A Personal Vision & Thesis for Psychology and Emerging Holonic Paradigms in Science through Crisis & Transformation of the Mid-21st Century

In this moment of punctuating paradigms in scientific inquiry, humanity is experiencing a decision point in its evolutionary spiral: how we will collectively organize, act, adapt, and evolve through our deepening self-realization and corollary technological development. Our inherited Cartesian-Newtonian models of science, technology, and societal values have led us to the edge of survival on our planet through the industrialized macroeconomic age of raw material extraction, competition, and accumulation.

In the coming decades, we will continue co-creating and adopting presently emerging new paradigms in consciousness, science, technology, medicine, economics, and societal values that harness energy and action potential from abundant sources. As this happens — in our lifetime — humanity will continue participating in and observing transformations of ourselves and our planet. Analytical pattern analysis, personal sense perception of the collective unconscious, and their merging through new paradigms of scientific inquiry (e.g., science of consciousness) corroborate an emerging truth: that our collectively shared century has been and will continue to be defined by crisis and transformation.

Through my own direct experience, I perceive multiple, intrinsically connected domains of crisis qualifying our present moment in humanity: one of conventional surface crisis (e.g., scarcity, fear narratives causing societal entropy, collapse of living systems), and one of fundamental spiritual crisis (e.g., human awareness punctuating entropic conditioning/thought patterning, realizing infinite consciousness potential, healing, increasing intrinsic-extrinsic supercoherence, et cetera) (Laszlo, 2017).

The intimate, upwardly trending conscious experience of crisis and transformation has become overwhelmingly apparent in recent years. Since 2020, I have personally noticed these two prevailing, seemingly oppositional forces within our macro-scale planetary crises: one qualified by profound fear and trauma, and another by profound expansion of perception, transpersonal awareness, and consciousness direction previously described as “anomalous” (Jahn & Dunne, 2011, 2012). Simply, one’s reaction to disruption is relative to one’s present quality of consciousness. If our sense of reality is based upon that which is dysfunctional and breaks down, we experience the trauma of its emergency. However, if our sense of reality is based rather upon intrinsic cosmological mechanisms conspiring toward expansion, we experience transformation of phenomenal emergence.

Though these two experiential realities appear very different, I am increasingly convinced through longitudinal experience and observation that though the former reaction appears entropic upon surface analysis, with sensitivity and care, the trauma resulting from crisis can transform into what Christina and Stanislav Grof (2017) termed spiritual emergence. Below are two brief intimate case studies exemplifying crisis and transformation from 2020-present:

Case study 1: I am a thirty-six-year-old male. At seventeen, I had an acute near-death experience (NDE) whereby through a car accident, I experienced transpersonal consciousness that profoundly shifted my experience of reality and life. Through this NDE-catalyzed shift in consciousness, my fear of death permanently fell away. Curiously, at exactly double my age at the time of my first transpersonal consciousness experience, in a weekend of meditation I experienced my first cultivated spontaneous transformation. In a moment in my meditation practice, a direct experience of absolute unity became my awareness. In this moment, similarly to my accident (though I did not sense parallels until later), perception of time stilled to a stop as awareness expanded infinitely. In infinite silence, my entire body became at complete rest. In the perceptual stillness of time came the cessation of breath and heartbeat. The infinity of presence flooded my absolute awareness.

This psychospiritual and physiological shift was perceived to be so profound, as if I had upshifted in awareness into a deeper ground state of conscious, psychic coherence. This experience lasted approximately three days. Since this experience, I have begun to understand, develop, and refine consciousness mechanics to effect material psi events, including telepathy, psychokinesis, precognition, and deep intuition. I attribute this intimate experience less to an individuated linear or nonlinear progression than to a macro-scale shift in collective unconscious preconditions, as similar experiences have been reported by many numinous peers in the wake of events that rose to collective crisis in 2020, including many whom I have worked with and shown how to mentally influence material targets, remote perceive, and send and receive information telepathically.

Case study 2: Margot is a fifty-nine-year-old female. She has not reported direct experiences of transpersonal consciousness, or conscious experiences of transpersonal nature. She lives a good, normal life. She is in a deeply loving, committed relationship and has security over physiology and safety in Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs. However, in the wake of collective crisis in 2020, being naturally highly empathic Margot began to experience profound sadness, loneliness, and disconnection from her family and larger community. News media is routinized in her home environment, and technological modalities of human connection began flooding into her daily life collective fear, trauma, and division. Her social environment being reactive to directionally negative media pedagogy, personal and collective experiences of suffering accumulated.

