Introduction: Locating Time, Consciousness and Writing and the Work of Peter Malekin

Abstract

This book contains a series of responses to the work of Peter Malekin as both scholar and teacher. These responses come from former students, from colleagues and from scholars who knew him only from his publications. The wide range of writing collected here reflects the wide range of Malekin’s interests, yet there was a coherent intellectual vision underlying all his work. We might state the core of that vision, in Malekin’s own words, as “the limitations of discursive intelligence are not the limitations of the mind”.1 What he sought to imply with this negative formulation is the reality and the significance of levels of the mind which are empty and unconditioned, “ungrounded, noncontingent consciousness”2. The philosopher WT Stace named the conscious experience of this level of mind as pure consciousness. This level of mind is notoriously difficult to write about, as Malekin points out in the introduction to his translation of Jacob Boehme: “... polarities, even metaphorical polarities like depth versus surface, are necessary for the process of reasoning and the functioning of language, even though they are ultimately invalid. When the mind is surprised by deeper experience it is still, and does not meddle with interpretations.” (3) Nevertheless, we can say some things about this kind of “deeper” experience. Pure consciousness is devoid of empirical content. In the terminology of philosophy of mind, it is without intentional states. This means that the normal structure of experience, with a subject, object and process of perception, is suspended. More accurately pure consciousness is prior to the usual waking structure of experience— that is, the experience of being a self amidst a world of objects, whether these are objects of perception or the usual mental content of ideas, feelings and thoughts. The mind is silent and empty and not directed towards anything. This also means that pure consciousness is prior to all the activities of mind that comprise our sense of self, the sense of being a separate, isolated ego. As Plotinus describes it, it is a state in which “you are your finite self no longer”.3 Using Plotinian terminology, we might describe this as reaching into noetic levels of the mind.