"Today is the birthday of William James, born in New York City (1842). As a young man, he studied art, then went on to Harvard University and earned a medical degree there. But he was never a practicing doctor — instead, he stayed on as a member of the Harvard faculty. He said: "I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave."
James coined and popularized was "stream-of-consciousness," which he meant as a psychological term. He said, "It is a fact that in each of us, when awake (and often when asleep), some kind of consciousness is always going on. There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or of whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life. The existence of this stream is the primal fact, the nature and origin of it form the essential problem, of our science." But eventually he settled on "stream-of-consciousness," an idea that other scholars lifted from psychology and used to talk about literature."
This too from the Writer's Almanac today. I have always wondered where the term ,"stream of consciousness" arose from. I have found that following that continuous wave that borders between thought,feeling,desire,sensation,perception, dream always leads me to new frontiers. I have also found that yoga has helped me to fine tune and tolerate the unexpected undulations on this unchartered path that always leads me to new knowledge often acquired by riding a wave of extreme perplexity.
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