Original Participation

How do you experience the cosmos? Did people in the past
experience such participation differently? Do mystics enjoy a
type of participation that eludes most people? In this latest
Science Set Free podcast, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon
discuss the notion of "original participation", a phrase coined
by The Inkling Owen Barfield, though also known as participation
mystique and the "porous self". They ask what might be made of
this form of consciousness, how people try to engage with it
today in experiences of ecstasy or by reading fiction, and what
can be learnt from what seems to have been a commonplace sense of
life for our ancestors, though can feel like fantasy or madness
in an alienated age.