Time and Mind: The Journal of Rock Art or Archaeology, Rorschach: Is there Consciousness and Culture More to Entoptics Volume 3—Issue 1 than Meets the Eye? March 2010 pp. 9–28 DOI David Luke 10.2752/175169710X12549020810371 David Luke is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Greenwich, where he teaches the psychology of exceptional human experiences. He has a special interest in the psychology of altered states of consciousness and ostensibly paranormal phenomena, and is President of the Parapsychological Association. He has studied techniques of consciousness alteration from South America to India, from the perspectives of scientists, shamans, and shivaites, and has published extensively on psychology, parapsychology, and psychoactive substances.
[email protected] Abstract The recourse to entopic phenomena as an explanation of certain geometric rock-art imagery has generated considerable debate among archaeologists and anthropologists of consciousness, and even among neuropsychologists, to a lesser degree. Surprisingly little has been discussed concerning the philosophical location of this debate in relation to the mind- body problem of consciousness, however, and a new perspective presented here on the experience of form constants challenges current thinking. Considering the neuropsychological-shamanistic theory of Paleolithic rock art in light of visionary experiences among both the blind and the sighted, and under different states of altered consciousness, an argument is presented that form constants are not actually entopic as they are currently defined, that is, made within the eye and the visual cortex. It is suggested that the entoptic rock-art model is swayed by philosophical biases that force theorists to see what they want to see, somewhat like a Rorschach ink blot test, when, rather, it actually appears that there may be more to entoptics than meets the eye.