Threshold Experiences

“In the beginning” so goes many a great story. These familiar words beckon us across a threshold, often transporting us into unknown worlds and novel experiences. So too our lives are filled with many such “beginnings” – new jobs, relationships, adventures, and even the inception of life itself. Each of these “threshold experiences” not only introduces us to new domains, but also draws us into the realities of archetypal fields. Learning to creatively interact with these prefigured, a priori fields can allow us rich access to sources of eternal wisdom. Jungian analyst Michael Conforti’s examination of the initial clinical interview as a “threshold experience” shows that the same archetypal processes responsible for the generation of life itself also shape patient- therapist relationships, creating fascinating, highly patterned dynamics. These powerful fields structure events so that core issues in clients’, and often even therapists’, lives are re-enacted in the therapeutic setting, with remarkable fidelity to the archetypal field within which each is embedded. Conforti’s deft weaving together of psychological and scientific theory, dream analysis, and clinical vignettes elucidates the ways that the psyche entrains both client and therapist into a synchronized pattern. An understanding of the role of the Self in this process reveals the profound meaning and purpose that can be gleaned from careful attention to the communications occurring during the early phase of the therapeutic dialogue. Drawing from the fields of Jungian psychology, biology, quantum physics, and the new sciences, the author provides a unique lens for viewing the central archetypal dynamics operating within an individual life. His findings demonstrate how past experiences not only shape the initial stages of therapy, but also allow us to understand the future trajectory of treatment. This important study confirms C.G. Jung’s assertion of the need for an interdisciplinary perspective if we are to truly comprehend the workings of the psyche.

Beyond the Threshold is the first book to seriously consider the interplay between traditional world religions and metaphysical experiences in exploring the timeless question of what happens when we die. Christopher M. Moreman examines and compares the beliefs and practices of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, as well as psychic phenomena such as mediums and near-death experiences. While ultimately the afterlife remains unknowable, Moreman's unique, in-depth exploration of both beliefs and experiences can help readers reach their own understanding of the afterlife and how to live.

'A wild, sleazy, drug-filled odyssey ... Doyle's maverick novel deserves the accolades coming its way' Independent 'The best work to date from a writer who gets better and better with each release' Irish Indepdendent 'A masterclass in what not to do' New Statesman 'His best book so far: riddling, irreverent, fearless' TLS Rob has spent most of his confusing adult life wandering, writing, and imbibing literature and narcotics in equally vast doses. Now, stranded between reckless youth and middle age, between exaltation and despair, his travels have acquired a de facto purpose: the immemorial quest for transcendent meaning. On a lurid pilgrimage for cheap thrills and universal truth, Doyle's narrator takes us from the menacing peripheries of Paris to the drug-fuelled clubland of Berlin, from art festivals to sun-kissed islands, through metaphysical awakenings in Asia and the brink of destruction in Europe, into the shattering revelations brought on by the psychedelic DMT. A dazzling, intimate, and profound celebration of art and ageing, sex and desire, the limits of thought and the extremes of sensation, Threshold confirms Doyle as one of the most original writers in contemporary literature.

‘There is a physical world, which we all accept as real, but there is also a spiritual world, which interpenetrates this material world and is its cause and foundation. Between these two worlds exists a threshold that can be felt, seen clairvoyantly, traversed and passed through by anyone with a real desire to do so... At this threshold there is a guardian, whose task is to stop humans from passing across it unprepared...’ – From the Introduction Based on first-hand knowledge, Are Thoresen offers insights into the meaning of the threshold to the spiritual world. He describes his own experiences in encountering this threshold and going beyond it. But there are many thresholds to the spiritual world, he says, and many ways to pass them – as there are many aspects to the ‘guardian of the threshold’ and versions of the so-called ‘animals at the threshold’. The worlds beyond, too, have a variety of different constructions – or, as the Bible says: ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions’. The author describes the methods and techniques for opening the spiritual sense organs required to cross the threshold, and clarifies the differences between Imagination (seeing spiritual ‘pictures’), Inspiration (understanding those pictures) and Intuition (living ‘inside’ the spiritual reality). Structuring the book on his own biography, Thoresen conveys many of the lessons he has learnt through decades of familiarity with the invisible dimensions. However, he warns that there is only one good reason to attempt to cross the threshold, and that is to serve God and humanity in the name of love. If we do it out of curiosity, or to enhance our personal development, it would be better not to try.

