{"id":1317,"date":"2026-09-13T15:36:43","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T15:36:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peterrphd.com\/wordpress\/?p=1317"},"modified":"2026-10-19T22:02:39","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T22:02:39","slug":"frontiers-of-body-mind-reciprocity-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterrphd.com\/wordpress\/?p=1317","title":{"rendered":"ON THE FRONTIERS OF BODY-MIND RECIPROCITY"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Segment Four Human Completion Project<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lucca, Italy<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/em> – Gustave Flaubert<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thought is a man in his wholeness, wholly attending.<\/em> – D.H. Lawrence<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I believe that experimental physics is about bringing abstract ideas to life, like artists.<\/em> – Silke Weinfurtner<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A poem mustn’t mean but be.<\/em> – Archibald MacLeish<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ah, not to be cut off, \/ not through the slightest partition \/ shut off from the law of the stars. \/ The inner \u2013 what is it? \/ If not intensified sky, \/ hurled through with birds and deep \/ with the birds of homecoming.<\/em> \u2013 Rainer Maria Rilke<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am the observed relationship between myself and observing myself.<\/em> – Heinz von Foerster<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 …Just as a lapis Philosophorum, with its miraculous powers, was never produced, so psychic wholeness will never be attained empirically,<\/strong> 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\u2026<\/em> – C.G. Jung<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Much of human consciousness consists of non-computable noetic insights.The term noetic<\/em> from the Greek is used here to refer to mysterious forms of implicit, complete knowing through direct experience. Learning via noetic modalities \u2018feels\u2019 more like an unknowing<\/em> and unlearning<\/em>. They are moments of understandings akin to surmises<\/em> or inklings<\/em>. Noetic learning is akin to a ‘letting go’ of conventional structures and accepted definitions of orthodox knowledge, and a ‘letting come’ of emergent, implicit knowledge. Noetic insights may be inadvertently, aesthetic, tacit, and inexplicable and come from direct experience of hunches, dreams, revelations, and aha!<\/em> moments. Noetic insights are unique and highly personal to the experiencer. Noetic knowledge is an apprehension of deep meaning of things that while fraught with mystery and profundity, are nonetheless indisputably true.<\/em> Noetic awareness is legitimate intuition-based knowing beyond linguistic and calculative forms and found plentifully in the arts and humanities. Because noetic knowledge is personal, informal, and interior, it is not ontic<\/em> knowledge, that is, knowledge composed of easily separable elements isolated from ordinary, fluid, non-demarcated experience. Without clear phenomenological borders, noetic consciousness cannot be fully disclosed by narrative exposition or rational analysis. Noetic understanding is non-representational and cannot rightfully said to be \u2018translated\u2019 into other domains. Noetic literacies provide alternatives – or what cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner refers to as \u2018left-hand paths\u2019 of creative departure from conventional ways of knowing and being \u2018smart\u2019 as found in our schools. The essential move here is to understand intuition as a cornerstone mode of noetic cognition and not simply a reaction to outer world stimuli.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Failure of schools to understand the viability of noetic intelligence withholds from noetic oriented students and faculty the opportunity to learn from others in epistemic communities of academic support. Lacking even a minimal epistemic culture for atypical learners, a deep distrust emerges between students and instructors, as well as within noetic learners themselves. Concerning the latter, this failure ultimately divides learners\u2019 cognitive experience into valid\/invalid<\/em> categories and their essential identity into fragments that can have devastative 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 and engage the world. If our inner life detaches from our outer life, our heart from our head, or body from mind, we are broken<\/em> people who drift from our true identity center. Individuation is forestalled or prevented. Furthermore, the presence of noetic learning in conventional school curricula built exclusively upon ‘cognicentric\u2019 epistemologies, faces professional rejection. Unconventional intelligence or neurodivergent knowing isn’t recognized as valid by schools using traditional educational lenses. Consequently, noetic learners often face depression and anxiety in classroom and work environments .