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Spiritual experience with Jessica Corneille
86 Plays1 month ago
Welcome to another episode of “Imagine an apple”!
In this episode, we tackle the issue of spiritual experience.
How do these vary between individuals, and how do they vary between human cultures?
Twitter: @imagine_apple @SurenVynn @frabcus
Timestamps:
01:40 What are spiritual experiences?
03:30 Oneness with the Universe
05:30 Nondual experience with Vynn
08:20 Rejection from life goals triggering nondual experience
09:30 Jessica’s move to Madrid and starting new job
10:49 Lucid dreaming
14:01 Hearing voices
19:20 Changing perceptions of reality
20:15 Scales of enlightenment experience
21:00 What were you reading?
22:02 Alan Watts and Buddhist Koans
23:30 Effing the ineffable
25:28 “I am God!”
27:27 The experience of love
30:15 How do you live day to day?
34:26 Psychedelics
35:35 Sense of self
38:15 Research on spiritual experience
41:15 Neurophenomenology
43:00 Mental health disorders associated with spiritual experiences
44:05 Vocabulary around mental experience
45:00 EPRC Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium
45:50 Kundalini Awakenings
48:40 Wrapping up
49:00 Can you recognize another?
Theme written, performed and recorded by @MJPiercello
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:00
Speaker
everything around me felt that it was breathing or pervading this new life energy. um So it felt as though there was a benevolence or an intelligence permeating the universe or at the the basis of the universe and I i experienced an incredible sense of ah unconditional love and oneness with everything and everyone around me.
00:00:32
Speaker
Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of Imagine an Apple with Vin and Francis. And today we've got Jessica to talk about spiritual experiences. Welcome to the show, Jessica. Thanks for having me.
Discussion on Visual Imagination and Aphantasia
00:00:50
Speaker
Right. So can you Imagine an Apple and what is that like for you? and who I love this question. I've been listening to some of your episodes and it's a good one.
00:01:01
Speaker
How would I imagine an apple? i've In my mind's eye right now, I'm seeing a green apple on a table and on a black table. So it's very much visual. I don't have aphantasia like yourself, Frances. I believe you you mentioned that in a previous episode, yeah.
00:01:21
Speaker
Cool. So looks like we're dealing with a fantastic person here. It also happens to have the ex the extra ability of how entering into spiritual experiences.
Profound Spiritual Experience and Perception Change
00:01:32
Speaker
So what does that feel like? What does it feel to have a spiritual experience? Can you talk us through that?
00:01:39
Speaker
Well, I would say that I've had multiple interesting experiences in my life, but the main one that really changed everything was some years ago, and it completely changed everything, my perception of the world, my behavior with people, and the way I just experienced my day-to-day life.
00:02:05
Speaker
Perhaps I'll go into that one because it's the most interesting. And then but there have been a number of different experiences that one might call spiritual or altered states experiences that I've experienced. Yeah. So I'll just jump right in. I mean, it's hard to kind of talk about this experience with words because you know by their very nature, they're ineffable. So it's very hard to use words to describe them, but I always try to the best of my ability.
00:02:34
Speaker
but um You know, in summary, around eight years ago, I was in Madrid. I had just moved countries and I, ah in a nutshell, and it seems trivial to say it this way, but I woke up one morning and when I opened my eyes, I ah i woke up to a new reality in many ways. So I had had a very profound lucid dream the night before. And when I woke up from that lucid dream and to a new day, I just, everything was completely different. My perception of life changed from then on.
00:03:03
Speaker
and eight eight years or so down the line and I'm still kind of living off that wave, that shift that occurred to me all those years ago. What happened is I opened my eyes and everything around me felt that it was breathing or pervading this new life energy. um So it felt as though there was a benevolence or an intelligence permeating the universe or at the the basis of the universe. And I i experienced an incredible sense of ah unconditional love and oneness with everything and everyone around me, including inanimate objects. I felt intuitively that there was a ah sort of spiritual essence or ah
00:03:47
Speaker
quality a a life quality to everything around me, including those inanimate objects. And I just had this incredible sense of gratitude flow over me and I cried for, I mean, it could have been a few minutes, it could have been a few hours, I don't know, because i time completely shifted in that and that's space, in that state. And it was the most blissful experience of my entire life. It felt like an absolute rebirth and There's so much to say, but one thing I will say, ah just to top off that summary, is that it felt as though it didn't feel as though anything new had happened. In many ways, it felt as though it was a homecoming. It felt as though it was a remembering of of what life was all about, an objective witnessing in many respects of reality, which is that
Non-dual Experiences: Vin and Jessica's Stories
00:04:37
Speaker
it is a miracle in and of itself.
