Nine Months Into My PhD Journey…An Update
In all honesty, I have found it incredibly difficult to write while juggling school, research projects, and of course, parenting three kids. I don’t even think it’s the challenge of the finite resource of time. It’s more the freedom of creative expression that gets lost in the plethora of checklists and style guidelines and scholarly references.
Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash
Octopuses seem to be all the rage recently, and I’ve found myself pulled into the rabbit holes of their complexity, the mysterious symphony between their semi-autonomous arms with local control centers and central brain. Not to overly identify with an octopus, but the metaphor kind of works for me. I have the academic arm, dizzied by research, swimming more fluidly in a sea of thinkers and experiencers. And then there’s the arm of exploration of the spiritual realm (which of course can’t be contained in an arm), which seems to fire in fits and starts. And then the professional arm, where I am working in a professional capacity with a research institution on scientific research of anomalous phenomena. And then my connector arm, parent and partner and friend. And my purpose arm, trying to figure out how my exploration aligns with some sort of life path (or perhaps this is the central brain trying to symphonically conduct these limbs?). All of these arms, connected and yet independently sensing the world. Camouflaging with the surrounding world, drawing into themselves when called upon. Or perhaps this is just my excuse for the relative hibernation of my creative writing arm. So here I am, quieting the APA style guidelines and turning over a new font in hopes that creative expression will find some life alongside academic investigation.
I think the best place to begin is how far I’ve come. I entered this PhD program in October wanting to study intuition. I believe this focus was rooted in the following: (1) my intuition was strong and I sensed it ripe with potential; (2) I believed there was wisdom to be found in its cultivation; (3) I was fascinated by the gendered aspect of where the edges of intuition met ‘female intuition,’ relegated to an inferior societal rung; and (4) intuition was in many ways the most societally palatable of ‘anomalous phenomena.’ I was compelled by its diversity of enthusiasts, with business schools and Malcolm Gladwell aficionados on one side and parapsychology and spiritualists on the other. I envisioned myself making sense of the expanse of the scenery and shifting the societal zeitgeist to the ‘extended human capacity’ margins.
And then I entered this PhD program, a program that unabashedly explores the breadth of the ‘noetic sciences,’ the far reaches of consciousness and psychedelics, anomalous experiences and ufology (yup, that’s the study of UFOs), religion, philosophy, experiencers, Shamanism, and more. Suddenly, my tepid dipping of the toe into intuition was overrun by extrasensory perceptions and subtle beings. It’s been a fascinating ride. It’s quite a trip to live in one world of what they call ‘high strangeness,’ and another world of parent-teacher meetings, summer camps, cocktails with friends, and hikes in the wilds of British Columbia. And then there are the moments in between, when a curious friend cautiously asks me a question, opening a tender space where the everyday borders of knowing relax a bit. In these moments, my studies give permission to venture to the edges.
So where have I ended up? I am no longer tethered to intuition, not because it does not interest me, but because I see it within a shared space of bridges or thresholds, a tool of unseating what we thought reality might be. For me, intuition, synchronicities, the imaginal, and really all anomalous or paranormal experiences, are not independently significant. I do not see it as my life path to demonstrate veracity of these phenomena, though in my work as a researcher, I am swimming in these waters to develop my sea legs. Rather, I find myself interested in these phenomena as bridges into expanded consciousness. This is reminiscent of Jeffrey Kripal’s work in the Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and The Sacred. He writes, “paranormal phenomena are semiotic or hermeneutical phenomena in the sense that they signal, symbolize, or speak across a “gap” between the conscious, socialized ego and an unconscious or superconscious field.”
I see these experiences as potential breakthroughs into something much larger than our materialist frames can hold. Each time we sense someone far away in need, or when there is a synchronicity too powerful to make rational sense of, or when in a moment we know with total certainty something to be true, we find ourselves encountering a portal into expanded consciousness. And in places where religion is marginalized (let alone mysticism within a religious framework), I see people gravitating towards these anomalous phenomena with the same hopes one imbues in religion. That a moment can transport us, elevate us, connect us, to something simultaneously within and greater than us all.
So this is where I reside these days, fascinated by these portals - researching, observing, and experiencing how they not only expand us in the moment, but help us to live more expansively.
Cool Stuff I’m Thinking About/Working On/Experiencing
RESEARCH. Over the past year, I have been working with IONS on several research projects. One is research into their Noetic Signature Inventory, a tool which helps individuals better understand their noetic capacities unique to them. We have been running some interesting studies on thousands of people who have completed this inventory, finding intriguing results about norms and patterns of people’s signatures.
NERDING OUT. I’ve been fascinated by emerging research on interbrain synchrony. I think there may be clues in these findings that could serve as a bridge towards mainstreaming conversations on interconnectivity and, dare I say it, collective consciousness.
IDENTITY. I took a fabulous course through Morbid Anatomy on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa. If you haven’t read her, she was an incredibly powerful human, most famous for her book Borderlands Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. I have been deeply inspired by her work, particularly on spiritual activism, expounded on in this essay by AnaLouise Keating (also the wonderful instructor in the class). In my next post, I will write more about a hypothesis of mine called ‘subtle fissures,’ and the crossing over of identities as staging ground for the ability to cross between worlds.
EXPERIENCE. I took a course with Jeffery Martin and the Center for the Study of Non-Symbolic Consciousness on fundamental wellbeing, a 6-week course of intensive meditation and positive psychology practices with the aim of transitioning the practitioner along a spectrum of what the program calls fundamental wellbeing. It was an intense, powerful, and overall wonderful experience. I am exploring how to deepen this expansive state over time, and how experiences of anomalous phenomena might affect one’s trajectory along this spectrum of awakening.
