“The Self,” “I,” and “a Single-Consciousness-and-‘I’”

The Single Consciousness-and-“I” as a Universal Human Phenomenon, a Characterization of “Human Nature”

Witz and Goodwin (2012) present their vision of a single consciousness-and-“I” as a universal human phenomenon, a vision of universal human nature. Of course the extent to which and the manner in which one can see a person as something like the single consciousness-and-“I” in different cultures needs to be explored and discussed more carefully. This would involve developing sample portraits that evoke different individuals’ single consciousness-and-“I” at different levels of intelligence, emotional maturity, in different cultures, and so forth, as well as investigating gradually and systematically how the defining characteristics of the conception of the single consciousness-and-“I” suggested in Consc. III (Sections 1-3) need to be adjusted, in terms of phenomena/subjective experience in other cultures.

Actually, the assertion that the single consciousness-and-“I” is a universal human phenomenon/reality is part of the essence of the whole thrust of Witz and Goodwin (2012). This assertion is virtually equivalent to what Witz and Bae (2011) at the end of Consc. II state to be the result of sustained development of and experience with The Participant as Ally—Essentialist Portraiture. This is “the fact that there is in everyone (in her ‘I’) a subtle level where there is an understanding of the consciousness and being of any human being. This level can be attained with ‘sympathy’ by the awareness and inner attitudes and disciplines . . . [described in the article], putting away one’s own stereotypical notions and cherished interests, and it is this that is the basis of human beings understanding each other” (Witz & Bae, 2011, p. 442). ² If the phenomenon/reality of the single consciousness-and-“I” is indeed to a significant degree universal, it is so astronomically vast that it seems to be prior to any conceptions of human nature and experience developed in a particular society and culture. It affects both innumerable specific issues in the social sciences as well as fundamental assumptions of the social sciences as a whole (sociology, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics considered as a single knowledge enterprise). A more radical position would be to regard the single consciousness-and-“I” as epistemologically and existentially relevant and prior to all culturally developed conceptions of the human being and to everything that is articulated as the meaning of human life in philosophy and religion (This is actually an insight that is developed in numerous different ways by Sathya Sai Baba; Witz, in press ³ ). Witz and Goodwin (2012) seem to advocate both of these two positions.

Presuppositions in approaching the human being in portraiture

In Essentialist Portraiture, one analyses transcripts, and so forth, with an awareness and knowledge of existing concepts in sociological theory as well as with familiarity with the connotation of expressions in public discourse in Western culture and in everyday discourse in the participant’s culture. In addition, one relies on “significant passages” (Witz, 2006) where the participant talks about things the way she sees them and feels about them. Hence although the interview is “active” (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995), one suggests to the participant the questions one has with as few assumptions and expectations as possible so that the participant can feel free to present things the way she sees them and feels in connection with them. All this is standard grounded theory philosophy (Corbin & Strauss, 1990). In grounded theory work one is also well aware that the larger aspects of subjective experience and the external circumstances that the investigator is seeing in the participant depend on investigator’s background, interests and sensitivities, and above all her own motivation for the research.

However, the emphasis in portraiture (2 and 3 in Figure 1) on subjective experience (“feeling, consciousness, state” as well as the aspect of “sympathetic introspection”) goes beyond a grounded theory orientation. For example, a portrait will try to represent and evoke how a particular experience of the participant and how conditions that the participant experienced in a particular period of time (months) in the past exist in her today, how she sees them, feels them today, how they reverberate in her attitudes and views, and so forth, and otherwise variously pervade her today (“seeing the past in the present,” Witz & Bae, 2011). It seems that the Essentialist Portraiture approach in interviewing, introspective analysis, and preparing an evocative but reliable portrait presupposes/acknowledges that the participant and the self represent an inexhaustible phenomenon; to some extent this is also true for Portraiture in general. Just as every tree is a unified whole, unique and different, and just as every leaf on the tree is unique and different, so also every person is unique and different, and one could portray and evoke aspects of how she is in innumerable ways. And just as a good portrait painter is confident and knows she will be able to paint an insightful portrait of almost any person, so does a qualitative researcher portraitist.