00:04:39
Speaker
and I think we go about our day-to-day life with these filters you know ah blocking us from experiencing life to the fullest and including perceptually and you know colors and everything seem a little bit dimmer when we're not in that state I feel and yeah it's kind of an unveiling more than an acquiring of a new experience it feels like it's something that was always there but that I wasn't you know able to access until that state, until that that point in life. But yeah, I'm sure this, you have questions. It's fascinating, but also like very familiar to me. Before I jump in, Frances, do you have anything to add? and I've got loads of questions about what the experience is.
00:05:24
Speaker
I think actually I'm going to i'm going to ask Vin. So it came up in conversation last night when we were just talking before about the interview that Vin had a kind of more of what he would describe I think as a non-dual experience than a spiritual experience.
00:05:37
Speaker
um Yeah ge I think it might be useful if Vin briefly describes that as like a different one and then we've got like some angling on it from different directions. um Yeah Vin can you just briefly describe the change that you had and the feeling different because you also had a permanent change in how you feel about the world. Yeah slightly different in tone I think but I think everything that Jessica has just said is very similar to what I experienced. It was spontaneous, except mine wasn't, I woke up ah literally from but waking, you know, from sleeping state. It was during the middle of the day I was walking down a path and I just like felt the heartbeat in my eyes and I sort of looked into the sky and I saw the blueness, the the trees and the birds and I realized, oh, this is, so that's me. I'm looking at that's me and I just felt this intense bliss like I was let in finally on this great cosmic joke that was taking place and I mean you've described it in so many words and I kind of like have I can ah I can also only describe it in so many words but I think that underlying feeling is very similar the sense of like gratefulness the sense that everything is joyful and blissful and to me I remember being very like
00:06:53
Speaker
funny about it. ah And so it was also very much a homecoming or like a remembering of who I really was, like underneath all of this ah human garb, if you will. So it was like this unveiling, like it was finally like seeing with my eyes or like through my eyes ah for the first time. And funnily enough, it also happened about seven years, eight years ago for me as well. yeah So and everything was just naturally, when I looked at everything, I wasn't, there was no difference in visual perception. It was just that
00:07:30
Speaker
the thing that was looking at the world was now a different thing, like IEI was now looking at myself, if that made sense. It does, to me. Yeah, so that was interesting because like I think that there was a slight trigger for for for me. there was I was striving very hard prior to the experience,
00:07:54
Speaker
towards a goal that I had in mind, i.e. I was trying to get into university and I was so single-minded about reaching this goal. I had kind of given up every... I stopped looking back at everything and um accepted all the sacrifices that I had put into this singular goal of trying to get into like my my university at that point.
00:08:14
Speaker
and I just had received like a rejection saying like you are now rejected from your first choice uni I was like oh I was like oh and then I just like walking down the the road slightly despondent but then when I felt like that experience when I looked through my eyes and I realized like actually it doesn't matter like it was pointless anyway but like in a fun way I suddenly saw the point of it all like okay this is this is it because it doesn't I don't have to be anywhere I already the am where I need to be and so
00:08:50
Speaker
realizing that made me feel very at one with the universe. And so there was like a trigger. I suppose that that was like the trigger. I was striving very hard towards this one girl and I was like snapped away from it and i I was like suspended and suddenly I was enlightened the next minute. yeah So and it's interesting that and so I'm interested in like what preceded your spiritual or non-dual experience for you and how that played a role in the unfolding of what came after. as You spoke about lucid dreaming and I haven't done that in a while. for you What was the dream that you had? Was there something strong in this emotional experience? Yeah. Yeah. So thank you, first of all, for sharing that because, yeah, I mean, it's, you explained it so eloquently and beautifully and it's, it is interesting how whether preceded by something or triggered or not, these experiences are almost always similarly experienced, you know, that sense of oneness, homecoming, and so on and so forth, minus some details, perhaps that we don't share exactly the same experience. You know, it's not identical, but it's very similar.
Lucid Dreaming and Awareness Shift
00:10:01
Speaker
but yeah I mean what preceded mine I had a really well to give you some more context I had just moved to Madrid so I was in a new country I had't ah had lived there prior to the experience as well but that was my first time in three or so years that I had moved back and I had just you know started working at my new job in fact it was my first proper job and I was in a very very happy place in my life and Yeah now moving on to the actual ah timing when it happened that weekend i wasn't intoxicated i and i didn't go out the night before i just went to bed one night and i had a really powerful profound lucid dream.
00:10:46
Speaker
It wasn't something that I was seeking at that time, it just happened. But I had had lucid dreams in the past, so when especially when I was a child, I was able to lucid dream more often. It wasn't you know necessarily a super regular thing, but it's something that I was able to access a state that I was able to access but anyway this one that happened that occurred right before my experience it wasn't sought after and it's a very interesting dream because in my dream I don't know if you've ever watched the film Waking Life
00:11:20
Speaker
and but it's virtual it was very similar to that film which I mean it's explainable because I had watched the film several weeks or so prior to my experience so something in my something had worked through my subconscious mind perhaps and led me to have a dream that was very similar to that but different as well because in my dream I was speaking to a number of different I was wondering in this space speaking to a number of different characters that I knew intuitively to be great thinkers, so mathematicians, ah philosophers, psychologists, and so on, and you know and and other kind of great thinkers.