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under my healing education umbrella, I envision noetic learners – students and faculty – employing a model of knowing whose dominant images expand knowing that results 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 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 \u201cthe Good, the Beautiful, and the True\u201d in various ways. If techno-scientific tools or digital and AI applications come between learners and their innate image-making powers, it can paralyze their mythopoetic insight to what of life lies beneath convention and norms. By giving over our image making capacity, we lose the cognitive capacity most fundamental to consciousness and personal agency. The result is a cataclysmic splintering of students\u2019 inherent bundle of cognitive capacities, the loss of which contributes to the growing global mental health crisis facing education and all sectors of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Noetic knowledge straddles and blurs ontological borders \u2013 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 \u2018included middle\u2019 (Basarab Nicolescu, “Manifesto” 2002), representing a bridge 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<\/em> is the antimonial both\/and.<\/em> Its rational and unconscious elements can neither be fixed nor discursively defined. Enlightenment legacy thinkers in today\u2019s schools turn away from “…the discomforting co-existence of the rational and irrational, that includes the unfathomable, soul territory of all things,” (Elizebeth Nelson, “Research in Analytical Psychology”). Giambattista Vico held that one could \u2018enter into\u2019 and become \u2018one\u2019 with other cultures and histories via the reconstructive imagination of fantasia<\/em> and, in that respect, he stood as \u201cone of the true fathers of the doctrine of the unity of theory and practice (Isaiah Berlin, “Vico & Herder”). 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Students of the arts and the humanities learn through literature and philosophy to cultivate the capacity to become the Other<\/em> (Rojcewicz, “Beyond Othering” 2026 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 learners and the world as vital Other, bringing diverse powers from beyond the self into 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 form 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 that is not myself<\/em>. By penetrating the exterior surfaces of people and things, we gain imaginal access to them with our discerning 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<\/em> 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 noetic musician implicitly asks of the score, “With your permission,” humbly requesting entrance into the life of the work. Abstract music is then \u2018felt\u2019 to be a kind of ‘affecting presence’ (Armstrong, “The Affecting Presence”), more akin to a living entity and creative intelligence, imbued and supported by the investment of consciousness of musicians who over the years have poured themselves into the life of the musical score through their performances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similar to that process of noetic understanding, Vico posited the existence of the \u2018reconstructive imagination\u2019 or fantasia,<\/em> a self-creating power of humanity to \u2018enter into\u2019 the mental life of other cultures, histories, and perspectives unlike our own which only the imagination can realize (Isaiah Berlin, “Vico & Herder”).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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, digital tools, 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 (“Education in Search of Spirit,” 1996) insists that \u201cwhen knowledge is on-looking rather than in-working, there can be no flowing of the self into another, or of the other into the self.\u201d When learners creatively think with critical and disciplined feeling, they can intuit their study-objects \u2013 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 have personal meaning for learners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What follows below are several examples of intimate, transformative participation with Otherness, characteristic of noetic fantasia<\/em> (Vico) through the arts. In the line quoted below, American poet Walt Whitman presents an ontological fusion between the poem\u2019s \u2018child\u2019 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 \u2018both\/and\u2019 condition and not a dualistic \u2018either\/or\u2019 condition of binary dualism. No confusion of separateness here. Whitman writes,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Becoming the Other is an achievement of an \u2018ontological peace\u2019, that \u201crefers to an absolute acceptance of all that which is as it is without such dualisms as good or bad\u201d (Yoshiharu Nakagawa “Education for Awakening”). The noetic consciousness of artists has often been described as ‘child-like’. \u201cElementary school children,\u201d observes educator John F. Gardner (“Education in Search of Spirit”), \u201care not fully internalized as subjects, and the world has not been fully externalized as objects.\u201d 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\u2019s \u2018child\u2019 is both sensing and sensible, capable of direct synthetic knowing of the intersubjectivity of objects. The same is true for artists and learners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Students are themselves their primary \u2018instruments\u2019 of knowing and expressive activity. That learners themselves are their fundamental \u2018instruments\u2019 is obviously true for dancers and actors. It is equally true for musicians. Their violins and cellos are but material extensions of the psyche. Carl Erik Grennes hits the mark by stating, \u201cOne cannot correctly describe a musician\u2019s relation to his\/her instrument in terms of the body manipulating a physical object,\u201d (quote taken from Jon-Roar Bjorkvold, “The Muse Within”). He asserts that that the \u201cbody and instrument constitute a system that collectively exhibits the property of mind.