ (van Manen 2010 p.1024) that bypasses the disjunction of atypical thinking, knowing, perceiving, and acting. Parkin points to the etymology of ‘presence’ that implies something both ‘deeply held’ or ‘inmost’ and something ‘given’ or ‘disclosed.’ Presence as noetic consciousness is a tacit state that is immanent and transcendent of us. Presence, in Parkin’s view, bears a close kinship with an extended sentience of compassion, caring, self-disclosure, vulnerability, or touch. Presence is a relational state of intersubjective and interobjective availability to life, allowing for a fluid ‘giving away’ and ‘coming back’ that discloses the communion of subject and object, self and other, unconscious and conscious mind, the personal and communal.

Authentic learning of any kind is mysterious. Learning via noetic modalities ‘feels’ more like an unknowing and unlearning. Noetic modes are akin to a ‘letting go’ of conventional structures and accepted definitions of orthodox knowledge, and a ‘letting come’ of emergent knowledge. Noetic ways of knowing are akin to an openness (Chinese yin) or a willing surrender to what spontaneously and mysteriously appears in the immediate learning environment. For example, the Zen way of art places great emphasis on the freedom of the artist from attachments, judgments, calculation, control, and expectations. Muge or freedom from fracturing wholeness, comes from recognition of non-dual reality (Nakagawa, Ed for Awakening p. 203). In this state of freedom, the art, the artist, and the artmaking are indivisible. When possessing this consciousness of complimentary identity, life is art (Herrigel, Art of Archery, p.45).

This freedom from an agenda of expectations or control is what Gerald May (“Wisdom of the Wilderness”) calls ‘copelessness’, a highly productive, ready state of availability (e.g., Hindu sattvic) to whatever suddenly comes forth. Copelessness means “directly knowing what is moment-to-moment without projection of acquired knowledge” (Krishnamurti in Ed for Awakening, p.194). An artist, in the creative process, does not impose a wholly external form upon some ostensibly ‘inert’ material, but rather, allows form to emerge from a generative reciprocity between artists and materials (Abrams ??), whether these materials be stones, or pigments, or words spoken or sung. As a noetic state, ‘copelessness’ is highly suggestive of what John Keats referred to as ‘negative capability’ (Source?). More than the ability to divest oneself of reaching for rational explanations or judgments, negative capability means being freely available to life’s mysteries, questions, paradox, doubt, awe, and not-knowing.Negative capability constitutes a via negativa to conventional knowledge but is a positive approach to what we don’t understand (Christopher Banford (cf., Parabola, p??). Noetic insights and suprarational knowledge are fully real and not merely cerebral but are mostly unrecognized by schools since they emerge in contexts “of releasing the mechanisms in consciousness that need to be defined, to compare, to understand – in short, to defend one’s psychological territory” (Moss, 1979:5).  T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets) also grasped the importance to creative insight of ‘copelessness’ beyond expectation, “Or when under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing -/ I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope.” Atypical learners relinquish expectations of learning and knowing via conventional modes to allow emergence of their intrinsic suprarational capacities.

Following May, Keats, and Eliot, healing education project seeks to augment everyday knowing in the analytical ways of reason with diverse anomalous ways of understanding reality through unlearning, disclosure (i.e., aletheia: truth, unveiling), beholding, and emergence of what is hidden but real. Imaginative insight calls for an appropriate constraint. The physicist Arthur Zajonc declared, “We must pause and reflect before speaking, quietly engage the issue inwardly before acting, open ourselves to not knowing before certainty arises, as so we live for a time in the question before the answer emerges” (Zajonc, p.97 Heart of Higher Education). Creative power of art doesn’t stem from data, numbers, theories, or schemata; its intelligence is enmeshed in femur, sinew, and flesh and comes from the ‘felt’ participatory knowledge through extended sentience. Keats aspired to a direct, perspicacious access to reality via images. He says he is after ‘verisimilitude’ or likenesses (i.e., images) of truth. As ‘truth’ always eludes us, we must accept that our knowledge is forever incomplete and ‘truth-like’. Keats understands ‘intimacy’ not as emotion but as feeling, very close to ‘touch’ (cf. Banford, Parabola). Bruce Mangan, describes noetic insight as a ‘feeling of knowing’ to be understood as a diffuse, trans-sensory experience that includes a sensation of ‘rightness’ and, hence, ‘meaningfulness’ (Mangan, Bruce. 2001. “Sensations Ghost: The Non-Sensory ‘Fringe’ of Consciousness.” Psyche 7(18). Available from: http://psyche. cs.monash.edu.au/v7/psyche-7-18-mangan.html). Keats proclaimed,

“O for a life of sensation (i.e., Oneness or floating state – author’s emphasis) rather than thoughts.”

Smyth (cf., Smyth et al, 2008) understands negative capability as a “yielding which in turn yields what otherwise could not be gained,” that is, a “yielding state of letting come.” Negative capability in the particular and noetic literacy in general traffic in a world where suprarational meanings abide and emerge. The intimate, immersive participation of the embodied mind in the process of engaging with art or science activities accords with accounts of revelation and mystical experience (W James; E Underhill). Having a mutual “mind of winter” (Stevens), entering the “first object looked upon” (Whitman), “becoming the sun” (Plotinus) positions us to face a numinous, suprarational reality larger than ourselves and beyond our uniqueness or isolation from the world. As such, human beings are all of Being.

