John Briggs (born 1945) is an American author and co-author of general audience nonfiction books in the fields of holistic physics; aesthetics in the arts; creativity, creative process, and consciousness studies. Emeritus Distinguished CSU Professor of Writing and Aesthetics at Western Connecticut State University, Briggs lives in Granville, Massachusetts, where he has served as a Selectman and a police officer. Themes Holistic approaches to nature, art and indigenous traditions, and reflections on the ways that human consciousness experiences the whole. His early work explored metaphor as a holistic deep structure principle in the arts. More recently, he has linked this metaphor principle to the holistic (holomorphic) mode of consciousness utilized by Native American and other Indigenous cultures. He has advanced the theory that a primal form of ambivalence fulminates at the core of consciousness: the irresolvable paradox between our existence as separate individuals and our existence as inseparable from the whole. His work includes critiques of reductionist assumptions in science, in arts theory, and in anthropocentric thinking generally. Education and career Briggs, son of psychiatrist John Briggs, Sr. and psychologist-musician Muriel Ann Briggs, received his B.A. in 1968 from The College of Letters, Wesleyan University, Honors and cum laude; his M.A. in 1972 in literature from New York University, and his Ph.D. in 1981 in aesthetics and psychology from The Union Institute and University. He taught on the Humanities Faculty at the New School for Social Research from 1973–1984, and was an adjunct professor of English at Brooklyn College (1974) and Mercy College (1974–1987). Since 2003 he has been an on-line scholar in residence at The Institute for Educational Studies, Endicott College Master of Education Program in Integrative Learning (Montessori). Briggs spent 25 years as a faculty member at Western Connecticut State University (WestConn), beginning in 1987 as the Journalism Coordinator for the English Department. He became full professor in 1995, and in 2000 was chosen as one of 12 CSU Distinguished Professors of the four-campus Connecticut State University system. At WestConn he served as English Department co-chair in 2003–2007, was a principal designer of both the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative and Professional Writing and the Department of Writing, Linguistics, and Creative Process, which was split off from the English Department in 2007. From 2004–2008 he served as the senior editor for the national literary magazine, Connecticut Review. Teaching literature, his specialties were the modernist novels of