Contact with universal consciousness through the research of human mentality

One of the most respected psychologists in the Slavic world—where materialist prejudices are less pronounced—Prof. Victor Petrenko, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, discusses his views on the nature of mind and reality. He shows, through remarkable experiments, that our very perception is conditioned upon our ability to tell ourselves, conceptually, what we are perceiving. It is possible that we simply do not perceive what we have no conceptual categories to make sense of. This way, we may be immersed in effectively alien aspects of reality that we cannot cognize. This captivating essay introduces to a Western audience the high-quality—and arguably less metaphysically biased—scholarship of the Slavic world in an area of knowledge whose relevance to our lives cannot be overestimated.

Since its establishment as an experimental science, psychology has gravitated in its cognition towards the Cartesian subject-object paradigm, in which the role of the object has been attributed to the “research subject”—a person—to be studied by objectively measurable methods. And since such methods are scarcely applicable to the inner, spiritual and social life of an individual, the research has been restricted to studying simple physiological reactions, associative processes, and patterns of perception of simple objects. Thus, methods of self-observation and introspection fell by the wayside in psychology. Only with the arrival of psychoanalysis did a branch of science emerge—parallel to the mainstream—that brought forth humanistic and transpersonal psychology, focusing on first-person spiritual experiences.

More recently, however, there has been increasing focus on holistic systems of being and processes that include the human personality as a subsystem in the relationship between human beings, environment, society, history, science, art and spiritual values. And the higher the level of holistic systems is examined, the more complex and less understood are the mechanisms of the regulation and development of the complex whole, in which a human being is embedded.

For example, V. Vernadsky’s speaks of the biosphere and human civilization being a geological factor in the evolution of the Earth’s crust, but also of the reverse influence of geomorphological processes and cataclysms on the emerging noosphere—the realm of human mind. This line of thinking was continued by A. Nazaretyan [36, 38] and V. Panov [41] in the analysis of technogenic crises caused by the disruption of the moral and technological balance, and the impact of the spiritual state of society on nature and industrial progress.