Some people refer to the numinous nature of reality as God, ‘Mind at-Large’ (Huxley, Doors of Perception), or the timeless and spaceless realm of Being. The ‘numinous’ (Otto, Idea of Holy) carries with it an autonomous and compelling sense of eternity and a power that seizes and enchants consciousness. The numinous transcends comprehension in rational and ethical terms and is accessed by a noetic modality Rudolph Otto also refers to as ‘feeling’, that has an objective referent he identifies as the ‘holy’. The holy is not simply a psycho-emotional state, but an awareness of ‘personal emptiness’ (i.e., “I am nothing; Thou art all”) before an awe-inspiring, transcendent reality felt to be separate but not separated from oneself (Otto, Holy, p.7, 11) andthat can only be hinted at or suggested through mythopoetic images, symbols and ‘numina’ of the internal environment (Otto, p.11). Whatever its ultimate disposition, noetic encounters with the numinous are experienced as a majestas (i.e., majestic presence Otto 19), a fellow ‘subject’, an ineffable daemon, or overwhelming Thou before whom we ‘shudder’. Such forms of noetic consciousness are to be recognized as authentic “faculties of knowledge and potentialities of thought in the Spirit itself” (James, Varieties 62). 

The numinous awakens both a cognitive predisposition different from normative rational faculties of knowing and establishes a new standard of evaluation of life (Otto, 15). For example, evolutionary cosmologists, Brian Swimme underwent a metanoia (i.e., life-changing mind-body conversion) of humanity’s interconnection to the Kosmos (Tubali, Big Think, 6/2/25). Similarly, the philosopher Materlinck, while in the Arctic circle, described a revelatory experience of the unity of subject/object consciousness akin to ancient and contemporary artists that he believes occurred “beyond the Polar circle of the mind… where the psychology of man mingles with the psychology of God” (p.340 Underhill). Nicholas Berdyaev wrote, “Creativity is a spiritual action in which a person forgets about himself, moves outside of himself in the creative act, absorbed by the task (Significance of Creativity).” By its very nature, art is ‘spiritual’ in the sense that it engenders an expanded sense of self in dynamic connection with life. The delusion of a radically autonomous self is completely overcome via the living ‘energy’ and ‘urgency’ of the numinous and its ‘holy’ referent (Otto p.23). Confronting the numinous enhances our perception of the universe in all situations of life thereafter. We find we can no longer collaborate in good faith in the modernist project of fragmentation without betraying ourselves and living in bad faith. Through life-long immersion in arts and humanities, we enter into a noetic relationship with the common ground of a participatory reality between self and the world, “the underlying goal of Western intellectual and spiritual evolution (Tarnas, Epilogue, The Passion of the Western Mind).This is possible as the arts and humanities nurture our ability to handle paradox, contradiction, and opposition via images, metaphor, poetry, and indigenous narratives by making available to us the cognitive imagination that discloses unfolding depths of human and cosmological potentials.

IMAGINATIVE COGNITION

Far from being just one of our cognitive powers, valid in the field of art, scientific discovery and the like, it [imagination] is our whole power the total functioning interplay of our capacities. – Robert Averns

I’m enough of an artist to draw freely from my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. – Albert Einstein

The possible’s slow fuse is lit by the imagination. – Emily Dickinson

Who knows what lies behind and beyond our images until we trust them enough to ride them fully, even into the darkness and into the depths like a seed in the soil? – Matthew Fox

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The core concept of noetic literacy within my healing education initiative is the cognitive imagination, the visionary power of intelligence. It is the optimum means for evoking and reading images (Jung CW 12, para 219), discerning realities, engendering meaning, and entering into diverse cultural configurations. It is the primary tool of objective analysis and subjective assessment. It supports rationality, even as it functions differently from instrumental reason and the calculating intellect. While it is clearly evident among artists and innovative scientists, cognitive imagination is not their exclusive gift, but rather an essential endowment of creative humanity. It nurtures citizens’ capacities to move from the apparent to the less apparent and perceive veiled messages, vested interests, and pseudo-truths in politics, corporate life, news broadcasting, internet sites, and advertising. It clarifies the spiritual seekers’ judgment among iconic artifacts and sacred practices. As image literacy involves what Hillman (Re-Visioning) refers to as “seeing through,” a depth psychologizing process of moving from outside to inside and looking behind, within, or beneath the surface of appearances to deeper realities.  Citizens engaged in “seeing through’ via the cognitive imagination make themselves and democratic communities less vulnerable to manipulation by lobbyists, special interests, or hate groups, as they perceive consensus explanations in their fantasy and mythic ambiguities. As a result, citizens are better able to make strategic decisions and realize goals in situations lacking a prescribed answer or response. 

To speak of imaginative cognition is to speak of the organizing, relational, synthetic mind and its associative and patterning processes in intimate cooperation with the instrumental and critical mind and its differentiating and isolating tendencies. We continually find that our understanding is facilitated by cognitive processes that are mysterious to us as to how they function. We have hunches that lead to understandings without knowing how to explain them. Jerome Bruner (Ways of Knowing) pointed that people perfink. That is to say, people perceive, feel, and think simultaneously as a cognitive ensemble. The senses and all other cognitive modes are terms, forms, or ways of knowing are a cojoined mutuality. Imagination as cognitive fluidity, which after Kant, is responsible for linking and organizing varieties of sensory experiences into an integral framework that is referred to in this work as the healing education project. So it is that sensory perception is thinking across the senses. Thinking is the body as an active, nondiscursive intelligence. Each cognitive faculty implicates the others. They do so, engaging one another detached and distinct; but they also explicate each other from a shared consciousness of imagination.