\u201d Musicians and their instruments, awareness and activity, are one. Musicians abide in a symbiotic, noetic state with their artistic instruments. A pianist\u2019s fingers hear<\/em> music as they contact the black and white keys. A horn player\u2019s lips call forth<\/em> 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 \u2018tuned\u2019 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. They experience intersensory penetration of the subjectivity of the objective world and objectify their interior life through use of their artistic materials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sensations of touch can be presented by novelists to readers aurally and sound rendered through a tactile sense. Speaking of a work by Virginia Woolf, Camille Caprioglio notes that Woolf\u2019s fiction shows an ostensible kinship with features of neurodiverse cognition, \u201cEven sensations other than sight are rendered visually, so the reader sees<\/em> what is heard of felt\u201d (\u201cA Poet on Mars,\u201d Aeon, October 17, 2025). One can discern in Woolf a Proust-like trait of fading in and out of consciousness,<\/em> alternating between stream of consciousness reflections and sharp observation of small details of the outer world, sometimes ostensibly merging with material objects, calling forth and \u2018speaking\u2019 out the concerns of their interior life as a form of her poetic intelligence. Michaelangelo is known for his noetic \u2018seeing\u2019 capacity. He created art via the physical powers of his visionary intelligence, a cognitive power he referred to as Intelleto<\/em> (Nachmanovitch “Free Play”). 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 encumbering the artefact. Michelangelo rejected the popular mathematical emphasis on proportion in the name of \u2018spiritual\u2019 proportion. Geometry, mathematics, and the rules of perspective were for him useless without the observing eye,<\/em> a special noetic ability for discerning beauty and harmony by seeing through<\/em> the surface and the apparent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, the sage Taoist Chuang Tzu identified the premier woodcutter Ch\u2019ing as possessing similar perceptual and productive powers. In order to make an artful bell stand, Ch\u2019ing 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\u2019ing entered the mountain forest in equanimity to examine the heavenly nature of trees: \u201cIf 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.\u201dChing\u2019s fasting to concentrate his skills and overcome distractions mirrors mindfulness meditation practice of focused awareness on an object that results in the dissolution of the subject-object split and the realization that a subject observing an object cannot be located. Ken Bradford maintains, \u201cAs the everyday object-subject split dissolves, undivided awareness relaxes into empty-open nature\u2026\u201d and \u201clifts the obscuring illusion of a separate selfhood, as the fullness of Being recognizes its true nature\u201d (Ken Bradford \u201cMindfulness and No-mind Fullness,\u201d, Mountain Stream Meditation, 11\/24\/25 livestream; see his book “The I of the Other”). This noetic capacity for insight beyond the illusion of an autonomous self is fundamental to an artist\u2019s way of knowing. It is a non-striving ease of \u2018flow\u2019 wherein one faces no discernible subject-object, only the One of unity. The monism featured in the Whitman line above (i.e., \u201cThere was a child went forth evert day\u201d) is echoed in the following lines, first from Wallace Stevens and, secondly, from Plotinus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne must have a mind of winter to regard the frost on the boughs of the pines crusted with snow.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, Stevens depicts a moment of noesis,<\/em> featuring an indissoluble ontology between the body-mind intelligence of the poem’s speaker and the natural world. \u201cWe are not a part of the whole, we are<\/em> the whole\u201d (Helminski, “The Knowing Heart”). 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” (Brian Swimme “The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos”). When contemplating the inscrutable Milky Way, Einstein did not muse upon it separate from his body-mind instrument, but experienced it directly<\/em> in an imaginal manner, as if in communion with the “Old One,” as he called it. 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<\/em>, that is, neither wholly objective nor wholly subjective (Michael Talbot, “The Holographic Universe”), but an amalgam consciousness that defies normative categories, pointing to how much our tacit knowing is unfathomable and yet happens every day. Likewise, in the line to follow, Plotinus insists,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNo one ever saw the sun without\/Becoming sun-like, \/ nor can a \/ Soul see beauty without becoming beautiful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018embodied mind\u2019 that is neither subject nor object but a ‘connective tissue’ or intermediate state joining the two (Sara Robinson \u2018Body dwelling mind\u2019). On this point, Nobel Prize recipient and geneticist Barbara McClintock insisted that researchers must take time to ‘look’ into and ‘listen’ to what one’s materials of study have to ‘say\u2019 and must necessarily possess a ‘feeling’ for the organism as a form of openness to “let it come to you.” (in Evelyn Fox Keller, “A feeling for the Organism” 1983, quoted in Parker Palmer, “The Courage to Teach” ). Creative scientists like McClintock demonstrate the value of logic and data together with direct intersensory knowing of content that is ontologically inseparable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Noetic extended sentience is a wisdom older than the cerebral mind, deeper than words or numbers (Abrams, “The Spell of the Sensuous), and more inclusive than the enframing<\/em> (cf., Heidegger) of technology (Richard Rojcewicz, “The Gods and Technology,” pp. 103-5). 