The Peril in Thinking

Modern consciousness, in the West, is structured as two domains: ordinary consciousness and visionary experience, inspiration, or what I call here, living thinking. Over centuries we have learned to privilege ordinary consciousness exclusively and the domain of living thinking has slipped into oblivion. Yet, the upheavals of cultural transformation, or paradigm shifts, always seem to originate in inceptive moments, when living thinking appears or breaks through a threshold into the ordinary consciousness of certain individuals. These people are then "given" the task of bringing new meaning across the threshold into empirical reality, through some kind of art form. We are in such a time of upheaval once more, and many individuals are, one way or another, making contact with this threshold. This is where the peril lies