Ordinary thinking in its instrumental form understands polar opposite cognitive modalities as disjointed, when, in fact, they are complimentary and related. Instrumental reason appreciates life only at the antithetical poles, blind to antimonial connections and what lies in between, bypassing their mutual reciprocities. Instrumental reason is the form of rationality we utilize when we calculate the most economic application of means to ends. Its measure of success is displayed by maximum efficiency and input-output ratio. On the other hand, Aristotle stated that “the greatest things by far is to be a master of metaphor…that implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.” Similarly, Jonathan Swift knew, “Vision is the act of seeing things invisible.”  The cognitive imagination is the premium power to perceive the inner life of things (i.e., “seeing more than meets the eye”) via image and metaphor and, thereby, experience the material world as an epiphanic occasion of vital spirit. It is what makes our experience meaningful, enabling is to interpret and make sense of the oppositions, contradictions and paradox of life. Imagination makes perception more than mere physical stimulation of the sense organs. As such, imagination is the condition of all thought.

Reliable thinking always and everywhere requires deft, effective use of imaginative understanding and reason. It is also true that mental discipline is not unrelated to innovation and originality. Healing education’s noetic literacy of the multimodal mind for a new humanity highlights the intimacy between critical and creative thought and their subsequent products. The word ‘creative’ by definition implies a critical analytical component. Creativity involves empirical production, while ‘criticality’ involves a subjective judging and assessing. When engaged in high level thought, body-mind intelligence necessarily generates and assesses its fashioned products (Dewey). When we marry empirical reasoning of the sciences with the tacit and personal knowledge of the arts and humanities through creative work, we achieve ‘an existential intimacy of learning (Rojcewicz 2021) with an all-sided humanity that transforms the secret chamber of soul, the penetralium (Keats) of unfathomable Being.

Within the healing education narrative of what it means to be fluent in noetic modes, various terms are used here – ‘cognitive imagination’ or ‘imaginative cognition’ – to identify the hybridity of rational and suprarational knowledge and consciousness. As the optimum faculty, cognitive imagination includes and transcends thinking in its instrumental and calculative aspects. The imagination doesn’t make things up; it makes things apparent. Its integral consciousness is a modality “not exhausted in quantitative or conceptual thought, in the mythical intuition of the symbolic images of the world, or in the experience of magical unity and power” (Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, 99). As such, imaginative cognition is the sum of one’s perceptual-cognitive capacities to know and generate knowledge (Averns). It involves both the forming of images essential to consciousness and making cognitive suppositions. (Guide to Human Thought, p.367). Imaginative cognition is fluid knowing, responsible for the bundling of multiple sensory experiences into a conceptual framework. It is what makes perception more than a mere physical stimulation of the sense organs. It renders our sensory life meaningful, allowing us to understand implicitly and explicitly quotidian experiences, as well as emergent numinous ones.

Cognitive imagination can be understood as the innate capacity of visionary perception displayed not only by artist, but also by children, mystics, religious intuitives, and everyday folks. Comparable terms include ‘intuitive intelligence’ and visionary intelligence’ refer to the optimum body-mind faculty linking rational and suprarational content and processes, as essential to scientists as to artists, as well as every other sector of life. The ostensible borders separating rational and intuitive functions are ambiguous and never clearly defined. An ‘irrational’ procedure often leads to success, while a ‘rational’ procedure may cause mayhem (Feyerabend, Farewell, p.10). As the fundamental faculty of perceiving, sensing, intuiting, whole-knowing and thinking, cognitive imagination performs a general organization of self and is the common condition of thinking in general, applicable to all manner of utilitarian and creative work. It is the key that unlocks thedoor to a new order of Being, belonging, perceiving, and meaning. In my story of transformation of education through noetic literacy, cognitive imagination is the hallmark of a fluid and complex intelligence essential for effectively addressing the present sickness unto education and the traumatized world of which it is a part.

HEALING EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY

…blatant problems of American democracy are directly related to, if not rooted in…epistemological and spiritual problems…where aesthetic, expressive, and spiritual dimensions are chronically undernourished, if not actively suppressed by schooling. – J Miller

Since the ultimate authority of life lies within the individual, there is nothing more important in life than to develop the innate tendency of the psyche to realize its wholeness. The psyche demands to be developed and to be made whole; obedience to this command is the highest good and the ultimate concern of life. – C.G. Jung

At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity. – Rachel Naomi Remensee

For those who give primacy to Ultimacy, full human development is seen as not only needed for an individual, but for society as a whole. Societies need fully developed humans, because it is the heroes of virtue…who are seen as the well-spring of cultural and social renewal. – Scott H. Forbes

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To stop education’s ongoing violent impairment of student learning and sense of self, schools need a guiding story of pluralistic intelligence that joins analytical reason with hands-on, intersensory engagements with the arts. Schools need to orient learners not only to their important career-related mental capacities and professional skills but also to the strength of virtue and imagination honed by the humanities, leading to wholeness. An imaginative exchange must exist at the core of education for it to be a healthy community of learning and knowledge production. Its justification is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest for life by uniting what is traditional and what is emerging in an imaginative consideration of learning. Schools impart information, but it must do so creatively. A school that fails in that respect loses its reason for existing (Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education).