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<\/strong><\/a>). 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” (Abrams “The Spell of the Sensuous). In John Moffet\u2019s lines to follow, it is understood that one\u2019s intrinsic identity is largely shaped by the reciprocity of sense-making of the embodied mind and our intersubjective engagements with the world:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTo look at this green and say, I have seen spring in these \/ Woods will not do-you must \/ Be the thing.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In each example above, deep understanding requires both imaginative and rational cognitive functions. My theory of Healing Education 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\u2019s 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<\/em> and held that it was the polar opposite to inferential reasoning. For Greek philosophers, Episteme was a visual intelligence, a beholding<\/em>, or direct perception of things, not a calculative reasoning, and could not be brought forth at will (Arthur Zajonc, “The Heart of Higher Education,” p. 96). Likewise, tribal shamans, in their roles as wisdom carriers of indigenous lineages, assume intimate, immersive identifications with nature’s ‘animal powers’ that assist them in healing, hunting, teaching, and advising community members (Harner, “The Way of the Shaman”; John Grim, “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<\/em>” (Christensen, Aeon, June 9, 2025).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Neo-Platonic sense, to know something is to become<\/em> it. To \u2018know\u2019 is to be<\/em> united with the known. The ancient Greeks referred to this oneness as gnosis<\/em> or direct subjective knowledge from the inside of an experience or phenomenon and not simply objective observation from a distance. Yogic traditions refer to yukta<\/em> or the yoking of splits between the knower and the known; this is a noetic consciousness of mind-body wholeness wherein understanding stops being conceptual and becomes lived. To \u2018see\u2019 spring, as in the Moffet line above, means to understand it phenomenologically, as if \u2018dwelling in\u2019 spring (Polanyi “The Tacit Dimension”) as an equal participant with nature and not simply as a by-stander. Knowledge acquisition through the arts and art making unite<\/em>s our mind with both our artistic \u2018object\u2019 and our performance function of the body, forming a poly-perspectival consciousness of reality. To be the thing<\/em> requires we necessarily draw a new circle to traffic the frontier of diverse perceptual and experiential worlds. Such transformations of our intrinsic Being result from intuitive signals, gut feelings, hunches, markers, revelations, and arts immersion. To become what currently we are not \u2013<\/em> i.e., the Other \u2013<\/em> means experiencing a shared noetic modality or \u2018heroic mind\u2019 (Vico, “The Heroic Mind”) able \u201c\u2026to lead ourselves beyond our believed capacities, to enter areas of thought for which we do not think ourselves prepared\u201d (Verene, “Vico\u2019s Science of Imagination”).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike the crisis of rapport brought about by the Othering of noetic ways of knowing currently taking place in schools, artists and all cultural creatives share an ontological relationship of \u2018adoration with the Other\u2019 (I. Livingston, “Unconscious Roots,” p.175). One such cognitive Other related to the essence or Being of learners is the physical body. The organ of the brain undergoes constant shaping and change by our daily actions and engagements in and with the world. Melanie Challenger understands,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Once we decide that the mind is the real human and the rest of the body only hardware, it becomes easier to disregard the physical work, including the neurocognitive work of a biological brain, through which we move, find our way, put thoughts into words, and recognise our own needs. A machine may do some of that work faster, but each act it takes over is one that the body no longer performs and that the body, including the brain, no longer learns through. The irony is that a project motivated by the desire to overcome bodily fragility is helping to produce more fragile bodies\u2026” (\u201cDeskilling the Body,\u201d Aeon Friday Oct 16, 2026).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Challenger insists AI is only the latest manifestation of the ancient impulse to bypass the material body. Similarly, Eric Booth points out how the body and its somatic cognition are essential to knowing via the arts and absent from AI:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cAI is all head, no body. Communication, understanding and learning are all deeply embodied, and engaging the artistry of learners activates multiple kinds of knowing. As every arts integration specialist, every teaching artist, every arts teacher knows\u2014you get different answers and solutions, raise different\/deeper questions and tap greater personal relevance and intrinsic motivation when the full range of human engagement is present” (\u201cDoubling Down on What AI Cannot Do,\u201d ArtsEd Amplified, 9\/11\/2026<\/em>).