00:11:59
Speaker
And I was asking each and every one of them the same question, and that was, what is the meaning of life? And they would respond with so eloquent responses. Each of them were very different from one another. And there was a point in that, I mean, this is before I had the actual, before I became lucid in the dream, it was just a dream. And I was wondering through, and then I started to gradually become more and more aware, like, oh, this is a lucid dream. there responding to my questions and then I realized I could probably try and speak to them too so we had these sort of back and forth conversations and if you ask me now what they were I can't remember I'll be honest but they were the responses the answers were so incredibly ah just beautifully said and I realized in my mind when I was thinking and I became lucid I thought
00:12:47
Speaker
these answers aren't in my mind already are they? You know it was like sort of in a dialogue so I was dialoguing with these characters but also with myself thinking and I still don't know I mean who knows were they characters from another dimension or were they all responses in my own mind or was I accessing something else? Anyway I don't tend to bother myself with that question because we'll probably never know but And then at the end of my lucid dream, I spoke to the main character, ah sort of main character in my dream, and I said, what is the meaning of life? And he said, just wake up. And that's when I woke up. I don't always described the dream because a lot of people would sort of naturally associate that
00:13:32
Speaker
end response with me waking up and then thinking, oh, what was that dream all about? Oh my God, you know, we're all one and so on, but it wasn't like that. It was literally a perceptual shift that occurred probably during my dream, but also upon waking up. So it wasn't, when I woke up, I didn't think about the dream. I just woke up and I was like overwhelmed by everything around me, you know? So yeah.
00:13:58
Speaker
jo Jessica, you just want to ask some phenomenology questions about your dreaming. yeah So when you normally dream and or normally lucid dream before that dream, do you what how do you experience dreams? Do you like see things, hear they hear things and in a voice, feel emotion? Just normally, yeah. Normally in dreams, well, they're very, my dreams are very detailed, but that's probably because I write them down every morning. So I keep a dream journal.
00:14:28
Speaker
not for any specific reason, I just find it very interesting. I guess now with large language models, I'll be able to analyse my dreams, which is an added bonus. But yeah, so I'm able to, I dream and I remember my dreams in great detail and they're, yeah, they're full of colour. I obviously communicate with and with characters my dream if I dream of characters, but um and do they look realistic with faces and things and in real worlds with like lighting and colour or like in abstract sort of matrix like faces? In the last few years yeah very much normal scenarios or abnormal scenarios but with normal looking people and normal looking sort of landscapes. When I was a kid I would almost always and only dream of
00:15:19
Speaker
space and planets colliding and the end of the world and meteorites falling on Earth and aliens and things like that. But now nowadays, ah they're very cool, interesting dreams, but they're not necessarily so far out. and that When they're lucid, that means you control you're more conscious in some sense and can control it. and Do they still look the same and feel emotionally similar?
00:15:46
Speaker
Well, I haven't really lucid jumped in the last, I don't know, a couple of years, few months, maybe. I can't remember the last time I did it, but yeah, I, they're very different in that, you know, when you're, when you're, when you become aware that you're dreaming, you can have so many, there are so many possibilities that can emerge from that state. And you really have a chance to explore your the inner workings of your mind. So that in and in and of itself is,
00:16:16
Speaker
extraordinary, I think, and it's such a powerful tool. ah In terms of the phenomenology of the dream, I mean, besides the fact that you can potentially interact with your characters, which is really cool, or do really wacky things that you want to do. No, I've not ever thought of that question, actually, you know, I think that the colours and sounds are relatively similar to normal, the ones that I find in normal dreams. Yeah.
00:16:41
Speaker
And is that the case for the dream before you had the spiritual experience as well? it Was it different in nature or in its qualities? or It was different in nature in that I had never dreamed of that specific scenario, like wandering through spaces, speaking to all these different people and and all these people telling me lots of different, like responding in very different ways, but in their own unique, beautiful, uniquely beautiful ways. I'd never had that before. And I was never so aware of how eloquent people were being in my dream, you know? They were long sentences. and
00:17:17
Speaker
Yeah. So in that sense, ah it was different, but in terms of colors and stuff, I'm not sure. I think it was relatively similar to a general dream, but yeah, the space, I can't remember there being any edges. It was kind of almost like floating or walking around in empty space or formless space. and And usually in my dreams, there are like specific landscapes that I'm in or I'm walking in the street or Yeah. So more similar to this waking life. Right. So I feel tempted to ask this question, even though I already probably already know what your answer is going to be. But did you experience any visual auditory or any other sensory modality changes prior to the experience and after the experience?
