Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD
The notion of a single, determinable objective reality that serves as a foundational idea of scientific materialism has been called into question by scholars, particularly in the disciplines of phenomenology, psychology, and humanities. Galileo proclaimed that only those properties of things accountable to mathematical measurement are objectively real and, consequently, all subjective qualities are misapprehensions. Later, Descartes established the hard and fast division between the thinking mind as subject and the material world as object. Both views forsake the viability of the spontaneous nature of our pre-conceptual and pre-objective world of experience.
Knowledge that splits humanity from nature, spirit from earth, and mind from body must be viewed within the current Anthropocene shadow with great suspicion. For millennia, shamans of indigenous cultures trafficked in wondrous realms, mapping realities between human and more-than-human worlds. Shamans today continue to serve as apprentices to and mediators between tribal members and animal and terrestrial intelligences through their visions, trances, ecstasies, dreams, and psychic journeys, thereby acquiring sensory and embodied knowledge. Shamans’ personal callings on behalf of their communities are marked by a personal illness and they can only realize their calling by first healing themselves.
Unfortunately, civilized humanity has forsaken its heritage of noetic understanding of extra-human realities. Indigenous hunters, healers, and shamans achieved pre-numerical knowledge through altering their everyday consciousness by dance, drumming, chanting, stories, sweat lodges, and wilderness quests. We stand severed from a vital source of our legacy by strict reliance on homogenized standards of thought. Few of us today have a reciprocal, noetic relationship with non-human, terrestrial forms of intelligence. Michael Feyerabend asks, “Is teaching the latest scientific fashion as the truth really the best way of preparing the next generation for life?” The current fashion of STEM dominated curricular narrow learners’ cognitive/perceptual bandwidth; arts and humanities curricula would broaden it.
As a result of my study for more than 30 years of nonconventional learning in folklore, liberal arts, performing arts, and fine arts programs at elementary schools, high schools, conservatories, and universities, I have come to value a spectrum of cognitive/perceptual modalities presented by folk and professionally trained artists. Mynoetic literacy project, expressed in several scholarly articles, online posts, and public presentations (also in a book currently in progress), refutes the notion of intelligence as a single generative cognitive function in favor of a pluralistic model of learning with an embodied, all-sided mind (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/existential-intimacy-learning-seeking-wholeness-stem-rojcewicz-phd/).
When we attempt today to grasp the world exclusively through calculative reason, we estrange ourselves from intimate participation with the sensuous life-world of direct experience. We ignore our animated connection with natural landscapes that engage and extend our senses. Our human mind-body-spirit instrument of knowing underperforms, lacking attunement to the world and ourselves. As a counter, noetic literacy argues for the legitimacy of mytho-poetic, intersensory learning modalities, such as used by indigenous healers, artists, and religious intuitives. Noetic knowledge is not ontic knowledge – that is, it’s not made up of easily separable elements – and therefore cannot be fully disclosed by logical exposition. It is a wholeness of the incorporeal intellect that embraces the irrational, spiritual, ethical, and aesthetic substance of life.
The academy’s specialized curriculum focused more on earning than on broad learning lacks a sufficient probing of the interactive field between the number-based sciences and the sensory-based knowledge of everyday experience. Noetic literacies offer us distinct epistemic antidotes to the philosophy of mechanism that, in the words of the poet Samuel Coleridge, “strikes death” upon an all-sided consciousness. By our re-legitimizing and supporting noetic literacies at all levels of school curricula, learners can directly encounter Anima Mundi, i.e., soul in and of the world, thereby shattering illusions of nature as disconnected from humanity and the world lacking sagacious psychic life (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/imaginalia-folk-wisdom-eclipse-literal-peter-m-rojcewicz-phd/.
The natural and technology-assisted sciences are particular, useful ways of engendering information and engaging the world, but there are other equally viable ways that lead to aesthetic, emotional, spiritual, and ethical satisfaction. While not abandoning the Enlightenment project’s to grasp the world in rational terms, noetic education contributes to knowledge-generation based on other than strictly scientific principles without dismissing science and its essential achievements.
We live in a critical place at an auspicious time requiring our appropriate and just measure of response to the chaos caused by indeterminate, discontinuous change. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermrojcewicz/recent-activity/all). We must decide whether to continue to support a numbers-based model of partial growth over human wholeness. We must critically engage the socio-political forces that polarize what should be a healthy bond between inter-sensory, intuitive awareness and number-based knowledge. Unfortunately, the academy’s fundamental commitment to rational cognicentrism makes human fragmentation acceptable, human impairment permissible, and educational trauma inevitable. Preventing further wounding of the integral nature of learners caused by the present educational system is our dire responsibility. Failing in that, education presents, causes, and perpetuates its own pathology.