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The arts and humanities lead to a trans-ontological apprehension of Being<\/em> 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 knowing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Noetic literacy discloses presence<\/em> between and among things.<\/em> Presence is a form of relational \u2018betweeness\u2019, a linking of \u2018interiorities\u2019 (Van Manen ) that bypasses the disjunction of atypical thinking, knowing, perceiving, and acting. Parkin points to the etymology of \u2018presence\u2019 that implies something both \u2018deeply held\u2019 or \u2018inmost\u2019 and something \u2018given\u2019 or \u2018disclosed.\u2019 Presence as noetic consciousness is a tacit state that is immanent and transcendent of us. Presence 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.<\/strong> This suggests the process of coming into psychological maturity that demands an archetypal death and resurrection depicted by the \u2018hero\u2019s journey\u2019 (Campbell, “The Power of Myth”) of transformation of consciousness, wherein one leaves behind a one-sided and limited condition of life for a richer, more mature condition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Noetic learning is mysterious. Learning via noetic modalities \u2018feels\u2019 more like an unknowing<\/em> and unlearning<\/em>. 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<\/em>) 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<\/em> or freedom from fracturing wholeness, comes from recognition of non-dual reality (Nakagawa, “Education for Awakening”). In this state of freedom, the art, the artist, and the artmaking are indivisible. When possessing this consciousness of complimentary identity, life is<\/em> art (Herrigel, “The Art of Archery”).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This state of body-mind freedom from an agenda of expectations or control is what Gerald May (“The Wisdom of the Wilderness”) calls \u2018copelessness\u2019, a highly productive, ready state of availability (e.g., Hindu sattvic<\/em>) to whatever suddenly comes forth. Copelessness means \u201cdirectly knowing what is<\/em> moment-to-moment without projection of acquired knowledge\u201d (Krishnamurti in “Education for Awakening”). An artist, in the creative process, does not impose a wholly external form upon some ostensibly \u2018inert\u2019 material, but rather, allows form to emerge from a generative reciprocity between artists and materials (Abrams “The Spell of the Sensuous”), 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 \u2018negative capability\u2019.<\/strong> Negative capability constitutes a via negativa<\/em> to conventional knowledge but is a positive approach to what we don\u2019t understand (Christopher Banford, in “Parabola,”). 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. Engaged teaching-artist Eric Booth (\u201cDoubling Down on What AI Cannot Do,\u201d ArtsEd Amplified<\/em>, 9\/11\/2026) points to this noetic feature as a significant difference between knowing through the arts and the knowledge of artificial intelligence when he writes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“AI can\u2019t ‘not know’ well. It can fail to find an answer, but it can\u2019t make productive use of uncertainty and ambiguity to find its way to discovery. Artistry comes to life in uncertainty. A good arts education teaches people what to do when they don\u2019t know what to do, how to find delight in inquiry, how to navigate contradictions, how to find analogies, how to care about quality\u2014recognizing ‘good enough’ and feeling the drive toward ‘better’.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Suprarational noetic knowledge is fully real but not fully cerebral. It is mostly unrecognized by schools, since it emerges in contexts \u201cof releasing the mechanisms in consciousness that need to be defined, to compare, to understand \u2013 in short, to defend one\u2019s psychological territory\u201d (Richard Moss).  T.S. Eliot (“The Four Quartets”) grasped the importance to creative insight of \u2018copelessness\u2019 beyond expectation, \u201cOr when under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing -\/ I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope.\u201d Atypical learners relinquish expectations of learning and knowing via conventional modes to allow emergence of their suprarational capacities indigenous to their authentic Being. Following May, Keats, and Eliot, my 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<\/em>: truth, unveiling), beholding, and emergence of what is hidden but real. Imaginative insight calls paradoxically for an appropriate constraint. The physicist Arthur Zajonc, in part following Rilke, declared, \u201cWe must pause and reflect before speaking, quietly engage the issue inwardly before acting, open ourselves to not knowing before certainty arises<\/em>, as so we live for a time in the question before the answer emerges\u201d (Zajonc, “The Heart of Higher Education”).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Creative power of art doesn\u2019t stem from data, numbers, theories, or schemata; its insightful knowing is enmeshed in femur, sinew, and flesh and comes from the \u2018felt\u2019 participatory knowledge through extended sentience. Keats aspired to a direct, perspicacious access to reality via images. He says he is after \u2018verisimilitude\u2019 or likenesses (i.e., images) of truth. As ‘truth’ always eludes<\/em> us, we must accept that our knowledge is forever incomplete and ‘truth-like’. Keats understands ‘intimacy’ not as emotion but as feeling,<\/em> very close to \u2018touch\u2019 (cf. Banford, Parabola). Bruce Mangan, describes noetic insight as a \u2018feeling of knowing\u2019 to be understood as a diffuse, trans-sensory experience that includes a sensation of \u2018rightness\u2019 and, hence, ‘meaningfulness\u2019 (Mangan, Bruce. 