Persistent non-symbolic experiences (PNSE) have been reported for millennia and are generally attributed to spiritual and religious contexts, although atheists and agnostics also report them. Popular terms for them include: nondual awareness, enlightenment, mystical experiences, peak experiences, transcendental experience, the peace that passeth understanding, unity consciousness, union with God, and so forth. Most are temporary, but some individuals report a persistent form of them.  For over a decade, our research project has sought to map this experience in thousands of adults. Methods used included long semi-structured interviews, a wide variety of gold standard psychometric measures, physiological measurement, and experimentation. Five core, consistent categories of change were uncovered: sense-of-self, cognition, emotion, perception, and memory. Participants’ reports formed clusters in which the types of change in each of these categories were consistent. Multiple clusters were uncovered that formed a range of types of possible PNSE experiences.

Have you ever had that momentary sense of the world coming to a standstill, where you feel but a tiny part of some grand and yet inscrutable vastness. This is... Read More

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Georgia Parkin and Charlotte Lorimer are the co-hosts of The Figure, a podcast in which they talk about three figures – a person, a number and an image. This project... Read More

To showcase the utility of new technologies for spiritual development and transformative education we offer a virtual reality workshop called Death is Fake News, which is based on a conceptual... Read More

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