The book "What Always Comes to Mind" with the subtitle "The visualist's guide to a metaspheric perspective on reality" is a highly original and unorthodox treaty on the workings of consciousness and the mind.
This book succeeds remarkably well in merging various usually unrelated fields such as art, science (physics and psychology), philosophy, language, semiotics and mysticism. Each page is provided with beautiful graphics and schemes, which at times can be more explanatory than the text itself.
In the introduction I was quite overwhelmed by a plethora of new terminologies and concepts I was unfamiliar with, but it paid off to give the actual book a chance.
In the first chapters James Guy introduces you to the concept of the "metaspheric perspective", which I will not explain here in order not to give away the essential building block of the book. Guy shows us a ubiquitous sevenfoldness in many manifestations of nature and mind, in which the fourth position establishes a turning point and a point of observation of the "I", which is actually a fleeting and artificial construct of mind itself.
This concept is of such a great importance, complexity and versatility that I will have to re-read the book a number of times, before I have created the necessary mental ontology to ground and understand this concept.
In the later chapters the book becomes a more personal account of James' journey through the psychedelic sixties, his encounters with people like Tim Leary and his initiation in the mystical experience where self is experienced as other and other as self.
Especially of value and very recognisable to me are James' accounts about the Noumenon and Kundalini. It seems to me that such full-body experiences of energy discharges -whatever they really may be- evoke the same vocabulary in different people from totally different backgrounds, which perhaps is a sign that the greater Logos speaks through us in such states linked to the experience of union.
This is certainly not an easy book and it may seem like hocus pocus to people who never have explored the inner dimension, but for those treading the path in search of enlightenment this book is an extremely valuable tool to map their experiences.
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