About EPRC

While each of our stories are different, their overall shape is very similar for most of us – being trained and working in our respective fields of inquiry while also having various Emergent experiences that we knew were not well understood by science and clinical medicine but seemed to be described by various spiritual and religious traditions.

Along the way, we all wrestled with the questions of how best to conceptualize and navigate the territory we found ourselves experiencing in order to appreciate the opportunities for growth and life enhancement that they offered while also realizing that some aspects of what was happening might be challenging in various ways.

Eventually, each of us realized that we wished to bring our life experience and academic capabilities to the problem of bridging this gap of knowledge and clinical competence, to help both those having these experiences and those caregivers, therapists, and clinicians who might interact with them to be as empowered as they could be to promote good outcomes.

Through an organic process over many years of personal networking and sharing this vision with each other, we founded the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium in 2020, a year of upheaval very much needing wisdom, healing, transformation, and growth. Hopefully, our work will support all of those.

The Name – Emergent Phenomenological Research Consortium

• Emergent

  Emergent is a neutral but descriptive word that refers to a range of experiences that can emerge in various contexts, such as contemplation, meditation, the use of certain substances, and in various contexts not always obviously related to those situations and practices.

• Phenomenological

  Phenomenology is emphasized here in the spirit of the Naturalists who first classified a great range of living things and then worked to see how they were related and could reasonably be classified and studied. We intend to apply similar methods to first person phenomena and how they relate to more objectively measurable phenomena, as well as how these group together into clinically meaningful patterns.

• Research

  Research means that we believe that the scientific method in its pure form of inquiry has a lot to offer the world of those undergoing the sorts of experiences we are interested in studying.

• Consortium

  Consortium reflects being an alliance of people and organizations for a greater purpose.