Corrigenda - Throughout my intellectual errands, within several decades, I have come on different definitions of the terms alphabetically listed below and accordingly so used them in the essays published on this site; obviously this has brought about some incongruities. Presently rather than the uneasy task, under the diktat of what advanced age brings with itself, of revising all my writings, I have had to revise many of these definitions and make up a personal unequivocal glossary, so as it appears below; correspondingly, when any of these terms appears in some essay of mine, the meaning is assumed to reflect that quoted in the following list. Between brackets [in smaller characters] the meaning of the corresponding term as it appears in an old dictionary of psychology (A Dictionary of psychology by James Drewer. Penguin Books – Revised edition, 1964.). Highlighted definitions are from WordWeb, a very good online/offline dictionary. http://wordweb.info/WW6.
- Awareness: the cognizance of a tangible or supra-physical event in or during the circumstance when it happens. Notably, remembrance (memories) is one of its aspects. [Mere experience of an object or idea; sometimes equivalent to consciousness.] State of elementary or undifferentiated consciousness.
- Consciousness: the inborn perceptive faculty affecting our sensory system as related to the practical and discriminative knowledge of events, as well as abstract matters. It both relays and gets feedback from the encephalic system as a whole, as such being a pedestal sustaining our status in both the mental, i.e. psychical, and the physical environment. [A character belonging to certain processes or events in the living organism, which must be regarded as unique, and therefore indefinable in terms of anything else, but which can perhaps be best described as a view of these processes or events, as it were, from the inside – the individual is, as it were, inside what is happening: the adjective conscious is ordinarily employed as a synonym for ‘aware’, but this is popular rather than scientific usage.] An alert cognitive state in which you are aware of yourself and your situation.
- Intellect: The seat
of the faculty of reason. [Mind
in its cognitive aspect, and particularly with reference to the higher
thought processes.] The capacity for rational
thought, inference or discrimination.
- Life (capital ‘L’):
the manifestation of life in all its aspects, both as a tangible physical
reality and as a transcendental entity manifest not just in space-time
but in other dimensions negated to our limited sense perceptions.
- Mind(capital 'M'): a resource of the unknowable cosmic entity, the inexplicable 'beyond'. Through it the cosmos is manifest and, to a limited extent, experienced by sentient beings as discernible with the faculties with which they are endowed both in its physical and supra-physical states, or dimensions. [The organized totality of psychical structures and processes, conscious, unconscious, and endopsychic; philosophically, rather than psychologically, the entity or substratum underlying these structures and processes.] That which is responsible for one's thoughts and feelings; the seat of the faculty of reason.
- Human mind: metaphorically, something like an ocean covering an infinite expanse wherewith an individual's bucket gets its allotted share. Differently stated: a limited capacity to explore or understand that which appears to our mental faculties but which is not an individual's endowment but a trait of the species related to the structural psycho-physical organism within his environment and culture. A human's resource, seemingly within strict boundaries, hence with undefinable but real limits dictated by existential contingencies.
- Psyche: the progressive outcome, as a constant buildup, of our life experience as a whole: its aspects are consciousness, conscious awareness and sub-consciousness; it is the interface between the human mind and the brain, (a quantum mechanics physicist would say between the 'wave' and the 'particle' and would equate it with consciousness) it is the translator of the picture which will relay the composes, presumptively to the actuator, the brain, which translates it into action, overtly or covertly to man that, as a whole psychophysical entity, is the actor in the comedy of life.[Originally the principle of life, but used generally as equivalent to mentality, or a substitute for mind or soul.] That which is responsible for one's thoughts and feelings; the seat of the faculty of reason - The immaterial part of a person; the actuating cause of an individual life.
- Reality: the perception of the physical environment as it appears to our senses or any other perceptual cognizance which can be proved. [The totality of existing material objects; more abstractly: the sum total of the conditions imposed by the external world on the activity of the individual, to which motor adaptation, on the part of the individual, is demanded.] All of your experiences that determine how things appear to you - The state of the world as it really is rather than as you might want it to be.
- Supra-physical: it can be somewhat equated to ‘spiritual’ and to transcendence where ‘transcendence’ implies perception beyond the limits of material experience. Also, extrasensory perception.
