The new disclosure’s general apprehension as regards specific faculties

As remarked in the introductory sections of this website, the new disclosure can only be apprehended directly by humanity through its non-standard apprehensive capacities and faculties. However, this may give rise to the idea that the new disclosure is primarily about “seeing things”, having different visual perceptions or experiencing daily life in some kind of entrancement or stupor. Many have and may come to believe that experience of wider reality must consist of entering into an introspective state and having a certain kind of inner experience alone. It is notions such as these that the new disclosure will reveal as being quite limited and groundless, or as being based almost entirely on ignorance and imagination, or upon a lack of knowledge and experience.

To avoid the support of further error, I draw attention here to standard apprehension as it pertains to the ordinary visual capacity. As it may be clearly understood, apprehension in this regard does not at all consist solely of visual perception through the eye. In order to apprehend this sentence, the individual must rely on a range of capacities of which the sensory and perceptual form but a part. Indeed, apprehension of ordinary reality does not consist entirely of perception at all, nor of sensation, but of the participation of all of the faculties that are available and in use in the current acts of being (depending on which aspect of reality is being apprehended).

Thus, we find that sensation and perception are not divorced from the activity of the cognitive processes. Rather, we find that along with sensation and perception, there is the involvement of the intellectual faculties, emotions, in the forms of sympathy, enjoyment, understanding, judgement, memory and so on. The apprehension consists of the combined response of the individual’s capacities to what is disclosed; the standard disclosure through “sight” is not merely or entirely to “sight”, and does not consist merely of visual objects and their sensation.

In many ways, intellectuality is superior to perception, which is also superior to sensation. Even bacteria have a capacity for sensing, on account of which they are able to interact with their environment via their primitive faculties. If the human being were to live entirely or primarily through their sensory faculties, without any perceptual or intellectual response, they would be less than the animals, who, through their limited perceptual capacities, have such capabilities of  judgement such that they are not wholly determined by what they sense. If human apprehension consisted solely of the sensation and reception of visual data, then a human being would be no more than a camera. Yet, the higher capacities of the human being penetrate the lower, and it is in and through them that the human being has those experiences of life that differentiate it from those of the animals. The whole being, which in a way arises out of the development of the being’s capacities, is usually involved.

Of course, this is not to say that every perception must be always directly related to a simultaneous sensation and cognition; people regularly experience intellectual activity without direct and simultaneous perception and sensation, as in periods of deep concentration, analysis or conceptualization. What faculties and capacities are involved in an act of living depend on a variety of factors. Yet, if and when it does occur in the individual human being that there is only sensation and no perception or intellectuality, many would consider this to be a very limited experience, akin to that perhaps obtained in a coma. However, many would assert that when it comes to the apprehension of non-standard disclosure, it must consist solely of the operation of one or another specific faculty to the exclusion of the rest; of “seeing things” which others do not see through their visual organs; and that it is these sensations or perceptions that form the basis for the experience, belief or knowledge about non-standard disclosure. This can only be in accordance with a somewhat primitive understanding and experience. If such a thing were to occur, it could not be considered to be a full apprehension of what was disclosed; the being could not be considered to have entered fully into the reality, any more than a supposed isolated sensation could give the sensing human being any real apprehension or knowledge about what was sensed if the sensation was not accompanied by some perception and intellectuality. Certainly, the being could not live their lives by such experience, or come to any ordinary standard of understanding concerning the nature of reality.

When we speak of and consider the development of the human capacity, we speak of normal, whole development, which means the co-development and synthesis of the various capacities towards the standard mode of apprehension with which human beings are ordinarily familiar and in which a certain interdependence between faculties manifests. Since the development of non-standard capacity is in many ways a continuation of the development of human capacity in general, we must also speak of the whole development of that capacity towards a healthy, normal standard of apprehension. Non-standard apprehension must indicate the same co-development of capacities, and their synthesis and interdependence as these manifest in and through the apprehension.

As with any developmental process, deviations may occur and a relatively abnormal development results, but the distinction and enquiry into normal and abnormal development must be understood in the context of the normal, which is also to say, in the context of an actual development and not a form of positive or negative degradation. The enquiry into normality and abnormality of nature and function is indeed entirely valid in terms of standard and non-standard apprehension and disclosure, but such an enquiry is also distinct, and can only really be undertaken by those for whom the apprehension of non-standard disclosure is already normal and standard (who would trust a doctor or a dentist who had not taken even one hour of training?).

The standard view of non-standard disclosure and the human apprehension of it can lead to an overemphasis on very limited realities related to sensation and perception. Just as the ordinary experience of life is only superficially connected with sensation and perception (while the same experience may be considered to be fundamental to the experience of life for the lower animals and forms of life), so it must be likewise that in the context of regular development, super-ordinary experience of life is only superficially connected with non-standard sensation and perception. The ordinary view entirely distorts the nature, functioning and phenomena of non-standard disclosure, which contributes to preventing the correct and healthy development of the apprehension of it.

The non-standard disclosure will not result in there being a generalized or widespread proliferation of people “seeing things” that other people do not see. This would only indicate, in fact, a rather generalized dysfunction in the populous, and an unhealthy development of minor capacities at the expense of a healthy development of the major. Instead, there will be an increased development of humanity’s intellectual and emotional capacities, with a development in the understanding people have with regard to themselves, other people, and the world itself, in accordance with the world process.

Just as it is the case that the higher ordinary capacities within the human being regulate the lower, such that what is sensed and perceived by the body is ordered and moderated by the intellect, allowing the individual to exist in closer proximity with truth and reality, so, with regard to healthy development, the human being’s capacity for judgement and understanding will supervene on what may be disclosed to its sensory and perceptual capacity by the non-standard disclosure. With this understanding, much superstition and foolishness regarding wider reality, and humanity’s experience of it, may be dispelled, and it is towards this end amongst others that the current non-standard disclosure will lead people.