 A democratic society benefits when its schools embrace more than the intellect’s reduction to instrumental reasoning and economic rationality by increasing the diversity of intellectual perspectives, products, and performances, while raising the mean of all (Eisner 1998:50). American democracy is currently moribund in questionable epistemological and ideological presuppositions that have made society an agent of political, economic, and epistemic injustice. Truth is politicized; fiction is reality; morality is an expedient matter of self-interest; might makes right, “God is on our side,” and anyone not-me is suspect, villainized, or otherwise Othered. Ron Miller (2000:2) observes, “conventional education… strives to defend and fortify the imperfect social and economic structures…” and represents “…a massive, deliberate, and efficient mechanism for placing human energies at the disposal of the corporate state.” The story of healing education is my social critique and re-imagining of learning as a holistic, integral counter to disembodied, hyper-rational education that, by itself, undermines self-integrity, cognitive freedom, and ultimately weakens democratic social order. The democratic spirit of my project seeks to nurture and celebrate a diversity of people capable of “…never succumbing to a feeling of futility, or the belief that they have come to an end of what is worth having” (Mary Warnock 1978 p. ??)

Schools must prepare students with knowledge of how the world presently works. Because the world displays ongoing, turbulent, and discontinuous change triggered by international migrations, geo-political strife, volatile financial markets, systemic racism, planetary deterioration, globalization, and incursions into sovereign states, the ability to grasp the inner workings of the world is extremely rare. It is essential that graduates understand the chaotic, unpredictable processes at work so as to perceive the sense of it all. Deane Nuebauer states, “Education at all levels needs to become in novel ways a theorizing activity and pervasive inquiry about the nature, order, and the way of things” (Globalization and Education, p56). The fragmented world calls for different educational models to radically interrogate the ways knowledge is generated, disseminated, and retained. Neubauer points out that the historical standards that have generated taxonomies of our academic disciplines and professions will be replaced by “imperatives to understand the world in terms of processes and relations extant within it (Neubauer, p.57). Knowledge found in broad based arts and humanities “expose the contingency of present arrangements” and “unearths a priori[s] buried in present assumptions…” (Sameer Pandya, Miller-McCune, Online Smart Journalism. Real Solution, July 29, 2010, 11:47 am).

Noetic literacy has been portrayed here as the ability to ‘read’ the warp and woof of our unique times characterized by chance, emergence, synchronicity, liminality, emergence, patterns, and self-organizing systems across all domains of meaning. The arts and humanities and their subsequent legacy of noetic ways of understanding traffic in experience of ongoing change, the uncanny, disenfranchised, and the ‘wild’. They satisfy the objective requirements of life and the subjective needs of spirit. They offer us a depth poetics of meaning. However, because the arts and humanities have been for at least two decades in decline in America (Source??) in favor of education as job preparation, things have taken a dark and dangerous turn. The role of the artist traditionally was to make its citizens believe not primarily in physical reality – i.e., the role of science and technology – but to believe in noetic and numinous things that could happen, that is, what is possible as being probable, or necessary. The irony is that the creative invitation of artists to indwell in visions of as-if has been hijacked by the ‘art’ of the con, lying in public, gas lighting, deflection, ghosting, media channels of ‘alternative facts’, and AI deep fake. For many, it is a dark, distressing time.

Citizens across all meaning oriented professions need to support holistic and integral curricula and pedagogy that feature acquisition of adaptive psychosocial skills that include frustration tolerance, cognitive flexibility, resilience, ‘response-ableness’, transdisciplinarity, interdependence, ‘copeless-ness’, negative capability, and noetic discernment of the difference between personal agency as a doer and one being done to. While obtaining an absolute and definitive knowledge of the world is deeply unlikely, noetic based learning and inquiry through the arts and sciences, is the healing education for our chaotic, directionless times. Healing education project must necessarily have strong roots in depth psychology, since self-understanding is pre-requisite for understanding the world and how it works. Studying the depths of the psyche in its interior and exterior aspects, means schools need to make inquiries into the unconscious mind that is itself, like the present times, characterized by uncertainty, oppositions, supra-rationality, compensation, shadow, synchronicity, and self-organization, as expressed in dreams, revelations, active imagination, altered states, synchronicities, visions, and uncanny psychic phenomena. The re-storying of education of student and faculty healing via noetic literacy with its antimonial both/and logic closes subject-object splits and offers the best approach to grasping the complexity of processes, relations, problems, dilemmas, and networks of global operations.