The portraitist’s confidence in portraiture is based on an intuitive understanding that portraitist, participant, and reader share a common nature that enables them to get an intuitive impression from the portrait. This common nature may be explicated in terms of the single consciousness-and-“I.” What is the basis of the portrait painter’s confidence that her portrait will speak to the person portrayed as well as communicate insights about the person portrayed to the viewer? We would say that she knows from experience and intuitively takes for granted that there is a commonality among human beings (among her, the participant, and the viewer) that enables her to paint a portrait that will be both acknowledged and accepted as her own by the person portrayed and that will give insights to a viewer (regardless whether the viewer personally knows person in the portrait or not). In qualitative work using portraiture à la Lawrence-Lightfoot, and in Essentialist Portraiture, the investigator has a similar confidence that her portraits will speak to both the person portrayed and the reader, and this confidence is likewise based on an intuitive knowledge of a commonality in subjectively understanding the portrait that the investigator develops. This commonality is to some extent caught and explicated by the conception of the single consciousness-and-”I.” The fact that I can understand a person subjectively, and that I can present my understanding in terms of a portrait that will speak relatively directly to the reader, ultimately reflects the fact that we each represent the phenomenon/reality of a single consciousness-and-”I.” The investigator portrays the participant’s self-understanding, her subjective understanding of, and attitudes to public or objective contexts, and makes them intelligible as larger wholes, based on particular longer passages. She shows these self understandings to be holistic subjective-objective wholes, unities as she (the investigator) herself subjectively understands them, and she shows how these aspects arose in the participant over time, and now exist in the participant’s single consciousness-and-”I.” These are all the same kinds of things illustrated as the processes that define the single consciousness-and-“I” in Witz and Goodwin (2012). The aspects or larger wholes that the investigator is able to see in the participant and which the participant acknowledges describe her and exist in her (the participant) in a unitary fashion are also wholes that arise in investigator’s single consciousness-and-“I” (or of post hoc analysts when they work as a team). And in developing the portrait the investigator goes to some lengths to evoke these holistic aspects so that a reader can subjectively understand them—by constantly taking the reader’s position she makes sure the reader is able to subjectively understand them with her consciousness-and-“I” just like she does.

Higher Aspects

“Higher aspects” were defined in Consc. I as “moral-ethical, metaphysical, social, and spiritual (including religious) higher principles, values, and ideals” (Witz et al., 2010, p. 397), that start in childhood or adolescence and evolve and often deepen over years and decades. The authors begin the article by “urging that these kinds of things should be understood directly as consciousness, or as the participant’s subjectively experienced . . . states and way of being in her daily life, because only at that level can these fundamental aspects of a person be really fully appreciated” (p. 397). In other words “these kinds of things” include in the values, ideals, and so forth, and the totality of subjective experience, of “feeling, consciousness, state” connected with them in daily living. So the authors conceive of this whole as part of the totality of the consciousness (subjective experience and being) of the individual, reaching potentially into all domains of her activity and having an identity and unity throughout much or all of her life. Two of their examples are (we only quote certain important phrases):

Excerpt 2. John, a junior in college majoring in chemistry who is planning to become a high school chemistry teacher: “Science is . . . more the study of absolute truth of how things work” (Witz et al., 2010, p. 398)

Caroline, a high school science teacher in her late 30s: “It’s my job as a Christian to reflect my faith and to reflect my God to everybody else. That’s my job. Okay? I do it while I’m being a teacher. [Being] a teacher is not my primary responsibility. My primary responsibility is to live the way I’ve been instructed to live. Do what I am supposed to do. That’s my first job.” (Witz et al., 2010, p. 399)

Using these and other examples, Consc. I develops a general vision of the arising and unfolding of a higher aspect in a person that involves three interconnected subaspects. First, (1), there is a “core consciousness,” called in Consc. I the “essence” of the higher aspect, suggested in Excerpt 2 by some of the connotations of the italicized phrases, which as subjective experience is sui generis. It is felt as a truth or an ideal that one aspires to in one’s life and that is felt as a main inspiration in all other subjectively felt aspects of the higher aspect. For instance, in the case of John, “Science is more the study of . . . absolute truth of how things work,” when John talks about this while he is feeling the meaning it has for him (while he is feeling how something shows the “absolute truth of how things work”), what he feels, his consciousness, is basically sui generis. It might be described as a “metaphysical feeling” (see Witz, 1995), with a timeless or changeless-transcendental quality (e.g., when he thinks about it deeply there may be a timeless moment where he feels this truth), Consc. I suggests “This (understanding that chemistry gives of ‘how things really work’) is how the world really is, this is how things really are” (p. 398),and so forth, and then points to how it arose and unfolded in his life.

