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Have you ever noticed that some of life’s best insights come from completely unexpected places? This happened to me last week as I was having lunch with John Cleese, the legendary comedian and actor best known for Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and A Fish Called Wanda. A passionate supporter of IONS’ work to advance the frontier edge of consciousness research, John graciously donated his time and talent at a special IONS event also featuring our Chief Scientist, Dean Radin.

Monday night I received the news that our beloved Bob Blackstone had passed away.

Earlier this month, Cassandra Vieten, Helané Wahbeh, Jonathan Schooler, and myself made presentations at the Symposium on Human Consciousness at the Vivenanda Ashram on paradise island near Nassau in the Bahamas. More than 200 participants from the ashram attended our sessions. Ashram participants are college graduates from all around the world interested in yoga and eastern philosophy. They are not necessarily devotees, although a core group of about 15 staff members are devotees themselves. It was therefore an enthusiastic and receptive audience to present our ideas and research.

I was pleasantly surprised when I was contacted by CBS News recently and asked to be interviewed for a Sunday Morning segment on extraordinary aspects of the mind and brain, including ESP. Having spent decades studying these phenomena as a scientist, I’m always willing to talk about the state of the research, and the CBS Sunday Morning program offered the unusual opportunity to speak to millions. However, I also knew that TV segments specialize in sound-bites and there’s never enough time to go into any one topic in depth.

Through my research on meditation and contemplative practices, I always noticed that what seemed like a very similar transcendent state was given different names like samadhi, oneness, non-dual, conscious awareness, etc. I also learned that transcendent states achieved through meditative practices have been reported across cultures and throughout history. The exact practices people used to achieve the transcendent states vary quite a bit from transcendental meditation to yoga to contemplative prayer, to other various forms of sitting meditation. Despite the different terms, those who experience them describe a similar unitive, ineffable state of consciousness. I also noticed that no one had systematically examined or synthesized transcendent states during meditation to look at the similarities and differences.

Consciousness can be described as your internal reality and self-awareness. It includes your relationships to your environment and the people in your life, as well as your worldview — your model of reality. Simply put, your consciousness determines how you experience the world.

Too often, change agents, politicians, activists, leaders of NGOs, and policy makers unintentionally employ methods that are actually counterproductive to what they are trying to achieve. Not only that, people who are working to make change in themselves, their families, or their clients or patients often feel flummoxed by the resistance they encounter.

Limitations in our human consciousness underlie many of the problems we face as a global community. This is why our research at IONS focuses on exploring the fundamental nature of consciousness, investigating how it interacts with the physical world, and studying how consciousness can dramatically transform in beneficial ways.