I have Richard Alpert (Baba Ram Dass) "Be Here Now"
to thank for this, and it speaks to the very heart of the question of Transformative Experience.

On Channel One, the physical body and physicality of the other is seen. Old/young, light/dark, fat/thin,
etc.

Flip to Channel Two, "As The World Turns," or the level of psychosocial reality. Social roles, politics, a housewife, truckdriver, attorney, minister, guru, and such distinctions. Neurosis, happiness, sadness, identities, The Therapy Channel."

98% of everyone we meet is tuned to the first two channels, and this seems to work fine for them.

Channel Three is concerned with Astrological signs; "Aries, yes I know how they are." Mythos, archetypes.

On Channel four, soul relates to soul, astral mythic roles, soulmates, beyond individual differences, "personality is packaging only."

On Channel Five, Consciousness is simply aware of itself.

There is a sixth channel where even this disappears.

bye...

Ram Dass was a fun guy and a good teacher. That's a good way to describe how/where we place our attention, although I must confess I've never spent much time on Channel Three.

Phil,

I'm reading The Eye of the Spirit by Ken Wilber and
just began chapter six, The Recaptured God; The Retro-Romantic Agenda and It's Fatal Flaws. It begins with this paragraph in italics:

"Transpersonal Psychology is the major school in psychology today that takes spiritual experience seriously. There are perhaps five major approaches in transpersonal psychology that are particularly
infuential: systems theory, altered (or discrete)
states of consciousness, Stan Grof's holotropic model, various forms of Jungian psychology (including Michael Washburn's 'neo-Jungian' view), and my own spectrum or integral approach. I maintain not only that the integral model incorporates the essentials of the other models, but that it includes many significant areas ignored by the others--and thus it can account for considerably more research and evidence."

Much of transpersonal psychology, defined in these terms, would take place on "Channel Three," from Jungian work to Deep Ecology and Carlos Casteneda.
A Casteneda devotee saw me with Wilber's book, which has a Toltec fashioned pyramid and sun orb on the cover, and assuming the book was about his favorite subject, launched into a long regalia about his shamanic experiences with peyote, UFOs and Don Juan Matus, whom he asserts is "real", as bystanders gawked and raised eyebrows.

How is it that they always find me? Nutbar Radar?

Ken Wilber on Integral Art and Literary Theory:

No wonder that for East and West alike, until just recent times, art was often associated with profound spiritual transformation. And I don't mean merely "religious" or "iconographic" art.

Some of the great philosophers. Schelling to Shiller to Schopenhauer, have all pinpointed a major reason for art's great power to transcend. When we look at any beautiful object (natural or artistic), we suspend all other activity, and we are simply aware, we only want to contemplate the object. While we are in this contemplative state,
we do not want anything from the object; we just want to contemplate it; we want it to never end.
We don't want to eat it, or own it, or run from it, or alter it; we only want to look, we want to contemplate, we want it never to end.

In that contemplative awareness, our own egoic grasping in time comes momentarily to rest. We relax into our basic awareness. We rest with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. We are face to face with the calm, the eye in the center of the storm. We are not agitating to change things; we contemplate the object as it is. Great art has this power, this power to grap your attention and suspend it; we stare, sometimes awestruck, sometimes silent, but we cease the restless movement that otherwise characterizes every waking moment.

It doesn't matter what the actual content of the art is; not for this. Great art grabs you, against your will, and then suspends your will. You are ushered into a quiet clearing, free of desire, free of grasping, free of ego, free of self-contraction. And through the opeming or clearing in your own awareness may come flashing higher truths, subtler revelations, profound connections. For a moment you might even touch eternity; who can say otherwise, when time itself is suspended in a clearing that great art creates in your awareness.

You just want to contemplate; you want it never to end; you forget past and future; you forget self and same. The noble Emerson: "These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time."

Great art suspends the reverted eye, the lamented past, the anticipated future: we enter with it to the timeless present; we are with God today, perfect in our manner and mode, open to the riches and the glories of a realm that time forgot, but that great art reminds us of: not by its content, but by what it does in us: suspends the desire to be elsewhere. And thus it undoes the agitated grasping in the heart of the suffering self, and releases us,--maybe for a second, maybe for a minute, maybe for all eternity,--releases us from the coil of ourselves.