Continuities of Consciousness, Life-Worlds, and Numinous Experience: Cognitive-Phenomenological Foundations for an Empirical Neo-Shamanism

Summary

Numinous experience, which embodies a sense of the sacred, promotes feelings of unity, humility, and healing. It can be understood through phenomenological perspectives that emphasize a shared primary consciousness among sentient beings. This understanding highlights the interconnectedness of life and suggests an ethical responsibility to care for the environment amid the global climate crisis, drawing from traditions like shamanism.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Numinous experience—as the felt sense of the sacred—evokes feelings of allone unity, communality, humility, and healing. Its schematization in the absolutes of traditional religion can also be seen as all-encompassing symbolic unifications of an otherwise fragmented human life-world—as more analytically depicted in the life-world phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger. In both feeling and concept the numinous would be the semantic amplification of the more concrete organism-surround nonduality of non symbolic organisms—as reflected in a primary consciousness shared across Uexkuell’s sentient animal umwelten and Gibson’s “envelopes of flow.” H usserl’s phenomenology of passive synthesis and James on pure experience can be understood as intuiting the implicit forms underlying such a primary transspecies consciousness, as both differentiated into these concrete lifeworlds, to the level of the inferably sentient protozoa, and abstractly amplified as the human numinous. The latter, with its original social template in an ethically responsible shamanism, becomes similarly responsible in the contemporary context of a human caused global climate crisis for the care and conservation of that Spirit it both develops as such and accurately intuits as a universal is-like shared with all sentient beings.