Next there is (2) the totality of subjective experience and being (“feeling, consciousness, and state”) connected with the higher aspect, discussed in Consc. I as “the exact shape of the higher aspect.” Typically, the core consciousness or essence develops over a period of time (years) and becomes a vision and inspiration that start to give direction and play a significant role in the individual’s life. For example, John “started feeling this way” “when he took chemistry in high school.” Even as a kid he had been interested in how things worked; in eighth grade he had a teacher who “really made science fun,” and “when I thought about it, chemistry was more of, kind of my personality” (Witz et al., 2010, p. 398). Today “the original feeling in chemistry class has become a conviction and unified him and given him a direction and a larger outlook in life. Now his whole thrust in his studies in college and his vocational plans is to pursue this vision in his life and have others share in it” (p. 399).

Finally, (3) when a person becomes deeply dedicated to a particular higher aspect to the point that the latter becomes central in her life, she tends to evolve in her subjective being (in her consciousness) to levels where she herself experiences unity and oneness and where this shows in various ways in her behavior and relationship with the world. That is, the subjective experience of the core consciousness, or the essence and subjective experience of the higher aspect (1) generally becomes more and more pure, more and more powerful, and tends to develop into a subtle consciousness “bereft of particulars” (i.e., without particular memories, images, etc.) that pervades and is present in the individual much of the time (This can be to some extent seen in the original portraits from which the examples of Caroline, Thomas, and Lynn in Consc. I were drawn ⁷ ). Obviously, in this whole vision, the core consciousness, (1), is central and has a special status. It forms the constant focal point of thinking and subjective experience and the source of her personal growth over periods of years. And it is obviously also the germ that over years transforms into what is directly experienced in terms of the unity and oneness suggested by “pervasive [subjectively experienced] consciousness bereft of particulars.”

The Single Consciousness-and-“I” as the Natural Situs of the Arising of Experience, Development, and Unfolding of Higher Aspects

In Consc. I, the main focus was on elaborating the general vision (1)-(2)-(3) in terms consciousness, and on presenting it as a more or less universal phenomenon human life in many cultures. But already then we felt that there was in the modern social sciences and humanities no larger understanding that would accommodate this vision. Why do things like higher inspiration, moral consciousness, and metaphysical feelings, particularly feelings of Truth with a capital T, arise in the human being at all? Why does the core consciousness of the higher aspect lead over years to the development (2) of a vast spectrum of feelings, pursuit of ideals, commitments, and to the subtle pervasive consciousness (3) that we see in the examples of Consc. I? How is a relatively objective phenomenon and phenomenon of subjective experience of such magnitude and extent and external/subjective coherence as (1)-(2)-(3), which plays such a large role in the daily life of individuals often their whole life long—how is such a phenomenon even possible? How does it fit into the understanding of the human being in the social sciences and humanities? Personality and “loving to tinker with things and see things work” in a child and young person do not usually result in something like John’s (1)-(2).

So in our mind, Consc. I posed the question “how could one conceive of the human being in terms of consciousness so that (1)-(2)-(3) can be seen as a natural phenomenon in the life of many people in many cultures?” And we will see in the next section that to this question, Consc. III represented a direct answer. Namely, the human being should be understood as a single consciousness-and-”I,” because the individual’s consciousness-and-“I” during the day is precisely the arena in which the development (1)-(2)-(3) blossoms into the incredible phenomenon which it is.

Always the Same Person, Always the Same More and More Pure Core Consciousness as a Source of the Existential Power of Higher Aspects

In addition, the conception of the single consciousness-and-“I” also gives a glimpse of a mystery which is still far from being understood. This is that the inner moral, metaphysical, and existential power that manifests in a higher aspect when it becomes central in a human being’s life seems directly connected with the fact that the individual embodies the phenomenon/reality of the single consciousness-and-“I.” When a teacher who is devoting herself to his/her students like Greg in Witz et al. (2001) or Caroline in Lee (2006) and Consc. I, or when a person is dedicated to the uplift of society or humanity in such a way that this dedication becomes all-encompassing and begins to transcend the normal self-centered preoccupations, she will appear as having an inner and outer unity or oneness. She will also be semiconsciously aware of a greater inner unity and oneness of her own consciousness and being, ⁸ and then this unity and oneness becomes visible to others. Then it almost seems that “the reality of oneself feeling (presupposing, tacitly taking for granted, whatever) one is always the same person,” which every person experiences, assumes the form of her being aware of a single (“subtle”) consciousness that pervades her some portions of the day.