2001. \u201cSensations Ghost: The Non-Sensory \u2018Fringe\u2019 of Consciousness.\u201d Psyche 7(18). Available from: http:\/\/psyche<\/strong><\/a>. cs.monash.edu.au\/v7\/psyche-7-18-mangan.html<\/strong><\/a>). Keats proclaimed,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cO for a life of sensation<\/em> (i.e., Oneness or floating<\/em> state \u2013 author\u2019s emphasis) rather than thoughts.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Smyth (cf., Smyth et al, 2008) understands negative capability as a \u201cyielding which in turn yields what otherwise could not be gained,\u201d that is, a \u201cyielding state of letting come.\u201d 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 (William James “The Varieties of Religious Experience”; Evelyn Underhill “Mysticism”). Having a mutual “mind of winter” (Stevens), entering the “first object looked upon” (Whitman), or “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 mysterious wholeness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some people refer to the mysterious nature of reality as God, \u2018Mind at-Large\u2019 (Huxley, “The Doors of Perception”), or the timeless and spaceless realm of Being. The \u2018numinous\u2019 (Otto, “The Idea of the 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 \u2018feeling\u2019, that has an objective referent he identifies as the \u2018holy\u2019. The holy is not simply a psycho-emotional state, but an awareness of \u2018personal emptiness\u2019 (i.e., \u201cI am nothing; Thou art all\u201d) before an awe-inspiring, transcendent reality felt to be separate but not separated from oneself (Otto, “The Idea of the Holy”)<\/strong> andthat can only be hinted at or suggested through mythopoetic images, symbols and \u2018numina\u2019 of the internal environment. Whatever its ultimate disposition, noetic encounters with the numinous are experienced as a majestas<\/em> (i.e., majestic presence), a fellow \u2018subject\u2019, an ineffable daemon<\/em>, or overwhelming Thou<\/em> before whom we \u2018shudder\u2019.<\/em> Such forms of noetic consciousness are to be recognized as authentic \u201cfaculties of knowledge and potentialities of thought in the Spirit itself\u201d (James, “Varieties of Religious Experience”).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> (i.e., 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 \u201cbeyond the Polar circle of the mind\u2026 where the psychology of man mingles with the psychology of God\u201d (quote found in Underhill “Mysticism”). In a similar vein, 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 (“The 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 radical autonomous self is completely overcome via the living \u2018energy\u2019 and \u2018urgency\u2019 of the numinous and its \u2018holy\u2019 immaterial referent (Otto “The Idea of the Holy”).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Confronting the numinous influences 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<\/em> 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, \u201cthe underlying goal of Western intellectual and spiritual evolution (Tarnas, \u2018Epilogue\u2019, “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. In his influential work, \u201cIn Over Our Heads,\u201d Robert Keagan pointed out that a most significant move toward self-growth is the \u201csubject-object shift.\u201d By that he means gaining necessary objective distance on oneself that provides needed flexibility to handle the complex either-or issues of binary logic. According to Keagan, \u201cYou start\u2026constructing a world that is much more friendly to contradiction, to oppositeness<\/em>, to be able to hold onto to multiple systems of thinking\u2026This means that the self is more about movement through different forms of consciousness than about defending and identifying with any one form.\u201d (quote found in “Stealing Fire” ). This achievement of heroic selflessness and \u201cthe wisdom and power to serve others\u201d (Joseph Campbell, “The Power of Myth”) occurs from immersive engagements with art, mysticism, nature, meditation, visions, prayer, psychedelics, and various forms of altered consciousness. Rilke, perhaps, said it best,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ah, not to be cut off, \/ not through the slightest partition \/ shut off from the law of the stars. \/ The inner \u2013 what is it? \/ If not intensified sky, \/ hurled through with birds and deep \/ with the birds of homecoming<\/em>.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Segment Four Human Completion Project Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD Lucca, Italy 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 … Continue reading ON THE FRONTIERS OF BODY-MIND RECIPROCITY<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterrphd.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterrphd.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterrphd.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterrphd.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterrphd.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1317"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/peterrphd.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1384,"href":"https:\/\/peterrphd.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317\/revisions\/1384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterrphd.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterrphd.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterrphd.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}