00:18:09
Speaker
So good question. No, nothing prior to the experience that kind of, yeah, I feel, no, no, nothing. fair Yeah, exactly. It's the same thing. Nothing's happened. It's just the internal experience of yourself and the world. yeah Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So nothing up until the experience itself and then following the experience for several weeks and actually probably for several months and probably to a lesser extent for several years.
00:18:36
Speaker
The colors were extremely vivid around me. Shines and he you know the hues and of ah colors. Everything was just glowing in a way. um Everything felt it felt as though I had acquired HD vision. That's what I normally say, because it really felt that way. I didn't hear... Just quickly, did that alter your imagination as well? oh I don't know. I don't...
00:19:03
Speaker
I mean, yes, I'm sure it did, but it's because the experience itself was so like, was towering, it's not something that I was thinking about. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah, but okay great question. i I didn't experience any, you know, sort of hearing voices or anything like that. And I didn't see things that other people couldn't see, but my perception of reality was very different, I think, to what many of my friends were experiencing at the time. Now I know many people who've had
00:19:34
Speaker
you know, to some degree or another, these kinds of experiences, either a full blown, non dual awakening, enlightenment experience, or spiritually transformative experiences to a lesser degree or a different degree. ah So I've met other people now who kind of share similar experiences. But at the time I was like, I definitely felt like it wasn't something my perception of reality was very different to the general person, right i probably still is. Yeah.
Interpreting Spiritual Experiences: Frameworks and Texts
00:20:04
Speaker
So this kind of relates to your current research that you're doing. And I want to ask you this a little bit later in a while. ah But like I'm sure there's going to be like some sort of scale of spiritual experience where there's a full blown experience versus a partial experience. um But before we go into that, and I was going to ask you but a little bit more about your personal experience just prior to the you know the dream or the experience, um what were you reading before that? was that like Do you remember what you're reading or like do you remember what thoughts or ideas you were consuming and were percolating in the back of your mind that obviously came to a head with the experience?
00:20:51
Speaker
yeah I don't think I was reading anything at that very moment in time. I'm an avid reader. I love reading, but i yeah i wasn't reading I don't think I was reading anything at the time or nothing specific that comes to mind. But again, I love these questions because they're really you know making me think about what happened before and the experience. and But no, nothing specific, nothing particular in particular. And actually,
00:21:19
Speaker
i you know i've I've met people who have had their experience as a result of indulging in sort of spiritual text. or So I understand you know the nature and the relevance of the question, but no, that wasn't the case for myself.
00:21:34
Speaker
Yeah. And ah in terms of music, I've always had an eclectic taste. And I think music is something that isn't often discussed and when we talk about altered states, but that is ah probably one of the most powerful tools to accessing altered states more generally. So, but ive I think I've always had pretty good tastes. so And that hasn't changed. okay If I may say so myself.
00:21:58
Speaker
Just to add in my experience as well, I think prior to my experience of like awakening or going down the road as it were, because it really really wasn't that mundane for me, I was listening to like Alan Watts and reading Buddhist scriptures and Zen koans about like the nature of reality, summit less summit, attain less attainment, that sort of thing. All these paradoxes that supposedly like give rise to non-dual experience on a spontaneous basis for people who like come across them. Of course, that didn't do it for me. It was just like me walking down the road and then seeing like my heartbeat in my eyes, which is what did it. But as soon as I had that,
00:22:44
Speaker
all the intellectual understandings of what non-dual experience is like expressed in words suddenly clicked for me in ah in ah in a way that was truly ineffable but at the same time there was like all these like conceptual metaphors that were already there that hadn't quite clicked until that moment and it's like oh there it is and so I think the the um the experience itself would have happened regardless of whether I read it or not it's just that ah because it happened and I had like this pre-existing intellectual understanding of it, the intuitive clicking in into place, so to speak, um was able to like connect up to all these intellectual ideas. So I wasn't completely like lost about it. And so I wasn't, it was it wasn't completely ineffable. I could like F a little bit of the effable. So that helped.
00:23:36
Speaker
Yeah, ah yeah that's that's really great. and yeah You had a framework through which to see um these experiences and actually many people don't, I didn't. and It was still blissful and beautiful enough and and I had enough support to not freak out about it but lots of people who have the experience without a prior framework probably no not probably I mean definitely do freak out about it at least like possibly not initially if the experience is blissful but you know during the integration stages and trying to make sense of the experience it's definitely worth becoming acquainted with all the sort of you know literature that there is out there on spiritual experiences but just the nature of self like
00:24:23
Speaker
i I love Alan Watts, and I only discovered Alan Watts after my experience. I think he was probably the second author that I had read following my experience, and it was an incredible moment because I really reflected myself, or the words really reflected themselves back onto me, and I felt understood, even though Alan Watts is no longer with us, obviously, but his words really helped me understand that, whoa, it's not just me.