“I” as a Concept in its Own Right; “I” and the “Self”

H. Herring in his part I of the entry “Ich” the Historisches woerterbuch der philosophie (Herring, 1976) says the first independent conception of “I” in Western tradition is found in Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. And he and U. Schoenpflug in part II goes on to review (with references to the original sources) several dozen ways in which “I” was conceptualized, in the philosophy following Descartes (Herring, 1976), in the emerging psychology in the 19th century, and in 20th century Western thought (Schoenpflug, 1976). Many of the 19th century conceptions focus on the prominent role that “feeling ‘I’” or awareness of “I” plays in particular types of experience (e.g., in sense perception, in voluntary action, in emotion, etc.). But in the 20th century, the specific psychological conception advanced is usually intimately connected with some conception of the self. G. H. Mead for example develops a contrast between “the ‘I’ and the ‘me’” (Strauss, 1956, pp. 243-247): “the ‘I’ is the response of the organism to the attitudes of others; the ‘me’ is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes” (p. 243). This “I” and “me” are both aspects of, or “phases” in, a conception of (or in what Mead thinks is the phenomenon of) the self: “The ‘I’ is something that is never entirely calculable . . . The ‘I’ both calls out the ‘me’ [e.g., I am concerned about how others see me] and responds to it. Taken together they constitute a personality as it appears in social experience. The self is essentially a social process with these two distinguishable phases . . .” (pp. 246-247).

Actually, Mead does not really make “I” into a concept (see “The ‘I’ is something that is never entirely calculable . . . , ” and “the self is . . . a social process” above), he leaves it rather open. But he does use it to highlight his concept of self. “When one is running to get away of someone chasing him, he is entirely occupied in this action, and his experience may be swallowed up entirely in the objects about him, so that he has, at the time being, no consciousness of self at all. We must be of course very completely occupied to have that take place, but we can, I think, recognize in that sort of [experience a] possible experience in which the self does not enter” (Strauss, 1956, p. 214). Here Mead is primarily interested in bringing out what he means by “self,” by showing that there is consciousness and experience of “I” “in which the self does not enter” (he uses this phrasing several times). When I am running away, he says, I have “no consciousness of self at all,” but at the same time I still have I experience,” there is still some form of feeling (consciousness) “I,” because there is consciousness of me running (I am running from the one who is chasing me, I am running because I am afraid, I don’t want to be caught), in other words there is some (possibly faint) sense of “I” that is part of my consciousness. So overall, Mead’s effort is directed at establishing an insightful conceptual understanding of “self” as different from “I.” Of course another theorist might easily disagree; for example, the very fact that one is running, or that one is experiencing fear, might be attributed to the individual’s self.

