Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

The very notion of culture is an artifact created by bracketing Nature off. Cultures — different or universal — do not exist, any more than Nature does. There are only natures-cultures, and these offer the only possible basis for comparison. As soon as we take practices of mediation as well as practices of purification into account, we discover that the moderns do not separate humans from nonhumans any more than the totally superimpose signs and things.

[…] Absolute relativism presupposes cultures that are separate and incommensurable and cannot be ordered in any hierarchy; there is no use talking about it, since it brackets off Nature. As for cultural relativism, which is more subtle, Nature comes into play, but in order to exist it does not presuppose any scientific work, any society, any construction, any mobilization, any network.

—Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern

The natural method involves seeking consistency and equilibrium among different modes of analysis applied to the study of some mental phenomenon…In the case of dreams, phenomenology, will supply us with first-person reports about how dreams seem, especially how particular dreams seem from the point of view of the person who has the dream.

The mental sciences—psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience—are needed to provide answers to a host of questions that are not answered by how things seem, even if we take how they seem to be as how they really are for the dreamer. The mental sciences will tell us about the objective side of dreams.

—Owen Flanagan, Dreaming Souls

Akali Sikh warrior wearing the distinctive Akali turban, India, 1860. 

The proposed integrative model of existential threat experiences

Daniel Sullivan, Cultural-existential Psychology: The Role of Culture in Suffering and Threat

Vistāra - The Architecture of India Exhibition Catalog The Festival of India, 1986

Willy Schrödter, Commentaries on the Occult Philosophy of Agrippa

Bronze hand used in the worship of Sabazios. Hands decorated with religious symbols were designed to stand in sanctuaries or, like this one, were attached to poles for processional use.

Date: Roman 1st–2nd century AD. Collection: British Museum.

Roberto Assagioli’s Psychosynthesis Star Diagram

A schematic representation of the personality system. 

‘Biological bases’ (such as genes) and ‘external influences’ (such as cultural norms) are inputs to the system. Personality traits are found in the category of ‘basic tendencies’, which are influenced by biological bases, but not external influences. Causal paths are indicated by arrows, and show that, over time, traits interact with the environment to produce ‘characteristic adaptations’ (such as attitudes), and these in turn interact with the situation to produce the output of the system, the ‘objective biography’. The ‘self-concept’ is a subset of characteristic adaptations of particular importance to self theorists. Adapted from McCrae and Costa (1996)