Udâna
Unconscious
Understanding
Unity
Unity of consciousness
Unity of the visual field
Universal constants
Universals
Udâna
Word definition: Udâna; this universal energy is considered responsible for bodily functions is one of the types of prana, collectively known as the vāyus.
Etymology: Udâna (energy of the head and throat), One of the earliest references to Udâna is from the 3,000-year-old Chandogya Upanishad, but many other Upanishads also use the concept, including the Katha, Mundaka and Prasna Upanishads
Technical description: Rising energy, resident in the throat
Phenomenological description: Udâna is situated in the throat area and is light blue in colour. ( M.J.M.)
See further: https://marinusjanmarijs.com/subtle-energies/nadis/
Relevance of the concept: Udana (Sanskrit) Udāna [from ud out + the verbal root an to breathe, blow] The life-current which rises upwards; one of the vital airs or life-currents of the human or animal body which vitalize, build, and sustain it.
The concept in mythology: Rivers, streams.
Unconscious
Word definition: unaware.
Etymology: Word Origin & History: 1712, “unaware, not marked by conscious thought,” from un- (1) “not” + conscious. Meaning “temporarily insensible, knocked out” is recorded from 1860. In psychology, the noun the unconscious (1884) is a loan-translation of German das Unbewusste. The adjective in this sense is recorded from 1912.
Technical description: The unconscious mind (or the unconscious) consists of the processes in the mind which occur automatically and are not available to introspection, and include thought processes, memories, interests, and motivations.
Even though these processes exist well under the surface of conscious awareness they are theorized to exert an impact on behavior. The term was coined by the 18th-century German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Empirical evidence suggests that unconscious phenomena include repressed feelings, automatic skills, subliminal perceptions, thoughts, habits, and automatic reactions, and possibly also complexes, hidden phobias and desires.
The concept was popularized by the Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. In psychoanalytic theory, unconscious processes are understood to be directly represented in dreams, as well as in slips of the tongue and jokes.
Thus the unconscious mind can be seen as the source of dreams and automatic thoughts (those that appear without any apparent cause), the repository of forgotten memories (that may still be accessible to consciousness at some later time), and the locus of implicit knowledge (the things that we have learned so well that we do them without thinking). (Wikipedia)
Phenomenological description: Outside awareness.
Synonyms: Unaware.
Cross-cultural comparisons: The term “unconscious” (German: Unbewusste) was coined by the 18th-century German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling (in his System of Transcendental Idealism, ch. 6, § 3) and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge (in his Biographia Literaria). Some rare earlier instances of the term “unconsciousness” (Unbewußtseyn) can be found in the work of the 18th-century German physician and philosopher Ernst Platner.
Influences on thinking that originate from outside of an individual’s consciousness were reflected in the ancient ideas of temptation, divine inspiration, and the predominant role of the gods in affecting motives and actions. The idea of internalised unconscious processes in the mind was also instigated in antiquity and has been explored across a wide variety of cultures. Unconscious aspects of mentality were referred to between 2500 and 600 BC in the Hindu texts known as the Vedas, found today in Ayurvedic medicine.
Paracelsus is credited as the first to make mention of an unconscious aspect of cognition in his work Von den Krankheiten (translates as “About illnesses”, 1567), and his clinical methodology created a cogent system that is regarded by some as the beginning of modern scientific psychology William Shakespeare explored the role of the unconscious[ in many of his plays, without naming it as such. In addition, Western philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Eduard von Hartmann, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche used the word unconscious.
In 1880, Edmond Colsenet supports at the Sorbonne, a philosophy thesis on the unconscious. Elie Rabier and Alfred Fouillee perform syntheses of the unconscious “at a time when Freud was not interested in the concept”. (Wikipedia)
Relevance of the concept: Many mental processes are completely outside our consciousness.
The concept in mythology: The Sea.
Understanding
Word definition: mental process of a person who comprehends; comprehension; personal interpretation.
Etymology: Word Origin & History: Old English understandincge “comprehension,” from understand (q.v.). Meaning “mutual agreement” is attested from 1803.