Schools in a democratic society must enhance the epistemological and cognitive pluralism required for effective decision making, problem solving, and evaluation of competing claims to truth. The reconstructive imagination, following Vico, is the tool to ‘enter into’ other cultures and alter ones’ fundamental Being. Imaginative cognition is necessary for our ethical decision making and comprehension of the subtleties of life. Cognitive diversity as expressed through the arts and humanities means we add more not less than logic to the mind of learners. At the heart of the healing education project is “the practice of freedom – freedom to think imaginatively beyond ideologies or authoritarian systems, freedom to structure creative energies to propel and direct the human spirit, freedom to become one’s own intellectual authority” (Rojcewicz CM 2001:111). The learner, “develops the capacity to move among worldviews, transcending particular identities while simultaneously honoring each of them” (Arthur Zajonc, Kosmos Journal, Vol. V, No. 1 Fall/Winter 2006 www.kosmosjournal.org). Cognitive freedom means ‘thinking’ with critical disciplined feeling and ‘feeling’ with conscious evaluation of experience that leads to knowledge prized not exclusively for its effective utility, but also for its essential truth, and potential for transformation.

Today’s intractable problems are systemic challenges that defy solutions via single worldviews and individual disciplinary approaches. Noetic learners are well suited to work in transdisciplinary teams that require a broad portfolio of ways of perceiving, knowing, acting, and making. We understand the accompanying growing pains from opening to new perspectives when old institutional policies, structures, and configurations no longer serve students’ greatest needs. We should ‘play’ innovatively with the structures dividing typical from atypical learners to the mutual benefit of students and society. We should overcome the brittle territorialism school overseers hold regarding rational, objective, and techno-scientific disciplines and practices. Atypical learning modalities that implicate emotions, interpersonal engagement, intuition, and extended sentience are adaptable to effectively address racism, nationalism, global warming, neoliberalism, and planetary degradation that require more than rational or technological approaches. Noetic modalities flexibly serve personal and socio-political needs by honoring human idiosyncratic wisdom across knowledge of arts and humanities, multicultural, folk, and indigenous carriers of wisdom.

Healing education project is my ‘constructive postmodern’ (David Ray Griffin 1992), holistic critique of today’s dominant worldview that is excessively material, exterior, objective, and dualistic. It places integral importance upon the interior and exterior dimensions of individual and collective life composing a whole. Healing education theory augments the notions of intelligence and human excellence when perceived strictly through lenses of techno-science, specialization, hyper-rationality, and neoliberal standards that serve corporate needs over broad-based educational outcomes. Part of education ‘healing’ its own illness [8] will come from dethroning its underlying fantasy of intelligence as residing within a single factor ‘G’ (Mesa Foundation). This fantasy promotes the idea that real meaning, research, teaching, and truth depend on a single, unified vision of cognition. My educational project is a working meditation on authentic broad-based learning from a perspective of pragmatic idealism. As an educator and a poet, I am an idealist seeking to practically realize holistic values and integral outcomes through the arts and humanities, looking to poetry, folklore, mythology, depth psychology, and indigenous wisdom systems. The task requires a rethinking not only of education at all levels, but also of the teaching roles of faculty, family, community, and cultural institutions that influence learning, knowledge, and human development. This enormous undertaking must be accepted without cynicism or despair, for deep, transformative learning may take place informally where it is noticed least, as a “learning beyond any teaching” (Hillman (Re-Visioning, p??).

We currently witness a contagion of fragmentation throughout education. Reflecting the “worldwide pandemic of polarization” (Kirk Schneider, The Polarized Mind), 2013, p1, 5), schools have fixated on limited sets of reductive, exclusionary values to the omission of arts, ‘spirituality’ (Laurel H. Campbell and P. London) and greater epistemological and cognitive diversity that would augment normative standards that perpetuate human alienation, disjunction, decay, and conflict. I have argued that school curricula based primarily on either quantitative science, or the qualitative arts are by themselves inadequate and have contributed to the polarization of society. The healing education initiative highlights the intersection of multiple academic and tacit forms of cognition and envisions a noetic humanity open to all images of selfhood, subordinate to none (Pico Della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man)). To heal education itself and thereby offer citizens learning experiences that mend their mental, emotional, and spiritual splits, we must avoid the romanticizing of atypical non-discursive knowing as superior epistemic events and the senseless discrediting of scientific knowledge and practice. Both forms of knowledge are essential to a salubrious self, vibrant life, and concordant society. And yet, education typically ignores atypical knowledge.

We stand at a crossroads and must decide whether to continue to support an educational model that cripples diverse learners or begin to pursue human and environmental wholeness. We must not avoid this ethical challenge, no matter how strongly we may believe that normative, numbers-based quantification methods guarantee the correctness of the techno-sciences. Education at all levels suffers from the limits of its rationalistic and techno-scientific virtues.   Education privileges and then separates the hard sciences from the human sciences is a “disguised moral discourse,” producing widespread human, socio-political, and ecological calamities (Jennifer M. Gidley, Evolving Education: A Postformal-integral-planetary Gaze at the Evolution of Consciousness and the Educational Imperatives – Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, School of Education, Southern Cross University, May 2008). As we make human splitting and the marginalization of groups acceptable by disconnecting learning from the larger questions of humanity and everyday life, we make the sickness unto education allowable and student trauma inevitable. We must leverage upward personal and social fragmentation like scattered seed for noetic flowering. Let us cease imposing upon nonconventional learners arbitrary, academic identities that reflect not the splendor of their implicate uniqueness but the stupor of mass identity and culture. Education itself is the problem; and education is the solution. Let us ‘re-story’ schooling, learning, and learners in ways that restore an all-sidedness to human development through holistic, distributed factors that promote and maintain health of body-mind-spirit.

