Jeffery A. Martin

Center for the Study of Non-Symbolic Consciousness and Harvard University
Keywords: non-symbolic consciousness, non-symbolic experience, consciousness, spiritual growth, enlightenment, nonduality, cognitive science.

Non-symbolic experiences 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. Persistent non-symbolic experience involves a fundamental change in the experience of what it is like to perceive the world.

Over the past 7 years our research project has sought to map this experience in over 1000 adults who report persistent non-symbolic experience (PNSE). 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 (or continuum) of possible PNSE experiences.

This continuum seems to begin with a tightly constructed individualized sense of self and end with an individual being unable to at all detect an individualized sense of self. When examined, the clusters, or locations on the continuum between these two points, form a logical series of stages in the deconstruction of the individualized sense of self. They also appear to correlate with specific brain regions and processes. The variety of these clusters and their underlying categories may inform the debate between constructivist, common core, and participatory theorists; and finally provide a generalizable conceptual map and psychological framework for these types of experiences.