Technical description: Understanding is a psychological process related to an abstract or physical object, such as a person, situation, or message whereby one is able to think about it and use concepts to deal adequately with that object. Understanding is a relation between the knower and an object of understanding. Understanding implies abilities and dispositions with respect to an object of knowledge that are sufficient to support intelligent behaviour.
Understanding is often, though not always, related to learning concepts, and sometimes also the theory or theories associated with those concepts. However, a person may have a good ability to predict the behaviour of an object, animal or system—and therefore may, in some sense, understand it—without necessarily being familiar with the concepts or theories associated with that object, animal or system in their culture. They may have developed their own distinct concepts and theories, which may be equivalent, better or worse than the recognised standard concepts and theories of their culture. Thus, understanding is correlated with the ability to make inferences. (Wikipedia)
Phenomenological description: The ability to make conscious and logical and meaningful connections.
Synonyms: Apprehension, perceptive, responsive.
Relevance of the concept: Understanding is a conscious process.
The concept in mythology: View from the hill.
Citations: Roger Penrose professor of mathematics at Oxford, explained that his interest in consciousness goes back to his discovery of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem while he was a graduate student at Cambridge. Gödel’s theorem, you may recall, shows that certain claims in mathematics are true but cannot be proven. “This, to me, was an absolutely stunning revelation,” he said. “It told me that whatever is going on in our understanding is not computational.”
Supporting evidence: Introspection, logic.
Unity
Word definition: The state of being one; oneness.
A whole or totality as combining all its parts into one.
Etymology: Word Origin & History: c.1300, from Anglo-French unite, Old French unite (c.1200), from Latin unitatem (nominative unitas) “oneness, sameness, agreement,” from unus “one”
Technical description: a relation of all the parts or elements of a work constituting a harmonious whole and producing a single general effect.
Phenomenological description: The perceiver and the perceived are one.
Synonyms: oneness, undividedness
Cross-cultural comparisons: Henosis (Ancient Greek: ἕνωσις) is the classical Greek word for mystical “oneness”, “union” or “unity.” In Platonism, and especially Neoplatonism, the goal of henosis is union with what is fundamental in reality: the One (Τὸ Ἕν), the Source, or Monad. The Neoplatonic concept has precedents in the Greek mystery religions as well as parallels in Eastern philosophy. It is further developed in the Corpus Hermeticum, in Christian theology, Alevism, soteriology and mysticism, and is an important factor in the historical development of monotheism during Late Antiquity.
Supporting evidence: Similar independent descriptions Of mystics from different cultures.
Unity of consciousness
Technical description: Human consciousness usually displays a striking unity. When one experiences a noise and, say, a pain, one is not conscious of the noise and then, separately, of the pain. One is conscious of the noise and pain together, as aspects of a single conscious experience. Since at least the time of Immanuel Kant (1781/7), this phenomenon has been called the unity of consciousness. More generally, it is consciousness not of A and, separately, of B and, separately, of C, but of A-and-B-and-C together, as the contents of a single conscious state.
Historically, the notion of the unity of consciousness has played a very large role in thought about the mind. Indeed, as we will see, it figured centrally in some of the most influential arguments about the mind from the time of Descartes to the 20th century. In the early part of the 20th century, the notion largely disappeared for a time, but since the 1960s, analytic philosophers and others have begun to pay attention to it again.
See further: https://marinusjanmarijs.com/evidence-based-approach/14-research-areas/mystical-experiences/unity-of-consciousness/
Phenomenological description: our inner experience seems to possess a single centre: whatever is going on seems to be happening to only one being.”
Even with a split brain patient consciousness is singular, shifting from the left side of the brain to the right side and back.
Relevance of the concept: Schrödinger :“Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception.” To Schrödinger, consciousness is only One, singular and identifiable with its universal source: Brahman, the Absolute.
The concept in mythology:
Citations: Nick Herbert:… in his explorations of the mystery of consciousness, also wants to know why there is a felt-sense of the “unity of conscious experience”
Unity of the visual field
Word definition: The visual binding problem.
