The present session is the first part of the first meeting of the Depth and Archetypal Psychology course, held monthly in Sydney. This part of the first session, held on 14/9/2019, focuses on the relationship between the capacities of our minds and our ability to apprehend the reality of the external world.

As an animal species, human beings have significant limitations in the capacities of the five senses through which we perceive the world outside. Neurological studies of the brain also suggest that what we can process consciously in any second is, at best, only about 1/25,000 of our sensory input, and in many cases the information received through the five senses is reduced by a factor of around two hundred thousand.

This would mean that the human conscious mind probably apprehends the reality of the world in a form reduced millions of times over; and even within this limited amount, around seventy-five per cent derives from visual information, which occupies approximately twenty-five per cent of the brain.

For this reason, human action in the world is shaped largely through visual data and their symbolic meaning for the mind—a mind focused less on the objective truth of things in the external world than on their practical meaning for us.