Thursday, August 5, 2010

The Nature of Consciousness: An Interview with Francis X. Charet

Francis X. Charet, faculty member in the Individualized MA program and coordinator of Consciousness Studies, speaks about the conditions of time, mind and the soul on the Single Eye Movement website. Drop by and listen to what he has to say. Here's an excerpt:

My own view is that there is a fundamental unity underlying "body" and "mind" and yet a distinction has emerged seemingly to initiate a dialectical process for the purpose of the differentiation of consciousness. Some have resisted this distinction in favor of one side or the other; there are others who have seen and experienced the unity behind it all and these are the visionaries. But to attain this level of consciousness, and not experience it as the consequence of regression into unconsciousness, is exceptional, transpersonal, and probably the work of several centuries on the collective level.

Read more here.

Speaking of consciousness, here is Francis with the very conscious Grace Paley several years ago on the Goddard campus.

2 comments:

Benton Rooks said...

Thank you for sharing this! It was an honor and pleasure to interview Francis, who is as much of a Wise Sage as he is an academic professor.

Alex Mero said...

A distinction must be made between what is and what we observe. The numerous material appearances we observe are attributes of the awareness, but the awareness itself is not reserved to a person. The awareness is much more than that. It is about a universal power which penetrates through the whole reality and transcends all human attributes. A human is one of the many manifestations of the awareness, just like everything that surrounds him, although a human is a special manifestation because he has a thinking capacity. Thinking is a specific development of the awareness, valuable and useful without doubt, but it is also extremely one-sided and possibly dangerous, because it has the tendency to develop own theories and to distance itself from the essential awareness due to this. The privileged attribute of a human being is therefore not the fact that he is the only being who can be aware of the reality, but in the fact that he is able to grow towards the awareness at the source of everything, thanks to his thinking capacity.