Technical description: The Binding Problem Objects have different features such as colour, shape, sound, and smell. Some, such as colour and sound, are represented separately from the instant they hit our sensory receptors. Other features, such as colour and shape, are initially encoded together but subsequently analysed by separate areas of the brain.
Despite this separation, in perception the brain must represent which features belong to the same object. This is the binding problem.
Any case of the brain representing as associated two features or stimuli that are initially represented separately can be called binding.
Holcombe, AO (2009). The Binding Problem. . In E. Bruce. Goldstein (Ed.),
The Sage Encyclopedia of Perception.
Phenomenological description: Brain research has shown that visual information is processed by at least thirty separate areas of the brain. Nevertheless our visual field is unified in a way that is not yet understood.
See further: https://marinusjanmarijs.com/evidence-based-approach/14-research-areas/brain/unit-of-the-visual-field/
Relevance of the concept: B. Libet in ‘Progress in Neurobiology 78 (2006) 322–326’ “It should be added that subjective experience also involves an integrative property. That is, although billions of individual nerve cell actions give rise to conscious awareness, the actual experience is a unified one. For example, if you look at any object in your external visual field, it appears as a smoothly organized structure, even though we know that several separate areas in the cerebral visual system are contributing colours, spatial configurations, motion, and meaning (interpretation) to it. This has been termed the ‘‘binding’’ phenomenon. There have been attempts to account for this by certain neuronal
functions. For example, Wolf Singer and colleagues claim to have found a synchronization of rhythmic electrical potentials between areas of the brain that might be involved in binding ( Gray and Singer, 1989 ). But even if this is a valid neuronal correlate of binding, one still has to explain how it gives rise to
the non-physical integrated subjective experience.
John Carew Eccles neurophysiologist who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse, asked himself the question why that visual information that as brain scans show, is processed by the brain in at least 30 different locations in the brain, nevertheless gives rise to a Unity of the visual field.
Eccles realized “that some sort of field would have to be postulated to account for the integrative aspects of the mind”.
Eccles seems to indicate a non-physical field.
One could suggest that the ideoplastic generated visual perceived mental surroundings in lucid dreams and in out of the body experiences, could be connected with the binding problem. (.M.J.M.)
Universal constants
Word definition: a quantity or parameter that does not change its value whatever the value of the variables, under a given set of conditions.
Etymology: 1350–1400; Middle English < Latin constant- (stem of constāns, present participle of constāre to stand firm), equivalent to con- con- + stā- stand + -nt- present participle suffix
Technical description: The fine-tuning of the universal constants and laws of physics, that govern the properties of our universe and the geological, chemical and biological fine-tuning.
Relevance of the concept: The fine-tuning of the universe seems to be with such an extraordinary mathematical precision that this fine-tuning is seen as the strongest supporting evidence for the existence of a transcendent kosmic force.
The concept in mythology: Creation.
Universals
Word definition: of, relating to, or characteristic of all or the whole.
Something that may be applied throughout the universe to many things, usually thought of as an entity that can be in many places at the same time.
Etymology: Plato’s philosophy.
Technical description: a general term or concept or the generic nature that such a term signifies; a Platonic idea or Aristotelian form.
An entity that remains unchanged in character in a series of changes or changing relations.
See further: https://marinusjanmarijs.com/evidence-based-approach/14-research-areas/cosmological-planning/platonic-forms/
Synonyms: Platonic ideas.
Relevance of the concept: Universals are a class of mind-independent entities, usually contrasted with individuals (or so-called “particulars”), postulated to ground and explain relations of qualitative identity and resemblance among individuals. Individuals are said to be similar in virtue of sharing universals. An apple and a ruby are both red, for example, and their common redness results from sharing a universal. If they are both red at the same time, the universal, red, must be in two places at once. This makes universals quite different from individuals; and it makes them controversial. IEP
The concept in mythology: Archetypes.
Supporting evidence: Carl Jung’s research.
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