The Mental Senses
Robert S. Gebelein, BA,
Mathematics, Harvard, 1956. Set out to design a new civilization
1955,methods psychotherapy 1959-63, withdrawal (a la Toynbee)
1964, dream analysis 1966-67. Discovered "the self-steering
process" (paper presented at 1991 ASD Conference) and "the
psychological age of puberty." Self-published Re-educating
Myself.
Abstract
In addition to the five physical
senses, we all have mental senses, normal senses, through which we
perceive our own thoughts, memories, feelings, and dreams. The way
to study dreams is by observing them first of all with the mental
senses. Because of the high status of physical science and social
pressures applied by physical scientists, the study of mental
processes via the mental senses, formerly known as
"introspection," was abandoned in favor of the study of physical
behavior with the physical senses.
The methods of science can be
adapted to include the study of mental processes, including
dreams, via the mental senses, if we can get past the aura of
"objectivity" and the stigma of "subjectivity." Science is not
"objective," but is a "collective subjective" kind of observation,
which is more likely to be more accurate than any one individual
observation, given independent observers. Most scientific
experiments don't have multiple observers. The way science works
is through replication. Observations with the mental senses can
also work in a scientific way, through replication, even though
there is only one observer. Although physical scientists are not
at all qualified to say anything about the study of mental
processes, they have the very highest status in our present
culture, and they can be expected to use that social power in
destructive ways, as they have in the past, to ridicule and
persecute and apply extreme social pressures in unscientific ways,
to squash any attempt to establish a mental science.
Adapted from THE MENTAL
ENVIRONMENT: (MOSTLY ABOUT MIND POLLUTION), not yet published.
