ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE - NURSING

Alternative Medicine - Nursing

Alternative Medicine - Nursing

Nick, a single, 25-year-old African American man, suddenly started crying and blurted out that he was very depressed and was thinking about a suicide attempt he had made when he felt this way as a teenager. His doctor referred him for a psychiatric evaluation. Nick is tall, bearded, muscular, and handsome. He is meticulously dressed in a white suit and has a rose in his lapel.

Much of today's research into consciousness focuses on those aspects that have some sort of obvious anchoring in the physical brain, including the fields of neurophysiology, biological psychiatry, and neuroscience. While there seems to be an uneasy consensus that consciousness (or the mind) cannot be fully reduced to physical systems (or the brain), there is as yet no widespread agreement as to their exact relation ("the hard problem"). This article begins by attempting to provide a compendium of those aspects from the "mind" side of the equation that need to be brought to the integrative table.

Integral Psychology (Wilber, 2000b) compared and contrasted over one hundred developmental psychologists--West and East, ancient and modern--and from this comparison a "mater template" was created of the full range of human consciousness, using each system to fill in any gaps left by the others. This master template, although a simple heuristic device and not a reading of the "way things are," suggests a "full-spectrum catalog" of the types and modes of consciousness available to men and women. This catalog might therefore prove useful as we seek a "brain-mind" theory that does justice to both sides of the equation--the brain and the mind--because what follows can reasonably be expected to cover much of the "mind" aspects that should be included, along with the "brain" aspects derived from neuroscience, in order to arrive at any sort of sturdy and comprehensive model of consciousness.After outlining this "full-spectrum" catalog of mind, I will suggest my own model for fitting mind with brain, culture, and social systems. In other words, I will summarize one version of a more comprehensive or integral theory of consciousness, which combines the full-spectrum mind catalog (or master template) with current neuroscience, brain research, and cultural and social factors, all of which seem to play a crucial role in consciousness.

Nonetheless, all of these various codifications of the developmental levels appear to be simply different snapshots taken from various angles, using different cameras, ...