CODA: RE-STORYING AND RESTORING EDUCATION

… rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them … imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them … for when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. – Giambattista Vico

The truth is no longer the truth. It’s much more difficult to agree on facts. Beliefs replace facts and truths, and opinions become the new truth. One of the most difficult challenges for leaders, especially in a global organization, will be how to manage this when creating a narrative that can bring people together.” – Morten Wierod

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Our polarized schools, like Western society in general, are marked by noetic mal nourishment. Our assumption that separateness defines human nature and universe has won its epistemic justification necessary to amount to privileged knowledge (Philip Berghofer, “Husserl’s Noetics: Toward a Phenomenological Epistemology, Journal of The Brit Society for Phenomenology 2019, Vol. 50, No. 2, 120-138 https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2018.152(.?)5778 p.122 Notes) and provides the ground of our western techno-scientific worldview: fragmented, impersonal, random, mechanical, objectivist, separated. These consequences of the Western worldview are also negatively rendered unto the Noetic learner, causing adisjunction of selfhood via academic structures of exclusion. The Western mind’s alienation from the world is a result of a series of paradigmatic revolutions (Tarnas, Passion of the Western World). From the theories of Copernicus, we witnessed a cosmological shift away from a geocentric perspective where the earth was the center of the universe and humanity held a predominate place with a heliocentric perspective in which the sun was the center, and the earth and humanity wholly unexceptional. The Copernican cosmological crisis and its alienating effect on the mind received philosophical development from Renee Descartes. The autonomous modern self became distinct from the world it sought to know and dominate. A human was a conscious, personal observer facing an unconscious, impersonal, material universe. The estrangement of humanity from the world produced by the Cartesian ontological revolution received epistemological expression by Immanuel Kant. Kant who pointed out that all knowledge is radically interpretative, as the mind can have knowledge only of its internal phenomena and not of external things. The cumulative outcome of the Copernican, Cartesian, and Kantian schisms is that humanity is seen as but a tangential agent adrift in a purposeless universe. But the lesson of Kant, supported by postmodernism, is that the world is never as described by our worldview. We represent the world to ourselves as impersonal, mechanistic, and purposeless, and we respond to those representations, as if they were metaphysical laws. The truth is more likely to be that the impersonal, mechanistic, fragmented, and purposeless qualities reside within us. 

We need a healing narrative of learning that leads to noetic insights beyond normative categories of fragmented knowledge and intersubjective division, a story of all-sided learners free of epistemic harm, cognitive splits, and diminished mental health. C.P. Snow described the antagonism between the two cultures of science and the humanities (Snow, The Two Cultures). Understanding these divisions are essential to the health and safety of humanity; failing to do so threatens humanity and the earth. Conflict between the epistemic legitimacy of various assemblages of knowledge over millennia have seen truth claims of numerical relations emerge as superior. Numbers have become the sine qua non to human claims to knowledge and certainty. Knowledges have deep impact upon how we live our lives, as the Cold War era of the previous century witnessed a struggle between two theories of knowledge – Marxism and liberalism – that violently shook the world (Nirenberg, Uncountable).

 Healing education project offers a narrative of education that would transform our schools’ understanding of how nonconventional learners phenomenologically experience coming to knowledge. It valorizes and confirms multiple values and logics of both the natural and human sciences toward a synergetic, transdisciplinary integration, without sacrificing their unique and valuable distinctions. Educators should seek to augment the best of STEM curricula with transdisciplinary, real-world opportunities including arts-based inquiry that inherently call for employment of multiple learning modalities, bridging the gulf between empirical science and nonconventional intuitive ways of knowing for the purpose of realizing all-sided individuals with broad cognitive bandwidth. Traditional learning is assumed indirectly through external performance of facts, knowledge, and capacities via tests, term papers, and projects. Nonconventional learners, however, arrive at knowledge directly in ways more aptly experienced as ‘not-knowing’ and ‘unlearning’ via intuition, hunches, epiphanies, and insightful moments of aha! The story of noetic learning told here recognizes not only the whole-person, but also what Nilofer Merchant refers to as onlyness, “that thing only one person can bring to a situation.” Healing education project is about respecting and honoring each and every learner, as “each of us stands in a place no one else occupies” (Merchant). It includes “learning about” subject matter content but also “learning-to-be” an all-sided integral person.Presently in our schools, noetic learners, students, and faculty are “betwixt and between” themselves due to their epistemic uniqueness, trapped in education’s ‘liminal’ zone (V. Turner), sentenced to learning stagnation and disjunctions of Being.

The narrative of the healing education project invites student and faculty learners to make a bold onto-existential turn toward the generative relationship of diverse and tacit knowing to undisclosed Being. Its premium concern lies with each whole student. Atypical learners arrive at their nonscientific understanding and personal ‘truths’ in ways that are neither countable nor recognized within education’s Enlightenment legacy, and so they appear transgressive, mercurial, or dumb. Atypical learners are indeed learners, but they suffer profoundly in ways that may reflect or trigger adverse childhood experiences (ACE cf., https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jcpp.14022) when they experience the classroom as a dead end, while ‘knowing’ the truth of their noetic knowledge is otherwise. In my vision of learning for a noetic humanity with consciousness of wholeness, students and faculty alike have ample opportunities to enhance their integral consciousness and atypical learning in ways that accurately mirror the tacit understanding taking place that gives form to their true identity. On this point, Forbes (2003:22) states, “This militates against education to fit an externally derived model of who a person should be and sees the teacher as helping students find and actualize who they are.” Noetic learners need support to fashion self-understanding and self-completion missions that stem from their intrinsic atypical ways of thinking, reasoning, acting, and seeing the world. To enact the story and ‘sing the myth’ of the new human of noetic consciousness, following the ancient Greeks, means to lay bare and make appear the form of outer appearance and inner essence of lived experience. The arts, humanities, supported by the related wisdom of folklore, mythology, and depth psychologies must necessarily augment scientific materialism, engendering in students and faculty a sense of awe, wonder, and imagination, as declarations of who we are and what we value in the world.