Innumerable little and big realities of subjective experience conveyed by the use of “I” indicate a substratum in moment-to-moment consciousness of thinking, feeling “I” (“I-feeling”, “self-feeling”) almost every minute and hour of the day. In contrast, the conception of the “single consciousness-and-“I” regards both “I” and consciousness together as a single entity of an unknown nature and of an inconceivable magnitude. The phrase “consciousness-and-’I’” brings to mind, not a particular conception of “I” and the self, but primarily the fact that throughout the day, one’s consciousness or conscious subjective being is in innumerable ways in a unity with some awareness or feeling of “I”, or in a unity with some—often faint, sometimes strong “feeling ‘I’,” (“I-feeling,” “self-feeling,” Denzin, 2007). In fact “I” is used constantly in everyday speech to give the other person some idea of “how I experienced something at a particular time,” or “how I then felt or how I now feel the experience related to me (to myself),” and so forth. And these kinds of uses of “I” play a huge role in interviewing and developing a portrait. “I” is almost constantly used in various ways to indicate awareness of oneself (“I”) experiencing something with one’s senses or in one’s mind, or remembering how oneself (“I”) was or became aware, and thus to indicate a natural unity of consciousness and “I.” For example the participant may say “(with emphasis) I saw [with my own eyes] . . . ,” or “when I saw that [with my own eyes], I really thought that . . . ,” remembering what she saw then, and/or emphasizing what her experience then really was (what “I” really experienced then). Or she may be suggesting that the significance of what she saw then became clear to her since then, but that she (“I”) already had an inkling of that then. Or, as another example, the participant may say, remembering: “And he said ‘X,’ and I was, like [pretending to be taken aback], ‘then why did you earlier say ‘Y,’ which made me think that you had attitude Z toward me,’” with a suggestion that when the person she was talking to earlier had said “Y,” her reaction had been “he thinks such and such (Z) about me, of me (‘I’),” and so forth. Or (a more complex example), imagine I tell my friend: “I remember I walked out of that meeting and was standing beside the elevator, and I realized I didn’t remember why or how I walked out . . . ” This could be part of all kinds of different scenarios: for example, only then I realized how rattled I was, or only then I realized I had been completely absorbed thinking about something at the meeting and so forth. In addition, there is a suggestion “I remember an ‘I-state’ at the elevator where I became aware that I was rattled, or where I became aware I had been absorbed and so forth. a few minutes earlier when I left the meeting,” and there is a suggestion that that awareness involved a faint memory of me remembering myself at the meeting, and possibly while walking out of the meeting. In conversations between friends, and in interviews in which the participant is the interviewer’s ally, expressions of this kind, which involve having certain perceptions with the senses and certain kinds of thoughts and feelings in some kind of a unity with “feeling, awareness of ‘I’,” are very common. In addition, in the last two examples (the exchange involving “X” and “Y,” and becoming aware while standing at the elevator), there are suggestions of such awareness involving “I” or feeling “I” extending to earlier implicated situations. The various types and levels of awareness or feeling “I” may vary from “quite faint” to “extremely aware,” “with full conscious awareness.”

In the preceding, we gave examples of friends or of participants in interviews mentioning “I-feelings” or “self-feelings,” but obviously “I-feelings” or “self-feelings” of innumerable kinds occur constantly, almost every minute of the day, during most of one’s activities. Indeed they seem to form a veritable substratum of processes which one is barely aware of and that is, constantly going on. Subjective experience of some kind of feeling of “I” comprises an absolutely vast, extremely diverse set of phenomena, many of them extremely subtle, representing subjective realities of a completely different scope than addressed by existing psychological conceptions of “I.”

Use of the Substratum of Constant “I-Thinking,” “Self-Feeling” in Serious Everyday Communication and in Portraiture

Now in serious conversations, when one person speaks for a paragraph or longer, the “I-feelings” and “self-feelings” communicated to the other, play a huge role in enabling the other to get deeper subjective impression of what the first person is feeling, what concerns are moving inside her, and so forth. In such a conversation, if one looks only at individual sentences or phrases, the “being I” or “feeling of I” suggested in them is usually too vague or subtle so that one cannot be sure of what the person was feeling. In other words, if one looks at only a single sentence or phrase, the realities of what the person is talking about, as well as her whole more complex subjective state while she is talking, is usually extremely unsure. However, in the context of a whole paragraph-sized or longer passage (which is quoted verbatim in the portrait), where the participant makes an effort to explain her experience and her feelings, the situation is quite different. For as illustrated in the last paragraph, here the participant expresses herself spontaneously and in a natural way, to give a sense of how she (“I”) felt when she experienced the situation at the time or to give a sense of her own (again “I,” or self) attitudes, reactions, and so forth, involved at that time and in thinking about it since then. So in a long passage, the investigator is much more able, by having the passage on her mind for days or longer, to become aware of what was likely to be a more exact sense of the feeling of “I” involved. And the investigator will go on and immediately use this understanding to evoke and explicate the particular larger aspect(s) in the participant that she is elaborating with the passage. In doing so, she is essentially assuming the participant to represent a consciousness in which both her memory of the experience and her understanding of the significance of the experience for her life, for herself (for “me”), are in a unity. In other words, she is assuming the participant to represent a single consciousness-and-“I,” and the portrait wants to give a sense of that single consciousness-and-“I” (Witz & Goodwin, 2012, Section 4). So in portraits of adults, focusing on the natural unity of “I-feeling” or “self-feeling” as it appears in significant larger passages (faint or powerful, directly visible or implicated) is likely to quickly provide a rather accurate representation of the realities of the participant’s subjective condition as well as of external aspects of her as a person. For that reason, Witz and Goodwin (in press) declare that the single consciousness-and-“I” represents a whole new, more adequate way to understand “subjectivity.”

