The New Alexandria Archive

The New Alexandria archive is a repository for published works that contribute to the standing body of emergent language. Scholars worldwide are currently identifying trends of new language, narrative, myth and metaphor, which are part of transformational patterns within the global system. This developing collection exemplifies significant works documenting these trends and their conditions.

Filters and Reflections
Perspectives on Reality
Zachary Jones, Brenda Dunne, Elissa Hoeger, Robert Jahn, editors
ICRL Press, NJ. 2009

We respectfully submit this recent publication by the ICRL, a friend of our site.

From the pen of the ancient Roman poet Lucretius Caro, to the banner of the 17th-century woodcut on the front cover, and from the traditions of some Native American cultures - we are advised that when confronting the unexplained it is best to consider it from several different perspectives.

More recently, a similar concept was proposed in a 2004 essay by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne, entitled "Sensors, Filters, and the Source of Reality." Their thesis, that consciousness constructs its reality by ordering the information it derives from the external world through an array of physiological, psychological, and cultural filters, has now been considered by nineteen distinguished scholars who here present their commentaries from a broad spectrum of professional and personal perspectives.

The authors' viewpoints are drawn from such diverse backgrounds as art, Buddhism, evolutionary biology, fantasy, out-of-body experiences, philosophy, physics, psychology, semiotics, and systems engineering, among others, and each contribution offers a unique and fascinating glimpse of how the filters of consciousness bear on the construction of experience and its style of representation.

Read more, including the table of contents, here.

Mushrooms, Russia and History
Valentina Pavlovna Wasson
and R.Gordon Wasson
Pantheon Books, New York. 1957

This digital edition was scanned from the original and hand corrected by Igor Dolgov, Zachary Jones, and Greg Golden, with thanks to a generous contributor.