When we immerse ourselves in the ‘dream’ image-language of unfathomable art, we give over our local, autonomous identity in self-surrender for the ‘All’ of life. Between egotism and ego-loss, we shudder in awe before great art as a ‘tremendum’ and ‘fascinosum’ (Otto, Idea of Holy), a mysterious reality beyond ourselves. As we move deep into the aesthetic experience, we open to “a feeling of being entered – or entering upon-something greater” than ourselves that is “at the heart of the sense of transcendence” (Murphy, Michael H. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology; Palo Alto, Calif. Vol. 1, Iss. 1,  (Spring 1969): 21.). In that way, we find strength from sensing an all-encompassing self which overcomes anguish of ontological uncertainty. And, in the words of Joana Macy, “It is a source of courage that helps us stand up to the powers that are still, through force of inertia, working for the destruction of the world” (Macy, see sheet on Intersubjectivity). In that space, we experience integration of learning and ‘spirituality’. As educators, parents, and citizens, it is our ethical responsibility to end the widespread epistemic harm done to atypical learners, many of whom are BIPOC, requiring attention be given to their mental, moral, physical, social, aesthetic, and spiritual needs. We live in a broken world in need of repair (cf., Hebrew Tikkun olam). And because the outcomes of how we educate largely depends on the health of who we are in our essential Being, schools themselves must be more complete in order to actively nurture the complete learner in themselves, their students. and their faculty.

Education at all levels must purposively heal itself of the ‘illnesses of one-sidedness of operation, reflected in accelerated, ‘advanced’ programs in elementary and high schools and career-focused STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) specializations in colleges and universities. STEM arises from a ‘theology’ of materialism, enshrines logic and calculation, ‘idolizes’ objectivity, privileges exterior life over interior life, and projects a flatland view of reality devoid of interiority and spirit. The goal of my healing education project is creation of a complimentary learning environment of the natural and human sciences that serve human completion. It seeks learning experience that links the wisdom of noesis to the wisdom of logos, overcoming their current split. Overcoming cognitive splitting will be a long and varied enterprise. Toward that end, it has been argued here that integrating the ‘arts’ of knowing and being with the techno-sciences is indispensable to address and begin to turn the ship of schooling and learning toward the port of epistemic and cognitive wholeness. Immersed in the arts and humanities, we come to the furthest reaches and the deepest sources of knowing and knowledge, noetic and ontic, as expressed in the interior and exterior life quadrants of individuals and groups (Wilber, Integral Theory) in a total field of wholeness co-arising. Thinking in noetic states of embodied cognition in the arts, we know, and we are nondual consciousness of wholeness, referred to in depth psychology as the archetypal Unus Mundus (i.e., One World), the foundation of matter and spirit underlying opposition and fragmentation. The ultimate goal of healing education is relational living in a democratic society as integrated people with a new humanity of noetic intelligence and the intuitive wisdom Spinoza termed ‘beatitude’, an ontological intimacy of embodied awareness with conscious nature, a participatory reality of self and the world. We must be the healing.

ENDNOTES

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[1] C.G. Jung maintained, “The development of personality means nothing less than the optimum realization of the whole individual human being. …Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination. “To educate a man to this seems to me no light matter. It is surely the hardest task the modern mind has set itself.” (Jung, Dev. of Personality, 1954c VOL 17 p.171, paragraph 289).

[2] Rachel Naomi Remen (1999:36 “The Heart of Learning”) has acknowledged, “As a student in medical school, I was rewarded for my woundedness and punished for my wholeness. My sense of cultural wound was actually deepened and reinforced by my experience of medical education. It took me many years to realize that medical education is not an education at all: it is a training. An education evokes wholeness and attends to integrity, while training specializes, focuses, and narrows us. And in specializing we disavow of wholeness. We sacrifice our wholeness for expertise.”

[3] It is not spurious to align health and education through holism. It has been widely recognized for many years now within all social sectors, including medicine. Unsatisfied with impersonal surgical and pharmacological treatments, patients and physicians alike often turn to diet, exercise, meditation, biofeedback, embodiment, and other ancillary treatments. See Swami Ajaya, Psychotherapy East and West, p.7).