"Threshold Concepts in Practice brings together fifty researchers from sixteen countries and a wide variety of disciplines to analyse their teaching practice, and the learning experiences of their students, through the lens of the Threshold Concepts Framework. In any discipline, there are certain concepts – the ‘jewels in the curriculum’ – whose acquisition is akin to passing through a portal. Learners enter new conceptual (and often affective) territory. Previously inaccessible ways of thinking or practising come into view, without which they cannot progress, and which offer a transformed internal view of subject landscape, or even world view. These conceptual gateways are integrative, exposing the previously hidden interrelatedness of ideas, and are irreversible. However they frequently present troublesome knowledge and are often points at which students become stuck. Difficulty in understanding may leave the learner in a ‘liminal’ state of transition, a ‘betwixt and between’ space of knowing and not knowing, where understanding can approximate to a form of mimicry. Learners navigating such spaces report a sense of uncertainty, ambiguity, paradox, anxiety, even chaos. The liminal space may equally be one of awe and wonderment. Thresholds research identifies these spaces as key transformational points, crucial to the learner’s development but where they can oscillate and remain for considerable periods. These spaces require not only conceptual but ontological and discursive shifts. This volume, the fourth in a tetralogy on Threshold Concepts, discusses student experiences, and the curriculum interventions of their teachers, in a range of disciplines and professional practices including medicine, law, engineering, architecture and military education. Cover image: Detail from ‘Eve offering the apple to Adam in the Garden of Eden and the serpent’ c.1520–25. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553). Bridgeman Images. All rights reserved.

Between Urban Topographies and Political Spaces: Threshold Experiences uses the term “threshold” as a means to understand the relationship between Self and Other, as well as relationships between different cultures. The concept of “threshold” defines the relationship between inside and outside not in oppositional terms, but as complementaries. This book discusses the cultural and social “border areas” of modernity, which are to be understood not as “zones” in a territorial sense, but as “spaces in between” in which different languages and cultures operate. The essays in Between Urban Topographies and Political Spaces identify the dimension in urban topographies and political spaces where we are able to locate paradigmatic experiences of thresholds. Because these spaces are characterized by contradictions, conflicts, and aporias, we propose to rethink those hermeneutic categories that imply a sharp opposition between inside and outside. This means that the theoretical definition of threshold put forward in these essays—whether applied to history, philosophy, law, art, or cultural studies—embodies new juridical and political stances.

This book explores the relationship between architecture and philosophy through a discussion on threshold spaces linking public space with publicly accessible buildings. It explores the connection between exterior and interior and how this creates and affects interactions between people and the social dynamics of the city. Building on an existing body of literature, the book engages with critical philosophy and discusses how it can be applied to architecture. In a similar vein to Walter Benjamin’s descriptions of the Parisian Arcades in the nineteenth century, the book identifies the conditions under which thresholds reveal and impact social life. It utilises a wide range of illustrated international case studies from architects in Japan, Norway, Finland, France, Portugal, Italy, the USA, Australia, Mexico, and Brazil. Within the examples, thresholds become enhancers of social interactions and highlight broader socio-political contexts in public and private space. Architecture of Threshold Spaces is an enlightening contribution to knowledge on contemporary architecture, politics and philosophy for students, academics, and architects.

In the twenty years since Ray Land and Erik Meyer published their first paper on Threshold Concepts, there has been a steady stream of papers mulling over their original suggestions that learning, far from proceeding in an orderly fashion, is instead a process of struggle – perhaps alienation and confusion – that puts students in a troublesome liminal ‘in-between’ state. As their understanding develops, liminality gives way to transformational insight whereby a whole field of study comes, often quite abruptly, into focus. There is a gain but often also a loss: in this new world, old certainties, assumptions and even aspects of our identity can be left by the wayside. Threshold Concepts in the Moment is the sixth collection in the series on the subject of Threshold Concepts, following the 8th Biennial Conference held in 2021, anchored at London’s UCL but running online across the world. Its contributors, who range from ‘old hands’ to new members of the community finding their feet, mull over the insights of the threshold concepts framework in higher education, scrutinise their own fields of study, explore the implications of liminality for pedagogy and becoming professional practitioners, and consider the broad implications for pedagogy of factoring in the troublesomeness of knowledge and learning.

It has long been a matter of concern to teachers in higher education why certain students ‘get stuck’ at particular points in the curriculum whilst others grasp concepts with comparative ease. What accounts for this variation in student performance and, more importantly, how can teachers change their teaching and courses to help students overcome such barriers? This book examines the difficulties of student learning and offers advice on how to overcome them through course design, assessment practice and teaching methods. It also provides innovative case material from a wide range of institutions and disciplines, including the social sciences, the humanities, the sciences and economics.

What Our Last Words Reveal About Life, Death, and the Afterlife A person’s end-of-life words often take on an eerie significance, giving tantalizing clues about the ultimate fate of the human soul. Until now, however, no author has systematically studied end-of-life communication by using examples from ordinary people. When her father became terminally ill with cancer, author Lisa Smartt began transcribing his conversations and noticed that his personality underwent inexplicable changes. Smartt’s father, once a skeptical man with a secular worldview, developed a deeply spiritual outlook in his final days — a change reflected in his language. Baffled and intrigued, Smartt began to investigate what other people have said while nearing death, collecting more than one hundred case studies through interviews and transcripts. In this groundbreaking and insightful book, Smartt shows how the language of the dying can point the way to a transcendent world beyond our own.