00:24:50
Speaker
And there are lots of other people out there who probably have these experiences if this is the second book I'm picking up and it's talking about exactly that. Yeah, yeah, he's amazing. Well, it's nice to see that you and I are, and i among other people, Alan Watson included in this bunch, ah people who have the experience without like going completely off the rails, because obviously we've heard accounts of um people experiencing this non-dual state or spiritual awakening.
00:25:16
Speaker
in places like the Bible Belt, where all they've known is this Christian spiritual framework. And when they have this have experience, they immediately go, I'm God. yeah That must mean I'm the Messiah. And they start like shouting heresies, and people think they're crazy. But of course, like we know we we know better than that. and So we don't like go out shouting like I'm i'm Jesus or whatever, um because we have different like frameworks to talk about this experience. um But it's interesting to see how how people with different frameworks like express this fundamentally same
00:25:53
Speaker
reality, like, you know, experience of, of reality, the shift of consciousness. And you mentioned Jesus Christ. I mean, if he did exist, then probably he probably had a similar experience, but wasn't possibly, again, this is totally, you know, a theoretic, I mean, this is just an idea, but he probably just didn't have the framework through which to understand it. And then, you know, because of religion and and beliefs that people were, were meant to uphold were, were you know, it was kind of necessary at that time to follow the crowd and and follow your social group and what they believed that you probably didn't have, you know, the outlet through which to express himself and to investigate what was really going on within and then probably had an emergency or a crisis, if that.
00:26:42
Speaker
But um it's worth mentioning. there are soap That's the thing. so I'm really interested in the overlaps between mental health disorder and spiritual awakenings that I wouldn't necessarily deem as a disorder or occurring in conjunction in conjunction with a disorder.
00:27:01
Speaker
and Yeah, I think there are overlaps, but I do really strongly believe that these experiences can occur as experiences in their own right without the presence of a mental health disorder. ah You probably know that or believe that. I certainly know that and believe that, as do many others.
Integration of Spiritual Experiences into Daily Life
00:27:21
Speaker
In any case, we should be supporting individuals on either side of the spectrum and
00:27:28
Speaker
ah Can I just ask, I want to ask a little bit more about the love part of the experience. So like, I've seen you say various things like, like, ah love being sort of infused in everything, unconditional love, the whole universe breathing intelligence. How do you perceive those things? Like, how do they come to your mind? What's the experience of feeling those things? Yeah.
00:27:55
Speaker
Well, they really don't seem to, well, they don't feel like mental, like thoughts or theories or beliefs. It feels very much like an internal embodied experience. So it's really, again, hard to describe the experience because it's. Yeah, you're asking me to describe something that is just undescribable because it doesn't really occur in the thinking realm or in the realm.
00:28:24
Speaker
Yes, it's not symbolic. Yeah, it's non symbolic exactly.
00:28:31
Speaker
it's just it's like It's almost heartfelt. It's an embodied, heartfelt experience, intuitive experience of ah our oneness within the universe, our oneness with the universe, our communion. it's that It's not specifically in your body when you say embodied. You mean it just is throughout your mind and body, kind of.
00:28:55
Speaker
Well, I suppose if I say it embodied, it also implies the mind. But the way that it feels, at least for me, in my own experience, is that it's, it's very much heart based. It's like an intuition. It's a, it's a knowing, it's a deep inner knowing, it's a feeling rather than something that I'm that I'm thinking about or like, oh, I'm i'm feeling so much love. It doesn't occur in that sort of space. It's, it's really internal. And it's so like a bodily emotion, like, um yeah, and it's stronger. Yeah, to me, it just really felt like nothing that I had ever experienced before, even though it felt like a homecoming. It wasn't an experience in itself that I felt that I had ever experienced before. So it kind of
00:29:37
Speaker
It's like ah another dimension of experience or like another layer of experience and unless you've had that, it's very hard to really understand it. yeah You can conceptualise it through words and we can try and understand each other through these beautiful symbols which are words but they don't do the experience justice because they don't bring you into that state and that state is just so far beyond anything that it occurs in like a general everyday way of living.
00:30:08
Speaker
and I know that's not very helpful. Vin, is it similar, your answer to that? It would be, but like as someone who understands you and has a similar experience, i will the question I would like to ask is, how do you go about living your day-to-day life knowing that you have this?
00:30:28
Speaker
you know i've into i've Thankfully, I've integrated it. very well in my life. I feel extremely blessed that that's the case. And it's something that it's just permeated into every aspect of my life now. So now I research the experience. I'm going to start a PhD in October on you know observing these kinds of experiences. Yeah, from a from a psychological lens. Thank you. And So it's something that really, it's just so much a part of my everyday life now, not only in my feelings, thoughts, behaviors, but also in my work. And I'm also no longer, I think it's important to mention, I'm not i'm not in this altered state all the time. I'm not in this sense of awe and wonder and rapture all the time. Sometimes it comes back to me and I know it's always there. And if I focus on it, I'm very much back into that state. But, you know, in my everyday life, i'm
00:31:28
Speaker
you might be chased by a dog or you have to do bills and you have to like. 100%. That was the case even right after my experience. So another reason why it would not have been, you know, classified as a mental health disorder, even if I had gone to a psychologist is because I mean, I just, I was able to sustain my life in a very normal way, even though everything was different, but I i still went to work. I was promoted some like week or two after my experience.
