egoic to unconscious) has the potential of presenting itself as the dominant surface
(state of consciousness). This suggests a psyche that brings into play different
facets of consciousness in an attempt to understand itself. Of course, another level
located on that continuum of consciousness is that of somatic consciousness,
examples of which have been cited in this thesis, particularly in regard to D.H.
Lawrence and David Malouf. Two other particularly relevant positions along the
consciousness continuum are, I propose, SC and MLC, which we will examine in the
next chapter. First, however, it is necessary to provide a short prelude so that
these modes of consciousness may be seen in their proper context.
Jean Piaget's clinical work with children identified a series of cognitive
developmental stages that stops finally with formal operational thinking
characterized by the abstract, analytical, inferential, and hypothetical thought we
associate with normal adulthood. I ndividuals at this level of awareness possess
both a highly developed self-consciousness and the ability to assume the
perspective of others. Along with Piaget, Ken Wilber identifies a magical-animistic
mode of consciousness characteristic of small children, from two to four years old
(Wilber, 1990:254). Their thinking is magical in the sense that they have an “ ...
unrestrained and unrefined belief in action at a distance” (Wilber, 1990:254). Their
awareness is pre-personal in that the subject has not yet had the encounters that
will force it to recognize its separateness from other things in the world. Far from
being egocentric, small children have little sense of ego at all. I ndeed this sounds
very much like the state of pre-egoic participation mystique described by Abram
thus:
Whenever we assume the position and poise of the human animal
- Merleau Ponty’s body subject – then the entire material world
itself seems to come awake and to speak, yet organic, earth-born
entities speak far more eloquently than the rest. Like
suburbanites after a hurricane, we find ourselves alive in a living
field of powers far more expressive and diverse than the strictly
human sphere to which we are accustomed (Abram, 1996:65).
I t is also analogous to that state of mind that existed prior to the break-up of the bi-
cameral mind described by Julian Jaynes. Rather than being seen as an infantile
state might not this be better understood as a remnant of a transpersonal
consciousness that has all but effectively been destroyed in the Western cultural
tradition by the privileging of egoic consciousness and is now only being
rediscovered through quantum mechanics? I believe so, for as Radin explains: