Towards a Medicine of Higher Consciousness

Consciousness is the new darling of science.

Over the past decade or two, the mystery of how mind and self-awareness arise from matter has become a valid subject of inquiry within the mainstream hard science community.

This isn’t happening due to a spike of interest in spirituality on the part of physicists. It’s because physics itself keeps backing them into the question.

We're Not in Kansas Anymore

Since the time of Galileo, attempts at attaching scientific principles to the phenomenon of consciousness were seen as either meaningless or dangerous - an incursion of spirituality into the gated realm of data and determinism.

Although Quantum theory is already more than a century old, mainstream physics has only recently begun to engage the consciousness question in a serious way. As researchers probe ever more deeply into the nature of matter, they’re finding it harder and harder to rationalize their observations with the prevailing mechanical clockwork model of reality. At the quantum level, matter behaves less like a collection of miniature ping-pong balls colliding in space and more like a cloudy landscape of potentialities and information. As Dorothy famously declared, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Everything we thought we knew about the material world is being challenged and we simply can’t go any farther in the exploration of reality until we come to grips with the nature of consciousness itself.

This marriage of physics and metaphysics is an undeniable move forward for humanity, even if it’s still a rocky relationship. While the spiritual community has eagerly embraced principles of quantum theory, conventional scientific research continues to take a stubbornly reductionist stance, trying to find the matter at the bottom of every phenomenon.

Making Subjectivity Matter

Academic and entrepreneurial interest in the mechanism, or “doorway” of consciousness is at an all-time high, but the actual experience of conscious awareness remains inaccessible to hard science research because it would require breaking one of its foundational tenets - conferring validity on subjective (a.k.a., anecdotal) data.

Such data is not only considered worthless, but potentially dangerous - capable of contaminating the purity of objective (i.e., credible) data. The double-blind placebo controlled trial was created for this purpose and is still considered the gold standard methodology for clinical trials because it filters out all possible observations that might invalidate the objective data being collected - evidence which meets a self-created and internally endorsed standard of legitimacy.

The irony of this is in science attempting to understand a first-person phenomenon while treating subjective experience as its least reliable source of evidence. The content of consciousness is often regarded as an impediment to research rather than a legitimate object of study.

Does Consciousness Have a Compass?

If we agree that consciousness is more than a random phenomenon that emerges when living systems become sufficiently complex, we're naturally moved to ask: what is it for?

Although teleological questions aren’t generally considered integral to conventional scientific inquiry, they’re hard to ignore when the object of study is, in fact, a precondition to the act of study itself. If consciousness possesses an intrinsic purpose—one that can only be recognized from a sufficiently expanded state of awareness—then the level of consciousness being experienced by the researcher might actually be critical to what can be observed, learned, and ultimately understood.

I believe that exploration of higher consciousness is more than a philosophical or spiritual pursuit. It is a legitimate research priority—not only because it may support a putative goal of consciousness itself, but because the research may stand to benefit from increasingly conscious states on the part of the conscious beings conducting it.

The Observer Problem Comes Home

In this moment, science is being called to stretch its boundaries. It has become obvious that any study of consciousness is a study of the phenomenon underlying the very act of investigation itself.

As consciousness operates exclusively within a first-person arena, it follows that research into higher states of consciousness will necessitate interrogating the interiority of individual research subjects.

Consciousness is the incubator of every experiment in which it is being studied. It is the medium in which it—as the object of study—is being cultured. There’s no exit from this labyrinth, except by accessing a higher perspective or dimension with which to survey the problem.

A New Model

The principal challenge in bringing science and consciousness together is finding ways of plumbing the depths of subjective experience for data that can be expressed in concepts and language acceptable to the scientific reader.

My goal is to offer a simple model for formatting data derived from first-person sources to make it useful to the broader field of scientific research. This article is the first in a series that will attempt to bridge scientific and metaphysical concepts by:

i) elaborating a clear topography of the landscape of consciousness including a proposed geometry and quantitative identifiers of states of consciousness,ii) introducing a novel methodology for interrogating subjective conscious experience, and

iii) proposing the use of perceptible shifts in consciousness as a research tool.

Towards a Science of Self-Transcendence

What if consciousness can only be fully understood from within an increasingly conscious state?

The most meaningful question for research is not merely how consciousness works, but whether it can be developed systematically. A mature science of consciousness may ultimately require a corresponding medicine of consciousness: an intervention capable of reliably shifting consciousness so that the resulting changes can be observed, measured and modeled.

Subsequent articles will define aspects of higher consciousness, propose a landscape of conscious experience, situate consciousness within quantum theory, expose the plausibility bias, and explore the requirements of an optimal intervention in terms of suitability for use in a research context.

Coming soon, Part II: Mapping the Landscape of Conscious Experience