00:31:59
Speaker
I just remember feeling a great sense of overwhelm at the beauty of everything. So I would sometimes have to have to lock myself in the bathroom and be like, Oh my God, this is everything so amazing. But in terms of how I was able to cope in life.
00:32:16
Speaker
it It was fine. it was It flowed. And if anything, I felt like I almost had better cognitive ability and and abilities to sort of deal with everything in life. Because everything was, as you mentioned, like this great cosmic joke and also extremely important at the same time. And the paradoxes that come with these experiences are absurd. Yeah. It seems bad thing anyone would think that it was a mental health condition. It's like ill health. I can imagine why.
00:32:47
Speaker
Well, it just seems like having direct awareness of things that are kind of logically, emotionally, intuitively true anyway, even though even though I haven't felt it directly in that way. very well yeah If you've studied enough things, there clearly it clearly is the case that, um i'm i'm ah yes, I'm a self, but I'm also part of the universe, and I'm tangled in the universe, and maybe the universe. so yeah yeah Yeah, very kind of strange.
00:33:15
Speaker
It is, and I think it's probably because many people working in these kinds of, you know, in the areas of mental health and and psychiatry, even though they mean well, they probably haven't had the experience themselves. And whilst I believe that these experiences are more common than we think, they're still not probably accessible to all people, you know, on demand for sure, but also especially not spontaneously.
Scientific Study of Spiritual Experiences
00:33:40
Speaker
And so, you know, to someone who's never had the experience like myself before the experience, I would have never believed that these experiences were were possible or accessible to to me, you know. um And you only really read about these experiences in philosophical religious texts. And even then they're filled with, a you know, with sort of, yeah, they're not kind of directly associated with what we're talking about, but they're sort of talked about in the, in the realm of symbols again, and storytelling. And yeah, so, and science has really covered it. Is there a non-spontaneous way of getting them then? Because, yeah. Well, many people look to psychedelics, you know, powerful psychedelics like 5MeO DMT or, you know, even psilocybin.
00:34:35
Speaker
access certain non dual states, awakening experiences. And then there are other ways that I think you can build up to these experiences potentially. So through meditation, ah mindfulness,
00:34:50
Speaker
But again you know how ready is each individual to have the experience it probably depends on their past on you know on their past traumas on their past beliefs on how they were treated how they've been treated throughout their lives there's so many factors involved that it's very hard to identify really the extent to which certain triggers that are not.
00:35:11
Speaker
things like psychedelics that you take, and then you see a direct change, like before and after the experience, if it's something that you work your way towards, it's really hard to sort of pinpoint whether it was really that, or whether it was a combination of that and everything else that was happening in one's life. So I don't know if that makes sense. But yeah, it's, it's really hard to study these experiences in other Yeah, in other words,
00:35:35
Speaker
So one thing that many people who report having this experience is a sense of self gets extinguished and they have to go about living their lives after the experience without ego. So I guess the question I want to ask you is like, did you continue to have a sense of self? Yeah, really good question.
00:36:01
Speaker
Yes, I did, but it was a very different sense of self. It was a sense of self that encompassed everything around me, you know, and the universe. It wasn't an obliteration of who I was. It was a different way of experiencing myself.
00:36:15
Speaker
And, but it's true, it almost felt like I had returned to a childlike state and I had to learn the ways of the world again, because I hadn't known life to be like that until that very moment. And again, without a framework.
00:36:32
Speaker
it wasn't, ah it luckily wasn't a negative, in fact it was the most beautiful experience of my life, but it was still kind of like, oh my god, what's happening and why are we not talking about these experiences more? Why was I not taught that this was a possibility at school? Why ah have I not ever heard about this kind of thing? Then gradually I realised that, you know, you can read about these things in in books like Alan Watts' books and in Eastern Traditions and Indigenous Cultures.
00:37:01
Speaker
but at the time I didn't know. I think this childlike state that you revert to with the experience is sometimes called oceanic consciousness where everything is just kind of emanates from this baseline, this bedrock of reality. So, yeah I mean, these are all obviously still metaphors to talk about this like ineffable thing, but it kind of like catches it for me, sense of vastness of it all.
00:37:30
Speaker
Yeah. I love it. Yeah. ocean Oceanic boundlessness or yeah. So I was, yeah I was a bit surprised to just randomly then it's like, Oh yeah, I've had that experience. because it happened to give up a conversation but I know you've done research to different people and how, that how common the experience it is like, is there a percentage of people who just naturally have ended up having it and they just not mentioned it or like 10% of people have had the experience or 1% of people who have the experience.
