A Thank-You Gift to My Dad: Illustrations Based on Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker

This essay reflects on a series of etchings created as a personal tribute to my father, Allan Leslie Combs, and inspired by Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. Blending memoir, art, and cosmological imagination, the article explores creative gratitude, spiritual vision in science fiction, and the connection between art and consciousness. Keywords: Allan Leslie Combs, Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, consciousness and creativit

The Aperspectival Playfulness of Allan Leslie Combs

This commemorative article reflects on the work of the late Dr. Allan Leslie Combs, a pioneering scholar in consciousness studies and an influential mentor. The essay argues that his scholarly writing, characterized by profound openness, heartfelt compassion, and sharp wit, represents an embodiment of the integral consciousness he writes about. Through a close reading of his essays and a personal reflection on his mentorship, the article connects his playful style to Jean Gebser’s concept of aperspectival consciousness and frames his humor within Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of divine “play” (lila), concluding that, for Combs, scholarship is an embodied practice and his manner is a sign of deep developmental attainment. Keywords: Allan Combs, consciousness studies, integral consciousness, aperspectival playfulness, Jean Gebser, Sri Aurobindo, mentorshi

Neural Mechanisms Underlying Jung’s Active Imagination: A Review and Hypothesis

Active imagination is a key technique of Jungian analysis. Despite its centrality, and its potential importance beyond Jungian psychology to the area of systems neuroscience, psychology, and consciousness studies, there are no known neurological mechanisms underlying this psychological phenomenon. There is a history of using the types of mental imagery used in active imagination to explore consciousness. The development and use of active imagination is briefly reviewed, and a case is developed that the neurology underlying active imagination would be fruitfully explored by considering it a special case of mystical experience. Active imagination primarily uses the right hemisphere processing of symbol and metaphor, just as mystical experiences do. A hypothesis is presented that active imagination is a left hemisphere, conscious function, communicating with unconscious functions located in the right hemisphere. Keywords: active imagination, neuroscience, Carl Gustav Jung, mystical experience, neural mechanism, brain hemispheres, split brai

What Is Happening In the World Today and Why: Humanity’s Evolving Consciousness and The Role of Archetypal Energies as Guides During An Unfolding

What is happening in the world today and why? Humanity is evolving its consciousness at individual and collective levels. Given these seemingly tumultuous times, as of this writing (January 2026), to make such a statement may sound like a strange thing to say. However, I suggest that if you are alive today and if you are reading these words, these are the very times for which you were born—to assist Humanity as it evolves its consciousness with your unique gifts, whatever they may be. That is, this period of our individual and collective human being-ness may be characterized as an unfolding period of weeding out and alignment with the essence of Humanity’s evolving consciousness. This perspective underlies the essence of what is presented in this article

CIIS Dissertation Abstracts 2024-2025

This compilation of 69 dissertation abstracts reflects the exciting research completed by the 2024-2025 graduates from PhD programs in the School of Consciousness and Transformation and the Clinical Psychology Doctorate (PsyD) in the School of Professional Psychology and Health at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). The original and impactful doctoral research presented here spans psychedelic studies and mental health; embodied approaches to healing and trauma; explorations of social justice, identity, and lived experience; ecological awareness and environmental renewal; spiritual and transpersonal transformation; and the evolving dynamics of digital life, culture, and relationships, and so much more.https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/dissertation-abstracts/1002/thumbnail.jp

