THE TWO TIERS OF CONSCIOUSNESS:

A Physiological Paradigm

Collaborations: Joan & Ralph

We began our collaboration three years ago when we assembled the initial Guidebook.  We combined the text from Ralph’s writing on the brain and consciousness with his poems and Joan’s recent art.  After we repeated this collaboration in our present book, The Two Tiers of Consciousness, we decided to explore more general ways of combining text, poetry and art.

This book is a collaboration of text and poems by Ralph Margolies-Kiernan with original art created by Joan Margolies-Kiernan.  It has 138 pages that are organized into 16 chapters and include 20 poems and 29 works of art.  It outlines a physiological paradigm as a substrate for a behavioral conception of consciousness that impacts much of what we have previously taken for granted in psychology.  It changes our understanding of thinking processes, perceptual explorations and the affects involved in emotion.  It introduces a new aspect of consciousness, the perceptual tier, as the unvoiced substrate of experience that underlies everything we think and do.

Peek inside