Rojcewicz, Peter

Rojcewicz, Peter M.  –

“Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD is an executive education consultant and administrator, teacher, folklorist, scholar, poet, and applied humanities advocate. He has researched and taught international fairy tales, folk and popular beliefs, and cross-cultural manifestations of the mythic imagination. Trained in Folklore and Folk Life, English Literature, Jungian depth psychology, and Eastern Philosophy and Religion, he is an authority on archetypal images and symbols found in the arts, wisdom systems, dreams, and mass media. He is a recipient of the Worcester Poetry Prize and the Allen Ginsburg Prize: Honorable Mention.

Peter held the position of Pacifica’s Provost, Vice President of Academic Affairs, and Accreditation Liaison Officer at Pacifica Graduate Institute, serving on the President’s Executive Leadership Team. He was named Senior Director of Transdisciplinary Social Research. Earlier he served as Chief Academic Officer, Accreditation Liaison Officer, and tenured professor at University of the West; Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty at Antioch University Seattle; Dean of the School of Holistic Studies at John F. Kennedy University; and Professor and Chair of the Department of Liberal Arts at The Juilliard School, where he was Director of a National Endowment of the Arts Challenge Grant ($2M).

Peter earned his doctoral degree in Folklore & Folk Life from the University of Pennsylvania where he received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. His folklore fieldwork and scholarship on the enigmatic “Men in Black” phenomenon is highly sighted in the social science and humanities literature. A long time member of the Columbia University Seminar on Innovations in Education, he has published and lectured on holistic approaches to art, education, and consciousness, focusing on noetic learning modalities that expand the notion of the intellect to include extended sentience and noetic awareness essential to body/mind/spirit integrity.

Visit his blog on Executive Leadership, Educational Management, and various topics related to folklore and folk life, arts education, and depth psychology at peterrphd.com”

SOURCE: LinkedIn

 

Personal website: PeterRphd.com

 

 

 

 

 

Below: Abstract for talk presented in London, 1999

“Beware the Physical in the Material: Imaginalia, Folk Belief and the Eclipse of the Literal

Imaginal phenomena are first and foremost archetypal images, self-originating and autonomous manifestations of the psyche, fundamental ground of mind and nature. Our every idea, perception and bodily sensation is a psychic event existing first as an image. AlI realities physical, social, mythic, religious – are inferred from psychic images. They are the fundamental stuff of consciousness. The continuum of extraordinary imaginal encounters with ETs, fairies, dream figures, angels, ghosts, Men in Black, apparitions and other anomalous entities are archetypal images of ontological and epistemological complexity. Their paradoxical nature is described in folk belief traditions as simultaneously psychic and somatic, physical fact and creative fiction, personal and impersonal. Archetypal images are simultaneously immanent in and between people and transcendent of people. We can never be sure if we invent them according to patterns they set, or they invent us. Any definition of imaginal reality is, therefore, an approximation at best, a metaphor remaining “as-if.” Imaginal encounters help us to recover a mythopoetic vocabulary of the soul.

Imaginalia are nudges by the soul toward developing the capacity for personifying images as real “persons” and assuming an aesthetic perception of reality. Extraordinary encounters with imaginal others returns the psyche/soul to its non-human imaginal ground. Our century has lost vital contact with soul, seeing it as an outdated notion. When we can see deeply through images to realities beyond the literal, we enlarge our imaginative capacities and expand the soul through aesthetic modes of knowing. It is as if the ego must undergo encounters with non-human entities or abductions to otherworlds of the soul where we ourselves are images, in order to help us recover our aesthetic ability to take in the world and see images as true realities and actual powers. The images we create in turn create us. The ways we imagine the world provide us with images by which we view ourselves. As such, encounters with imaginalia are experiences of death. We die to the ego’s illusion of ourself as a literalism of biology and society when we realise that we are multiple personifications of the life of images within us, objectitied images of the imagination. By engaging imaginal persons immanent in all people, things, and events, we realise that the greater part of the soul is outside the body and thereby shatter the illusion of the world as without psychic life. A life lived along the psychic and extrapsychic continuum of imagination avoids spending itself in either unrestrained sensual materialism, or tinker bell-headed spiritualism. Folkloristic, aesthetic, and archetypal perspectives will be used to discuss the movement of consciousness toward imaginal perspectives.”

SMiles Lewis’ review of Day-2 … Otherworld Reality: Exploring the Ontological Status of Imaginal Consciousness (Abstracts and Bios)

 

 

Videos

 

Compelling Art Talk with Peter Rojcewicz PhD (2023)