The Substratum of Constant “I-thinking,” “Self-feeling” as the Arena for the Growth of Higher Aspects and their Evolution to Pervasive Consciousness. Given the preceding, the relationship between the vision of “higher aspects in a person” in Consc. I, and the significance of higher aspects from the perspective of the single consciousness-and-“I” becomes clear. Essentially, constant “I-thinking,” “self-feeling” is the arena for the growth of higher aspects and their evolution to pervasive consciousness (2, 3, Section 2 above). We already said that thinking that involves experience of “I,” “I-feeling,” and “self-feeling,” forms a kind of inarticulate and pervasive substratum of one’s subjective state of being that goes on constantly during the day. But imagine a person is moving inspired by, filled by, pervaded by the consciousness of a higher aspect in her. Imagine John studying chemistry, or sometime in the future teaching chemistry with the consciousness of how chemistry shows the truth how things really work (We have to imagine this because we have no further data from him on this). Or think of Susan when she is teaching English as a second language (ESL) to foreign students today (at the time of the interviews): “. . . the most fun thing is to listen to my students speak, and to encourage them. Mostly, just to hear what they have to say and hear them communicating in English and to be impressed by what they do . . .” (Witz et al., 2010, p. 400). In fact, she is happy just being in the awareness of having “a good environment in class where students feel like they can get questions [answered] whenever they want, and come up to me after class and ask . . . ‘can you help me use the pay phone’” (Witz, 2006, excerpt 4, on p. 255). In these examples, one can see the overall subjective state starting to approach a condition where there are some periods in the day (half hour, hours) where the individual is semiconsciously aware she is living and fulfilling her higher values, ideals, commitments. In terms of Consc. I, there are some periods in the day where a more or less unbroken subtle consciousness pervades her and expresses (becomes visible) in outward behavior in innumerable ways.

Relation to Literature on the “Spiritual Aspect of Human Existence”

The last point is directly related to efforts in the scholarly literature to characterize what it is that makes something “spiritual” in the general sense of the term (both in religious and secular life and in culture generally, including “morally engaged, committed”). “Higher aspects” or “life-level moral-metaphysical engagement” overlap with spirituality in this sense. ⁹ In the introduction to his classic Spirituality and the secular quest, Van Ness (1996) proposes this definition:

Excerpt 3. The spiritual aspect of human existence is hypothesized to have an outer and inner complexion. Facing outward, human existence is spiritual insofar as one engages reality as a maximally inclusive whole and makes the cosmos an intentional object of thought and feeling. Facing inward, life has a spiritual dimension to the extent that it is apprehended as a project of people’s most enduring and vital selves and is structured by experiences of sudden self-transformation and subsequent gradual development. (Van Ness, 1996, pp. 4-5).

Portraits, by naturally picking up participants’ existing higher values and commitments and presenting them the way they appear to them and are subjectively experienced and understood by them as in Sections 1 and 2 above, automatically give an idea of what is (subjectively by the investigator and the participant) “apprehended as a project of . . . [their] most enduring and vital self.” The conception of a single consciousness-and-“I” then points out further that in the innumerable times of using “I” during the day, and the even more innumerable times when one is not speaking, interacting, and so forth, one may be engaging oneself in one’s “project.” One is constantly equilibrating oneself vis-a-vis the whole range of impacts from the outside (talking with others, seeing a movie) as well as one’s own more personal preoccupations and desires, and presuppositions and abilities.

Van Ness’ formulation “apprehended as a project of people’s most enduring and vital selves” fits to quite a few case studies using the Participant as Ally—Essentialist approach. ¹⁰ For example, only an extremely small percentage of high school science teachers discuss socioscientific issues on a regular basis in their classes, and Lee in her dissertation studied four such teachers to see what moved them to do so (Lee, 2006). One of her participants was Sarah, who had been teaching science for 23 years. In her high school and college years, Sarah loved to see applications of science and thought of pursuing a career as a physical therapist or in research in genetic engineering. However, in her senior year in college, she became a teaching assistant (TA) and was deeply affected. She had never registered the freshness of authentic communication with students, the dynamics of learning, and intellectual challenges involved like this before and changed to becoming a high school science teacher.

