ABSTRACT
Damasio (1994) believes that individuals can represent anything without externalizing it and to represent something is to form some kind of image, concrete or abstract, of that thing. If this is so, then images must be formed from memory traces of sensory experience - what I call 'experience through association'. My suggestion is that we are all able to experience what things would be like because we have images portrayed to us continuously through, for example, the media. Seeing images and having some relatedness to them through the media can result in experience through association. This could be called indirect experience, but the image is so vivid, that an individual can construe it [albeit from their own frame of reference], and thus have comportment toward any situation or phenomena. Experience through association can, I believe, be acquired through other channels. When my
participants began the Course, they had perceptions of it and the accuracy of these perceptions depended a great deal upon the source of the experience through association. Sometimes they gained their perceptions from mothers who had been nurses, or from traditionally trained nurses with whom they worked in nursing homes. The senses are fed information from several differing perspectives and seeing these other aspects or dimensions of nursing and the Course, provides other 'partial perceptions' which then help the Course to manifest itself in consciousness. According to Kelly (p50) constructs may not change until an individual is exposed to a similar event or experience which forces a modification of the construct. But it appears that an individual may choose to continue to use old constructs, even if they have been exposed to more recent similar events or experiences - thus their perceptions of nursing remain tainted by traditional images. Dasein comports itself towards something possible - it anticipates a 'potentiality for Being' (Heidegger, p306) which I think, suggests that the individual is capable of adapting to unexpected situations despite using old constructs;
Even in expecting, one leaps away from the possible and gets a foothold in the actual.
