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

The numinous, or felt sense of the sacred, evokes unity, humility, and healing. While traditional religion schematizes it in absolutes, phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger analyze it as a symbolic unification of a fragmented life-world. The numinous amplifies the nondual organism-surround relationship seen in non-symbolic organisms, reflected in Uexküll's animal umwelten and Gibson's "envelopes of flow." Husserl's passive synthesis and James's pure experience intuit forms underlying a transspecies consciousness, differentiated into concrete lifeworlds down to sentient protozoa and abstractly amplified as the human numinous. With its social template in an ethically responsible shamanism, the numinous now calls for care and conservation of Spirit shared with all sentient beings amid the human-caused climate crisis.

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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.