James Guy

Thinking the Float Tank – Friday, August 25, 2023 (Day 2)

Metaspheric Perspective

Speaker Bio:

Surviving the “psychedelic sixties” as an accomplished advertising art director, James added “accidental mystic” to his resume and, in 1980, published Metasphere: The Altered State of Word, presenting his discovery of an essential structure to historical representations of the geometry of mind. After retiring his art career, in 2016, he published What Always Comes to Mind, The Visualist’s Guide to a Metaspheric  Perspective on Reality. James has presented at “The Science of Consciousness, 2018,” Tucson, AZ, USA, and at “Psychedelic Science 2017,” Oakland, CA, USA. At this conference, he is presenting his 2023 book Toward Repurposing Mind, a Phenomenological Narrative by an Accidental Mystic.

Abstract:

Perhaps a quote from Alan Watts’ 1965 book The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness will give you a sense of my motive: “If you get the message, hang up the phone, go away and work on what you have seen.” Indeed, some have published what they have seen, but few have included the “work” of going beyond personal integration into a breadth of research which, for me, became a virtual collaboration with the outlier genius of G. Spencer-Brown, Charles S. Peirce, Arthur M. Young, Malcolm David Lowe, Timothy Leary, and Hermann Hesse. My particular “work” seems to have focused in on an otherwise overlooked phenomenology of mind, the tragic flaw of bias in the hegemonic conative vs cognitive mind. Analogous to the Renaissance artist Brunelleschi’s first rendering of spatial objects in relation to the eye, metaspheric perspective is the discovery of a praxis of rendering mental objects in relation to the “I” in an equally lawful manner, pointing to the expansive gap or “nullpoint” underlying and just prior to the viewpoint of the “I,” similar to the “space” described by Viktor Frankl: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”