00:38:04
Speaker
know what percentage of people in the population generally yeah like have a spontaneous spiritual awakening? Yeah, we don't really know. I wouldn't be able to give you an exact figure because these experiences aren't really, they haven't to date really been investigated scientifically or empirically so it's really hard we don't really have many numbers around that but we recently published in fact it's I think it's about to come out I keep saying that in every podcast it's about to be released onto the big world wide web but we've we've recently written a paper trying to ah address this question and we found that around 45% out of of individuals in our study
00:38:51
Speaker
So 45% out of 3,135 individuals who took part in our study claimed to have had a ah nonpharmacy you know non-pharmacologically induced ah spiritual experience of some sort. So not necessarily an awakening, but then I believe it was 15% of those had claimed to have had an experience of ultimate oneness or you know bliss or ecstasy.
00:39:20
Speaker
you know, a unit of experience, basically. So off the top of my head, I don't know exactly how much that would have been within our population, but 15% out of the entire population that we sampled. So it's quite a lot of people, but that's just indicative.
00:39:37
Speaker
Yeah, it's substantial numbers. It's not a tiny amount. Yeah, exactly. and you know And these were people who didn't necessarily claim to have any sort of spiritual or religious belief or claim to have had any spiritual experiences in their life. So we're just random people plucked out of the you pluck from the internet asked to take part in a survey ah investigating a variety of different things and questions. So, yeah.
00:40:05
Speaker
interesting figures and exploratory, so still much work to be done on that. So I invite any anyone working in psychology to and to try and repeat, you know, to to replicate this study because I think it's really worthy of knowing. Yeah. Yeah. What's your ah research goal in your PhD and have an idea of what you're going to try and what questions do you want to answer most? Well,
00:40:35
Speaker
I know what questions I want to answer in general in my career. As part of my PhD, I think it'll probably be looking at the sort of neurophenomenology of these experiences and trying to see whether, you know, the brains of certain individuals who have mental health disorders are similar to those or different to those who have, you know, these experiences without mental health disorders. And my hunch is that they are very different.
00:41:01
Speaker
But yeah, that would be the ultimate PhD goal but again me to see it depends on which university I choose to go to and which supervisor I work with but yeah but yeah I mean there's so much there's so much there to unpack and neurophenomenology is just one aspect of of what I want to investigate with regards to spiritual awakening experiences.
PhD Goals and Neurophenomenology of Awakenings
00:41:27
Speaker
And it's all with the ultimate goal of sort of bringing up conversation around awakening type experiences within ah psychiatric systems and clinical population, ah sorry, not clinical populations, but within
00:41:41
Speaker
clinical practices in order to sort of shed light on them and and raise awareness that these experiences are a thing that people who don't have diagnosable mental health disorders can have these experiences um and it's sort of a plea to stop are investigating and to stop diagnosing people with disorders by default without any other reason to do so. Just because these experiences fall outside of the boundaries of what we know to be normal in our secular
00:42:19
Speaker
sort of consumeristic personality that doesn't really lend itself to these types of experiences, at least not anymore, possibly in the past. And, you know, and many societies know this. I mean, these experiences are often central to many different cultures and societies around the world. So we also should be looking to those cultural groups and and trying to understand how they perceive reality and Yeah, rather than just believing that what we feel in the West is normal is ultimate reality and ultimate normality. Fantastic. Can you be more sorry yeah <unk> be more specific about like which men type of mental health disorders are typically associated with these kinds of experiences?
00:43:08
Speaker
Yeah. So, ah you know, psychosis based disorders like ah schizophrenia, bipolar disorder is a really common one. Yeah. And it's, it's just ludicrous because these experiences are so different to and the characteristics of all the diagnosis.
00:43:28
Speaker
ah Basically, it just depends on which psychiatrist you fall on and that shouldn't be the case. you know there should be just We should know a lot more about these experiences by now and and when to help people through medication and when to absolutely not touch medication because they're not disorders and they actually often lead people to better styles of living, to to gain and acquire more empathy for other people and and often undertake roles in life that are lend themselves more to love-based values and rather than division. Yeah, something and but I want to ask
00:44:07
Speaker
When we met, we had a conversation about vocabulary, because I talked about this podcast and how almost part of our goal is to get people more used to talking about what it's like inside their own experience about all sorts of things, and to have more words around in the end or more ways of talking about inner mental experiences.
00:44:26
Speaker
and we're we're generally quite poor of it poor poor at it. and Have you seen any signs of anyone improving the way these conversations can happen or do you have any like needs for vocabulary or things that would be good if more a society understood and could talk about? Yeah, I think there's a general inclination ah for people who've had these experiences who know something about Eastern traditions to start using you know language that is often found in sort of tantric or yogic texts in Hinduism and so on.
