Implications and consequences of post-modern philosophy for contemporary transpersonal studies III. Deleuze and some related phenomenologies of felt meaning: Psychosis and mysticism as inherent "structures of Thought"

Abstract

There is a surprising confluence in the philosopher Deleuze, the psychoanalyst Bion, and phenomenological psychologist Gendlin on what Deleuze terms the immediate "sense" of understanding and Gendlin calls "felt meaning." Beneath its more differentiated propositional articulations, all three understand this phenomenon as a felt sense of constantly shifting coherence and incoherence, and based in often tacit metaphoric, figural, and/or synesthetic processes. For Deleuze and Bion, in particular, psychotic thought disorder is understood as the exaggeration of this incoherence potential within all felt meaning. Correspondingly, the expansion or enhancement of the felt coherence aspect of ordinary thought becomes the basis for the mystical states of consciousness that become a major concern of the later Bion and Deleuze. The Indian spiritual teacher Krishnamurti, known for his use of an ordinary language of deceptive simplicity to describe spiritual enlightenment, offers a striking confirmation of Deleuze and Bion on numinous states as latent within all felt meaning.