The world continues to get more fascinating as our global economic calamities, political instabilities, societal disruptions, and cultural meltdowns are paralleled in lockstep by philosophical, scientific, and technological developments of a profoundly exciting and forward-looking nature.
Case in point: The International Consciousness Research Laboratories, or ICRL, “an international, interdisciplinary, and inter-generational consortium of some 75 members, most of whom have been associated with the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory as interns or research collaborators over its thirty-year history.” The two-minute presentation above offers a virtual tour of the project, which launched in 1996. Along with watching it, read this statement from their website, and note how it indicates the ICRL’s dedication to pursuing truly revolutionary research that promises to effect a paradigm shift of historic proportions:
“Our goal is to extend the work of PEAR into a broader range of inquiry; to encourage a new generation of deeply creative investigators to expand the boundaries of scientific understanding; and to strengthen the foundations of science by reclaiming its spiritual heritage. Ultimately, we seek to integrate the subjective and objective dimensions of human experience into a self-reflexive Science of the Subjective…Our mission is pursued via collaborative initiatives in Basic Research, Educational Outreach, and Pragmatic Applications, all of which focus on the exploration and representation of the role of consciousness in physical reality.”
If you’ve read any of my horror fiction in Dark Awakenings, Divinations of the Deep, or the various anthologies where it has appeared, then you know the “role of consciousness in physical reality” is something I’m profoundly concerned with as well. This is a subject of long-running interest in gothic/supernatural horror fiction as a whole, where changes in consciousness regularly produce changes in physical identity and the natural world. Moreover, it hooks directly into the primal link between supernatural horror and religious experience. The fact that it’s also a subject of dedicated, above-board research and inquiry by scientists and scholars from 20 different countries is simply amazing.
A big thanks to David Metcalfe for the head-up about this project via a tweet. Speaking of which, you’d do well to follow David, since he tweets a stream of consistently fascinating links and thoughts, including links to his own work.