Emergent Phenomenology
Research Consortium

Millions of people now meditate, take part in psychedelic ceremonies and clinical trials, practice yoga, breathwork and prayer. Some of them have experiences they did not expect: states of light or bliss, a loss of the usual sense of self, waves of energy through the body, or long stretches of fear and confusion. Some of these experiences help people. Some knock them off their feet for months.

Medicine has not kept up. Emergency medicine and emergency psychiatry textbooks say almost nothing about these experiences. The main diagnostic manuals, the DSM-5 and the ICD, have no suitable codes for them. There are no agreed standards of care and no trials that compare one practice with another. A doctor who meets a patient in the middle of one of these experiences usually has little to go on, and the patient often has even less.

That gap also makes honest consent hard. Teachers and clinicians cannot clearly tell people what a practice might do to them, good or bad, because nobody has gathered the evidence in a form they can use.

The Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium was founded in 2020 by a group of scientists and clinicians who had each been through experiences that their own training could not explain, but that matched descriptions in spiritual and religious traditions. After years of informal conversation, they set out to close the gap between what people go through and what their caregivers understand.

Today the consortium brings together more than 80 researchers, clinicians, therapists and practitioners. Its members work at institutions including Harvard Medical School, MIT, the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, the University of Zürich, the University of Melbourne, Yale and the University of Virginia. They include neuroscientists who study meditation, psychiatrists, psychologists, philosophers, spiritual directors, and people who run support services for those in spiritual crisis. Emma Bragdon, who founded Integrative Mental Health University, is a member too.

The work rests on three pillars: science, spirituality and healthcare. It combines first-person reports, questionnaires and brain measurement to study what happens during these experiences, what helps and what harms, and how to support good outcomes.

The consortium uses the term emergent phenomena for experiences that others call spiritual, mystical or energetic. It uses emergent practices for the practices that tend to bring them on, such as meditation, psychedelics, yoga and prayer. The plain, neutral words are a deliberate choice.

Researchers in this area often get stuck on one question: what are these experiences really? Are they contact with something beyond the self, or events in the brain? The EPRC sets that question aside. Its members describe the approach as ontologically agnostic, which means they study what people report and what can be measured, without first deciding what the experience ultimately is. A believer and a skeptic can work side by side on the same data.

That choice matters for patients. A person in the middle of a frightening awakening does not need a doctor who agrees with their beliefs. They need one who recognizes what is happening, knows its likely course, and can tell a passing crisis from an illness that needs a different kind of treatment.

The consortium describes success in practical terms. Clinicians would understand the range of spiritual experience well enough to recognize it and take it into account when they diagnose and treat. Patients would be offered real options, which might include mindfulness, meditation or psychedelic-based treatment, and would choose with good information about risks, benefits and alternatives.

The findings would reach the places that shape everyday medicine: diagnostic and billing codes, the major medical textbooks, and the certification standards for medical specialties. And people who meditate, pray or take part in ceremonies would understand what their practice can do, with support for whatever it brings up.

This is slow, careful work. Changing a diagnostic manual or a textbook takes years of published evidence. The consortium is building that evidence one study at a time, and sharing it openly with clinicians and the public.

When my own awakening began in 2021, I went looking for people who understood what was happening to me. The therapists and doctors I saw were kind and capable, but they had no map for it. I found my way through largely on my own.

Later I built Stories of Awakening, a study of hundreds of first-hand accounts of awakening: what people experience, what comes before it, what happens in the body, and what helps afterward. Working on it taught me how much is still unmeasured, and how much good careful measurement could do for the next person who goes through this.

The EPRC is the community doing that work at scale, with the scientific rigor and clinical reach that no single project can have on its own. I joined because I share its aim: that someone in the middle of one of these experiences should be met by a clinician who knows what they are looking at.