Hi, my name is James and I write under the pseudonym StillJustJames. Why do I do that? Because I get a giggle from some readers, others take it as an acknowledgement that my meditation practice over 65 years has had no effect, still others take it as my wanting to hide something about myself, and rarely, one or two actually read it right. It's not a game that I am playing, it involves an insight that I had at some point in my life, that most of what we think we know is constrained by our cognitive frame. A cognitive frame, as I have defined it, is like a 'worldview,' but that sounds so expansive – "Wow! A view of the whole world!" – and what I am pointing to is, in fact, that our view is so limited, constrained by what we have been inculcated and enculturated with. This is why I use the image of a painting in its frame. While viewing a painting, our eyes stop at the inner edge of the frame, and we rarely notice the wall it is hung on. Sometimes, our limitations are even more severe, as if we are living in a silo underground with no way out.
I have a PhD in philosophy. My primary focus is on advanced meditation practices, especially in Tibetan Buddhism, Consciousness, and scientific paradigms, especially the cognitive framing within which they are developed. Now, I said "primary focus" and it reads like I am all over the place – meditation, Buddhism, consciousness, and science. The truth is that I do not recognize the foundational delimitations that see them as different subjects.
The goal of my work is to promote an unconstrained science founded upon an inclusive cognitive frame that allows us to go beyond the inherent limitations of our current frame of mechanical materialism. This frame is the reason that we see ourselves as a collection of mechanisms, with some kind of dualistic constitution of matter and spirit, or mind and brain, all of which is subject to a cognitive stance that can only be either objective or subjective. To advance that goal, I developed a novel paradigm for understanding ourselves and our world, which I call Responsive Naturing. The original genesis for this paradigm was my meditative and contemplative practice using a singular meditation technique called Great Responsiveness Meditation that involves a foundational 'turning around' of sound and hearing. Unlike so many others who are concerned by the limitations of mechanical materialism and work towards a more inclusive paradigm – while leaving the fundamental questions of consciousness, time, space, and gravitation as they are – I have also developed a complete foundation for my Responsive Naturing, which I call the Theory of Gravitation Only. It consists of a fully developed and necessary role for cognizance, rather than trying to find a place and origin for the abstraction called 'consciousness;' the replacement of causality with responsive naturing; the non-existence of both time and space, these being merely conventions; and the fundamental activity of gravitation that fundamentally is the activity behind all of these novel ideas.
I strongly believe that only by changing how we think about our problems, how we see ourselves, and how we relate to each other and our shared world, will we be able to overcome the extreme calamities that we face today. We can't fix problems with the old way of thinking and acting that caused those problems to begin with.
My dissertation, titled "There is a Way of Seeing the World Different," is on the subject of 'Biphasic Perception' and focuses on how this structure, and the absence or failure of the second phase, explains so many open questions about perception. And yes, that title is like my pseudonym – it instigates a perceptual process that elicits several results, depending on the reader. Some examples of how these two phases of perception explain open questions are: why we see fluid motion when we watch films and videos, including why we only see fluidity at a frame rate of 20 fps or greater; the difference between thinking, which is slow and requires language, and reasoning, which is extremely fast and does not use language, and how this can be; and they even explain why our early modern human ancestors used a particular painting technique as long ago as 32,000 years to induce an actual experience of motion in some of their cave paintings. Study of this technique has led to scientific discussion of the "prehistory of cinema," but without an explanation for how it worked, which I present a solution for in my dissertation. As well, I have had a 30 year career in Software Design, originally focused on automated software development, during which I was first confronted with the enigma of human creativity, which is unsolvable from within our current cognitive frame. I was a speaker at The 30th Annual Science of Consciousness Conference held in Tucson, Arizona, April 22-27, 2024, where I introduced this Paradigm of Responsive Naturing and Biphasic Perception.
If you would like to contact me directly, you can email me:james@stilljustjames.com