My Consciousness Conundrums

What do particle colliders do? And what does this suggest regarding consciousness studies? Subatomic particles such as protons, antiprotons, electrons, and positrons are isolated into pairs and thrust into a circular conductor. With its 27-kilometer loop length, the Large Hadron Collider at Cern is the largest such collider, allowing paired subatomic particles to generate maximum velocity, force, and energy. Their head-on impact generates opportunity for new matter to be “born” from their colliding annihilation. These newly born matter forms, like the recent discovery of the Higgs Boson, are deemed fundamental particles and comprise the fabric of our physical universe.  Allan B Wallace, the scientist, Buddhist practitioner, and consciousness researcher, argues for the validity of contemplative inquiry. Wallace believes that meditation practices conducted by advanced practitioners are akin to astronomical research on the cosmos turned inward. These first-person consciousness informa...

A bronze statue of the Hindu deity Siva stands before Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research located just outside Geneva. (see image below) How did Arya Siva and the Large Hadron Collider meet? Let us discover one possible narrative line between Siva, science, our collective culture, and the unfolding of consciousness studies. As with most explorations into consciousness and the studies that form them, our provisional answers or responses to its enigmas, queries, and quandaries will leave us with more questions. Consciousness discoveries at once expand and deepen the field of inquiry, while lurking beneath our postulations is the shadowy notion that our present insights are mere refoldings of previous ones. Standing just over two meters, Siva, the Hindu God of creation and destruction, is represented as Nataraja, the deity’s cosmic dance form. Siva is in mid-movement. One leg is raised, generating velocity, while the other is planted on its base. Four arms extend, tra...

How do our concepts regarding consciousness determine our understanding of consciousness? Do they fence us into the safe and “sane” demarcations of the known and socially accepted? Or do they provide jumping points toward broader, more profound, and even more granular understanding? Do our experiences align with our concepts, and do the contiguities of experiences and concepts intersect and give rise to insight regarding the befuddling nature and dimensionality of consciousness?  In correspondence with Aldous Huxley, Harry Osmond, in 1958, coined the term psychedelic—a single word composed of two Greek words, psyche for soul and delos for revealer. Psychedelics as a clinical modality has gained mainstream acknowledgment, institutional backing, and research funding and has become a capitalist venture port in the last two decades. In his 2018 New York Times article “My Adventures with the Trip Doctors,” Michael Pollan describes the complexities of such clinical trials and the commo...