Back to: Consciousness Cartography: Mapping Non-Local States of Awareness
A Word Before We Begin
Welcome to Module 0. You’re here because something in you already suspects that the story about consciousness you’ve been handed, that it’s simply what brains do, a kind of biological software running on biological hardware, doesn’t quite account for the fullness of your own experience. Maybe you’ve had a moment you couldn’t explain. Maybe you’ve sat in silence long enough to notice that awareness itself feels larger than any thought or sensation it contains. Or maybe you’re a skeptic who came here precisely because you want to stress-test these ideas against the best available evidence. All of those are the right reasons to be here.
This module is an orientation in the truest sense. Before we venture into the far territories of remote viewing, out-of-body experience, precognition, and collective consciousness, we have to know where we’re standing. We must understand what consciousness is, why it’s considered the hardest problem in science, and why the model you hold about it determines everything you consider possible.
We’re also going to do something that most courses in this territory either skip or rush past. We’re going to take the mainstream materialist view seriously before we challenge it. The scientific establishment didn’t arrive at its skepticism by accident. It earned it, through centuries of hard-won progress in getting rid of explanations that felt true but weren’t. The best way to build the case for non-local consciousness isn’t to dismiss that skepticism. It’s to understand it well enough to show precisely where it runs out of explanatory road.
That’s the spirit of this course. Not belief, not dismissal. Inquiry. Disciplined, honest, first-person inquiry, backed by the best available research. By the end of these fourteen modules, you’ll have a map of consciousness drawn from direct experience, traditional cartography, and modern science. Module 0 is where we assemble the instruments before the expedition begins.
“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
– Attributed to Nikola Tesla