Over time, Margot became aware that she was experiencing a spiritual crisis. She began to mentally deconstruct conditioned religious patterning in her life in both personal belief and social agency. At the same time, Margot began to experience psychosomatic declines in physiological health. A building mild depression coincided with respiratory illness, decreased blood-oxygen absorption, and diagnosis of early-stage diabetes. As her inner crisis reached a crest or peak, Margot began to experience deepened states of awareness. As she became increasingly aware and modified identified lifestyle behaviors and variables contributing to her recent health decline, her mind-body began to heal. Her sadness began to transform into gratitude, love, and emotional resilience. Her respiration healed, resulting in increased blood-oxygen absorption levels and deeper quality of sleep. She has since navigated through her conflicts with religion and is becoming increasingly spiritual and intuitively home in her heart. Through her personal experience of collective crisis, she is experiencing transformations in harmony with her readiness for them.

By the end of this century, my deeply intrinsic sense perception is that we as humanity will experience a foundational epistemology shift in how we approach all sciences, including health and medicine: one from reductionistic-materialist and reactionary pathogenesis and chemical intervention (e.g., disease/disorder) to one of prevention and expansion of human potential through subtle energy mechanisms (e.g., psychoneuroimmunology) and consciousness direction (e.g., healing and transformation of the psyche and deepening understanding of consciousness-directed events or psi). I personally sense that by the end of this century, if we choose to, we have the potential to co-create a paradigm of health that looks not downward but upward, focusing not on managing disease but on healing and transformation of the whole human mind-body complex. This is the future I sense within the domains of health and medicine, beginning in the human psyche and expanding outward across humanity, Earth, and our future beyond. As a psychology professional, I seek to help facilitate intrinsic and extrinsic transformation of the human being in the global panpsychic emergence and emergency of Earth and humanity in our mid-21st century lifetime.

In this moment, our pan-medical institutions, framed within downward-focusing reductionistic materialism and an historical context of world war of the twentieth century, focus attention on disease and entropy, looking to material intervention to treat symptoms without attending to causation. Simply, because we focus on disease without defining health, we have produced increased disempowerment, disease, and trauma. This has been my experience working in business development with the pharmaceutical industry over the last decade. However, deepening awareness and desire for change is building: medical professionals are beginning to become aware of the frailties within their inherited reductionistic-materialist epistemologies, and systemic solutions emerging within more holonic operational paradigms. New science based upon new paradigms, though presently met with institutional suppression, is expanding for the very reason science progresses: because it produces results where old paradigm interventions have comparatively failed.

These multi- and transdisciplinary sciences are emerging. The holonic scientific paradigm transformation is inevitable: the only question is, how ready are we collectively to vertically upshift, as Ervin Laszlo (2023) says, our quality of consciousness on the personal level of the psyche? The answer is highly favorable, as more members of our human family, including you and me, look more deeply within to discover the transformational power within us to heal and to expand awareness into the nest of our unique and rarefied personal psyche: the universal panpsyche.

As we continue navigating through this century of collapse and emergence, and the holonic restructuring of the human family and individual trans/personal human being, the need for qualified professionals in helping the creative (individual) and co-creative (collective) development of the human psyche is only going to rise. In 2023, this is already observable in global nation-states’ identified high-need and essential professions by its immigration departments, and the exponential growth of the wellness industry, presently valued above $1.5 trillion (as of 2021) with 5-10% growth forecast annually (McKinsey & Company, 2021, 2022), particularly in the United States and Europe. For comparison, the pharmaceutical industry is presently valued at just $1.48 trillion USD (Statista, 2023). This means that over the next generation and beyond, the fundamental power in health is going to continue to experience paradigmatic shifts away from reductionistic, chemical interventions that often do more harm than good in favor of integrative approaches emerging through new sciences in and transforming public perception of health and healing.

As Max Planck (1931), Erwin Schrödinger (1959), Fred Alan Wolf (1999), Rupert Sheldrake (2005), Richard Conn Henry (2005), and others have sensed over the last century, the universe is mental, singular, and thus shared. Healing and transformation of the whole human being, I confidently postulate, is systemic to the nature of Mind. As one’s intrinsic qualia influence and create one’s extrinsic environment, so mind/consciousness influences form, from the molecular functioning of DNA and cellular integrity/repair (Dasanayaka et al., 2023) to the resilience of complex systems, including but not limited to the whole human being.

I am submitting my application for candidacy toward a doctoral-track graduate program to enter the rapidly expanding body of scientific inquiry and experience of psychology as the foundational science to and experiential application of human transformation. As a student of psychology, I seek to learn from, study with, and contribute to the body of new science in psychological transformation of the human being. As a psychology professional, I seek to become a vehicle for our evolutionary future as an upwardly intelligent species, harnessing and directing this life toward healing, transformation, and self-realization at the level of the individual human being.

