Metaphors from Alice in Wonderland illustrate firstly the ridiculous ...

It was impossible to comprehend the dynamics and creativity involved in each individual process of
becoming more conscious, but as my awareness of the transformed identity evolved – more
“muchness” – it created an opportunity for personal consciousness and perspective. The essence is
that as “I experienced”, I increasingly knew who “I am”. I experience consciousness through the
interpretation of my five sensory organs, as well as mental activities. Although I could use language
to express what I experienced, I had an “inner knowing” that precedes concepts or words (Luo,
2009).
In addition, I realised that consciousness includes the conscious experience of self-awareness,
preference, emotion, remembering, conceptual thought, inner speech, mental imagery and
exteroception as well as interoception and sensory perception (Farthing, 1992). My subjective and
personal perceptions, discernment and apparitions, whether inside or outside my body, contributed to
my experience of consciousness. My personal consciousness contributed to the collective
consciousness, enabling me to share the unifying awareness that operates within my community.
By identifying the characteristics of consciousness as subjectivity, changeability, intentionality and
selectivity (Farthing, 1992), I recognised its various functions. I experienced that consciousness
defines; it sets the context and adapts by eliminating vagueness, and it assimilates and edits
conscious content to form analogies. I appreciate the creative functions of consciousness.
Conclusion
By my using a variety of visual texts as data and supportive theories to confirm my reasons for
juxtaposing the specific data, the data became saturated and reliable. I stayed connected to the data
and applied juxtaposing to use and guide me towards literature and theories that I otherwise would
not have used to triangulate my experiences and observations for validating my data.
My subjective philosophy is that there is not only one road that will lead to the inner life of the
individual l – the self or the other; therefore, I combined a wide range of interconnected datacollection
and interpretive methods (Ellingson & Ellis, 2008) to discover and explore and to give a
detailed account of my auto-ethnographic journey with Alice from the Underland to the Wonderland
of the UFS‟s renewed institutional Identity.
I was constantly aware of the critiques of AE (Delamont, 2007; Manning, 2007) and questioned the
validity of their claims of egocentric self-indulgence, unethical familiarity, experiential and nonanalytic
personal knowledge. I found these claims to bear value, but prefer to substantiate my labels
with scientific theories and findings (Gobo, 2008; Hoffman, 2000; Polanyi, 1958).
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