Back to: Consciousness Cartography: Mapping Non-Local States of Awareness
Bridge to Module 1
You’ve done the foundational work of Module 0. You have a working understanding of why consciousness is genuinely hard to explain, what the major theoretical options are, why the brain-as-filter model matters, and what’s at stake in this inquiry. You’ve begun the practice of phenomenological observation, and you have a baseline entry in your Consciousness Cartography Journal.
Module 1 takes you into the cartographies themselves. The great wisdom traditions didn’t wait for modern consciousness science. They spent centuries, in some cases millennia, developing meticulous maps of the territory of consciousness through direct investigation. The Buddhist jhāna maps. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life. The Vedantic koshas. Robert Monroe’s Focus levels. Stanislav Grof’s perinatal and transpersonal cartographies. Ken Wilber’s Integral model.
The question you’ll carry into Module 1 is this: are these different maps describing the same territory in different vocabularies, or genuinely different territories? What makes a map good? What are its limits? And what does it mean to compare maps that were drawn by people in radically different times, cultures, and states of consciousness?
That question will keep us honest. And honest is the only way this course works.
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets