Abraham Maslow wrote of "self-actualizers". In college he was fascinated with some of his professors who were gregarious, engaging and fascinated with both her or his subject and with the whole process of education itself. In his later works on psychology, he was more concerned with the nature of healthy individuals rather than how to categorize mental illnesses. Focusing on the structure of 'eupsychia' rather than of psychopathology might better help us understand the nature of the human mind. Psychology (especially since Freudian psychoanalysis) has traditionally focused us on studying ways in which menatation can go wrong- Maslow wanted us to focus more on what the highest capabilities of humankind were than on our worst disturbances. The obvious analogy: would you rather learn clockmaking by studying bunches of broken clock-parts, or would you rather first look at an intact watch? (Granted, the neurosciences have learned much from neuropathology in the specific form of headwounds, but would we have really been so interested in the nature of consciousness without such fascinating examples of it such as Leonardo DaVinci and Albert Einstein?) We can't really understand what human experience "is" until we see what it's capable of, in addition to what it has been.
These pages represent Don Norman's concept of "cognitive artifacts." I'm toying with two basic ideas here, the first being that while consciousness is "wet," that is, it is necessarily instantiated in some biological form (i.e.- a brain), parts of our memory might exist externally, in the form of books, or recordings, or rows of stones. . . . . The other is that individual human lives are the atomic elements of the social sciences. The Glass Bead Game is weaving a personal fabric of meaning from all the strands of thought you have at hand (bricolage des idees). If you want to follow one of my typical ideational fugues, try progressing from Donald O. Hebb to Gerald Edelman, then introducing a variation on the theme with Alfred Korzybski, finally resolving the tension with Gregory Bateson.
A series of relevant quotes from Hesse's Glass Bead Game. (Thanks, Gail!)