[4] It must be understood that when I mention various noetic forms, such as mythology, folklore, and indigenous wisdom systems, I do so to include them among viable knowledge, even if condemned as spurious by the Enlightenment Project. Kiera Coughlan argues “that the relationship between what the western episteme calls “mythology” and academia specifically, and western formations of knowledge more broadly, is essentially a colonial one in which the worldview, knowledges, religion and cosmologies of colonized peoples is termed folklore, mythology, superstition or fiction as a way of devaluing and ordering their ways of knowing as ‘less than’ and as objects under the rational, empirical and scientific Western gaze.” See “Colonial Others and Otherworlds: Re-Encountering the Mythic in Irish Myth and Folklore Studies.”  M.A. in Culture and Colonialism, College of Arts, National University of Ireland, Galway. Academia.com

[5] See Peter M. Rojcewicz, Royal Society of Arts 2000; Existential Learning, Academia Letters; Current Musicology.; video interview Dr. Margaret H. Freeman, Co-Director, Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts, an academic think-tank, Myrifield, MA, conducted with me, February 28, 2025.https://myrifieldinstitute.org/

[6] The weighty responsibility of classroom teachers continues to increase. Ongoing pedagogical and technology training, learning outcomes assessment, behavior monitoring, classroom safety safeguarding, trauma triggering prevention, accreditation compliance, school rankings, microaggressions management, cooperation with visiting Teaching Artists, student special needs, etc., are part of a long list of duties. As learning is a widely distributed phenomenon, we should not look exclusively to teachers to support the atypical cognition of our students. That reality fully acknowledged, however, does not negate the fact, as stated by Scott H. Forbes (Holistic Education 2003:46) that “…teachers should have their own experiential learning and sagacious competence present when engaging with students.” Eric Booth, widely regarded as the founder of the Teaching Artist profession and author of several books on teaching artistry insists that teacher authenticity ignites students’ yearnings to “make connections,” asserting that “80% of what we teach is who we are” (Booth, Making Change, pp. 26, 46). Human fragmentation infects every sector of society, and each has its responsibilities to right the epistemic injustice to noetic learners. This is particularly true for teachers when their normative learners undergo, perhaps for the first time, an experience of ego loss/transcendence as part of an experience of subject/object synthesis referred in this article as noetic, ‘spiritual’, ‘eco-cultural’, ‘analogical correspondence,’ synchronized ‘entrainment’, or ‘flow’. Conventional learners may not possess a framework of understanding non-dual events and may turn to their instructor for guidance. Without gaining some perspective of comprehension from teachers as to the viability of anomalous cognition relative to normative knowledge, learners may suffer lasting confusion, anxiety, and self-doubt.

[7] Regarding this issue of the language of noesis and transformation of consciousness, I acknowledge my debt to former colleagues in the School of Holistic Studies, John F. Kennedy University, Mike Grady, MFA, former Chair, Department of Arts & Consciousness and Vernice Solimar, PhD, former Chair, Department of Integral Psychology. I am grateful for our many informed conversations and exchanges.

8 The fields of medicine and nursing are slowly examining the role of intuition in assisting in diagnosis. Dean Radin has pointed out the interests of parapsychologists in the role of intuition in human knowing and capacities. See Radin, Dean. 2008. “Testing Nonlocal Observation as a Source of Intuition.” Explore Jan/Feb 4(1): 25–35.

9 ‘Spirituality’ is a term in education that often carries highly controversial, political associations regarding issues such as separation of church and state, prayer in the schools, ten commands placed in classrooms, ‘fundamentalist’ versus ‘modernist’, and more. Those tensions point to multiple splits across all sectors of life. Education as a field for the human developmental unfurling of spirituality has roots in Maria Montessori, Rudolph Steiner, Sri Aurobindo, and Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan. Erich Booth has boldly stated, “The learning that happens within good teaching artistry provides essential support of the spirit without teaching the religious. The Healing Education theory and practice is offered here as a means to close the wound open between the very human and very personal disconnection to spirit. Spirituality as understood here is neither rooted in religion nor politics but rather is understood in a broad sense of self-awareness and inquiry continuous with a sense of interdependent life. See Steven Glazer, ed., 1999. “The Heart of Learning, Spirituality in Education” and John P. Miller, 2000. “Education and the Soul, Toward a Spiritual Curriculum” and Miller, 2000. “Caring for New Life, Essays on Holistic Education.”

10 The two categorical headings (pp. 21-24 here) identifying key factors and approaches to understanding and fostering Noetic Literacy emerged from personal email exchanges with Roque Ehrhardt de Campos, Academia, December 17, 2024. I am grateful for his engagement.

11 Vico’s verum factum convertuntur first appeared in his 1710 work, De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia (i.e., “Of the most ancient wisdom of the Italians”). In effect, it transferred to humanity a power previously exclusive to God. People understand what they themselves create – history, language, culture, law, art, social institutions, etc. Since God created the world, only God can understand it fully. This was not an attempt to displace God but to recognize the ‘spark’ of divinity inherent in humanity. See also Pico della Mirandolla, “Oration on the Dignity of Man” published in 1496. In this manifesto of humanism, Pico contends that the unique quality of humanity is its indeterminate nature. Each person is open to all possible images of self and constrained but none. Fashioning a desirable or ideal individual in the Renaissance was an act of ‘divine’ creativity that allowed humanity to either ascend to angelic heights or descend to brutish status. The god-like dispositional ‘spark’ within the soul could be characterized as creativity, uniqueness, improvisation, or receptivity to all forms of knowledge.

12 The quote from Eric Booth is taken from his unpublished article “El Sistema’s Open Secrets” and used by permission from the author June 11, 2025.

REFERENCES (currently under construction)ABSTRACT (288 words)