Last year, we started something amazing. Now, we need your help to bring it to the public.

Our project is called the Expert Opinion Project: Expert Consensus on the Intersection of Emergent Phenomena and Mental and Medical Health. It aims to advance mental health and psychiatry by introducing traditional and indigenous understanding of spiritual experiences into the Western medical model. Our research team has been working on this issue for more than a decade. Last summer, we finally secured the necessary manpower and funding to move forward.

Feeling extremely lucky, we are thrilled that our submission has been accepted for presentation at the ASSC Conference this July in Heraklion, Crete. However, our non-profit spent all of the project money to finance our work and pay our wonderful experts, which is why we need your help to get to the conference!

Why this matters?

As many people—and their loved ones—are aware, despite extremely positive benefits in emotional wellbeing overall, even a gentle exploration with psychedelic compounds or even attending a meditation retreat can sometimes have unexpected psychological effects. People often hesitate to share these experiences with their doctors and care practitioners because they fear being stigmatized. Sometimes, these experiences can spiral out of control and ruin lives. With this project, we want to initiate a change in mainstream healthcare.

How many people do you know who have questioned whether they are undergoing a spiritual awakening or struggling with something that could be dangerous, such as schizophrenia or a bipolar disorder? We are here to share crucial insights about the importance of these nuances. We find it incredibly important to preserve the dignity of people who don’t necessarily need to be pathologised and/or medicated just because we don’t understand what’s happening to them.

To do this, we have recruited over 20 top experts who work at the intersection of what we call “emergent phenomenology” (spiritual, mystical, magical, psychedelic, weird, non-local, acausal—you name it!) and psychiatric and psychopathological conditions. They are helping us reach expert consensus by tackling deep questions all the way from safe clinical encounters, necessary clinical skillsets such as what having an open and nonjudgemental mind truly means, to suggested additions for mainstream psychiatric textbooks such as the DSM or ICD.

Ultimately, we aim at reforming how these experiences are understood and approached in clinical care settings, creating training programs and board certificates that will enable us to enter an era in which all of the strange and unexplainable experiences will be supported through their proper integration and not shying away. We want the scientific community to know about our work and to join us in making the world a safer place.

Who are we?

My name is Beata and I work as a researcher at the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium and Qualia Resarch Institute. I’m the author of the blog Thoughts on Evolutions (which is why I ended up researching all of this), as well as the upcoming book called The Good Annealing Manual: From Psychedelic Alchemy to the Chemistry of the Mind that I wrote for the Californian Qualia Research Institute. In my work I focus on understanding the oscillatory dynamics of consciousness and building the music theory of consciousness. Drawing on my personal experiences with emergent phenomenology, one of the things that drives my research is to understand how we can tune ourselves into a more equanimous and compassionate key by working with our attention.

I'm Hannah, a consciousness researcher with a recent PhD in psychology. My own journey with unusual consciousness states (including what I believe was Shaktipat—an energetic transmission) that profoundly altered my awareness has fuelled my commitment to creating frameworks that honour both scientific rigour and the mystery of emergent experiences. I believe much can be gained by translating between worlds that rarely communicate. As Co-Principal Investigator on this project, I'm aiming to bring transformative spiritual experiences into the clinical and scientific mainstream, but this work isn't just academic for me. I've witnessed both the life-changing potential and the very real risks of these experiences, and I believe we need a new clinical approach that preserves the dignity and depth of what I consider sacred experiences.

How will the funds be used?

We will use the funds to finance ASSC conference registration, travel and accommodation expenses, as well as to print a zine in which we would like to present our research on emotional well-being, as well as a theory of consciousness we've been working on. Registration costs are fixed, while the rest are my lower approximations:

ASSC Registration: 2 x 550 EUR

Accommodation in Heraklion for 5 days: 800 EUR

Travel costs: 2 x 200 EUR

Zine: 200 EUR

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Big thank you to everyone who is willing and able to support our mission <3