User:Carl Flygt

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Carl H. Flygt is a New Age theorist notable for the origination of conversation theory, a general theory of language use in social situations. Flygt was born on January 30, 1957 in Nashville, Tennessee, attended preparatory school at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville and university at Vanderbilt University, also in Nashville, where he majored in molecular biology. During these years he became interested in the problem of human consciousness, specifically in the significance for the greater social organization of altered states of consciousness that could be induced by psychoactive agents such as marijuana and LSD.

A year of graduate study in psychobiology at the University of California at Irvine convinced him that the real problem of consciousness was institutional, not biological, and he migrated to Northern California and the San Francisco Bay Area in search of the New Age, made noteworthy by the Stewart Brand's publication of the psychedelic Whole Earth Catalogs. He found work with the Institute of Noetic Sciences, but while there was unable to articulate what he felt must be a clear and simple solution to the production and maintenance of altered states of consciousness by socio-physiological methods.

He settled on a program of individual research including Chinese qigong, which he learned (and continues to study) with the well-known master Peng-Si Yu of Shanghai, China and his wife, Ou-Yang Min of Beijing. He was also impressed by the principles of neurolinguistic programming, by modern natural language philosophy, in particular the approach of John R. Searle at the University of California at Berkeley and by German idealism as exemplified ultimately by the Austro-Croatian clairvoyant and polymath Rudolf Steiner, but originally by the ethics of Immanual Kant, the dialectic of G.W.F. Hegel and the dialogs of Plato before them all.

Flygt's theory of conversation is forthcoming in a book to be published by Lindisfarne Books of Great Barrington, Massachusetts entitled Conversation: A New Theory of Language.