Abstract
In this reflective tribute, I draw on a November 2025 remembrance gathering for Allan Leslie Combs to explore how his scholarship on consciousness lived through his presence, pedagogy, and relationships. The article weaves reflections from students, colleagues, friends, and family to show how Leslie treated consciousness as a living, radiant field and knowledge as participatory. Speakers describe a mentor who walked beside their work, welcoming spiritual, creative, and embodied ways of knowing, while trusting love, humor, and trickster-mischief as legitimate modes of inquiry.
I then turn to my own dissertation research on play consciousness (PlayCS) as a tangible extension of this legacy, tracing how Leslie’s support of poetic and playful writing helped me recognize play as an important way consciousness moves and knows in relationship. In this way, PlayCS functions as a small inheritance from Leslie’s “playground”: an effort to articulate how scholarship might honor the play of consciousness without diluting rigor. I close by framing Leslie’s legacy as an ongoing charge: to tend the luminous field he helped cultivate, where multiple ways of knowing can converse, radiance is practiced as a relational ethic, and each faithfully told story contributes to the larger mystery of which all are a part.
Keywords: consciousness studies, pedagogy, play consciousness (PlayCS), participatory inquiry, integral scholarship
Recommended Citation
Gardner, J. C. (2025). Love Will Get You Further: Allan Leslie Combs and the Legacy of Radiance. Journal of Conscious Evolution, 22(2). https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/cejournal/vol22/iss2/10
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