Two years after she started teaching, during the summer, Sarah volunteered at a facility to take care of disabled children who were autistic or paralyzed. Actually, she had been involved in helping the disabled in her extracurricular activities throughout her formative years in high school and college. However, her experience that summer was different. She talks about what she felt:

Excerpt 4. . . . And when you are working with the handicapped children . . . (enumerates: autism, Downs syndrome, paralyzed) . . . whatever they have. And you ask yourself, “Why is this child like this?” I mean, it just happens, you know? There’s no reason. Their mother and father didn’t do anything bad; this child was not abused or dropped as a baby, it just happens. And some of these conditions are a reality . . . No drinking, no smoking, no drugs, not having sex before you get married, you have a child and it’s conjoined twins, because that happens. No one does anything wrong; it’s not a moral statement, but you have this reality . . . (From excerpt 13 of tape 1, Lee, 2006, p. 181)

I remember that one little girl—she was so sweet. She kept grinding her teeth, so her teeth were all rubbed down. She kept rubbing her hands . . . a huge callus was right here. Her mom was a sweetheart and she never, you know, you just [wonder] . . . what happens to make them like that? . . . There’s just no [reason or explanation] . . . (From excerpt 14 of tape 2, Lee, 2006, p. 182)

“It’s not a moral statement,” that is, you cannot blame the parents for the child’s condition, “but you have this reality,” that is, there is the reality that there is this child having and constantly experiencing this disability. So there is larger concern for the whole human condition (parents plus child), and “Why is this child like this?” summarizes what she felt was a huge moral problem for which she had no resolution. Within a few years she created a course dealing with topics in applied scientific areas or technological practices such as cryonics, genetic engineering, and stem cell research. To make the scientific and moral issues more vivid, she started to include more and more cases in the news such as Terri Schiavo, Jack Kevorkian, Richard Seed, and Christopher Reeves. The range of topics and cases became larger and larger. At the time of the interviews there were stacks of articles and rows of video clips neatly organized in a file cabinet, and magazine cover stories were posted all around the walls in her classroom. These are all indications of how much and at how many levels she was personally involved in this “project.”

A Harmony, Almost Oneness, of Consciousness at Time Levels of a Minute and of a Year

We have argued that higher aspects may sometimes be described as “as a project of people’s most enduring and vital selves” à la Van Ness. There is also an insight of Assagioli (1965), originator of a well known system of psychotherapy, that touches on the vision of a single consciousness-and-”I.”

Excerpt 5. . . . The word “spiritual” in its broader connotation . . . includes . . . not only the specific religious experience but all the states of awareness, all the functions and activities which have as common denominator the possessing of values higher than the average, values such as the ethical, the aesthetic, the heroic, the humanitarian, and the altruistic . . . (Assagioli, 1965, p. 38). ¹¹

Assagioli points to a combination of “all the states of awareness, all the functions and activities,” and “possessing of values higher than the average, values such as the ethical, the aesthetic, the heroic, the humanitarian, and the altruistic . . .” The former is at a moment-to-moment level of subjective life and external behavior, but “values higher than the average such as the ethical . . . ,” while they can be seen in the individual every day at a moment-to-moment level, also unfold in her at a level of years and decades. So the phrase “single consciousness-and-’I’” draws attention to the fact that feeling “I” (“I-consciousness,” “I-feeling,” “self-feeling”) is at the root of one’s subjective being regardless of time level—there is a harmony and almost oneness of subjective being at short and long time levels (“I” at the level of a minute or hour, and “I” at a level of years and decades). The phrase “consciousness-and-’I’” suggests that the uses of “I” and the innumerable strong or faint, and so forth. “I-feeling” or “self-feeling” at levels of seconds, minutes, or so that occur constantly even when there is no interaction with another involves “small (almost infinitesimal) modification, realigning, reenvisaging of things-and-me, of things-and-how-I-see-them” (Consc. IV, Section 2). In other words they are intrinsically connected with the subjective reality of higher values that evolve and keep an identity over years or even decades because they “represent a global adjustment in my single-consciousness-and-’I’ as a whole, as a totality” (Consc. IV, Section 2). Indeed it is because of this harmony, this oneness—what other word is there for this alchemy!—that Participant as Ally—Essentialist Portraiture insists on using paragraph-sized or longer verbatim interview transcripts (often with indications of intonation and other prosodic features) to communicate to the reader the “I-feeling” and “self-feeling” of the participant that evokes the “values higher than average” and “higher aspects” (Consc. I) in her, combined with as well as her other aspects (personal issues, desires, and expectations, etc.).