The Evolution of Self-Awareness in Conscious Organisms

Self-awareness in conscious organisms remains an enduring puzzle for philosophers and neuroscientists. This paper proposes a tripartite evolutionary model tracing its emergence through three sequential types: the sensory self (primitive egocentric, valence-tagged awareness of sensory states), the bodily self (external objectification of the body as a distinct entity, evidenced by mirror self-recognition in select species), and the cognitive self (internal objectification of the mind enabling recursive self-transformation). Adopting a monist framework, the model treats consciousness as the biological substrate of delayed neural apperception (the “Delayed Present”), within which selves emerge as increasingly sophisticated models. It distinguishes non-human metacognition—implicit, online regulation—from human autopraxis, an explicit form of self-teaching that accesses long-baseline patterns of behavior and intervenes on them to restructure cognition and behavior. This qualitative leap is evidenced by exponential cognitive-behavioral hybridization (CBH), quantified via an H-index that scores artifacts across three domains (material, conceptual, and functional hybridization), in stark contrast to the static, non-ratcheting tool behaviors observed in non-humans. Neurologically, autopraxis arises from the unique expansion of the human prefrontal cortex within the default mode network, integrated with disproportionate cerebellar specialization for hierarchical sequence processing, and propelled by the Pandora complex—a compulsive motivational drive to pursue self-generated imaginative possibilities across extended temporal horizons. Comparative anatomy shows that convergent intelligences in non-human animals lack this full cerebello-prefrontal-default mode circuitry and its dopaminergic amplification, explaining the absence of generational technological escalation elsewhere. The model brackets the philosophical “hard problem” of consciousness to focus on the evolutionarily tractable question of how recursive self-modeling emerged, offering a falsifiable taxonomy for animal self-awareness claims and highlighting the cerebello-prefrontal loop and its motivational drivers as key targets for future research. Current evidence indicates that the hominin lineage, uniquely via autopraxis and the Pandora complex, developed the capacity to increasingly shape its own cognitive and material future. Keywords: self-awareness, consciousness evolution, autopraxis, cognitive-behavioral hybridization, cerebellum, default mode network, Pandora complex, cumulative cultur

Embodied Transcendence: Psychedelics and the Evolution of Moral Abstraction

This paper explores the role of psychedelics in the context of evolutionary brain development and the conceptual capacity for moral realism. Drawing on theories from evolutionary anthropology, neuroscience, and moral philosophy, the first part provides a brief overview of human evolution and brain expansion. From here, recent empirical data from the neurosciences is assessed on the effect psychedelics have on the brain, along with speculations on the role of psychedelics in our hominoid evolutionary history—specifically, the capacity for phenomenologically rich, conscious, subjective experiences that are incredibly vivid and real. This imaginative capacity for transcendence and disembodiment could enable the realization of new forms of abstract, absolute, and perfect concepts. The influence of epigenetic neurogenesis may have enabled our brain to expand and function as it does now, with its complex neural structures that facilitate conceptualization, visualization, association, and categorization, allowing for more advanced structures of vocalized noises, such as syntax and eventually, meaning. Finally, the concept of moral realism is analyzed within the framework of the theories outlined in the first part and demonstrates how it may have evolved. The claim is that psychedelic use and the psychedelic experience could have created this abstract moral concept, which would then be encoded in our collective consciousness over evolutionary time. Keywords: human evolution, brain expansion, psychedelics, transcendence, abstract concepts, moral realis

Allan Leslie Combs: Celebrating the Life of a Trickster and Pioneer in Consciousness Studies

The Journal of Conscious Evolution (JCE) is a peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to exploring consciousness, conscious evolution, and transdisciplinary inquiry as they relate to human growth, transformation, and planetary well-being. Originally founded by Allan Leslie Combs (1942-2025), Professor Emeritus at CIIS, JCE highlights outstanding work from both students and professional scholars around the world. A distinguished author, teacher, and mentor, Combs devoted himself to the study of consciousness, authoring over 250 publications on consciousness and the brain, including Synchronicity, The Radiance of Being (which won the 1996 best book award from the Scientific and Medical Network) and Consciousness Explained Better. He founded the Society for Consciousness Studies and served on the faculties of several graduate programs, most recently as professor and director of the CIIS Center for Consciousness Studies in the Transformative Studies Department (TSD). Known widely for his exemplary and wide-ranging scholarship on consciousness, excellence in teaching, and mentorship of young scholars, Combs was a beloved teacher, mentor, and friend, whose magnanimous presence united diverse communities, as embodied in his deep understanding of several fields, making him what he called a “perennial philosopher.” To celebrate the life and legacy of Allan Leslie Combs, the editors of JCE issued a call for papers relating to the life, legacy, and scholarship of Combs. The submissions in this special issue of JCE explore and reveal impacts from Combs on themes related to JCE and Combs’s own research interests. A variety of topics are explored and expressed through letters, poems, visual art, and essays. Please enjoy this celebration of Combs\u27s life and ideas

BOOK REVIEW Processing Reality: Finding Meaning in Death, Psychedelics and Sobriety, by John H. Buchanan

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In This Issue of IJTS

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