Noetics is a scary word for some, but it has useful connotations from Greek "nous" of a cosmos that is both intelligible and intelligent, other connotations that imply the various modes of intellectual, aesthetic/symbolic and spiritual culture worldwide, and others still that leave the door open to what used to be called parapsychological study or, "the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality" and, thereby, to the hard, soft, and wet sciences (as well as spiritualities across cultures) that intersect with our understandings of  biocultural development and, a la, let's say, Maslow or Teilhard, the "farther reaches of human nature" and "the building of the earth.")

My personal take on the term noetics is its connotation of the nondual and processual understandings, practices and lore of diverse cultures (including the modern/postmodern) across time and place as these preface, enrich or help contextualize the nondual dimensions of contemporary scientific and humanistic inquiry and self-understanding --  Stuart Kauffman, Thomas Berry and Zhuangzi, for examples, are on a demonstrable continuum if you look at things with a deeply interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and intercultural eye, (or so I argue in the June '04 issue of the "Journal of Chinese Philosophy").  And this understanding itself has political and other implications including some for the future of religion and of leadership in a globalizing world in whose future we are inter-conscious, participating members. You can easily factor out the religious formulations of "the mystical body" on the one hand and those of scientific quantum or "connectivity hypotheses" on the other and still find a deeply processual and nondual trend in sciences and humanities that points to a future hermeneutic of interhuman and ecohumane development that fully reduces neither to the physical, the biosocial nor the idealistic/spiritual categories. It is time to get the quantum folks, the bioscience and biocultural and, for an instance, the rDzogs-chen folks in the same seminar, the same lab, the same conversation.

In fact, I would nominate interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and intercultural interpretation as another generic rubric. This phrasing codes for a hermeneutic Indifferent to disciplinary walls, and one that is both appreciatively and critically inclusive of diverse cultural constructions and their mutually complementary and compensatory ways of knowing -- again, with a nondualizing eye to the "ecology of mind" and the "unity of mind and nature" as Bateson puts it -- yet without a "commodifying" of diverse forms of knowing as mere fodder for a totalizing or homogenizing perspective. This is where ideas like those of Jean Gebser, Victor Turner and, say, Parker Palmer -- or maybe Cornel West? -- intersect. And where Julian Huxley's idea of education as the (as a) major agent of psychocultural evolution on earth joins with the ideas of truly common weal and, therefore, peace and the (self)understanding of the species and its context.

Guy Burneko

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