00:44:57
Speaker
So that's at least there's something. There is ah there are words and and vocabularies that we sort of lend and borrow from other cultures. In our own, we've sort of yet to develop that
Developing Vocabulary for Spiritual Experiences
00:45:09
Speaker
language. I feel there are organizations such as the EPRC, the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium, which I i work with proudly. And they you know some of their projects involve that involve trying to improve ah the way we talk, the way in which we talk about these kinds of experiences. And that also includes language and vocabulary. And there are other smaller groups, but again, it's not, it's quite, they're quite niche groups and um doing wonderful work, but also, you know, yeah, it's it's not like a general conversation that people are having and it should be.
00:45:48
Speaker
but Speaking of vocabulary, I think in the past you've mentioned talk of spontaneous spiritual awakenings versus spontaneous Kundalini awakenings. Can you talk more about that? Yeah, it's yeah it's it's really hard because kind yeah we found that basically wanted to understand in our study whether Kundalini awakenings were more were described to be more physical because oftentimes when I've spoken to people they they've had these kinds of experiences they've called them Kundalini awakenings but they've also had this sense of like shooting or rising of energy or heat on the base of the spine to the crown of the head um or other physical sensations um like tingling in the hands or
00:46:37
Speaker
maybe even visions things like that so kind of wanted to explore whether people's uh vocabularies differed when it came to um the experiences being different i.e more physical experiences would that equate to a kundalini awake what was would be described as a kundalini awakening more than a spiritual awakening And we found that yes, people who have more physical sensations tend to use the word Kundalini awakening. But again, I mean, it almost feels futile to, that's a really good question and I try to address it, but it, it almost feels futile to try and address it because
00:47:14
Speaker
again, you know, language is something that, for instance, those who don't know anything about Eastern traditions, they wouldn't use the word Kundalini awakening. So there are, it's just quite flawed or flawed way of looking at it. So it was a bit of a failed attempt to try and differentiate two sets of experiences. But I think ah like you mentioned earlier, there are just spectrums of experiences differing in strength and in profundity and varying in physical sensations and non and then varying in different types of and somatic and and perceptual and behavioral kind of changes. I think there are a variety probably, you know, how long does the experience last for different individuals? How
00:48:03
Speaker
Life changing was the experience for different individuals. What are the physical symptoms and how do they differ amongst different individuals claiming to have this oneness right yeah experience?
00:48:16
Speaker
But there are so again, so many variants vari and they haven't been they haven't been explored, although some people are trying to sort of explore them, but they're just very, very difficult to investigate as experiences.
00:48:32
Speaker
purely you know because of the nature of what they are and how different they are to an everyday way of experiencing life. Yeah. I think ah we've asked everything that I wanted to ask. And we can keep talking forever. But I think we've covered everything. OK, in that case, um before we wrap up, one last question for me and then we can say goodbye. But can you recognize another person said and as an awakened being when you meet them and when you've like talked to them for a while. Yeah, I mean, it's a good question because immediately after my experience, I really felt that I could, you know, I really could feel that someone had had a similar experience just by the way they, their eye expressions, you know, the their expressions, the way they were. But I think
00:49:31
Speaker
Now it's more a question of speaking to people and quite quickly you realise that many people have had some sort of interesting experience if not a full-blown awakening. I recognise you as an awakened being. Likewise. But um yeah, how about you? I'm actually curious because you probably feel that way or do Do you recognize people, when you meet them, do you feel that kind of pull and recognize yourself in them? It's not instantaneous. It's not like I speak to them and oh ah I get this energy. like They're obviously an awakened being. But it's usually like when they start talking about self, yeah reality, ah worldview, these are like key words for me. And when they describe these things in non-dualistic terms, and it's hard to like describe them. like
00:50:24
Speaker
But the way they go about describing these like very core, I guess ontological piece of position that most people take for granted in different ways, that's how I know like, oh, they probably had like a spiritual experience or like an awakening. And if they talk specifically about their kind of awakening where they're like,
00:50:43
Speaker
had no sense of self or they had this experience of cosmic bliss or the beatific vision or whatever, that's when I'm like, okay, this one's this one's awakened. So like whether there's like several degrees of awakening, I'm not entirely sure, but usually that indicates to me that they've had somewhat of a similar experience. Yes, yeah. No, I feel that that's very much yeah representative of how I feel at the moment. But initially, yeah, I felt that, yeah,
00:51:12
Speaker
maybe not in the first few weeks, but when it started to integrate and I started to meet people, more and more people in probably similar circles as well. I just felt that, yeah, I felt there was an energy about certain people, but now I don't, I don't necessarily get that as much. I just, it's more a question of opening up, speaking and understanding our commonalities, but yeah. Cool. I guess with that, we've come to the end of our session. Thank you very much, Jessica. Thank you so much, it was great chatting. Yeah, it was fascinating, thank you Jessica. Thanks Francis, it was great.