Simply, the future of all fields of human experience — scientific, technological, societal, psychological — will continue its expansion toward harnessing Nature’s innate mechanisms, that is (operational hypothesis): purposive, directional cosmological forces conspiring toward higher order, organization, and coherence (Chardin, 1959; Laszlo, 2017). Through humanity’s new sciences emerging in this moment, psychology will serve as a central transdisciplinary agent facilitating individual healing and transformation through a century defined by collective crisis and transformation.

In a mental universe, for humanity in this moment, the most direct way into experiential transformation is through the psyche: our future is consciousness-directed (i.e., noetic, psi), purposive, and elegant. As a discipline through the twenty-first century, psychology will continue to become increasingly integral to transdisciplinary punctuations in science and scientific inquiry into the nature of humanity and the cosmos. I seek to be part of this epi-transformation.

Selected Bibliography

Blum, R. (Ed. ). (2022). The New Paradigm in Cosmology. SelectBooks.

Carnegie Institution for Science. (2023, October 16). Scientists and philosophers identify nature’s missing evolutionary law. Phys.Org. https://phys.org/news/2023-10-scientists-philosophers-nature-evolutionary-law.html

Chardin, P. T. de. (1959). The Phenomenon of Man. Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

Grof, C., & Grof, S. (2017). Spiritual Emergency: The Understanding and Treatment of Transpersonal Crises. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 36(2), 30–43.

Grof, S., & Bennett, H. Z. (1993). The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives. HarperCollins.

Dasanayaka, N. N., Sirisena, N. D., & Samaranayake, N. (2023). Associations of meditation with telomere dynamics: a case–control study in healthy adults. Frontiers in Psychology, 14.

Henry, R. C. (2005). The mental Universe. Nature, 436(7).

Hubbard, B. M. (2015). Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential: Revised Edition. New World Library.

Jahn, R. G., & Dunne, B. J. (2011). Consciousness and the Source of Reality: The PEAR Odyssey. International Consciousness Research Laboratories Press.

Jahn, R. G., & Dunne, B. J. (2012). Quirks of the Quantum Mind. International Consciousness Research Laboratories Press.

Jahn, R. G., & Dunne, B. J. (2017). Being and Biology: Is Consciousness the Life Force? International Consciousness Research Laboratories Press.

Jung, C. G. (1974). Dreams II. Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1959). The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press.

Kuhn, T.S. (2012). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition. University of Chicago Press.

Laszlo, E. (2017). The Intelligence of the Cosmos: Why Are We Here? New Answers from the Frontiers of Science. Inner Traditions.

Laszlo, E. (2023). The Survival Imperative: Upshifting to Conscious Evolution. Light on Light Press.

Laszlo, E., Houston, J., Dossey, L., & Krippner, S. (2016). What is Consciousness?: Three Sages Look Behind the Veil. SelectBooks.

Lohrey, A., & Boreham, B. (2020). The nonlocal universe. Communicative & Integrative Biology, 13(1), 147–159.

Maslow, A. (1943). A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396.

McKinsey & Company. (2021). Feeling good: The future of the $1.5 trillion wellness market. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/feeling-good-the-future-of-the-1-5-trillion-wellness-market

McKinsey & Company. (2022). Still feeling good: The US wellness market continues to boom. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/still-feeling-good-the-us-wellness-market-continues-to-boom

Mitchell, E. D. (1974). Psychic Exploration: A Challenge for Science, Understanding the Nature and Power of Consciousne: A Challenge for Science, Understanding the Nature and Power of Consciousness (J. White, Ed.). Cosimo Books.

Nelson, R. (2020). The Global Consciousness Project Data. Princeton University.

Planck, M. (1931, January 25). Interview with Max Planck. The Observer, 17, column 3.

Radin, D. I. (2010). The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. HarperCollins.

Schrodinger, E. (1959). Mind and Matter. Cambridge University Press.

Schwartz, S. A. (2007). Opening to the Infinite. Nemoseen Media.

Sheldrake, R. (2005). A New Science of Life. Icon Books.

Sheldrake, R. (2011). The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature. Icon Books.

Statista. (2023). Revenue of the worldwide pharmaceutical market from 2001 to 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263102/pharmaceutical-market-worldwide-revenue-since-2001/

Targ, R. (2012). The reality of ESP: A physicist’s proof of psychic abilities. Quest Books.

Tart, C., Puthoff, H., & Targ, R. (1980). Information Transmission in Remote Viewing Experiments. Nature, 284(13).

Wahbeh, H. (2021). The Science of Channeling: Why You Should Trust Your Intuition and Embrace the Force That Connects Us All. New Harbinger Publications.

Wolf, F.A. (1999). The Spiritual Universe: One Physicist's Vision of Spirit, Soul, Matter, and Self. Moment Point Press.

Young, A. M. (1976). The Reflexive Universe: Evolution of Consciousness. Anodos Foundation.